They already did. They cut the healing, energy cost, and duration each by a third in SL, but not the cooldown. Net is that it’s the same HPS while active, and the same healing per energy, but only 2/3rds the healing over time.
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Make Mongoose Bite baseline: that is literally the centerpiece of SV’s playstyle. Make Butchery baseline: putting Carve on a 5 second CD is just stupid.
Nix Kill Command, just use Flanking Strike. It’ll erase any confusion for anyone who usually plays BM.
Give SV Lock and Load baseline, have it apply to Wildfire Bomb.
Make Aspect of the Eagle a toggle that only applies to Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite, but extend to range to 20 yards instead of 40. The hunter still needs to be in melee range for Butchery, Wing Clip, and Flanking Strike.
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No seriously, Blizz. For the love of Azeroth, please fix this nonsense. Hotmogu is the current Brawl. Try it out for yourselves.
It’s bad enough that you can’t even Feign Death while holding an Orb. Tell me how fun it feels to also lose out on Kill Command, Intimidation, and Coordinated Assault every time you have to drop down into the pit or Harpoon a target on the upper ledge from inside the pit.
The loss of Kill Command means you also lose out on everything that costs Focus. Your offense is quite literally reduced to Bombs and Auto-Attacks until either your pet runs all the way to the stairs, climbs them, and makes his way back around to your target, or your passive regen finally manages to build up enough Focus for a Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite.
I understand why and even like that these abilities have the pet requirement, but the pet AI being unable to overcome this insurmountable task of dropping down or leaping up a few feet absolutely destroys Survival in this BG and any other environment with similar featuers (Uldum).
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One thing that could fix this, I think, is to give hunter pets something like a warlock imp’s Flee, something that jumps the pet to the hunter’s location, regardless of pathing. You would still require pathing to the target, which is a limitation (but it avoids pet teleport exploiting, from say pets teleporting to unreachable targets), but would still let the hunter get their pet out of a bad spot or up a ledge or something. They should also, imo bake the same mechanic into Master’s Call. They could also make it so that hunter-initiated pet attacks (Kill Command, Intimidation, Coordinated Assault) work as long as the pet is in range of the target and either the pet or the hunter has direct pathing to the target.
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In contrast to a style of being hyper-focused on spamming a single ability to the exclusion of the rest of the kit that comes with Mongoose Bite, I would like a talent option that creates a more versatile and open playstyle.
Kill or Be Killed - If you have more than 50 Focus, Raptor Strike costs 50 Focus and deals 100% more damage.
Styled after the bonus to our pets’ basic attack, I feel like expending more focus in fewer GCDs for a competitive amount of damage would open up the spec’s ability to utilize its full range of abilities instead of ignoring them for the sake of getting off more casts of a single ability.
That feels far more “Survival” to me than raging out on your target with the same ability over and over and over.
This would also have more synergy with Latent Poison, as spending more Focus for heavier Raptor Strikes would create longer windows between Raptor Strikes, allowing more stacks of Latent Poison to build up.
I never felt survival was the same with out the artifact ability. There was something satisfying about building up to a big channel at the end of a mongoose bite window. It also made planning ahead important and was a nice contrast to my main spec. Now I’m normally mm so if more seasoned survival Hunter’s disagree then I would yield to them.
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Tactical Advantage - You make use of the terrain, creating a tactical advantage that provides cover and funnels aggressors to the tip of your spear.
I’m thinking use of the ability would create a stone outcropping around the Hunter in roughly the shape of the Greek letter Omega, breaking line of sight from ranged attacks and providing collision against would-be melee attackers except through the opening.
I think this would be an extremely versatile form of group utility that the spec is very much in need of. This could be used to break LoS from casters, which I imagine Prot Warriors would greatly appreciate, as a barrier from melee attackers which would have useful applications across all forms of play, as a means of securing a kill or node cap, or as a way to block a healer’s LoS on his allies.
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Similar to my issues with Mongoose Bite, I feel like Kill Command having a chance to reset itself pushes the spec into 1 button spam mode, which seems a bit degenerate and contrary to the nature of the spec. Then there’s the issue of Coordinated Assault and especially Pheromone Bomb creating so many procs that you start to question why Kill Command has a cooldown in the first place.
I feel like it would be more engaging to have a baseline passive that allows use of one ability to give incentive to use another.
Flanking Strikes - Raptor Strike has a chance equal to its Focus cost to cause your next Kill Command to generate twice the amount of Focus. Kill Command has a chance equal to the amount of Focus it generates to make your next Raptor Strike free.
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White hits don’t refresh anything, hence why it specifically distinguishes melee attacks from spells and abilities in the corruptions and trinkets. Vanilla use to say melee attacks in specific, but it’s been a long while since it’s been that way.
Butchery always sims better, but is useless overall because unless you wanna lose a substantial amount of single target for AOE, why take it? Especially once you’ve stacked expedience. The more of it you have, the less overall value other skills have over mongoose bite. But requiring that much borrowed power to be good shows how badly tuned the spec was as a whole.
That’s literally what I’m trying to say… You don’t want that, but if you’re using mongoose bite, you’re always gonna hit mongoose bite if it’s at 5 stacks since it does more damage than the bombs regardless, and if you have wilderness suvival then it’s gonna happen. You look at logs and it’s insane how much more damage it does than everything else. Pretty much makes most of your other skills useless in comparison.
i dont know how many more times i can say it. SV should go back to ranged. WAIT dont attack me yet. then a 4th spec or different class should be created. ranger maybe. make a full blown melee hunter. raptor for the builder. mong for a spender and flanking baseline for a bomb. take out the dumb cross bow and kill command is sh!t for SV. also…if its a new class than make a 2h/1h version and a tinkerer because for some reason blizz loves tinkerererer stuff. for reals though. its such and easy fix but they would rather let a four year old throw things at a wall and hope.
I actually rather liked a suggestion I saw in the Reddit thread for Ion’s interview response. They suggested converting SV back to WoD-era ranged, and then adding a capstone talent for Beast Mastery that converted it to a melee spec, adding Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite, etc. BM makes more sense as a melee option anyway, given that Rexxar, an absolutely iconic melee hunter, is literally titled as “Beast Master”.
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i really dislike the idea of Rexxar being the mold for which melee hunter should be cast. i think the hole we’re in now is because of that right now. people kicked and screamed at the end of legion about that and we got kill command dumped in the spec. in my opinion the best option is a forth spec or new class. BM and MM should just be built and tuned as they are now. blizz has such a hard time just doing that i cant see them fixing or work that in well.
Ok, but there are precious few other alternatives. Heck, to make Legion-era SV make sense at all, they had to invent a completely new “hero” in Holn, just to have some hero to associate the spec with. If nothing else, that says the change was definitely a mistake, with zero lore precedent. Rexxar is the only hero I can think of that’s both melee and fits the hunter concept. If we must have melee, it should be based on him.
what im getting at is dont base it off a current hero. so far its been a mess and should be designed from the ground up without a hero to look up to.
I mean, the lack of an associated hero can be seen as pretty clear evidence that the spec lacks a cohesive theme, and that what it does have isn’t terribly compelling. Heck, RSV did have heroes to associate with, namely Sylvanas and her Dark Rangers. MSV is just a handful of hand-me-down and lost-and-found mechanics calling itself a spec.
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You mean besides the two that you’ve already acknowledged? All this shows is that the spec underwent a significant change that preceded lore. I imagine a similar situation arose when Explosive Shot, Lock n Load, and Black Arrow came to prominence.
The reality is that strictly melee Hunter heroes were never a necessity because the class was designed to be able to attack from both range and in melee. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t Hunters that primarily used melee attack. While not heroes on our behalf, the bosses Bloodlord Mandokir, Swamplord Musel’ek, and Skylord Tovra come to mind.
The origin of this issue can be dated all the way back to the removal of the talent trees, the ability to have both a ranged and melee weapon equipped, and the removal of the dead zone. That was the death of the original Survival Hunter and the birth of the 80s action movie hero that was the Explosive Shot era.
Just because there may not have been a plethora of heroes at the time known for their use of those abilities wasn’t somehow indicative of a lack of a cohesive theme. The theme was there, it just had absolutely nothing to do with survival.
What two? Holn hardly counts, he was literally invented just to give SV a “hero”, and no one really cared about him or remembers him. Rexxar is a BM hunter, not an SV hunter (ever see him use a crossbow or a grenade or a spear?).
Black Arrow had precedent all the way back to the Warcraft RTSes, Sylvanas and the Dark Ranger unit both had it, iirc. I believe some of the dwarven rifle units had an effect similar to Explosive Shot.
Do you remember a hero class that lobbed grenades and used crossbows? Me neither.
SV never, and I truly mean never, had a viable melee-oriented build before Legion. Their talents in Vanilla had melee bonuses, but they still attacked from range. The difference was that, unlike the other two specs, they were actually reasonably dangerous even if you got inside their deadzone. They still did far better at range, and their raid role, when they were used in PvE (which wasn’t super common before ~MoP, iirc), was also exclusively ranged.
This fiction that SV has always been a melee spec is just that, fiction. SV has always been predominantly ranged, it’s just been more capable in melee than the other two. It’s never been melee focused, though, and it’s never been intended as a melee spec.
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I’m not disputing this at all.
Neither of which are Survival Hunters. And therein lies the issue. For all intents and purposes, the Survival tree was more or less PVP support. When they dropped the old talent trees and pushed to the modern style that had specs virtually standing as individual classes, they had to create something from scratch for Survival and wound up piecing together various abilities that had nothing to do with survival.
I’m just pointing out that this isn’t the first time Survival has ventured into new territory. Having a generic unit from the RTS that might have used one ability and Sylvanas using another doesn’t exactly put the revamped RSV in any better shape than the revamped MSV as far as hero representation.
There are plenty of arguments to be made for and against both RSV and MSV. I just don’t think this idea of hero representation having any sort of correlation to the quality of theme and design of the spec amounts to much of one.
Apologies, Snakeshado. Wasn’t paying attention to which thread I was replying to. Taking the conversation to a more appropriate thread.
How about the whole of thundetlord orcs clan then?
Though their style was closer to legion sv than current
So it seems like people are really buying into Hazzikostas’ misconception here, huh.
No, that’s not true. That all happened in MoP. By then Survival had already been using Explosive Shot and Black Arrow for years. Nothing meaningfully changed about SV’s identity and gameplay going from Cata to MoP. Melee was gradually phased out over years and hadn’t been the major part of the original SV Hunter since way back in the Hunter class review in patch 1.7. I know it might be hard for you to accept but Hazzikostas is wrong on this.
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