This is some feedback (not like Blizzard reads our feedback) about some ideas of how SV hunter could improve in the next patch.
Mastery: Spirit Bound: While your pet is active, you both regenerate 1.0% of maximum health every 1 (was 5) sec.
Mastery, as of right now, is a completely useless defensive. Giving us a maximum of 1% of health regeneration every 5 SECONDS. Taking into consideration the insane burst some classes do right now, Spirit bound should at least increase 1% health regeneration every second.
Spec Identity: Everyone knows that SV hunter doesn’t have any identity. SV hunters, as the name implies, should be the hunter with the most ability of survivability, it needs to have more defensives. We should have a big repertoire of traps with different abilities and dots.
Pet: Taking into consideration that Blizzard was inspired by Rexxar when reworked SV hunter, we should see how is Rexxar’s play style. Looking at Heroes of the Storm, we can see that Rexxar isn’t dependable on his pet but more of an extension of him. It would make sense if SV hunters would have any other way to generate focus such as chakrams or something alike. Pets should give us more of a survival/defensive utility. Maybe, there could be an ability that when activated, our pet would come to our rescue and take all damage received for 6-8 secs. Also, I think our pets should give us some kind of health regeneration other than Spirit Bound.
Talents:
It would make that for SV hunters to have Camouflage to be a baseline ability.
Steel trap should be a baseline ability.
Mongoose Bite: I think enough people have told Blizzard enough feedback about this talent. Should be a baseline ability.
Legendaries: Overall, most legendaries for SV hunter are really bad.
Latent potion should be either buff or a baseline ability.
Latent poison baseline would build on the depth of the spec. One of the specs biggest strengths is how many interactions there are between the abilities (Latent Poison, Flare + Trap, Wild Fire Bombs, etc.) These interactions allow plays to demonstrate their mastery of the class and should reward with performance. So ya, anything that continues that trend is a good idea.
More than anything, the spec needs so F’ing dmg. Their single target is simply far too low and their AoE is very high maintanence. Survival works harder for less dmg than almost anyone. (Looking at you, Demonology.)
Blizz, stop being so freaking scared to make the spec strong and just try it for once. You clearly are absolutely fine with some specs being night and day stronger so you can’t pretend like that’s some Cardinal sin.
I would love to see pets give us X amount of focus per hit, or have a chance to give us extra focus, while Raptor strike becomes our generator and mongoose bite becomes our spender.
*Butchery, Terms of Engagement, Camouflage, Flanking Strike, Mongoose Bite (Keep Raptor Strike damage) and Steel Trap must be baseline abilities.
*Decrease Wildfire bombs, Disengage and Harpoon cooldown
*Decrease Raptor Strike (Mongoose Bite) focus cost to 20 and Serpent Sting to 10
*Decrease pet damage taken by 20%
*Massive conduit buffs
*Damage increased by 10%
They are quite rightly worried about the situation where Hunters feel pressured to play Survival, which would be pretty egregious since the overwhelming majority of the class plays it to play a ranged DPS. Yep, it’s a crappy situation. Shouldn’t have made it melee if they didn’t want it to be a problem. Don’t make obviously bad design choices; simple as that.
I understand your point. I, personally, prefer range SV but I also enjoy playing melee. I just think that every hunter spect should be in a similar level so people don’t feel forced to change like I feel forced to change to MM, you know what I mean?
If all 3 specs do exactly the same DPS and provide current levels of utility, you would still feel forced to play MM or BM as they do it all from range, with less risk of taking unavoidable damage, and with less (or none, for BM) loss of DPS when doing raid mechanics.
SV would have to either be better damage than BM/MM to make it an actual choice, or it would have to have unique utility. In both cases, people would feel compelled to play SV despite preferring ranged.
Yeah, I never said they should do the exact same damage. Yeah, that is the point, every spec should have unique utility so people would choose specs based on their utility/play style and not their pure dmg.
Thanks for your feedback. I use the tip of the spear talent too. My idea is that mongoose bite would be baseline, and on top of it, we can choose tip of the spear and combine their damage.
I feel like, even at a super easy level, increasing the duration of Serpent Sting and damage bonus of Coordinated Assault would be a great start. Serpent Sting’s duration and subsequent management makes it feel superfluous and kind of clumsy to deal with without Viper Venom, worse on AoE since Hydra’s Bite is so far behind Guerilla Tactics. In regards to CA, the spec largely plays and feels like a burst spec but the burst never really happens. CA feels so weak as a cooldown in practice despite looking good on paper.
At this point the spec isn’t even bad it just didn’t get a pass at all because blizzard used all their hunter dev time on marks and neglected the newest spec in the game and didn’t polish it
We also had a bunch of stuff removed that dramatically helped the flow of the spec
But goose bite should be baseline as it was in legion; it’s a unique mechanic they could build the game play around
SS needs it duration increased to slightly higher than goose bites buff duration to stop it running out before our goose bite expires because that feels horribly clunky and we have no method of passive reapplication
They also need to make sure our single target damage in equal to marks or BM at any given time and give us a niche to compensate for being melee, we seem to have that in air damage
It just needs a tune up and for them to make a few more things passive from the talent tree (goose bite, wildfire bomb talent)
Survival in the name doesnt reference survivability, though I dont dislike your suggestions in this area. Survival references wilderness expertise. Commando, tracker, scout. Bear Grylls or Les Stroud. Rambo.
In that spirit, wether MSV continues to be our third spec, a fourth spec, or some kind of talent option, I think it should really focus on open world content.
Don’t make it the top spec in PvE or Arena. Give it some sick buffs in open world. Make it the best spec for world PvP. Make it a desirable spec for downing world bosses.
I dont know what those could be, but I think focusing the SV identity on wilderness content would be good for spec identity, it allows blizzard to make the spec strong without alienating ranged hunters. You can give the spec unique utility, without disrupting the meta in either instanced PvP nor PvE.
Its supposed to be niche, theres a niche right there.
Imo, one more 5% dps buff across the board, reduce/remove the cooldown of Carve, and last but most importantly give the spec a unique debuff, similar to DH’s magic damage debuff. Could be physical damage in our case?
Give other players a reason to want a msv hunter in their group.
