Survival is quite a joke and it needs a rework like ret pala's

Classes Hunter
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Once again in the new patch note I see buffs for ele sham and nothing for survival. Seriously do they really have no idea how powerful ele sham is right now and how funny survival is in keys?

To my point, the current version of survival hunter is the worst over the 4 (or 3 and a little bit more) expansions after it’s been made into a melee dps. It feels terrible to play this spec, both playstyle wise and dps capability wise. I managed to get to 2.95k as survival and when I sign up to 23+ key I feel like trolling on purpose.

Guys can you find another dps spec who would literally USE UP their aoe abilities? Bomb has cds, carve/butchery have cds, I literally have to stare the trash and wait till I get my next butchery ready or there’s literally nothing I could do but spaming SS and Mongoose while the others are doing big aoes every single gcd. I don’t even want to mention how poor the damage is on those abilities I count on for aoe. Does it not sound weird to anyone that mongoose, a single target ability, is standing on the top of a spec’s M+ overall breakdown, even fort weeks?

In other surv posts I noticed some people saying “survival is fine on damage output, it’s just the playstyle”, how? During CA yeah kill shot does great numbers, capped at 4, but at maximum you can only KS 4 times with ideally 16 hits everytime you CA and that’s all about it, meaning that you always deal and can only deal A CONSTANT NUMBER OF DAMAGE with your ult regardless of how many trash your tank pulls. Trust me no tank is going to pull only 4 trash when the team have their cds up. So what’s the depentdent variable then? 20% bonus on the initial damage of the bomb? On my 416 ilvl hunter the bomb deals 12548 initial damage, 20% of that would be…2.5k, seriously? Once again why did they nerfed Guerilla Tactics in the first place? That 20% is just hilarious. If CA is reworked into something like this, it should be a 1min ability instead of 2. I’m serious. On pulls when CA is not up, surv’s damage will just be dead weight to the team.

Higher number is not what I’m asking for, though it does need to be take into account as survival does tank damage with their basic aoe abilities, baseline abilities like bomb and carve/butchery should do a lot more damage than they are now. All I’m asking from the designer of survival hunter, if such figure does exist, is to take a deep look into our talent tree, and compare it with any other dps’s, for example, warriors’. See how few 2 points talents do they have and how few “increase the damage of XXX by X%” talents do they have, and how many of them do we have. Better also think about how useful their talents are to their rotations and how irelevent our talents are to our rotation.

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The Hunter forum desperately needs more feedback from higher-end players such as yourself. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve all but abandoned the forum, and instead populate the SV section on Trueshot Discord.

Thanks for your contribution.

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all i’d want out of a rework is for it to be at least in the middle of the pack and to have a more robust talent tree. compare what survival gets compared to others and it’s like a night and day difference. look at unholy, arms, literally any of the other melee spec trees.

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The survival tree is a bit of a hodgepodge monstrosity honestly. The only place it realistically is functional is in PvP and even then, it could be better.
My biggest pet peeves right now probably have to do with Spearhead and CA not being choice nodes especially since they directly compete with want they want to do, followed by all our capstone active buttons basically fluff without being filled out completely. Fury of the Eagle also could benefit from benefiting from Mongoose Fury again, making it more valuable to use regardless of health pools and less of a clunky, obfuscated execute button (which we already have in Kill Shot anyways)
Another missed opportunity is Bloodseeker, an extremely overlooked mechanic of Survival that’s been with us since the initial legion rework. Initial thoughts immediately point to making Bloodseeker tie into some sort of AA proc, but there appears to be no proc to tie into, making this essentially just extra damage on something we’d be using anyways, which is sad. Bloodseeker could be used to trigger procs or even be used as a vehicle to carry a form of group utility like providing a small amount haste to everyone within 40 yards of the bleeding targets (or pet) for instance, or have a proc to give us Bomb CDR, which is less fantastic but still more interesting.
Barrage even being available to us at all is weird too. Isn’t this a prime candidate as a survival only spot for flayed shot? A simple AoE v Single Target choice? Screams ‘we ran out of time’ to me.
Terms of Engagement should also realistically be tied to something we use more frequently in combat too, with an internal timer controlling it over harpoon, I don’t know who came up with the idea to make harpoon into a DPS button but it was probably the same person who designed NTA. Hunter’s Mark would honestly be less obnoxious than current ToE is.
AotE being a talent choice is a bit cruel. It’s always been with us and offers a lot of qol for a lot of encounters but we realistically end up not taking it due to how strong our aforementioned expensive capstones are, so we can’t budget it. Should be baseline for Survival, ideally learned early.
I’d like say something about Carve Vs Butchery, but there’s really not much to say. The only time you’d take carve is if you don’t know how to read. Make this exclusively Butchery, remove carve, and roll frenzied strikes into it.

Mongoose Bite, and consequently Mongoose Fury, which is what the spec was initially designed/reworked around, ideally needs something that would let it either accent it’s AoE abilities or use MB to cleave/splash damage out. Restoring FotE as mentioned before is a good step in that direction, but also putting a talent that branches from butchery and under Mongoose Bite that makes Mongoose Bite also splash damage with a way to further strengthen the relationship between the two skills, ideally with weaving them, or accenting bombs in that way to encourage usage of all 3 in aoe.
I honestly could keep going but I don’t have the time atm

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And I’m not sure why it’d be a problem, per se, so long as that total AoE damage is decent despite it. Having that free time from having dumped out in 30% of uptime as much mass-AoE damage as would take everyone else 80+% of their uptime would typically just mean then that you have greater focus damage atop that AoE and tend therefore to do better in 3-5 targets that most other specs would.

Gameplay-wise, I’d prefer a Carve that simply charges up over up to 5 seconds (e.g., for up to 5 hits’ worth of Frenzied Strikes CDR) but is spammable. I’d prefer a 7s Butcher CD over the current 9. That’d be nearer a “sweet spot” to me. But, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with having no spammable AoE filler. We aren’t unique in that regard, and the lack can often open up other nuances. It doesn’t fundamentally problematize the spec.

If there’s crucial problem there it’d just be in that simpler part, the tuning—

And there is your issue. And yes, it’s more than a little weird.

Yep, that bonus is pretty much a joke.

There’s nothing wrong with asking for higher numbers, anyways, if the spec is undertuned. Heck, if the suggestions don’t ultimately amount to higher damage, even if through functionality changes instead of raw tuning buffs… then what is it doing for the spec’s viability.

  • Perhaps the cut-off on Birds of Prey should be softened despite leaving it behind Bombardier for frequent 5+ target situations.
  • Perhaps WFB should be buffed, with its ST value siphoned away from Mongoose Bite (perhaps even by dropping MF to a max of 4 stacks and 12s duration).
  • I’d also love to see Coordinated Assault be stack-based, for instance, instead of a fixed CD, as to be more flexible. (Gain a stack per 12 seconds. Once you activate Coordinated Assault, you have that duration in which to proc the WFB/KS buffs, each time spending a stack if/when you consume the proc.)
  • Should the funnel AA from Bloodseeker actually be useful for something more, perhaps as a “next MB is half-cost and oGCD” or increased Butchery damage for each bleeding enemy, etc., etc.? Sure, if that’d where we’re lacking.
  • Potentially even reworking Mongoose Bite/Fury altogether? Could be a huge boon, depending.

But, ultimately, we should be looking to improve the spec’s viability (in ways not dependent on over-tuning, though we’re generally far from that anyways), even in how we choose to replace our dead/dry-as-dust talents, I would think?

  • Now, having greater build diversity available to SV, too, plays into that viability, and I’m all for a talent tree rehaul. Our tree is a wreck. I just don’t think we need to necessarily follow already non-ubiquitous staples like having a spammable AoE, etc., and we should probably be pretty deliberate, at least for a start, about what characteristics of SV are actually/necessarily problematic or what capacities SV lacks / what situations SV has no answer for. From there we can then figure out how best to intuitively/thematically/interestingly integrate those things.
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Another thread, another person complaining about something they are not good at.

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i feel like you didnt even bother reading the actual original post traktor
i normally would think someone with hidden data on their main just claiming to be 2.9k on a whim was trolling but this guy also has hero on his account, almost 100 25s timed in sls3, as well as nearly getting to 3.7k io in the same season, mostly on survival
im inclined to hear the man out

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Indeed, it’s not a serious issue. So here the point is not straight to the aoe spamming but it’s overall damage output capability, by that I mean their cooldown or to say frequency doesn’t match with the damage numbers on those spells. Low frequency is totally fine, let’s say arcane mage, they don’t do a lot of aoes all the time but they do single target to make their next aoe huge. The idea can be close to that but survival they don’t have a system any similar, you have to mongoose only because you have nothing to use and mongoose you use have NOTHING to do with what’s coming on next on your bomb or butchery (not taking tier set into consideration, “borrow power”). Simply tuning butchery and bomb higher can for sure be a go, but take a look at dps evoker, that’s what you will end up with, I won’t call that a well-made spec.

Again I’m not against tuning, but the entire system of survival hunter is off, AOE and single target completely separated from each other and the spells are like fight in each’s own battle. I guess we both agree on that. If we don’t want to make another classic spec in retail we must look further. A good design/system comes first, then the numbers.

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I’d agree, but if the individual parts are tuned fairly and yet the numbers fall low, that reveals problems in the design/system. Similarly, if you know where and why the numbers fall low, it helps to direct those improvements to that design/system.

On that count, completely agreed. And I apologize if I made it seem as if numbers were the sole end-goal; I don’t think they are. I mean for those shortfalls to be only a guide that’d indicate what (re)design opportunities are available and give hints one way or another about potential decisions that might otherwise seem arbitrary. E.g.,

  • if MB were returned towards the Legion design, what all should proc a MB refresh?
  • Would it be a good idea to have Butchery contribute to/scale with Mongoose Fury vs., say, tuning Butchery higher and having your single-target melee skills increasingly reduce the focus cost of your next melee AoE so that Butchery can more satisfyingly be churned out between MF windows.
    • In what direction would we be taken by the synergies between the parts of the SV builds that we actually like?

Or do you think it’d be better to basically start from scratch?

  • While I don’t think that’s as realistic in terms of dev hours, I could definitely see the merit. It’s certainly more fun to think about, too…
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I was busy on school when survival finally got its moment over the pass several years, didn’t have much time for hardcore pushing so I just left it there.
And currently running on an Asian bnet, not this one. On global surv ranking on raiderio site I’m at 12th. If I need something to prove myself that will be it.

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id just be happy for them to drop bombs completely and give us a different aoe move to use instead i don’t like the idea of going into battle with my pet at my side then start throwing bombs everywhere like a mad man

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It is indeed new to have kill shot involved, but its performance is so constrained. It’s hardcapped at 4, it’s only available during CA, it loads only 4 shots per CA. The idea is not bad but if you take that 16 hits of kill shot away survival still counts on bombs and butchery for their constant damage.

Design wise, the idea is about interaction between men and their companions but how it works in the game is nothing more than a 3 seconds hard countdown that you need to monitor, I still don’t think my pet itself is any involved in this. I don’t feel being assisted by my pet when it’s doing the 3 seconds bite normally, but I do feel terrible when it gets knocked back, like by the miniboss in AA, and causes me to lose a kill shot proc.

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Real quick, and this question goes for anyone who comes across it:

What theme(s) should be the core of Survival?

Granted, Survival has traditionally been eclectic, though it later almost sort of coalesced visually around munitions and “DoT damage” in terms of capacity.

  • Though it never especially built around gameplay that’d anything have to do what’s specific to DoTs, except I guess as a soft-CD on Multi-Shot via Serpent Spread.
    • (I’ve skipped the earlier supportive functions of Vanilla Survival because it was solely about raising the floor of the spec, which had application only in PvP and leveling, never as an actual means of significant additional damage.)

In Legion, it seemed primarily to center itself around becoming the beast, so to speak, though it appended odd aspects also of improved trapping, etc. Allegedly, it was meant to convey those aspects of that alternatingly clever and ferocious focus of the predator, where one lives or dies by the blade’s width, and sometimes risking it all would be ultimately safer, but… that’s quite a mouthful.

Since BfA, though, Survival has had increasingly to do with coordination with one’s pet, rather than the pet simply being one of many tools available to this Survival Hunter who was now rather beastly itself.

  • Honestly, it’s a decently attractive theme, at least if it were visible from the gameplay, but I have to wonder if it’s worth centering the whole spec around… especially when there’s already a Beast Mastery specialization.

Moreover, assuming for a moment that we could receive for free all the melee replacements for our various basic ranged tools (when a melee weapon is equipped and within melee range of target, Arcane Shot, Countershot becomes Muzzle, Multishot becomes Carve, etc.)…

…is there any mechanic-bearing skill (or mechanic therein) that you think is essential to Survival’s theme?

  • E.g., as Bestial Wrath and maybe Kill Command may for BM, Aimed Shot and maybe Trueshot for MM, Rampage and Recklessness for Fury, Shadowdance for Subtlety, etc.
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Hard call. The spec has gone through many iterative shifts over the years, that much of what it originally WASN’T has now adhered to the fantasy and has anchored itself firmly in place.

SV’s post-WotLK gameplay was heavily influenced by what appears to be a Goblin Sapper/Trap Assassin (from Warcraft 2-3 and Diablo II respectively), a hybrid of these were thus imprinted upon the SV Hunter framework where it didn’t fit. In another take, Explosive Shot may have drawn inspiration from the Immolation and Explosive Trap we’ve had since the beginning, but these traps are indirectly tied to the Trap Assassin’s Fire Blast (ground targeted Explosive), Wake of Fire, and Wake of Inferno-- The Classic Hunter itself heavily inspired by the Amazon Class complete with a Bow (MM), Javelin (SV), Valkyrie (BM) and Evasive Mitigation (MISSING) center tree.

The first mistake Blizzard made with SV, is that instead of creating a new Sapper class, they forced out the Evasive Utilitarian fantasy that SV originally had, and imported the Sapper fantasy where it didn’t belong. That was the first of many blunders.

And now, retail SV can’t quite part ways with its adolescent Sapper-phase, which thematically has no place being employed in melee range, or even from a distance with your pet ally caught in the crossfire.

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While I can certainly see the appeal of an Evasive Utilitarian, I feel like that can only ever be a thematically-fitting enclosure for the core of a DPS spec, not the core itself.

Evasion, after all, has no throughput of its own (only the denial of enemy throughput, which then requires that one is directing that threat to themselves for it to generate mitigation); outside of a tank, it’s situational at best.

Utility, likewise, is literally what we call things that cannot have their use easily rotated or, more importantly, their equivalent throughput value easily quantified.

That leaves you with a potentially great thematic bundle for a distinct means of throughput, but not yet that means of throughput.

...

This is a nitpick, but… by that rationale MM wouldn’t be able to use Explosive Shot in any party setting, especially in a team with melee. While it might not be the most visually appealing, we’re regularly dropping meteors, pyroclasms, and even moons on our tank and melee DPS, so I don’t feel a tossed grenade is to be the straw that breaks the game’s fantasy logic.

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Not quite. The ability to evade and thus mitigate incoming damage is in itself throughput, as it ensures maximum uptime on the target. One of the problems with Hunter DPS in keys is our lack of evasive mitigation (dodge, parry, yes… but also spell hit mitigation is completely absent). When you lose mob pack uptime by premature death, that DH or Rogue is still alive racking up Overall Damage, which makes our performance appear worse than it otherwise would be.

A thematic consideration, nothing more. Gameplay comes first.

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You would be correct. Seen the title and went with the eye roll.

Clearly hes a GM, im all ears!

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honestly
survival could benefit from a ‘man v wild’ aesthetic/thematic overhaul and ditch wfb overall, like a primal hunter (spears did come first after all)
it can mechanically be reimplemented via using something like a cleaving ability with oils and different pheromones to simulate wfi, with a ranged component/talent augmenting it with a throwing spear ability causing it to radiate from the target for 6 seconds, effectively performing the same way as wfb without being some weird sapper aesthetic with basically no other tie ins
ive personally done some thought on the matter but never really gotten it into a talent tree stage

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I agree with this. The cooldown itself does not feel like your pet is helping you, despite that being the concept behind it. I’m personally in favor of changing Coordinated Assault to an effect that is active the moment you click on CA, which would bring it closer to being SV’s answer to Bestial Wrath.

I guess that’s one way to look at it, considering that it had several buffs that affected the hunter but not the pet. I was a bit too focused on getting to fight alongside your pet, sort of like the white lion from Warhammer or any game that lets you take an animal companion (the dog from Fable 2 and Shadow’s dog, Interceptor, from Final Fantasy VI come to mind).

Concept-wise, an updated version of the aborigine tracker with an animal companion. Instead of bone or stone-tipped spears, you get metal (mostly) weapons. Instead of running around in a loincloth, you wear mail armor. Instead of using primitive lures and traps, you have magical traps and bombs that set your target on fire. It’s a nice theme that, despite what some may say, stands out from the other melee.

Mechanically, Mongoose Fury should become the core of the spec. If we keep something akin to the current one-button design, have both melee and AoE skills generate Mongoose Fury stacks.

The spec should also have access to ranged attacks for situational use, but not to the point it overshadows the melee skills.

DoTs could also play a role for the spec, though this is iffy because BM has built-in bleeds and MM can built-in Serpent Sting.

Lastly, and this is something I’m borrowing from D&D, SV should have heavier armor than the other hunter specs because it is a melee spec. Were it not for the inevitable loot drama, I’d suggest changing the base hunter armor to leather and make mail armor proficiency exclusive to SV. Well, unless we want to drive the devs absolutely mad and ask them to make AGI plate.

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At that point, so would just going BM (as to go contextually easy-mode with neither the constraints of limited range nor of cast-times). And while that best-in-game level of relative mobility certainly helps BM’s floor, unlimited uptime is not exactly BM’s theme.

It’s a facet of its niche, certainly, but not its theme, nor any way it increases the damage ceiling of the spec. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Utility can add throughput, including by making one’s throughput more reliable, but it is not, in itself, reliably measured throughput. That evasion is the same.

As such, I do not think it can form the core of a spec. A great thematic bundle? Certainly.