These new survival changes look great - I think it’s Participation bias / self-selection bias where people will lambast these changes bc they either do not play hunter efficiently in content OR have a warped perception as to what the essence of survival is. These changes are awesome do not lose faith and keep these changes on the same trajectory.
-Wildfire bombs: Cool/great mechanic for survival - literally just OG traps in a more witcher-esque feel for survival - this bleed/fire route seems cool so far
-Raptor strike: people are malding over the fact they need to press a melee move - why? We are a melee spec regardless if we have damaging ranged abilities.
-Kill shot: This removal was warranted. IMO the only time KS was GOAT for surv was DF when we could multi-hit with KS and put giga bleeds on and pump it was a great feeling BUT this new iteration of surv in TWW basically did away with it. I understand some people do not like this being removed, but again this is blizz leaning into the melee focused aspects of surv, which is something that people are enjoying like myself (so posts like this is to counteract the growing distaste for what they read on the dev notes post)
-Boomstick: Instead of fury we now have this. Makes sense if they want to bring back (WHICH IS AWESOME) surv using two 1h weps. People we currently use a pistol when pressing explosive shot, this is just expanding on something already implemented. Hunters have used guns since, hmm, let me think, 2004??
I could go on but this is enough for now - I like the pathing keep it up
EDIT: see my most recent response below for further ideological opining (I felt the need to add this because @Altani brings up good response to my post) - Survival Hunter Changes Look Amazing - #8 by Wolfcolax-stormrage
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bro you peak at +10s how are you able to judge this
LOL - we got like 4 months in the season left - I am taking my time and doing 12s now at like sub 710 ilv - I was expecting bad responses but this takes the mouth breathing cake
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ngl I agree with some of your points I just thought that part in particular was funny overall though I feel like removing tip of the spear is an L
Oh no, you’ve alerted the horde of sweats
Agreed. Raw damage vs. ease of buff application. Still would perhaps have preferred alternatives to WFB be available, but I’d also be happy with glyphs doing that.
They’re not malding over the fact that they need to press a melee move. They’re malding over there being no other melee moves to press. Flanking Strike, Butchery, Fury of the Eagle (thematically, as it’s now a 4x shotgun spam)… all gone. Which feels all the worse when one remembers what all we had before the simplifications already prior to what we’ll see in Midnight.
Since Legion, we’ve gone from…
- an ST rotation that included a DoT,
- a filler/buffer,
- a near-unique-windowing ramping 3-charge nuke with RNG charge-generation chance,
- an expensive burst (very high-chance) generator for the above,
- a 20s CD that boosts resource generation that deals some damage, grants a buff if not already active, and has situational gap-closing value,
- a separate CD pseudo-nuke usable at range and bankable for range,
- a mid-length CD AoE,
- a slightly longer-CD AoE still useful for ST, especially for buff generation,
- and a still-longer-CD AoE nuke synergetic with the 3-charge nuke,
- and a damage-amplifying CD with situational value…
…to…
- a filler attack (spend slow-Energy),
- a generator (get back slow-Energy),
- an AoE rotational-CD (don’t overcap),
- a damage-amplifying main CD (with virtually no situationality beyond a single gap-close).
And that’s it. We’re destined only ever to be barren af now.
And you see the problem, yes? They take something that was decently satisfying, cripple it, and then use that as an excuse to cull it.
They aren’t, though, or they wouldn’t have given us Boomstick in place of our melee flurry of attacks. We’re adding as many ranged attacks as we’re removing. We’re just also losing skills in total. That simplification is the main trajectory of change, not melee-ness.
…The tooltip already works perfectly well for 1hs. FotE “strikes”, not “stabs”, and an eagle itself would slash, not… stab. Yes, they’d need to offer an alternate visual to the character model for DWing, but… they literally do that already for every spec capable of both 2H and DWing.
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The bleed “bomb” talent variation in the patch notes should be a glaive animation that hits multiple targets, causing a bleed. 
This would give those of us hunters who don’t care for the whole bomb theme a nice alternative.
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Hesontly fair takes - I am conflating the simplicity with melee-ness which is a fair critique of my original point.
It’s a re-org of a spec that I think is going in the right direction. Their shuffling/pruning of moves is keeping the good thematic parts of Surv - I ultimately am for pruning writ large because the feedback loops a lot of classes have are just not fun. I would much rather have the engagement come MORE from situational modifiers from the fight rather than me continuing uptime on TotS stacks OR mongoose stacks, that “complexity” as some call it is just not fun.
As for your KS argument I am perfectly fine with it’s removal tbh for Surv. Agreed it was awesome in DF as I stated but this is a marked shift for the game that I think is a net benefit for player retention AND growth and gives them more ease on tuning and more room to play around with fight design.
Ultimately this seems to be a direction of “TBC’ing” wow again - and I am all for it. I could be wrong and the LAST thing I want to do is put blizz on a pedestal but this seems the way to go
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Sorry, I should have mentioned likewise that if they’re not going to make it useful, it needn’t be there at all. And a shot that can only be used below 20% target-health without upgrades is inherently… not a great use of buttons.
…I just feel like this would have been better handled by choice nodes in the Class Tree and baselining Deathblow into it rather than removing even the option of the formerly classwide ability from 2 out of 3 specs.
Opposite here. I have Classic for Classic gameplay. The reason I can only play it socially is because I find the gameplay honestly dull af.
I’ve had various earlier versions of different specs that I preferred and would very much like to see certain bits of pruning (perhaps even level squishing again and reducing talents to 20 points per side while baselining whatever they refuse to make optional), but for the most part I’m very nearly satisfied with TWW combat and would vastly prefer it over anything TBC-style.
If it was WotLK, there might at least have been some chance at the goal not seeming to me to be purposely speedrunning self-sabotage, but… ugh.
I feel like this is a massively oversold “feature”, especially given that virtually every time I’ve seen it given as a reason for simplifications… we were immediately mess with multiple major patches of worsened balance (lasting into well after the problems simply from having made changes at all were fixed), be that in XIV, here (see WoD), or various other MMOs (tab-target or otherwise).
The only actual changes to ease of tuning come from changing the degree of talent-interdependency and stat-interdependency. If the simplification doesn’t change the value of one build vs. others by changing how an ability affects an otherwise unrelated ability to in turn affect the value of its talent (to in turn affect… yada yada yada), there’s no tuning benefit to gameplay simplification. Hell, even that comes almost wholly from bloating skill-specific passives, not kit breadth.