Survival Hunter is supposed to be a ranged melee hybrid with a focus on traps and ambush tactics - not an alternate Beast Master spec or Boomstick bot. Much like the classic Ranger design (Aragorn), we should be using ranged and melee weapons with abilities that tie into each other instead of the disjointed mess we have right now. Here’s how to fix the problem.
Replace Arcane Shot with old school Explosive Shot. The new Explosive Shot would have 3 charges, each with a six second cooldown. It causes an additional explosion on targets who are affected by Flamfang/Immolation Trap. This additional explosion of fire immolates other nearby targets. Heavy bonus damage for tying the trap and shot together.
Flamefang would cause people briefly run around screaming on fire in the immolated area. Use the effect from Warlords of Draenor.
Replace the useless Hatchet Toss with Serpent Sting. It would strike three targets with talents that get it up to 5. Add a stacking DoT affect that would increase its burst damage after gaining 5 stacks.
Snake Trap would increase all nature damage to the target and cut healing to them by 25% which stacks with other heal cutting abilities. The snakes would take a percentage damage total of 33% from AoE attacks. Triggering the trap roots targets with coiling snakes. After that they’re slowed by 60%. Further talents deep in the tree give it Entrapment effect from Classic TBC. Additionally, the snakes rapidly bite the target, adding Serpent Sting poisons stacks.
All your abilities do bonus damage for 10 seconds after you come out of Camouflage.
Gain focus from damage over time effects instead pet dependency. Again, we’re not a Beast Master.
Thrown Potions: Throw a healing potion that does a percentage based heal over time for allies and damage over time for enemies. Increase healing received by 50% on allies and 50% heal reduction on enemies. Stack with Snake Trap for maximum lethality.
Confusion Trap: A massive explosion of light and sound that leaves enemies blind and confused. Damage breaks the effect.
Wyvern Sting: Puts a target to sleep. Bring it back with the ability to fire through multiple targets in a straight line. Waking the target causes sever poison damage. (Percentage based)
Ranged and melee attacks would reduce the cooldowns of Camouflage and Feign Death.
Readiness: Another classic that resets all your cooldowns.
Gravity Trap: Works like Zarya’s Graviton Surge combined with like Wild Spirits. (Could even glyph it to look like Wild Spirits)
Enhanced Camouflage that allows you to gain seconds of invisibility back when you stand still. It also increases your damage bonus the longer you remain still. Its cooldown is lowered by your melee abilities.
Make ranged attacks gather Mongoose charges and lower melee cooldowns, while melee attacks do the same for ranged attacks and cooldowns. Give Mongoose charges a realistic duration.
This will fix the broken relationship between ranged and melee combat that SV currently has. Conversely, Raptor Strikes will speed up the cooldowns of Explosive Shots, Flamefang Pitch, and possibly traps.
Bringing Deterrence back, to have it coexist with Turtle, would be welcomed. Making Deterrence reflect damage and spells back for a percentage would also be good.
Understandable. It depends on what you want out of your experience. It can be satisfying in PvE situations to mass AoE and reset the shotgun. I find it a bit boring and not very effective in single target situations.
I liked the original Survival theme from classic and have been wanting it back for a long time. Perhaps they could keep the current one available, but add this Classic evolution that I’ve created as an option.
Agreed. It was a lot more clever back then. Lived up to the same Survival. I think all the original class spec themes were better back then. They just needed to evolve based on what they originally were.
At the same time, the game didn’t really have hardmodes(but only a little bit). It’s now all about timing M+, and to some lesser extent, getting the better 3’s comp. We know this as the endgames that matter.
Can SV traps and DoTs be so good to bust peach through a 25+ key?
Honestly, ever since Blizzard started basing game outcomes on damage/healing charts and addons, the game has gotten progressively worse. This is why so many people prefer Classic playstyle or just left. It’s all about mindless spam now, so wonder Survival got dumbed down to a boomstick rotation. Additionally, shifting the focus to endgame was always a massive fail for the game and killed immersion.
The game needs to get away from the numbers obsession and get back to adventuring. When it comes to official PvE and PvP content, we need an actual performance rating system more like Heroes of the Storm. One where you get titles and bonuses for being good instead of mindless rotation spamming and bots.
But that’s a whole other topic. In regards to the current system, the damage from this would easily keep up based the sheer level of poison and fire AoE. Talents could easily focus on reducing the cooldown of Camouflage and Feign Death, so that players could restealth and go nuts. And because ranged and melee reduce each other’s cooldowns, you’d be able to get some serious damage in. I suppose I could also suggest some AoE melee moves to fill in the gap. Thanks for making me consider that.
Fury of the Eagle needs to not be channeled, and Flanking Strike needs to not require a pet distance requirement. As we learned from Retail Legion(and not relearn it in Classic Leg since we won’t be doing that), FotE required a ramp-up from Mongoose, so people knew to CC it after a handful of globals, and Flanking Strike won’t pop off if the pet is not close enough(or if you had lost your pet).
Serpent Sting needs to hit really hard to make it less frequent in the rotation, like the old fashioned BArrow of some 28 seconds. Hatchet Toss is fine, but it better be like the Benjamin Martin version.
The reason why those abilities got canned, ironically, was because Blizzard had no idea how to actually make then GUD in the actual crunch of the game. If FotE and Flanking Strike actually was designed better, SV would be in a far different place today. That’s the funny part: Blizzard never made MSV successful. It was a grade of nu-RSV ever since.
That had nothing to do with the ramp-up. It still hit for less damage per GCD than MB itself did.
That is not how damage works, nor how frequency works.
No, it’s not.
In Shadowlands, between Hydra’s Bite, the Injectors legendary, and Volatile Bomb contribution, Serpent Sting could hit for up to almost 10x the damage of Raptor Strike.
FotE is in the most functional state it’s ever been right now, and again, Flanking Strike does not exist. Meanwhile, it did fine as a Focus/Tips generator, which it can still do through Takedown. What was lost was Coordinated Assault, since Spearhead (only the same charge-distance as CA) itself did nothing that just dealing that 30% bonus damage in direct form couldn’t do better against all but perhaps plate.
We would need 1h weapons in WoW (just pistols, no mini crossbow nonsense). This would make sense for both SV and Outlaw.
I would loooooove to have GW2 style weapon synergies, where you could go 2h melee, DW melee, 1h melee/1h range, DW range, or 2h range and all have different skills based on what you’re using. Or, at least have different skill effects depending on what you have equipped. That may be too broad a palate for the systems we have now. I’d like to think, though, that since we’re ranger survivalists, we could adapt to more than a couple of weapon options and 4 buttons (or whatever we’re pressing these days).
In short, revert it back to what it was in the last expansion. The only problem there is that it’s still the wrong concept. Survival isn’t supposed to be a second Beast Master with grenades. Though I would agree that this could be implemented as a BM option. I’d just exchange the grenades and shotgun for beast attacks.
I have to agree. The original wasn’t very thrilling in that aspect. That’s why I created an evolution of that spec that carried over the best parts and added new components that fit the original theme of Survival.
I can see why you’d like that and visually it’d be satisfying I guess, though I never did like the idea of shooting eagles out of my sword lol. It sorta grew on me after a bit. As for Hatchet Toss, that move serves absolutely no purpose. They only added that because the lazy devs didn’t do their research and actually think Rexxar was a Survival Hunter.
I had the idea of Serpent sting stacking dots and gaining bust power, but I can also see the appeal of a shotgun style version. Perhaps an optional talent that replaces my version with the hardcore shotgun and cooldown ability you suggested.
I think Blizzard should create class fusions where you can fuse Hunter and Rogue for a Gunslinger class. Dual pistols and lots of agility - Mccree style. Same thing with Mages and Warriors fusing into the long awaited Spellbreaker.
Devouring Plague: arguably the most powerful DoT of all time. That’s what FotE needs to emulate more.
I played the Rexxar bonus campaign in WC3, which was a Diablo-style kind of play. His Hero class was literally a Beastmaster, his bear being Misha. Rokhan, a SHADOW HUNTER (we don’t have those yet) and Chen Stormstout, a Brewmaster.
Only danger with poisons and dots is that of sin…Sin spec. Rogue mains may take issue.
Exactly. And same here. This is why I have no idea why people referring to Survival as having “that Rexxar Fantasy”. It’s irritating.
The kind of damage I suggested would easily match some of the most powerful rapid damage effects in the game. A trap that lights them up and fears them for a few moments, followed by 3 arounds of explosive shots that have a volatile reaction with the immolation. And of course with the help of Snake Trap, they’d be all stacked up with Serpent sting charges. Then the hunter could just leap in for melee attacks/bleeds, and jump back to ranged attacks with the cooldowns all reset.
Your harder Serpent Sting idea actually fits this style very well.
Its better than what we have now and fill their purposes to a degree that also have different themes for those who want, that is better than being a dumbstick bot
You seem confused. The period in which a green recopy of Fists of Furycould flailingly jabbed the eye of an axe or back of your scimitar at people as if they were each suddenly a long pointy stick… was before this expansion, lasting only for 3 in total (or, if you mean competitively and for its own damage, as our 45s AoE CD does now instead being used for mere free bomb-tosses and 10s crit buffs or MF-window extensions, that was quite the brief period altogether — only part of a single xpac).
We have a Boomstick now instead, which isn’t great for its lack of skin customization in place of just an uncustomizable animation that fit only thrusting weapons, but the dumbstick ability, at least, is behind us.
thanks for saying something completely irrelevant that adds nothing to the discussion or to what i said, im sure you are fighting another imaginary argument again