Survival Hunter SL Legendary - Butchery

I have noticed that the butchery talent has gotten a slight buff(even though mastery nerf negates it) and have been wondering if the Butcher’s Bone Fragments legendary will see some play?

I have used butchery in BFA and the typical rotation (AOE) is:
Wilfirebomb
Butchery
Butchery
Wildfirebomb
Butchery
Mongoose Window/kill command

Now this legendary would buff your next butchery after your first Mongoose window bye around 50-60% which would be a decent AOE and single target increase.

Now since this legendary now makes your butchery have a single target damage increase(around rank 3 mongoose bite) it can now compete with Guerrilla tactics in Single target and AOE.

I am assuming that Guerrilla tactics will still beat out Butchery especially since you can pick the cluster legendary. However butchery might be a more palatable talent in Mythic+ setting.

Can anyone on the beta do some logs of these two choices? So we can compare.

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Anything that boosts butchery is awesome in my book.

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I haven’t tested it yet, but does the bonus to Butchery damage have a timer or does it last until you use it next? Basically what I’m asking is it easy to “store up” the stacking damage bonus so you can have it primed going into your next fight?

It has a timer, something like 12-15 seconds.

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Please note, I don’t have very much experience with SV hunter.

I tried both the butchery legendary and the cluster bomb one in Torghast. The cluster bomb one seemed to far out perform butchery legendary. I had to really focus on not using Butchery to early to try and build up stacks and then when I did use it with stacks the damage wasn’t very noticeable.

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cant u eventually pick two legendaries? does this mean we can go both butchery and wildfire cluster for an ultimate aoe build?

Yeah, the Butcher one seems like too much of a pain to setup, especially when you will likely front load your Butchery damage at the start of a fight when you have all 3 charges and (hopefully) a Shrapnel bomb.

The Cluster bombs just seems so much easier to use as it just works every time with zero setup.

I’ve been playing around on training dummies trying to find a good way to use Butchery and it’s been disappointing. I wish they’d keep the CD at 6 seconds and make it two charges instead of 9seconds/3 charges, because it feels like crap waiting 9 seconds for your 5th Butchery during any sort of sustained fight.

Everyone is assuming you will at some point down the road, but I don’t think it’s been confirmed.

Tested it

Completely useless compared to the wild fire bomb legendary

So I found a recent M+ 10 run in Beta by a Survival Hunter who led in DPS (beating out a Sub Rogue and Mage) and Wildfire Bomb Legendary was 13% of his damage which is pretty great. He also ran Tip of the Spear over Mongoose.

EDIT: So I found another run where they used the “15% chance for free WFB on Mongoose/Raptor Strike” and the DPS difference is pretty noticeable. Cluster seems to be BIS for M+ for sure, even being pretty effective on single target boss fights.

I don’t think I ever did not top dps on beta with that legendary on

Just used goose bite as well

Seems to be that Tip of the Spear and Mongoose seem to even out over the long haul, but Wildfire Cluster does seem to be a non-brainer BiS for most content.

I hate tip of the spear

It might be one if the worst talents to play around I’ve ever experienced

They need to rework that whole damn talent row

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I haven’t played around with it much, but I appreciate the heads up.

It does feel like there are a few “traps” in the talent rows that need a small tweak. Butchery needs a rework for example, give it 2 changes and a 6 seconds CD would make it so much better, I think it’s a bit of a trap in that it’s 3 charges in 9 seconds you can spam it early, but then you find yourself waiting 9 seconds for that 5th Butchery and your WFBs dry up too.

LIke Butchery should be a no-brainer for AoE damage, yet it isn’t…that’s wrong. WF Infusion seems to be BiS even for Single Target DPS and that’s wrong too. They need to look at the Shadow rework from Beta and apply that to Survival and I think the spec would be in good shape.

(Then again I just said “just make it better and it’ll be better” so not sure there is any value there. :wink: )

If anyone cares, I did a bit more research on this and Wildfire Cluster gives about 13% of your DPS on a M+ run, but it drops to about 8% on a boss fight (due to more single target damage), if you take it as a whole of Wildfire Bomb, with the Infusion talent it equals about 40% of your WFB damage (so add up Shaprnel, Volitile and Phermone Bombs, Cluster is about 40% of that number).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single Survival Hunter log with Soulforge Embers (240% AP to 5 targets over 12 seconds), but I did find a few BM and MM hunters, and SFEmber does about 9% of their total damage. It also seems to stay pretty constant between Groups and Single Target.

Now 13% v. 9% makes Wildfire Cluster sound like a no brainer, but there are few other things to consider.

  1. If you want to play multiple specs and don’t want to craft a lot of Legendaries, Soulforge Embers might be better since all specs can use it.
  2. Comparing DPS is hard, so ideally I’d love to have seen some logs from Survival to compare apples to apples. Like MM for example, Aimed Shot does so much damage it might make SFE looks lower than it should)
  3. (And this is stretching it), since WF Cluster is directly tied to WF Bomb and WFB is doing like 45% of our overall damage with the Legendary, they may nerf WFB and even if they buff our other abilities to compensate WF Cluster would take a hit…although since Survival is so niche, I think that’s unlikely for now.
  4. But, WFC also is BiS for Raiding (hell, and probably for PvP), so if you want to go Survival Hunter and do all content, WFC is probably the best choice. In Castle Nathria it’s about 9 - 10% of total damage from logs.
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Also keep in mind it will scale with haste!

Pretty sure the legendary will be dead for the entire expansion.

We used to have a similar legendary in legion but back then carve/butchery was an actual dps ability instead of an ability which is mainly used to reset wildfire bomb. It was also not target capped.
As a matter of fact in legion butcheries dps scaled exponentially with more targets because of the hellcarver artifact trait.

U will also lose out on single target dps by not having Guerilla tactics because using the legendary without butchery is like not having a legendary at all.

The legendary just has too many downsides compared to cluster which is not target capped and also increases your singletarget dps.

Its a shame since the legendary could be cool if it increased wildfire bomb dmg instead.
It would let us have some unique builds like playing it with hydras bite + wildfire infusion to stack and release big green bombs or, once we are allowed to wear a 2nd legendary u can combo it with the rylakstalkers legendary which has a chance to reset wildfire bomb whenever u raptor strike.

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I imagine I will remain the same as a percentage of DPS though because more haste will mean more of every other ability too.

It’ll just lower the CD for WFB, won’t lower it for tar trap and flare though

Ah, I see what you mean. Thanks for the clarification.