Please for the love of god do not remake Survival it is the most fun ive had playing in the last 15 years ive played this game. I am the top dps in my guild raid while raid leading in heroic and mythic and I rarely if ever at all lose in overall dps in mythic+ keys. I am 2800io in almost entirely pugs and a 2.2k solo shuffle rating with Gladiator experience. Survival is in an AMAZING place besides the fact that their entire kit relies on their tier. In season 2 survival will take a massive L losing their tier unless blizzard either incorporates some of it into the base stats of survival or a nice rework of season 2 tier set.
The s1 tier is just an amazing flat gain that should be inherently added with the class starting with s2 otherwise survival WILL fall off. It is a complex and not noob friendly class but it is the most fun thing ive played in a while because its so fulfilling to beat the snobby âsurvival is badâ players who play meta classes with higher ilvl.
The biggest change i would like to see is reincorporating the slight ranged aspect of SV in from classic hunter with the addition of arcane shot into base hunter, just give us a ranged slot, add a new item like a musket or a half bow or something that gives us the ability to shoot arcane shot and give us a slight stat buff without macroing a weapon swap for a dumb ability that i just want for pulling far away mobs or filling in while im running from a mechanic. This would help with our low standing because we get more stats, gives us a range filler and is just really pleasent to see and would increase our class uniqueness again. Also give back dual wielding pls love u blizz <3
Unless you made that spec some 10 columns wide and cheesed pathing frequently to allow for flexibility, youâd end up with each build only able to work with half a spec, reducing freedom altogether.
The only melee mechanics thatâd be redundant on ranged are gap-closers and whatever defensives one bundles into them.
For instance, if Survival actually provided some survivability and mobility, both, by allowing you to more often blink-strike to close distance and gain mitigation based on movement speed (with instant movement speed skills and blink-strikes counting as some briefly lingering very high percentage), thatâd be something thatâd make more sense to melee.
But you could also just have those same gap-closing talents convert their functionality when a ranged weapon is used instead, providing very brief flickers of movement speed after each attack, with multiple applications able to overlap, in order to incentivize stacking your AA, GCD, and an oGCD shot, for instance, for its mitigation.
Heck, allow Flanking Strike to be used on an ally instead, regenerating further Focus and/or sharing a damage-absorbing affect with the target in place of its damage dealt, and allow its Ranged version to do the same or to kick-flip off of an enemy as a gap-maker instead of a gap-closer.
Splitting Ranged and Melee talents makes no sense because there is just zero need to do so and spending over a third of the tree then on bloat â{Function A but for a Melee Weapon}, {Function A but for a Ranged Weapon}, instead of simply {Function A, which sensibly varies slightly between using a Melee or Ranged weapon}â would badly hamper the specâs ability to provide a fun and choiceful array of talents.
RSV would not be the same as you remember in modern wow. multistrike does not exist anymore. even the wod iteration without multistrike would be extremely out of place in modern day wow and would be an entirely different spec than you remember.
I mean, they could bring it back as is. It could even kindly give BM something to point and laugh at if anyone calls BM simplistic, since the actual simplest-in-game would be so far beneath it (basically a competition only between RSV and Annihilation-AM-OF-SMF Fury). Though itâd also need to be 95% bloat talents in order to retain its earlier narrowness, so thatâs⌠fun?
Itâd just also be terrible outside of a singlular damage profile (sustained combat, with any adds needing to live for almost perfect cycles of Serpent Sting duration) â ill-fit for M+, anything requiring burst, etc., and likely just an inferior BM in terms of raid position (the hypermobile âmechanics serfâ).
More seriously, yes, any actually decent reiteration of RSV would likely look very little like old RSV.
Which is why people should really reconsider what theyâre asking for. Marksmanship is in dire needs of attention gameplay wise and it would be a LOT easier to staple on the parts of RSV people are remembering fondly (spreading SS with multi-shot and waiting for LnL to proc) onto current MM than try to force RSV into modern wow.
no execute, no cooldown, just dots and RNG proc without multistrike.
current identity of MSV is exciting and fun. guerilla fighter with animal companion using versatile flexibility in combat.
I never got this argument or line of thinking at all. there are plenty of specs with very low representation. what do you do with the others? just ignore it and hope more people like arcane or sub eventually? of course not. swap them to melee/ranged? no, thatâs equally silly.
WoD RSV is essentially 5 mechanics, the last of which was probably a mistake â
your fillers (Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot) apply Serpent Sting at full duration,
a 6s duration, 10s CD DoT,
a 21s duration, 30s CD DoT,
a 20% chance on each (per-2s) tick to grant 2 freecast charges of the 6s DoT, and
your 6s DoT can now âIgniteâ, removing any incentive to multi-DoT from the âDoTâ spec
âand if we back up to MoP we just trade out the first for old Rapid Fire (25% Haste for a bit). So, still 5 mechanics that could easily be inserted via conditionals from a single choice node at MMâs head (i.e., without requiring a single new node and only one new talent choice).
How to do that?
Choice Node between Aimed Shot and Caustic Shot.š
š or whatever rename better fits a non-explosive single-target shot than âExplosive Shotâ).
Serpentstalkerâs Trickery either inflicts a lower duration (building to regular duration) of Serpent Sting per Arcane/Multi, or simply Caustic Shot now also fires off a Serpent Sting in a âclose enoughâ. Iâd prefer the first.
Lock and Load has a slightly lower chance but provides two charges at a time. Or you just let LnL stack up to twice and increase its duration (perhaps only for Caustic).
Trick Shots instead causes your filler shots on your victims of Caustic Shot makes that DoT flare up (become AoE) for immediate direct damage and for as a further portion over its remaining duration.
In this way, you could spread Caustic on an LnL and then Multi-shot the 3 victims for bursty quadratic damage, or weave Caustic â Arcane, Caustic â Arcane, Caustic â Arcane/Multi-shot for greatest total AoE damage caused.
Yes, Volley would just make every Caustic Shot in the AoE flare up continuously.
âŚand accordant tuning changes to proc chances from Caustic given that Caustic is a 10s CD, 17% shorter than Aimed Shotâs 12s CD, and that its total damage per use per second (i.e., its own baseline damage contribution) may be faintly less because (as a 1-GCD, instead of 1.67-GCD skill) it provides more GCD time overall for other skillsâ uptime and would nonetheless compete fine with Aimed Shot even with it making up a lower portion of the buildâs total damage.
Voila. Yes, this means that unfortunately RSV gets âsaddledâ with a burst CD, Kill Shot, and a further rotational burst element in Rapid Fire. Oh noes.
I feel like itâs got a ways to go before it captures that as well as it should, but agreed, itâs already quite fun and the prospects for far better still are readily visible.
Aside, but on topic: Iâm still more a fan of going with 4 specs thatâd each bleed into their neighbors to a variable degree (wrapping around):
I know itâd seem like Marks and Pursuit ought to be at opposite ends, but this is the position that keeps them farthest apart from each other; remember, they wrap around.
I.e.,
Marksmanship would have a tiny portion of pet-synergy or temporary pet-summoning talents available to it from Beast Mastery and a fair number of Munition elements, but would have nothing from the core of Pursuit (MSV).
Pursuit would take from Munitions and Beast Mastery, but would have nothing from the core of Markmanship beyond whateverâs in the class tree.
Beast Mastery would take from both Pursuit (Wildling theme / Beast Within) and Marksmanship (comboing with its pet), but would take nothing from Munitions.
Munitions would have no dependence on pets nor any offering to further leverage them, but would have both specifically ranged attack tools and tools which incentivize melee range, along with both Sniper-esque and Wildling-esque aesthetic aspects available to it from Marksmanship and Pursuit.
Key difference being that none of the other specs were changed from ranged to melee while dropping from high representation to usually being the least played spec in the game.
you donât think the fact that a spec doesnât come online until they have 4pc warrants a serious look at their talent tree? am i taking crazy pills here or something? unironically i think ret now does a far better job at being a melee with ranged abilities than sv did with aspect of the eagle. itâs insane how everything has so much range.
the problem with tree is that you donât get great returns per talent point spent. compare any other melee tree and see how much stuff you get per talent point with rogue or warrior or feral ( a spec on a class with 2 ranged specs and 1 tank spec) or enh (like hunter, enh is a melee spec on a class with 2 ranged trees). compare with ret paladin or something and you get like 3-4 talent points worth of stuff per 1-2 spent on ret.
80% whats wrong with Survival is whats wrong with the other hunter treesâŚthe shared hunter tree. Weak survivability and overly expensive nodes and lackluster talents that no one wants to pick up.
Then with survival they need bring back arcane shot even if its a talent vs aspect of the eagle and it also should proc vipers venom. Bombs needs like 150% buff to its single target initial damage and 100% buff on it damage to targets after that. Carve just need to be made baseline and Chakrams needs be added in it place to buff bombs in same way Carve does.
they could do aoe ranged in the left side and center and do single target ranged and aoe melee in the center with choice nodes and do single target melee on the right ride of the tree. maybe change fury of the eagle into a choice node of a melee version or ranged version of the fury attack.
Meaning? (That wouldnât typically sound like a problem.)
Why would it make sense to require a talent just to remove a restriction that had no reason ever to have been added in the first place? Just⌠donât randomly remove SVâs access to Arcane Shot and Steady Shot.
Thatâd be excessive unless applying (very modest) nerfs elsewhere.
This happened almost 10 years ago. Itâs time to move on.
Nor does it really detract from how silly that line of thinking is. Letâs say in 11.0 SV is ranged again. (Itâs different than you remember, because WoW is an entirely different game now).
What happens if itâs still played less than the other two hunter specs? Whatâs the cope then?
What happens to specs like Arcane or Sub which are also historically low representation? We just shrug and move on? Of course not.
You donât think itâs because itâs a melee DPS without necessary utility? It was wildly played the last two specs in Shadowlands. Who would have thought a DPS thatâs OP would be played a lot? When RSV was played a lot it certainly wasnât because it was fun or brought anything specificâŚwhat could it beâŚ
But who cares if you would play it again? Thatâs clearly not a success metric for the design team. I think itâs obvious that blizzard doesnât care if you pay SV because youâll still play the other specs. DEI is not a priority when it comes to spec distribution in Azeroth. Yâall need to stop using that as an argument.
And even if general Hunter population is down because 1/3 specs is melee, itâs still one of the most popular classes. So IF they do want better parity across classes (not specs) then keeping SV melee is better for the game. That might have been the very intent of the Legion changeâŚ
Blizzard fanboys will really drop arguments like âpeople liking a spec is not one of their metrics for successâ with a straight face and think thatâs a normal and healthy philosophy for game design.
â What we saw is that because Demonology was the best all around spec performance wise. Over the course of the expansion we saw Warlocks who would really prefer to play Affliction or Destro gravitating towards Demonology.â
Remember when they actively tried to make fewer people play a spec? Or did you memory hole that so your feeble argument is 3% less feeble?
But Iâll try again, since you didnât understand it (though your random accusation of âfan boyâ leads me to believe you CHOOSE not to understand)âŚ
Imagine, if you will, there is an internal meeting at HQ and the Top Dog says, âtoo many people are playing hunter.â Iâm sure you can agree that itâs bad for the game for one class to over-represent that much. Now we have an internal success metric.
So, Little Designer has an idea. Make one of the specs melee. People are drawn to the ease of ranged pet specs and the fantasy of archery. Theyâll still have two of those⌠Why not make one melee?
They do it and it works! Little Designer is given the Best Idea of the Year award at that yearâs Blizzies and everyone drinks champaign.
Meanwhile, Forum Warrior is typing his heart out, shouting at the wind: âno one plays melee hunter so it must be poorly designed!â
See how absurd that is? You have no idea what their intent was with the redesign. But the fact that the population is still low and blizzard hasnât made a change MIGHT just point out that they donât care⌠And, in fact, are possibly happy about it.