Correction: Huln existed in the lore before melee SV but he was retconned into being a Hunter and had his pet Eche’ro added to the story upon Legion’s announcement. In the books he had no ties to the Hunter class whatsoever.
It was pretty common in WotLK and Cata, even being the most popular spec in the class and even the game at some points. It wasn’t common before WotLK.
Invented, completely retconned, same diff as far as I’m concerned.
Ya, and it was entirely ranged during that time. Even with ye olde talent trees, they still never ran around as a melee spec.
Heck, looking at the WotLK talent tree, the only nods to melee at all are Deflection, Counter Attack, and Savage Strikes. There were a plethora of other talents that exclusively benefited ranged attacks in that same talent tree. For example:
And those are just the ones that bonus all ranged attacks. In addition, the following talents bonused individual abilities, and exclusively ranged shots:
Heck, even in BC, Hawk Eye, Expose Weakness, Thrill of the Hunt, and Master Tactician already existed in the Survival talent tree (with Master Tactician being a pre-requisite for the capstone talent Readiness), making it extremely clear that even that early, Survival’s intended role was as a ranged DPS.
It’s really only the vanilla talent tree that lacks a distinct ranged focus. However, Hunter’s Mark only provided ranged attack power, as did Aspect of the Hawk. There were no melee-focused talents available in the first couple of tiers of either of the other trees, an area of those old talents trees commonly reserved for talents that globally benefits all of the specs, to encourage diverse builds.
But ya, SV was totally intended to be a melee spec. Totally.
Can we take it to one of the other threads, guys?
I can’t help but notice the percentage of increased dmg from Mastery is being reduced. I’m sure this is likely an adjustment from the increases to baseline ability and talent damage, but given how dominant Haste has been for the spec and how low Mastery has been sitting, I worry that this will push Mastery down even further.
I know Blizz has expressed in the past that they’re okay with certain specs not really wanting Mastery, I just don’t want to see that point where we’re passing up on significant ilvl gains because of the presence of one stat that is so far inferior to another.
Oh, that’s weird. That type of tuning typically isn’t done until much later in the beta. And isn’t mastery already SV’s worst stat, by like a mile?
Stats aren’t balanced against base damage, they’re balanced against each other. Base damage is too easy to independently tune, and the relevance of the strength of stats is only in relation to each other, and to some extent in relation to overall scaling (though generally you can see how a spec scales based on where Versatility lies in their stat weights early on. The better versatility, which is a fixed DPS gain for all specs, relative to the other secondary stats, the worse the spec scales with secondary stats).
Hopefully that’ll be corrected during the end-of-beta numbers tuning, but it is a bit concerning that Blizzard thought SV’s literal worse stat needed nerfed.
I wouldn’t put any stock in it, it’s more likely they pushed a nerf by accident than anything else.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:
Alpha is for core design iteration.
Beta is for fine tuning the design and initial tuning.
Prepatch (and the first couple weeks after release) are for final tuning.
The only time tuning happens this early is by accident, or when the tuning is so obviously unbalanced it is impossible to properly test the mechanics.
How dare you wipe the crumbs from your mouth and come for Nighthuntress Syrenne.
50% increase damage on kill command, and 3 Charges on Guerrilla Tactics
Oh, look, another hero invented whole cloth in Legion to try to justify hamfisting in MSV.
We gon ignore thunderlord clan? Their whole phylosophy was that hunting with ranged weapons made em weak.
The disrespect is real, I loved her. Her weapon was cool, her abilities were fun, I’d love to be able to set and choose to detonate traps in combat instead of it being automatic.
How are people feeling about getting kill shot?
I think it’s cool to have an execute but I think it’s still not addressing the issue about this class not really being melee.
We’re just adding to it with arcane shot and Kill shot.
It seems like we got some damage buffs on Serpent sting, Carve, Raptor strike, Tip of the spear talent, Flanking strike, and Steel trap, and butchery.
If that’s the case. Mongoose bite might have a little more competition on the sheer fact that you have more abilities getting in the way of just spamming mongoose bite. Especially with Kill shot now in the mix.
Any thoughts?
For real. Remember how most of the NPCs in our class hall who equipped weapons at all were using melee weapons? What a lousy attempt to make melee Hunters seem popular and cool.
Worth noting, SL iteration of Kill Shot is somewhat weaker than it was in the past. In 6.2 (end of WoD), Kill Shot dealt 785% weapon damage, reset its cooldown if it didn’t kill the target (so you could double-tap it every 10s), and healed us for 15% max HP if it did kill the target. By comparison, Aimed Shot in 6.2 dealt 500% weapon damage, so KS dealt 157% as much damage as Aimed Shot.
KS in SL does 200% AP as damage, with no reset or heal, compared to 248% on Aimed Shot, so it deals only 81% as much as Aimed Shot. However, part of that is because Aimed Shot, proportional to the rest of our damage, is actually hitting rather harder than it did before the weapon damage -> AP conversion in BfA. I’d have to go dig back up the numbers I ran for it, though. I think that still leaves KS hitting proportionately for rather less than it did prior. Ya, I know this is an SV thread, I just use Aimed Shot because 1) I like MM more, and 2) it’s one of the abilities I happen to have memorized the AP coefficient of.
I’m not sure where I land on that, though. The stronger KS, the weaker our damage outside of the execute window (which can feel pretty bad, ask Arms), but the more useful sniping KSes becomes (man, I used to love mouseover KSing stuff). KS’s strength is also inseparably tied up in the relative balance of Flayed Shot, which I personally am very much looking forward to (ya, it’s useless in AoE, but KS being primary rotational again just sounds fun. Also, we get a blink along with it). On that hand, I actually want KS to be stronger, so Flayed Shot also is.
I think they also still need to fix the weapon restriction on it for SV, if I’m not mistaken. Really, it and many of the SV abilities (ex. Tranq Shot), shouldn’t be tied to weapon type at all (not even melee, let us use that crap with bows as SV).
Carve/Butchery need better range. Their area of effect is incredibly small.
Wildfire Infusion should be baseline. It creates fun gameplay that is lost if it isn’t the highest simming talent on the tier. Just give us the fun thing Blizz.
Serpent Sting should be changed to a throwing weapon. Bizarre that ai pull out a crossbow to shoot once and then I just put it away. Make it a poison dart or something.
Similarly aspect of the eagle is also weird. I’m cutting the air and hitting you with a shockwave? Just make me throw chakrams or spears or something.
Other than that I like spec. Multi-dotting with Serpent Sting can be a pain sometimes but maybe that just means Hydra’s Bite needs to be tuned better for people who don’t enjoy dotting multiple targets.
Step 1. Make it ranged.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
Step 4. See step one.
Survival should get lock and load back. I don’t care if it procs grenades. Serpent sting should have more interactions a proc or latent poison could be nice, and mongoose bite needs to be made baseline along with the legion stabby move, or be removed so survival can stop smashing mongoose bite and pretending its a rotation. Ideally survival should be able to be played at melee or ranged for full damage to better fill out its identity, what kind of survivalist doesn’t use every tool? To that end eagle should have some kind of damage increase or somesuch rather then be a damage loss prevention tool.
So…I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring of survival revisions. Inspired by Sheepfacker’s impressive write-up (which can be seen here: Survival Hunter: Reforged ).
I’ve used the currently-known skill spread (as seen in WoWhead’s talent calculator for Shadowlands), have kept the class skills the same with the exception of one change. Everything beyond that is my own ideas. Now, without much further ado:
https://tinyurl.com/yyfxyuxySee, this I agree with. MSV is critically lacking in baseline rotational interaction. Wildfire Infusion is one of a few talents that add desperately needed synergy and interaction, and livens up the rotation considerably. It definitely should be baseline.
I’ve always felt it a bit wrong that SV doesn’t just literally pull out a snake a fling it at the target. Like, you’re literally right up in a dude’s grill, and you’re gunna pull out a little hand crossbow? SNAKE ATTACK.
I feel like the healing portion of Spirit Bond could be buffed a bit as Hunters generally have much weaker defenses than most classes and Mastery is already so low on the priority list for Survival Hunters.
Perhaps buffing the base value to 2% up from 1% or changing it so it ticks every 3 seconds instead of every 5 seconds would at least give Mastery some weight from a defensive perspective.