I had consistent 90th-95th percentile parses as SV in both Cata and MoP, i know how the spec worked.
It felt very good to pull off and yes subtle ways to improve your gameplay feel great and is what’s been clearly lacking in the game as of late, specially in pre-borrowed powers/RNG eras of the game where Warcraft Logs was the end game once you had reached BIS gear (because it was reachable). Dragon Soul, for all its numerous flaws was probably the point i had the most fun raiding because of this.
Have you ever stepped outside of a raid? You realize there’s more to a spec than just their damage rotation right? What’s the point of having two IDENTICAL specs outside of their 4 primary damage buttons?
I’m sure you were desperate for an opportunity to humble-brag about your parses, but unfortunately this statement makes no sense in context given nothing I said questioned your knowledge of the spec.
It is good to have subtle skill caps. It is not good to achieve that through unintuitive game design oddities.
Example of a good skill cap: BM having multiple cooldowns and getting maximum effectiveness when it lines them up. That makes sense and it’s intuitive; combining damage cooldowns multiplis their effects. Then you can think about how to line them up with certain times in the boss fight while also not losing cooldown usages over all. It complements the spec’s playstyle in a way that feels perfectly natural and it adds an element of dynamism to the playstyle.
Example of a bad skill cap: Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting scaling off spell damage instead of attack power in classic. Yeah, it makes some level of sense given those spells actually do damage in the form of a school of magic, but what doesn’t make sense is the rest of the class plays into physical attack power and that’s what our itemisation focused on. The skill cap here is also just a matter of knowing that this is how they work; once you find that out it doesn’t actually make anything more difficult in any dynamic sense.
Explosive Shot clipping itself is an example of an unintuitive skill cap. You get the Lock and Load procs and are encouraged to use them right away, but there’s a hidden caveat that makes you instead wait some time between casts. It’s not immediately obvious that this is how the game works, especially considering we already had some forms of damage-rolling dots in the game while Explosive Shot still worked this way. Once you do find out this is how it works, it changes your gameplay in a very minor, static manner. It doesn’t necessarily make the spec any harder to play and there isn’t any management beyond “wait a bit between casts”… which just interferes with the flow of the spec when it’s otherwise centred around “Always Be Casting”.
I understand wanting there to be skill caps. Survival was an easy spec. It was an easy spec before and after Explosive Shot stopped clipping itself. The point is that this mechanic a) added very little management on top of the core spec and b) it did it in a way that didn’t feel intuitive and generally made the spec feel worse. There were much better options to consider than this. For example, Black Arrow was a DoT that gave you chances at Lock and Load, which was a proc that gave you more single-target damage. They could have added a CDR mechanic to Black Arrow which allowed it to be applied to and maintained on multiple targets. This is a good skill cap because it’s intuitive: more Black Arrow ticks = more Lock and Load procs. There’s a clear reward and it requires management to achieve it. It works with the mechanics of the spec and not against them.
Even without that, though, Survival still felt better in MoP and claiming it was worse or even dead because you no longer had to stop between Explosive Shot casts is just plain weird. It had more focus regeneration making it flow better in its baseline form and it had additional abilities from the new talent systems while keeping all the best elements of its Cataclysm talent tree. There is a good reason why people generally refer to MoP as the peak of the spec.
The primary difference between specs of a pure DPS class is how they deal damage. Utilities are generally things that get shared between specs for the most part. Fun fact: specs are actually meant to share some things from the base class since, as their name suggests, they are specialisations of a class. Crazy, right? It’s actually NOT necessary to make specs feel so completely different to one another that they feel like different classes. In fact, that’s a bad thing; such a bad thing that Blizzard is now actively trying to move away from that design.
This is why Survival right now shares the vast majority of its utility with the other Hunter specs and most of the difference does in fact come in how it deals its damage.
The Hunter specs weren’t identical because they all had traps and aspects, for crying out loud.
I used to really like the old ranged Survival. I’m not a huge fan of the new one. My only issue now is that MM is forced into not having a pet. And I liked it better when it was an option. Because MM is a glass cannon and could use the pet to tank. Now it’s a question of do you want to be 10% weaker? Or have a pet and have better survivability? I’d rather just have all 3 specs have them like Warlocks. It’s class flavor is all I’m saying.
The differences between rogue and mage specs are distinct though. Sub has a bigger focus on stealth, Assassination has a bigger focus on bleeds and poisons, outlaw is kindve like a warrior/rogue mix with some ranged attacks. Mage specs speak for themselves, they all play differently and use different magic types.
I couldn’t ever figure out the identity of survival when it was ranged…like black arrow? Whats a black arrow have to do with surviving? It was so strange and felt like a black sheep. Having a melee spear with beast companion spec sounds really cool, and has a distinct identity to it, it makes more sense for the spec name too because its as if theyre down to their melee weapon out there trying to survive. I just wish the spec was designed better.
BM and MM already fulfill the fantasy of being a ranged hero with a bow or gun. There isnt much more you can do…unlike a class that uses magic like a Mage where you can distinctly notice the difference between specs by the type of magic theyre using.
The big problem here is called Serpent sting, 9 seconds average duration makes the spec clunky af, it needs to be longer, like rupture, or be applied via pet attacks or raptor / mongoose, or better: make wildfire infusion baseline and let the Green bomb to hit with Serpent sting all the targets.
I wanted to duel-wield as a melee hunter. Instead I am forced to use a single two hander and it isn’t nearly as much fun as duel-wielding. Thus, I lost interest in even bothering with the spec. I stuck with marksman on mine.
Survival literally used different shot types to Marksmanship but apparently it just arbitrarily doesn’t count as a valid spec distinction when it’s ranged weapons.
It really wasn’t strange. This is just you disingenuously trying to make it seem bad when it wasn’t. It makes sense to have a ranged weapon spec that focuses more on the utilitarian side of ranged weapon usage i.e. use of explosive, incendiary, and venomous rounds. Those are very common in RPGs and a cool aspect of ranged weapon combat. Now their representation in the class is absolutely pitiful. Black Arrow wasn’t a great fit, this is true, but neither is Arcane Shot for Hunters; both exist for historical reasons. If it was much of a concern it would have been trivial to rebrand Black Arrow into something that did fit better while keeping the mechanics of it the same.
No, it really isn’t that distinct to have another beast companion spec when we already have BM. What you are describing is just a worse BM. It also makes no sense at all and is borderline gaslighting to say that it makes sense for a spec called Survival to be sticking to the vastly-more-dangerous melee range. Not only does it not fit the name in a literal sense but it also doesn’t fit the traditional identity of Survival. Survival is meant to be the resourceful opportunist that makes use of every possible advantage to get ahead in combat. Arbitrarily not using the ranged weapon is the exact opposite of that.
Yes, in the past it had talents that buffed melee damage but that was because we had to use melee abilities when stuck in melee range so this was an extension of Survival’s versatility; it was never meant to be the core focus of the spec requiring you to fight in melee range for your full damage potential.
Same arbitrary double-standard against ranged weapon users as before: “spec distinctions don’t count when it’s ranged weapons!”
Nonsense about how apparently the entire universe of ranged weapon combat should be crammed into just one spec (because, let’s be honest, BM does not focus much on the ranged weapon) just so we can have a 13th melee weapon spec that amounts to being a worse BM
Blizzard should have went the route of demolitionist in RIFT, that spec was the best. Survival was about traps and explosives. and poisons and those are some things they really could have built a spec out of. They also messed up not letting Survivals dual wield. Oh well.
Tbh, specially in PvP if they brought that back as an option to replace Mongoose Bite, we’d be a fully functional ranged class again. Like i’m 2200 MMR in 2s atm queueing with a friend and i maybe spend 10% of my time in melee.
My friend was even yelling at me to stop playing like a melee when i was relearning the meta, lol
It is amazing as a solo and leveling spec - it doesnt need to be an amazing raid spec as well. Harpoon resets with kills make the spec tbh and this is why it is amazing for solo content.
Ah so because is a top-notch spec for solo and leveling then it is fine.
I mean, other than a holy priest any spec could be considered amazing at solo and leveling. Other than the tower mages in legion there has not ever been any hard solo content, and the difficulty of the leveling process has always been so low you can go by with just auto-attacking things to death.
So yeah, Survival is great at leveling content so nvm! ignore every issue of the spec. the spec is totally fine! /sarcasm
Its actually pretty good in the PvP in the right hands, higher skill floor/cap than most meta stuff but that’s pretty consistent with how Hunters always were in PvP bare the few seasons where Beastcleave was a thing.
In Raiding its not even that bad numbers wise, its mostly held back by its lack of consistent AoE, like half the other DPS specs in the game and stuck with the “lolmelee” stigma.
I agree. And I believe this just shows what the real issue is with Survival. The problem is not at all our DPS or our ability to fight. Number wise we are more than fine.
Our problem is in a clunky rotation, a nonintuitive form of scaling, a lack of quality of life, and an overall static talent tree filled with dead rows.
As I said before, Blizzard can buff the numbers of a spec to make it competitive, but if the spec is flawed, no matter how good it does in number people are still going to complain and the spec will remain disliked and unpopular.
Shadow Priests suffered the same we currently do in BFA. Shadow priest has been a very good DPS spec all throughout BFA yet people still complained and complained about it because although the numbers were fine, the feeling of playing the spec was not.
Survival deserves to get updates and changes just like Shadow priest, Warlocks and Shamans have gotten
Currently Survival is the only spec in the game that has not received even one mechanical change throughout both the alpha and beta
Disclaimer: I have no experience as a pvper since Legion so all my knowledge comes from PVE
Every new update I honestly feel like this is the path we will end up being thrown at…
I think the only way we can hopefully avoid this is by causing enough of a ruckus that Blizzard decides to throw us a quick rework at least. It seemed to work for the Arcane Mages so wth. Let’s keep trying.
Rise up your voices fellow Hunters and Survival Afficionados!