To The Devs: The general consensus is that Survival was better when it was a fast paced, ranged dot spec. Survival is supposed be a ranged and melee hybrid with an emphasis on traps, not shooting eagles out of a two-hander and relying on pets for Focus like a poor man’s BM hunter. In short, if we marry TBC’s melee/traps with MoP’s ranged combat, and add in Legion’s trap bonuses, we’d have a proper Survival spec.
To The Players:Add your thoughts below for what you’d like to see done about Survival Hunter. Here’s my list, and I think it’s pretty gold.
Restore SV’s focus on damage over time and split up their moves so that both melee and ranged contribute to the DoT setup.
Mastery increases damage over time effects and the percentage of healing you get from them. This will really up the damage to something respectable again.
Make DoTs the source of our focus and health regen. The more DoTs, the more focus you have for your shots.
Lose the clunky pet focus. Survival hunters are the trap masters.
Bring back Legion’s trap bonuses. The ones you got after the trap is set for 2 seconds. That was a smart idea and we loved it.
Hunter Weapon Kits: Instead looting separate weapons, have kits that contain weapons based on your loot specialization. MM gets ranged, BM should get melee, and SV should get both because it’s a hybrid. They all equal the same stats in the end.
Bring back the option of dual wielding.
Two-handers do burst damage with Mongoose, while dual wielding has a stacking bleed effect and melee speed boost per Mongoose hit. Stacks 5 times.
Bring back Snake Trap. A pure utility trap that applies all your various stings at once, including PvP talent stings.
Kill Shot drastically speeds up your damage over time effects.
Bring back Black Arrow, Explosive Shot, and Lock & Load.
Bring back Wyvern sting.
Bring back MoP’s AoE damage traps like Immolation and Classic’s trap talents, Entrapment and Clever Traps.
Have a PvP talent that makes Immolation Trap scatter people with a fiery fear effect that has them screaming on fire. (You have just the right effect in visions)
It was if you played in Vanilla. They even used to have a lacerate talent, which inspired my dual wielding idea. They even had melee damage increasing aspect. In current Classic they have talents like Counterattack, Deterrence, Deflection, and Survivalist to up your melee viability as well allow you to gain distance and attack from range. You can even put points into Improved Aspect of the Monkey to push your viability further. It’s tailor made for hybrid combat. I used to have Thunderfury, and wrecked people in melee combat by wearing them down with fast ranged attacks.
Either way, it’d be fun as hell playing like that. It’s pretty much what we do now, minus the clunky pet mechanics. Survival was fast and furious in several expansions. Let’s bring that back.
Being at ranged 100% of the time was still more or less ideal for Survival in Classic (barring some melee weaving weirdness in specific scenarios) and that was only emphasised as time went on. You didn’t ever deliberately run into melee. Those melee utilities were for holding up in a fight when the enemy deliberately got you stuck in melee because they knew that was the Hunter weakness. They only became less and less relevant as the game went on and they would make absolutely no sense with the current model of Hunter class design.
I also find it very unlikely that anyone helped you get Thunderfury as a Hunter in Vanilla and frankly I think your Vanilla experience is made up and you’re in no place to call others out for not playing Vanilla.
P.S. Aspect of the Beast did not give melee attack power until WotLK, by which point Survival had Explosive Shot.
No, they weren’t really. Survival was built to Survive in melee long enough to get back to ranged. This myth of the melee hunter stems from the lacerate talent which never made any sense and was so garbage the devs nuked it with the first Hunter class review.
I never said they’d jump right into melee combat, who actually does that even in the current model? What do you think a hybrid is? You attack with range, and you can duke it out in melee until you’re ready to blow aspec and switch right back to range again. I did that back then too.
As for the current model, it’s clunky and flawed and the entire point of this thread is to come up with ideas to fix it. If you’ve seen the PTR results, it’s not going well for us. Not only that, but the idea is fun because it becomes an even better hybrid than classic.
As for my old Thunderfury, believe what you wanna believe but I had it and ripped people to shreds with it when they got too close.
Yep, they didn’t balance it well, but I liked the concept of it because it added another DoT to the arsenal, which is what inspired the improved version I listed here. You’re right that the melee was primarily designed to hold out until you could get back to range, but it’s no myth that hunters could hold their own in melee and actually do damage. The trick was to use your moves and escape. It was seriously the most fun class in the game when it had that. Granted I had better weapons than average, so it could explain my delusions lol.
Either way, a melee ranged hybrid would be fun, and you can’t deny that getting our ranged combat back would be fun.
Yeah, we had that in Cata too. I remember my Scythe in Cata but that was a Wingclip weapon so I could get back to range and pump explosive shots into the target. Hell, just give me a 4th spec with MoP Survival and I’m good.
MoP is when Survival was at its absolute best. The only thing I missed was the melee combat, but I loved the ranged stuff and the traps. Legion and Vanilla did a great job with those. I loved the idea of Trap bonuses and talents enhancing them. MoP is exactly what I want to get back, but with some cool melee moves.
No, it went live and lasted long enough for me to use it. Either way, I liked the concept of stacking melee and ranged DoTs in PvP, so that’s the point. I thought it was clever.
In terms of the trap master stuff (way lay, talent to buff SV traps etc…), blizz tried that in legion then for whatever reason walked away from that angle. I can only speculate that players don’t want to Traps to be a core part of their dps rotation and that is why blizz walked away from the “Master trapper” angle with Survival. That being said I wouldn’t mind if lets say Steel trap was made baseline a SV hunter only ability and then the steel trap talent replaced with something else.
As for DW make it cosmetic only, or take the time to balance DW and 2h.
For the ranged stuff, I think you have 2 options.
Allow the mini-xbow the ability to shot arcane shot so SV hunters have a ranged option when aspect of the eagle is on CD (Obviously arcane shot would do less damage than mongoose bite/raptor strike)
Admittedly this would take a lot more effort, work and balancing and thus I don’t see blizz ever doing it, but since we are brainstorming:
-Some sort of hybrid system where mongoose bite/raptor strike and carve changes to a ranged ability when you are a certain # of yards away and have the ranged ability change back to mongoose bite/raptor strike/carve when you are a certain # of yards closer to the target.
-Some sort of buff/debuff or incentive for the SV to go between ranged and melee throughout the whole fight ( i.e… if you chose to stay in only melee proximity, or only in ranged proximity you would do less dps than the SV who is going between melee and ranged throughout the fight)
So your ranged ability would be say something like (melee ability would say the same thing, increase the damage of your ranged ability/shot)
“X shot” increase the damage of your mongoose bite/raptor by A%, stacks up to 5x, last for Y number of seconds
Thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts and ideas, we need more of that on this forum.
I was extremely disappointed when they bailed out on traps because I felt those traps brought creativity to the game throughout the various expansions. I loved using AoE traps for DPS in MoP dungeons, and Classic’s trap talents were absolute gold in BGs. Stuff like that transcended gear and made the class more tactical and intelligent than just spamming numbers. Legion’s traps were just an excellent addition to that legacy, and it was sad to see the class dumbed down since then. A smart trapper could turn the tie many close battles.
I feel that relegating ranged attacks to a mini crossbow graphic would be lazy and unnecessary, considering the game already had a successful melee/ranged hybrid for years before that, and more people enjoyed the ranged combat anyway.
I agree with your idea of ability swapping based on range because it’s basically what we did in classic and TBC, so long as we can have proper ranged attacks with actual ranged weapons, and not lazy-bows or magical eagles flying out of a two-handers. I think people want their bows and guns back, so it should be like the old days where we have both on our person at the same time.
The most common complaint is that Survival is clunky and dumbed down, which is the total opposite of everything it’s ever been. Survival was always fast paced, clever, and mobile, and that was the entire point of it. We need that back.
For the “throwing eagles” part, lets assume blizz takes the path of less resistance (which with SL only a little over a month away seems the path blizz will take) I.e… the only ranged aspect of SV will be aspect of the eagle- fine but during Aspect of the eagle the SV hunter should be able to shot a bow/gun that they have in their inventory instead of the shooting “magical eagles”.
So recently I got Thori’dal, the Stars’ Fury to drop (awesome bow, love the look), whipping out Thori’dal, the Stars’ Fury (or whatever ranged weapon) during the duration of Aspect of the Eagle would be pretty cool.
First off. I LOVE MELEE SURVIVAL. Stop saying the majority want ranged back. You have no evidence or solid statistics to say what % of hunter enjoys what. I played survival back in the day and yes it had some really fun stuff (explosive shot with lock n load). I personally want blizzard to improve the Melee sv.
I noticed you mentioned lock n load and explosive shot. I cannot scream loud enough on your side for this. I would crap my pants if we got this back. Honestly one of the most “fun” to use abilities out of any hunter spec. The original sounds and effects were exciting to use and felt impactful!
I like your idea of making the spec more heavily based around DOTs. That is different than the other hunter specs and I really like that idea a lot. Buff serpent sting! buff the talents to improve the sting even more so players can choose to play that way, it would also allow seperation of PVP single target focused folks vs M+ aoe focused folks.
I personally dont have an issue with focus regen through my kill command. The main issue i have is that when stacking my tip of the spear, I get 1 raptor out of it, then need to spam kill command all over again. Currently it just doesn’t flow well in my opinion. I mean they could buff the damage of Raptor strike A LOT with the tip of the spear and increase its cost by like 50 or something outragous to give you 1 big hit, then refill with kill command?
I see your point about time constraints, but personally I don’t make excuses for devs because it’s their job. They’ve had plenty of time to make something functional out of it, but what we have now just seems rushed. I’m really hoping to see ranged weapons return in the form of a Hunter kit.
Absolutely not, I love those grenades, but Explosive shot has a bit more kick than those in a short space of time, so it stacks well with them in a DoT spec when you need to unleash hell.
In terms of rotation, your focus is fueled by DoTs, so work with that in mind.
Serpent Sting
One grenade
Chakrams
Explosive Shot, then get into melee range and duke it out with another grenade for good measure.
Two-handers give your Mongoose burst damage, while dual wielding gives a stacking DoT. It’s up to you whether you want more melee burst or an extra DoT.
Bounce away to spam them with arcane shots and refresh your ranged DoTs. Use your traps and combat skills to evade melee while you wear them down. Chain your Dots again one last time before the Kill Shot because it speeds them up. Explosive shot and chain spam grenades to make sure they STAY dead.
Gaining focus from DoTs instead of a clunky pet mechanic will free you up to perform all these moves, giving you a faster combat style. It’d also be nice to have oldschool abilities like Counter Attack, except it’d be a cooldown instead of a parry proc.
It’s true I don’t have opinion statistics, but the statistic decline in SV hunters kinda speaks for itself. Whenever I talk to a hunter in game or on the forums, most say they miss Explosive Shot and want the old spec back, especially in the PTR.
The reason I want DoTs to fuel focus is because it would free you up to use your moves without being weighed down. I find it tedious to run out of focus and have to manually grind it back up with that sluggish Kill Command.
Tip of the Spear could work if it was merged with Flanking Strike and also immobilized the target. That way it hits mega hard, gap closes, and sets them up for your next assault.
And thank you I’ve always felt that tactical abilities like Snake Trap and Wyvern Sting really gave SV an identity of its own among hunter specs.
Currently, Survival plays more like Rexxar, who is actually the quintessential Beast Master hunter, who should have a pure melee option. Survivalists work with a combination of poisons, environment, first aid, traps, and tactical ingenuity - AND explosives! We’re more akin to Rambo, Aragorn, or Dutch from Predator, not Rexxar.
