I’m good with keeping Survival as a bombs and poisons kind of spec. I think that would be cool
For context… what do you even consider a Mastery that “actively interacts with [one’s] abilities?” And do any actually do that for the better?
A large portion are basically just Versatility but perhaps without the mitigation (or some other near-unnoticeable effect in its place).
- Frost DK, Unholy, Fury, Protection, Arms, Protection, Vengeance, Guardian, Havoc, Marksmanship, Fire, Brewmaster, Outlaw, Enhance, Resto Shaman…
Another portion just, in being optimal, increase the punishment for playing outside of the primary loop / set of optimizations / narrow your desirable pool/chain of actions. In some cases, they thereby increase engagement; in others, they thereby degrade nuances otherwise available.
- Beastmaster, Demonology, Feral, Ret, Disc, Shadow, Holy, Holy, Arcane, Resto Druid, Windwalker, Assassination, Subtlety…
And the remaining portion just end up situational — broadly a throughput loss, but occasionally desirable for the particular fight, resulting in further need for multi-gearing.
- Blood, Elemental, Survival…
(No, those lists are not exhaustive, and some blur the lines between their position and the set above or below it.)
Survival is already a Mastery that allows you to focus on, well, 3-5 GCD all-in focus fire and Kill Shot. It’s not a badly designed stat any more than Unholy or Sub’s or Fury’s or Ret’s, etc.
It’s just undertuned and with some opportunity for repolish via adjusting Focus costs on certain skills (not by spreading its modifier across anything and everything Versatility-/Crit-style).
- Well, that and badly punished by SV not knowing what to make of WFB’s position as core or not-quite-core to the spec.
personally I feel most masteries in the game are boring and survival is not unique at ALL when it comes to “versatility but specific” like 10 other DPS specs in the game.
if I was in charge for a day I would make our mastery based off of this conduit
I would retool it to this
(To anyone curious, Flanker’s Advantage is the name of the proc when the KC cooldown is immediately reset)
This mastery (while still being basically versatility) engages more with the theme of SV and borrows elements from ENH by giving it a slightly increased chance to proc
I’m going to hard disagree on this one, because I just leveled a Hunter from level 1 to 63 as a SV. And overall? It was a fun, enjoyable experience, and felt so much better than BM and MM. I’m going to finish leveling when I don’t have work keeping me off of my PC.
The only thing SV needs is the ability to offhand a ranged weapon of your choosing. You don’t gain the stats, only the raw DPS of the weapon for all of your shots/stings. Also, it’ll change your default crossbow, too, to whatever your new ranged weapon is. Then, simply buff the “Ranger” talent.
- Ranger: Increases your damage from your shots and stings by 20%/40%. (This is baseline already.) Arcane shot costs 10/20 less focus, and each Arcane Shot Critical Hit restores 5/10 focus. Each time you cast Arcane Shot, reduce the Cooldown of Explosive Shot by 1.5/3 Seconds.
Tada. Suddenly, you’re not a brilliant Ranged DPS, but you’re capable of switching to Ranged when need be. Your main bread and butter still revolves around melee, but you’re entirely capable of dealing some respectable damage at range. Just pick up Poison Injection/Serpent Sting and you’ve got some respectable ST damage.
That’s my only suggestion to improve SV. The rest? I like it. It’s fun. And I’ll defend it after trying it, because that’s what happens to opinions with an open mind; they change.
Oh. And maybe change the animation of Fury of the Eagle. It feels like London simulator, which is hilarious IMHO.
I… honestly prefer the current Mastery over that. At least it lets me decide what to focus my damage gains towards, rather than increasingly trimming away reasons to do anything other than spam for KC resets when able to.
Feedback is always appreciated but with the way the spec is designed right now Kill Command is your most important ability and you should always be using it as long as you aren’t overcapping Focus. That’s why so many things of the spec work off of Flanker’s Advantage 
That gives me all the less reason to want that to be the Mastery. If it’s just going to be RNG-dependent Versatility that increases punishment for not playing in an especially routine manner (degrading or devolving occasions where you might otherwise want not to just hit KC when able)… how is that a fun stat?
Is Mastery ever a fun stat?
But it’s not a punishment, it’s a reward for playing properly. The whole fantasy of the spec is fighting in tandem with your pet like that.
Okay, that’s fair. After all, if anything uniquely/particularly fun (for all/most) were uniquely dependent on the Mastery stat, that effect on gameplay would just get baselined (for the better).
- Or every stat (or all but Vers) would have to have equally palpable and enjoyable effects on gameplay, which is technically feasible but seemingly very difficult to pull off.
They’re one in the same when working within the same frame of reference and consequent value.
With a Mastery like that, which rewards you for following a routine that was already fairly default, avoiding Mastery causes your gameplay to have less of an obvious optimization for its skill floor but a greater number of optimizations that are still rewarded enough to be worth pulling off despite the base [no-stat] Mastery value (lower floor, higher ceiling), while stacking Mastery emphasizes that single area of optimization but at cost to other nuances (higher floor, lower ceiling).
I prefer the prior.
But you’re right; that’s still no worse a Mastery design than most.
You’re right but I ask you to consider the fact that mastery as a stat (and function) is effectively baseline—all specs get their mastery at the same level and all stats have a baseline amount of mastery that makes it function. For example, even with 0 Mastery rating on live right now, a Survival Hunter will always have ~13% Mastery.
Which is unavoidable in WoW (or any video game, really) and is entirely a matter of perspective. Am I being punished, for example, by choosing to play my Warrior sub-optimally or am I being rewarded for playing it optimally? Related, is it a punishment if I use my abilities in a wrong order and overcap on resources, or am I being rewarded by doing more damage and learning/mastering my spec?
Personally I believe all masteries in the game should function as a built in incentive to teach and help guide players how to get the most out of their spec. Take Enhancement’s for example. Their mastery on the surface “punishes” you for leaving your abilities off cooldown and rewards you for using them. I think it’s a good way to teach players that they shouldn’t just have abilities sitting ready to use and not use them.
The actual impact of that base portion varies heavily, though. Some effectively use that base portion in place of actual aura adjustments or skill %AP adjustments to the point it already forces/trims certain decisions. On others, the base portion is relatively negligible.
…Again:
And that’s where we’ll have to agree to disagree. If the effect of that forced tutorial is just to emphasizing one among dozens of optimizations, many others among which may then stop being worthwhile because of that emphasis on the one, then the result is almost always a higher skill floor but lower skill ceiling due to overly narrow focus/fixation.
A DPS meter (or, better yet, a Relative %AP/s, as not to be so gear-swayed) goes far further than a Mastery in teaching what strategies are most lucrative or considerations most worth spending cognitive load on, and without the negative consequence. A “Focus on This!” Mastery, on the other hand, both disrupts the balance of those optimizations and still depends as much on people reading tooltips as any individual ability or passive.
Theoretically, they’re worth having when balanced. I just don’t care for them where/when they reduce skill ceiling, especially if they become the leading stat. I prefer any option fixating on which would reduce skill ceiling to be non-optimal except to those who’d particularly want those simplifications.
Anywho, with a “Focus on This!” Mastery, at least we get the following options:
- Bad at most mechanics? Go whatever.
- Bad at most mechanics, but especially the Mastery mechanic? Avoid Mastery.
- Good at Mastery mechanic but not so good at the rest? Go Mastery.
- About equally good at everything, including things constrained by the Mastery mechanic, but not to the point of hyperoptimizing? Go whatever.
- Really good at everything, therefore including things constrained by the Mastery mechanic and to the point of otherwise being able to hyperoptimize? Avoid Mastery.
Granted, that’s not really any more customization than we get with the current Mastery —and it’d likely be less pivotal, even, in PvP— but at least it’d be a little clearer in what it’s meant to do? Maybe?
100 bucks says you’ve played it before and you’re just pretending to be new to it. Wouldn’t be the first time around here.
what kind of worm for brains do you have where you think anyone that likes SV is doing some sort of planned conspiracy? I can’t help but imagine you shaking with barely contained rage behind your monitor typing a bit too heavily because someone dared to have a different opinion than you
I don’t think you have an option though.
With the way the game works you have two general choices for designing a mastery: generic versatility but specific (read almost every single mastery in the game) or something that supplies you a framework of your gameplay loop / spec identity (see: fury warrior—you do more damage while enraged, using your rage spender enrages you, teachers players to efficiently spend focus)
Do you have an example
You better paypal me then. I played RSV in Wrath. This account came about in MoP, though, and I didn’t play it as much as I hoped, even though I got a full year of game time for free through Randstad. I came back in Legion and gave up on my MM Hunter because I hated the marking targets/vulnerability aspect, on top of the overly simplified talent trees. I spent most of my time playing in not-so-Blizzard places, specifically in era servers. And I have never played melee Hunter until now, when I returned in DF.
I joined the hate train thinking it was trash, but after actually playing it, it’s fine. Your assumptions are intentionally agitating if not borderline trolling. Keep those thoughts to yourself young man.
This is important, and it hasn’t really come to note for me just yet, but now that I think about it - it’s true.
Having a lot of conditionals tied to a low% chance that a 6 second cooldown ability procs an effect is detrimental to the class, especially if you go RNG dry. It’s similar to miss chance, where your most important stat is trying to maximize Kill Command resets. Design like this shouldn’t really exist; they removed it in MM’s old LotWR talent, where it was a %chance on a %chance, so it was incredibly rare.
An example is the Arcane Shot on KC reset chance; 30% of a 25% is 7.5% proc chance every time you use your main focus generator (and also a strong DPS button). And since the damage is low on Arcane Shot to begin with, you’re gaining maybe a 0-2% DPS increase on Single Target over the course of 60 seconds. The effect is pitiful because of RNG,
With how important KC is to your core rotation, having it refill instantly on a %chance is kinda dumb. I don’t know a solution to this other than having KC increase the recovery rate of certain abilities every time you use it, and having KC’s recharge increase whenever you use Raptor/Mongoose. That way it plays a bit more like the stack build up effect of Mongoose Bite - the more Focus you spend, the more Kill Commands you toss out, the more abilities recharge. Same concept as the original, but a more consistent implementation.
Cool story but I don’t believe you because I’ve seen this before. I don’t believe in all these years you, someone who clearly knows a lot about the class, just never happened to look at Survival and give it a try. Even I’ve tried it and that says a lot.
Once I had someone here telling me that they just went out to try Survival specifically because of my posts and then fell in love with it. A quick look at their post history showed that was a lie; they had been playing it for years. You conveniently don’t have a post history. Just popped into existence a few weeks ago. Who’s your main?
P.S. Didn’t you quit the class?
Or was Balance Druid another ephemeral honeymoon phase for you that you gave up on?
You don’t have to believe me because I literally do not care who you are or what you say. I replied out of good will and good faith, something you lack in heaps and spades. And I know a lot about a lot of classes for reasons I shouldn’t speak of here.
I quit MM and BM, never tried Melee Survival because of people like you decrying it as a stain against Hunter. Decided to spite you and I enjoyed it immensely.
I still enjoy my Druid, but I’m forced to reserve playtime with my druid for whenever my other friends are in the mood to play their low levels. I’m fine with this, as I have other responsibilities now and can’t always be online when they are. Druid is still fun and I like how it plays.
So you do know me. Yet your post history only goes back a few weeks
Who’s your main?
You’re allowed to type the words “private server”, you know.
I played on this character for a while, rerolled for crit chance + dark flight + skinning prof over LF Draenei.
This is not related to private servers, but related to a former job I had.
Literally plugging your fingers and your ears and saying “nah nah nah nah” when presented with something that goes against your beliefs. This is not reasonable behavior.
There is 0 proof that they could show you that would convince you btw. Isn’t that right?
1 Like
Another barely played throwaway toon 
Yes I don’t believe that someone who’s apparently such a die hard MM Hunter switched over and became a diehard Survival-only main in a day. Especially given on both the characters he’s posted on he is still MM with no saved Survival loadouts.
Reeks of alt-posting.