With 40 spots to worry about people picking and choosing specific meta classes was almost unheard of anyway, even if they wanted to be elitist about it, because just getting 40 geared and attuned people to participate was half the battle. That is a fact.
Surv was generally suboptimal and unloved, along with spriests, ret pallies and a handful of other specs. They COULD fit in a raid. They COULD do their job. There WAS a reason to even have at least 1 of the aforementioned specs sometimes (locks and spriest synergy for example). However in the vast majority of situations, for a progression guild going from MC to AQ on paper, it would be niche at best and a warm body until Naxx at worst. That is also a fact.
In my first post, I was simply saying that I didn’t want Surv to go back to those days. Blizz is literally repeating the same mistakes the devs made in 2004, in 2020. After solving them already from Wrath through MoP with ranged Surv.
Actually thinking about it no, Surv is even WORSE off than back then. Is Surv suddenly going to fly past BM and destroy Nzoth with enough agi? Lol no. Take a cue from the Void Form experiment and lay Rexxar Lite to rest, devs.
I agree, blizzard should make all classes have a button named “dps”, which channels a beam of constant damage based on your ilvl, usable while moving. This ability should do more damage than any other button/combination you have.
This is what the game is devolving into because of this degenerate difficulty, and “mythic mindset”. The same people saying paladins and shamans are a burden in classic, even though they do more damage than the encounters were designed for.
It’s a real problem with no solution, it’s just how a large vocal fragment of the playerbase chooses to play the game.
I have tried playing survival and maybe it’s just how I play the game. The class didn’t feel clunky to me, but like I said, it could be just on how I play the game in general.
I thought I read somewhere that the classes were getting some overhauls or was it the talents? maybe both? Perhaps the issues that people are seeing with the class will get addressed as they continue to mess around with SL.
Well OP you have more dedication than I ever did. I gave melee SV a try in Legion, but gave up and played my Arms warrior instead. Arms just felt better all the way around. Better damage, more fun, and no pet to get in the way when I wanted to loot something. lol.
I loved ranged SV in Cata and MoP, but when it went melee, I tried to adjust, but just lost interest. Earned my Patient title running Cata heroics with this guy. Good memories. Now I just post in the forums with him now.
Ive always wondered why they didnt elect to go the middle ground of a chakram styled mid ranged hybrid, or some sort of munitions based class, like a grenadier, gunner, or turret based game play.
They could have created 3 distict ranged specs and rolled the melee option into the BM spec which is a bit more of a thematic match.
I can appreciate the creativity, but implementation was substandard…
But I feel amazing while leveling and in world content. I think the Wildfire Bombs chugging, Harpoon rushing Survival Hunter with Guerilla Tactics, Wildfire Infusion and Terms of Engagement is the most engaging, dynamic melee I ever played, even ahead of DH. And it matches the Goblin and Engineering themes like none other.
Basically its the melee spec with a pet. Personally…if it must be like this I’d say give it a lone wolf trait as well. To not need the pet. If it must be melee lets melee. Not melee where we “shoot” a pet at the target first.
As is…its an odd spec. I send my pet to the target. then I throw myself at the target too. It be like playing stick with a dog. And you run after the dog who is running after the stick. Kind of defeats the purpose of throwing the stick in my mind.
The problem of survival is not the fantasy or the core idea of it.
They nailed that.
The issue of survival is that is a mechanical failure riddled with issues, which I have explained in previous post:
Clunky rotation without specific talents which forces everyone into a cookie cutter build.
Almost all talent rows are dead because many core necessities of the spec to actually work are talents instead of baseline (moongose nite, 2 stacks of kill command for examples)
Unintuitive scaling for various part of the spec, like how serpent sting has a weird scaling with haste that makes is so at high levels of haste casting serpent sting becomes a dps lost
I loved ranged survival and I want to love melee survival too.
My issue with survival is not even really its problems, my issue is that we have given months of feedback about it yet Survival remains the only spec in the game with not a single mechanical change since the start of alpha, not even one.
I don’t play Survival but judging by how often I see them in Arena I think the spec is doing fine. Asmogold was carried to Gladiator by a R1 MW and SV.
You can buff a spec to top damage, it does not mean that is good mechanically or enjoyable to play.
Shadow priest is a perfect example of this. They haven been competitive throughout all of BFA yet the spec was a pain to play so people complained about it.
Survival is not fine.
And the only reason is played in pvp is because BM was nerfed to the ground in pvp and MM is a joke in arenas
With corruption, it became apparent what the problem with the spec is… Focus. The resource regeneration is fine for a ranged class that spends seconds casting a shot or channeling multiple shots returning it, it’s even more than fine for the spec that gets to nearly afk their way to top dps from pet damage and a bleed, but the melee spec spending it nearly every GCD is constantly struggling to keep enough. They play like any other melee in terms of speed, but they just don’t have the resource gain needed to keep up.
Stacking vasts amount of %haste corruption makes them actually function. A simple survival only passive to increase Focus Regeneration would fix the spec, instead of having to blindly hope for a Kill Command reset, the most anti-climatically named ability they have. More like Nibble Command.
Personally I don’t mind survival bieng melee, but I’m not a big fan of its dependence on its pet still. Also the spec is a bit jank. Not as jank as Legion survival where you just literally didn’t have the resources to play the spec, but still jank none the less.
It’s always one or the other as well, either starving for rage, or you got the Kill Command reset from bomb and are over capped on rage. There is no in between.
Playing survival for five minutes people won’t notice this but I think the best way to describe how it feels to play survival after weeks of doing is
That we are fighting our own spec rather than enjoying it.
U got low focus? Get more haste
Oh but you have too much haste now? Guess what serpent sting is useless now.
Hey if you don’t take 2 stacks of kill command talent, then enjoy the multitude of wasted procs!
Talents don’t feel like options when most of them cannot be changed unless you want to play half a spec. We need at least a couple of talents to become baseline and for our passive focus to be buffed
Survival back in the day was fun, esp. in the 39th bracket. Proof of Activision not knowing what they are doing is seated in one little fact…HUNTERS DO NOT CARRY POLEARMS. As someone who traps and hunts with both guns and bow n arrows it makes me cry to log into my once proud 39th SH twink and glance at his Ginn-su sitting uselessly in the bank. Instead of a sword he carries a giant halberd. I have hunted with a machette strapped to my side but never a #$%^ polearm, glaive, pike, etc. That is the true irony of a telling story, that Blizz is so lazy with the gearing that they cannot even give a hunter something they would actually carry. BFA is the last xpac I will buy from Activision.
It’s actually really good. The CC is nuts and the damage windows are nice. Could use an extra defensive. The utility is just amazing and BM is still probably better for 3’s I would say survival is the king of 2’s
Same here.
MM is like a ranged paladin…slow as molasses and hits like a cannon.
SV is fast pace madness with butchery…feels like Fury warrior with a pet.
