Sv just feels like they got the janitor to throw it together after he was done mopping up the sploo fest druid devs had over their 3rd talent revamp in the other room
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Still zero changes for all hunter specs in The War Within let alone Survival.
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Yep. I think the Legion version was closer to a theme than the current iteration. At least that had a nice payoff when you stacked mongoose fury high and hit fury of the eagle. The theme of throwing down caltrops, and having hatchets to toss, at least seemed neat. Yeah, the spec was a bit clustered, but they could have fine tuned it, instead they just tossed it to the janitor/intern and said here, do what you want with it!
Then fired said janitor/intern.
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maybe the survival hunter tree was ai generated. i can’t conceive of any other reason why a melee spec needs to talent into being able to do melee things. even shaman gets primal strike at level 2 which while it doesnt scale off agility because it doesnt use agility until you spec into enh you can still run around smacking stuff. i just don’t get it. why not just make aimed shot turn into raptor strike or something?
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Raptor strike should be baseline and offer mongoose bite as a node that changes it as an option in the tree. It just shows how little care went into the spec.
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While this is mostly true (that is, it depends on their likelihood of being taken, as it’s builds that are balanced more so than individual talents), it’s also equally true for gameplay features, utility, etc.
The most anyone can hope for from a talent is the ability to opt out of or into a particular gameplay loop or consideration, with choices with higher cognitive load being tuned higher on paper as to perform better in practice for at least some players (typically, a group just slightly larger those who would already be willing and interested to engage with their optimizations, as to provide incentive for further/deeper engagement).
All else being equal (i.e., balanced for in-practice performance while being at least a tiny bit mindful of learning curve and differing types of difficulty), talents should be gameplay customization. Only where the context allows for interestingly gameplay-affecting shifts in duty in the context of a party/raid should it really overlap to capacity.
That all being said, the easiest way for something like a talent tree to allow people to opt out of complexity with only very mild/reasonable punishment… is banal throughput talents. Otherwise, one would have to start with a median of complexity, with talents then both, separately, increasing and reducing than complexity rather than players mostly just picking what things they want to play around.
- (To a degree, players being able to choose to reduce complexity is fine here and there, but it’d be pretty damn awkward for gameplay to be easier at 80 than at, say, 45, so I’d have to say that talents that add lenience or seemingly reduce complexity should be used sparingly and, ideally, allow for new optimizations through their added lenience.)
If the talent is only providing % damage, then ANY balancing they do to the class nullifies that talent as an option. There’s a reason they removed nearly everybody else’s talents that only did % throughput and if a spec does have one, it’s generally 1 maybe 2, not 6+ of these, because they really aren’t options. Imagine an entire tree of just those type of talents. You take the highest throughput ones, they then balance around you taking the highest throughput ones, thus nullifying those options. If you want to claim it’s “builds” they balance and not the talents (though evidence points contrary from developer notes themselves, they have budgets for talent value), then they’ll still balance around any builds that include any of these % talents, again thus nullifying their affect.
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I’m not sure why you are taking any part whatsoever of my post as a defense of how many throughput nodes there are on Survival. It was not.
I simply pointed out that baseline utility, flair, etc., are likewise siphoned towards talents, and the damage consequent to more interesting talents suffer the exact same final tuning as any %throughput node.
As such, the best we can hope for in any customization system is for the baseline to start from what is almost universally liked, while talents then adjust and build onto that gameplay wise.
Current Survival obviously does not do that very well. It is good, imo, that Mongoose Bite, Terms of Engagement, Ruthless Marauder, etc., are all choices, but even taking a maximally “complex” build on SV isn’t really that complex, and too few of the means of throughput have an impact on gameplay.
An “opt out” option (which is, again, all I think %damage or %stat nodes are good for) should be fringe or otherwise avoidable, never a necessary path to more interesting nodes.
None of that is what I’m addressing. I was only disagreeing with your angle that it depended on whether they were within particular builds. The rest, I kind of agree with, though not entirely.
I don’t think it’s just complexity that has to be modified by talents, but also options of damage profiles. Is more of your damage coming as burst or dot, is more of your damage aoe vs single target, ect. Those things could be the exact same gameloop with say butchery replacing mongoose bite or bombs shifting damage from their initial to make their dot last longer, ect. It doesn’t have to modify the complexity or even modify the gameloop. Currently, there’s just too many talents in survival that don’t do any of that nor modify the complexity of the gameplay.
I agree that mongoose bite as an option is good, but raptor strike as a forced talent that is later replaced by mongoose bite is not. Raptor strike should be base line (since, again, this is the only spec in the game that has literally 0 baseline dps abilities using their weapon sets). Mongoose should have more talents that optimize that more complex play, like fury of the eagle capitalizing stacks of it. Perhaps even a talent that adds an affect to mastery to modify the mongoose fury damage increase, so that mastery is actually desirable.
Instead we get 10% more raptor strike/mongoose bite damage on 2 different talents. Weee.
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That’s not quite what I said, though. (Or, you seem to be drawing some odd implications.) I said that whether talents’ power are siphoned away from the baseline depends on what else can be taken simultaneously – i.e., the build. Else…
…your baseline portion of and contribution to maximum AoE would always be degraded in compensation for your ability to full AoE, to the same net AoE throughout but now less single-target throughput, while each CD you’re allowed to layer atop each additional CD for maximum burst typically would degrade their individual contribution in compensation, to the same net burst throughput but now a more finicky spec.
The implication: reduce and move %throughput talents to a fringe position and they become harmless options typically for opting out of complexity at low cost —or, at worst, options for a unique niche into extreme situations— that would not need to be balanced around and therefore would not siphon baseline or core talents’ strength.
And on that note, though, profiles tend to have a much more obvious objectively correct answer for a given fight than do gameplay adjustors. They therefore typically become increasingly non-choices except to the degree that classes themselves can be swapped out to provide mini-bursts for this or that add where the party/raid would otherwise fall just short, and even that is rarely sufficiently possible through a player’s talent adjustment alone; it’s more a matter of raidwide coordination.
Agreed.
- Granted, I’d go further. Every melee equivalent to an existing ranged skill should be free upon getting its ranged variant, simply swapped upon equipping a ranged weapon. Survival should simply amp the bonuses of those melee variants further. Baseline Countershot, Multi-shot, Concussive Shot, Kill Shot, and Cobra Shot (replacing Arcane Shot as a half-physical and half-Nature attack) since they’re non-options anyways; in doing so, you naturally baseline all Survival’s basic melee tools as well.
Ngl, I have no interest in my on-demand damage —behind which, for now, my tier’s throughput is locked— needing ~8 GCDs of ramp-up to reach its normal damage. FotE already hits about as hard instantly as it did in Legion off of max Mongoose Fury stacks.
Mongoose Bite/Fury’s complexity comes primarily from being tuned high while having intentional anti-synergy. It has a level of commitment to optimize (its individual, not necessarily net value) akin to a mini-CD. The fact it doesn’t scale with anything else is what allows us a responsive profile on the whole even while being able to focus fire hard also without being locked behind a CD.
MB just needs better follow-up nodes likewise not locked behind a CD for their effect and/or SV ought to see slightly better use of Haste in builds currently less synergetic with it (such as by Kill Shot’s and Bite/Claw/Smack’s CDs scaling with Haste) so it at least isn’t categorically less synergetic with certain builds over arbitrary stat rules.
Please not this either. Either rehaul Mastery altogether or just balance its contribution across (at least pre-Mongoose Bite) ST and AoE damage and increase its scaling for a focus alongside Haste more on sustain over CDs longer than 9s (while Crit and Vers would favor CDs instead). The latter is far from ideal, but certainly preferable to what it is now or following it Ret’s errant footsteps or Frost DK’s stagnant more etc. (of a defenseless Vers equivalent taken only when tuned high enough).
Note: Mastery on Ret was far more impactful and useful as a choice when it focused on spender and CD damage due to spenders and CDs being their only significant source of Holy damage. Making everything into Holy(strike) damage as to benefit from Mastery just turned it into a worse Versatility, ultimately forcing it to be largely reverted (in its practical effects) in TWW. SV does not need to pursue those same known problems.
You’re not really saying anything, this is just word salad for the sake of word salad I guess? My argument was that talents don’t need to solely add or remove complexity, they can instead offer options to modify your damage profiles. Nothing about what I said indicated I believed one way or another about the degradation of baseline and maxmium AOE capabilities. Besides that, what you said actually isn’t even true. Look at the way they’ve modified monk abilities such that their AOE damaging abilities do more vs their primary target than the rest of the targets hit. So their baseline portion and contribution to their maximum AOE is not degraded in compensation for their ability to full AOE.
Holystrike added the physical damage type to most of the abilities affected by the talent, not the other way around. Crusader strike is really the only ability that talent changed to holy. Templar strikes is already radiant, Templar’s Verdict is already holy, hammer of wrath is holy, and so is judgment. I mean no disrespect, but it feels like you’re just saying things for the sake of saying things, which aren’t true.
Look, mate. You claimed that taking either of the two Mongoose Bite %damage-increasing talents would just have the devs…
…to which I responded that, no, that’s only true for the ones people would actually path through. The options that are actual choices do not typically have that effect, because people aren’t typically “taking those talents anyways”.
If what you said were actually true, you could not increase your net AoE or ST damage through talent choice compared to other specs without such choices because the difference would only ever be tuned back through adjustments to the baseline abilities. But that’s not quite the case.
That might have something to do with your splitting a sentence to specifically avoid its context. I noted the difference between what you claimed my angle was and what it actually is.
You then split the sentence in two and claimed the difference between them… was my claim. The heck, mate?
First-target multipliers are not relevant to what I pointed out; a talent that gives your AoE-capable skill that is already obligatory in your ST rotation getting a ST damage buff is not an AoE talent.
Nor do I have to look to Monk for examples of X rotational AoE skill used even in ST having a primary-target damage modifier. Survival has it right on Wildfire Bomb.
They are when it’s the talent itself doing it and not the ability. Wildfire bomb isn’t a choice talent that offers you a single target boost on a aoe ability, it’s just got that effect baked in. Mark of the Crane is a single target boost to an AOE ability that’s a choice talent for monk in TWW.
You’ve offered no proof that this isn’t true, just suggesting that they balance entire builds, to which I replied that contrarily they said they have budgets for individual talents.
That’s my point. Through the % increase talents you can’t.
You literally can, so long as they are not unavoidable talents.
They do not tune down your baseline skill’s damage any time a less-than-competitive talent exists somewhere on the fringe of a spec tree that allows you to increase its damage.
The value of a talent is generally dependent on what other talents are taken, tier sets, and stat preference. If you did not misunderstand them, then their procedure would be foolish: By assigning a set value to each talent independent of the things that affect their output, pathing, or even their possibility of being taken simultaneously with certain other talents, then they would be essentially forcing talent-bundles or (far fewer competitive) builds well beyond their stated goals for talent trees.
No, more likely they have a budget for each talent point expenditure such that one talent in its context should be worth as about much as the next, even if some see competitive value only in very niche situations. Even that, however, requires being mindful of the talent’s surroundings — of its place in a potential build. I’m not saying they actually accomplish that goal on the regular, especially among specs that see less effort, but I doubt their aim is so purposely errant.
The talents literally are the next talent or 1 talent away from the abilities they improve, they’re not on the fringes of the spec tree.
Sometimes. Case in point, if you’re able to pick up every talent that affects wildfire bomb and still have talents to take and bolster mongoose bite, the value of those talents do not care at all what the tier set is if the tier set only affects wildfire bomb. The value of the % increase talents do not really care what other talents you took. Maybe if survival had a much larger tree, but since it not only has the most % increase talents, but the small overall number of nodes, and the most number of 2 point nodes, this just doesn’t apply equally to survival like it might other talents that actually MODIFY how your stuff works.
Now you’re getting it. It was foolish and it did limit pathing ect ect. Why do you think affliction is so hosed into either everything aoe or everything single target and they’re now fixing it. Because they applied this mentality to the trees initially. Since then, they have moved away, but survival is still using the same talent trees it had in beta, with the exception of a few talents going from 3 point talents to 2 point talents and one or two capstone talent tweaks.
And neither was taken even to single-target raiding in S3. Only now are they again being taken, basically only for single-target fights, and only because our AoE is so trash.
They do, though, the moment the tier set makes Wildfire Bomb’s talents superior talent dumps over Mongoose Bite’s augmenting talents even for single-target: At that point there’d be no reason ever to take those MB-affecting talents.
While that might explain Sweeping Spear getting siphoned out of Mongoose Bite even then (as it’d still be competitive until optimal play and high %Crit and was obligatory without S3 tier set), it doesn’t quite explain Spear Focus.
The better explanation there is not that their balancing philosophy was so errant, or else Sweeping Spear, which affected more talents, probably would never have had precisely the same damage modification per rank than Spear Focus had. In my best guess, given the avoidance of such issues in other specs, the better explanation here… is simply neglect.
Look at which other spec had that problem: Affliction — one of the only other specs in the game regularly in the running for lowest popularity.