Survival Hunter end of Dragonflight Feedback

Classes Hunter
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Survival Hunter End of Dragonflight Feedback Post

General thoughts on Survival
It’s no secret that Survival hunter in its current melee iteration has been a pretty widely unpopular spec. Even when it has a competitive damage profile it doesn’t have much effect on the public’s opinion. (S3 Shadowlands). The spec has gone through multiple versions trying to find an identity with nothing really finding a solid fit. Borrowed power feeling like the only parts of the game to give it life. However Dragonflight has given a glint of hope to believe there is something more interesting at its core.

Talent Trees
Dragonflight brought in a lot of excitement and hope for the spec with the addition of talent trees. With the reworked Coordinated Assault and the return of our legion ability, Survival has a massively satisfying AOE. Killshot hits 4 targets and Fury of the Eagle hits like a truck. On the other hand the single target, mongoose bite focused side of the tree got the mostly underwhelming Spearhead. A cooldown that I feel only really got played because of the season 1 tier set.
While there is a solid core to the spec that feels really rewarding and enjoyable to maximize, The tree has some glaring flaws. The Spec tree currently has 17 points in the tree that are just a 5-10% throughput increase on single abilities. Some of the weakest of these being in the capstone section of the tree. The spec heavily depends on the base power of each individual button. There ends up being very little synergy between the spec so survival requires a lot of flat % buffs throughout the expansion to allow them to keep up. This lack of synergy ends up making the best trinkets and embellishments always be flat damage procs. The Survival mastery is also in desperate need of some kind of synergy to increase its value. Mastery is so weak for Survival that jewelry roughly 100 Item levels lower without mastery sims higher than jewelry with it.
Coming into Dragonflight our focus economy was also made significantly worse due to being unable to path through them in our tree.
Flanker’s Advantage/Intense focus: These two nodes increase the reset chance and focus regained from kill command. These were both part of the base kit in Shadowlands and don’t path through them cause there are better throughput options.
Alpha Predator: Double kill command is something you took in 99% of content previous to Dragonflight, but it being locked behind 4 points of pet/Kill Command damage in the general tree makes it impossible to get.
Carve/Butchery: This just isn’t a real choice, butchery previously was meant to be a talent you could take to replace carve. Butchery is a 2 second longer cd, but it gains 3 charges, a way bigger hitbox, and does 3 times the damage.
Ruthless Marauder/Deadly Duo: These aren’t bad nodes, but these are the last two, 2 point capstones left on ANY spec in the game.
As the expansion has progressed, we’ve seen talent trees get reworked, the overall power level and talent point economy has been refined. However survival has remained in a place where very few points actually feel impactful or feel like there is much choice.

Coordinated Assault
Coordinated Assault going into Dragonflight had a pretty large functional rework. Losing the 20% damage amp for a cooldown with more depth in its gameplay has been very fun. The sound of 4 Kill Shots critting is beyond satisfying. However the new CA desperately needs some quality of life changes to get rid of the 3 part macro required to get maximum output from the cooldown. I think creating a more streamlined rotation is also key to finding synergistic parts of the kit and fixing the macro issue. When spamming bombs, you clip the back half of the DoT, the DoT being roughly 60% of bomb damage There needs to be something to add value into the front half of the bomb, Wildfire Cluster from Shadowlands for example. Whether or not that exact ability is the answer, it’s something along that idea that’s needed. Another idea could be baking in the 20% initial damage from bombs to be throughout the duration of the cooldown and not consume the buff. This option fixes macro issues and adds a lot of needed power in both single target and AOE.
Spearhead
Spearhead is a really fun button in theory but clashes with what the button is supposed to feel like. You want to dump focus into as many mongoose bites as possible, but don’t have the focus economy for it. You end up spending a lot of globals on completely unrelated or unbuffed abilities wasting a lot of the very short duration. Spearhead has very few things working together to actually do any damage. There is also synergy that has been glanced over that could give some depth. S2 tier had the increased kill command damage after you threw a bomb by 40%. This plus the full stacked Deadly Duo buff and the double Kill Command/Execute Kill command actually hits pretty damn hard. What this needs is putting the power into the base duration and increased focus generation. Having the empowered Kill Command just gain more focus based on stacks of Deadly Duo is a great example. It is also worth mentioning that double Kill Command and execute Kill Command are too far out of the way to ever take in the general tree due to the other side being so much stronger.
Fury of the Eagle
The S3 tier set gave Survival the perfect damage amp button that flows naturally with the rotation and brings back the damage amp lost from Coordinated Assault being reworked. With Survival losing this tier, It feels like it’s losing a core button for the single target rotation. It was a super successful addition that would be more than welcome as a mainstay option. If it did come back, it would need something to give you a reason to fully channel it in ST. In single target you cancel the channel on the next global as other buttons are just more worth pressing. There was legion artifact power that increased Fury of the Eagle damage based on mongoose bite damage and that seems like a perfect fit. This would probably be a ridiculous amount of damage in AoE, so making that buff to the main target or some other option to give a reason to fully channel the button.

TL;DR

Talent Tree: Lacks synergy and relies too heavily on the base power of each individual ability. There are plenty of focus droughts due to it being a throughput decrease to grab what we had/took 99% of the time. (double Kill Command and 6 more focus generated per KC). Mastery has very little synergy with the majority of the talents and builds.
Coordinated Assault: Requires a 3 part macro. Empowering Wildfire Bomb is never worth it. Unintuitive rotation. Not enough power into the front half of WB to feel good about clipping the dot.
Spearhead: Very short base duration. Clunky to generate enough focus to play the cooldown as intended. Not enough working parts to result in satisfying or enjoyable gameplay. Extending the duration doesnt feel good.
Fury of the Eagle: Would love to see this being a damage amp going forward, just needs a reason to full channel in single target.

Feedback by Bendyneck, a Survival main & enthusiast from BFA to present pushing CE & 23+ mythic keystones. I have a ton of passion and love for this spec, and I want to see the most enjoyable version come to life.

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2

Nitpicks, but…

Better a 2-point talent at the end that can see value from taking just the one point than a 2-point talent just prior to the payoff, locking you into all 3.

That is, it’s at least an improvement over the likes of, say, Eagletalon’s Focus or Legacy of the Windrunner.

And if we expand the pool to include those who are worse affected by 2-point nodes augmenting capstone talents by having a powerful 1-pointer after them… you’d have a majority of specs.

Ultimately, all that matters is…

  1. your freedom to pick individual talents instead of merely talent bundles, and
  2. whether, in average context, those talent points have competitive value.

In that regard, Deadly Duo and Ruthless Marauder aren’t particularly the issue.

Putting aside for the moment whether we truly have a below-average degree of synergy/codependence between our skills…

A spec being dependent on the base power of each individual button is neither novel nor problematic.

Consider the high-synergy alternative: Modifier A increases the modification of Modifier B which inadvertently increases the value of Modifier C such that now your base skill D can finally hit for some worthwhile damage.

There’s no inherent power-increase in expanding each skill’s codependency (which, given final tuning, is at least as useful a term as “synergy”); it just changes how finnicky the spec is. Such increases are usually enjoyable to a point, as they offer more skill expression and flavor, but… only to a point.

Moreover, though, our individual skills already have a fairly average degree of synergy/codependence. Anything added through talents would necessarily add atop the codependence we already have, and there’s often a fine line between deepening the game loops we possess… and degrading them (see Holy Power on Ret, compliments of Of Dusk and Dawn, for example).

That is not to say any banal nodes currently obligatory because of their pathing shouldn’t be replaced; most of them should. However, if freedom of choice and a solid, nuanced but decently intuitive set of gameplay loops are the goal, the replacements should be chosen carefully — in large part not to be too synergetic/codependent.

  • As always, there are some exceptions, or some directions of synergy that are less problematic than others. If, for instance, a particularly AoE-focused option daisy-chains back to ST options or vice versa, this can feel bad in truly mass-AoE or solely single-target situations if the improved AoE still is not good enough to be used in ST or your AoE options frequent enough to to seemingly have room for an ST attack. However, if the tuning and space is sufficient, such can allow AoEs and STs to be individually stronger than they would be if their spammed use were not wasteful to net damage, inadvertently both increasing your max ST and max AoE burst (e.g., over a Mongoose Fury window for ST or a Butchery+WFB window for AoE) and making the out-of-category attack feel less like button bloat.

Some examples of not-too-synergetic yet more interesting and/or functionally distinct replacements for certain %damage nodes:

Improved Wildfire Bomb – Every 10 seconds and each time you throw a Wildfire Bomb, gain a stack of Bandolier, allowing you at 10|5 stacks to throw another Wildfire Bomb regardless of its cooldown and without incurring the global cooldown. This may be done even while casting or channeling without interrupting either. You may hold up to 12|7 stacks of Bandolier at a time.

  • This mirrors our S3 set’s functionality to a degree but without the need for FotE.

Tactical Advantage – (Now just 1 point) Your melee special attacks reduce the cooldown of Disengage by 1 second each. Kill Command and your attacks usable from range reduce the cooldown of Flanking Strike by 1 second each. Flanking Strike does up to 50% more damage, based on its Focus generation wasted.

  • Imperfect. Perhaps scales a bit too greatly with Haste and AotE (though at least the second is rarely taken and Crit initially outperforms Haste otherwise in RM builds). Possibly overly situational, dependent on Flanking Strike’s individual tuning (which currently barely competes with 5% Mongoose Bite and Butchery damage).

Killer Command – Your Kill Command has an 8|16% chance to strike the target and all bleeding enemies near it or you a second time. This bonus strike does not generate Focus but does apply all other effects.

  • While amounting to much the same but with added versatility, this should be more interesting in its gameplay impact due to extra TotS generation and sheer visuals (akin to a very rapid Lynx Rush).

Sweeping Spear – Your single-target attacks have a chance to grant a bonus temporary charge of Carve|Butchery that will also strike up to 5 enemies with Raptor Strike [Mongoose Bite] at 20|40% damage. Carve and Butchery have a chance per target struck to cause your next Raptor Strike [Mongoose Bite] to refund 50%|100% of its Focus cost.

Sharp Edges – Each of your melee attacks that fail to critically strike leaves a tear in its victims’ defenses, increasing the critical strike chance of other melee attacks by 3|5% for 5 seconds. Each critical strike increases your critical strike damage dealt by 3|5% for 5 seconds.

  • Rather Versatility- and Mastery-unfriendly, but certainly more interesting than what came before.

Names were retained as is to make obvious what they would replace. Many would ideally be renamed instead.

3

Says bloody who?

Bingo.
This (too much synergy) is exact problem frost DKs are in right now, where Oblit sucks total a outside of pillar windows, hitting for less than a damp fart. And all your other damage abilities are filler that barely qualify as dps. But inside Pillar windows…Oblit is god. Conversely, if you (or mechanics) screw up your window, your dps goes to dogwater until the next window comes around.

We dont want that to happen to survival.

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