This is an in-depth look at the strengths, weaknesses, and recommendations regarding Survival Hunter.
Icy-veins says this:
Strengths:
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Very High Leech due to ferocity pets, extremely strong self-healing and survivability.
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Consistently High Damage
Weaknesses:
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Has some reliance on pet AI to deal damage
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Relatively weak burst DPS
I disagree with nearly all of what icy-veins says (to an extent), and how I have interpreted Survival after months of playing one in Shadowlands is discussed below.
Strengths:
- Burst - Burst can be accomplished through specific gear and talent setups like any other class. Great burst for PvP and M+ can be achieved with the Wildfire Cluster Legendary + Guerrilla Tactics + Wildfire Infusion (don’t let articles and sites like Bloodmallet fool you into thinking you must have Soulforge Embers or something else to be successful in overall dps.
- AOE - Survival has amazing AOE DPS. In some simulations of top M+ or BiS Survival Hunters, it was at the top tied only with Outlaw Rogues.
- Fun Factor - Survival’s rotation is fluid and there are plenty of active talents to make their rotation more engaging.
- Aesthetic - Harpooning in, disengaging out, throwing bombs, pulling out a small crossbow to shoot bolts, throwing chakrams, and throwing traps creates an aesthetically pleasing gameplay that is unique to survival.
Weaknesses:
- Single Target - Survival sustained ST DPS is now the lowest in the game. Future buffs to Survival will need to focus on this and keep an eye on their AOE dps. Therefore, flat % buffs like they received this week are not the answer (similar to Fury receiving a flat % buff and a nerf to meat cleaver because their AOE was also already really high).
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Survivability - Considering they are called “Survival Hunters”, I feel they have the lowest survivability in the game. I also feel all mail-wearing classes have lower survivability than plate, leather, or cloth classes. Focusing on Survival, their problem is being melee with the same survivability kit as their ranged counterparts.
- All 3 hunter specs have Natural Mending (Talent) to boost frequency of Exhilaration to heal 30% of your max HP every two minutes, and Aspect of the Turtle to deflect all attack and decrease damage taken by 30% for 8 seconds every three minutes. 2 minutes and 3 minutes are a long time, and when Aspect of the Turtle is used, you cannot attack - unlike paladin Divine Shield which is immunity to everything for 8 seconds with a 5 minute cooldown, but you can still attack and heal.
- Survival HP5 is negligible compared to nearly every other class’s ability to self heal through talents (Arms Second Wind), heal spells (Druids, Monks, Paladins, Priests, Rogues, and Shamans), and on-hit healing (Death Knights, Demon Hunters, Warlocks, and Warriors) - with mage being the only other class with true healing issues that are partially resolved with short cooldown shields, slows, blinks, and the fact that they are ranged/out of harm’s way.
- The issue with Survival compared to even Mages is that even though they have disengage, traps, a one-time heal, and Aspect of the Turtle - is that they are in melee where M+ and raid damage is felt the most, traps do not work, and turtle = no dps.
Recommendations
Hotfix buffs tackle easy problems such as flat % damage buffs to help bring classes up to par. The 5% buff this week is nice and only puts us ~15% behind the top 5 DPS specs.
The big patch fixes that I feel Survival needs are as follows:
- Focused, small buffs to the single target abilities Raptor Strike, Serpent Sting, and Kill Command.
- Small buffs would be needed for all 3 of these so one of them, alone, does not create too much burst and unbalance the spec. Equal buffs to all 3 would prevent that but at the same time still raise their burst and sustained ST DPS.
- Guerilla Tactics to become baseline and a new ST talent to replace it.
- Carve currently does 28% attack power damage to 5 targets. This means you absolutely cannot use it on less than 4 targets just to barely break even at 112% damage and it caps out at just 1 more target. This means you absolutely need to take the Butchery talent to replace Carve - except Guerilla Tactics is best-in-slot for ST and AOE and synergizes with legendaries and other talents better.
- The problem with making Guerilla Tactics baseline is the fact that Survival AOE DPS is already top tier. Therefore, the replacement talent would need to be a talent focused on ST DPS to finally give them the ST DPS boost they need or they can take the trade-off of going back to lower ST DPS for higher AOE DPS by selecting the Butchery talent (which is also aesthetically pleasing).
- Carve needs to be removed and replaced with Butchery but with only 1 charge - allowing the Talent to increase charges to 3. Again, this is because Carve is so weak and difficult to find the best time to use it and Butchery is much more aesthetically pleasing and a wasted animation with most people taking Guerilla Tactics.
- Buff to their mastery (currently their worst stat) to truly make their HP5 noticeable (mine is currently 1% HP every 5 seconds - to be noticeable, it would need to be 5-10% every 5 seconds) and to help boost their focus-spending DPS.
- Rethink Aspect of the Turtle to be able to attack while it is active for Survival spec-only.
- Chakrams is another aesthetically neat Talent that not many choose due to the other 2 talents being much better. It just needs a flat buff to be viable and compete with Birds of Prey builds and Bomb builds or reimagined to replace…
- Aspect of the Eagle - This is where the controversy comes up. Ranged Survival vs. Melee Survival. I believe Survival should be melee. Harpooning in, disengaging out, throwing bombs, and dashing back in flanking strike creates a fun playstyle. Beast Mastery and Marksmen already fill the “archer” archetype well.
- Aspect of the Eagle does not fit the Survival aesthetic (a glowy magical eagle your weapon “throws” at the enemy).
- A great reimagining of Aspect of the Eagle would be to change its name to Chakrams and use the animation of Chakrams - keeping everything else the same reading "replaces your raptor strikes with chakrams, increasing the range of raptor strike to 40 yards for 15 seconds every 1.5 minutes).
- Similar to how we now use talents to fill the Void void as shadow priest, we could change the Chakrams Talent to “Aspect of the Eagle” to read “Chakrams now replace Auto Attacks and Raptor Strikes, increasing the range of all Auto Attacks and Raptor Strikes to 40 yards for 10 seconds every 30 seconds” or some other similar combination of active time and cooldown time.
With the above buffs to the talents in numbers 2, 3, and 4 above, the buffs in number 1 above may not be needed if Blizzard can create a ST talent to replace guerilla tactics that accomplishes number 1.
Overall, it is clear that Survival needs some attention, but not too much. I do not think it should be on par with Marksmen in DPS due to marksmen being ranged and having to stand still, and because their AOE is already great. I do think it should be on par with Beast Mastery which also needs attention. The above recommendations would help it in the area of ST DPS and bridge the Melee vs. Ranged controversy similar to the Shadow Priest void form issues of BfA. I never post and do not know if anyone from Blizzard reads the forums, but this is my feedback from a spec I really enjoy but do see the couple flaws.