Viper’s Venom baseline. Makes the spec more reactive, and Serpent Sting a bigger part of the rotation. SS also increased duration for Mongoose windows.
Mongoose Bite baseline, but the Legion version. This would create 2 “phases” for the spec. The build phase, where you primarily use Serpent Sting, Raptor Strike, Wildfire bomb, and Kill Command(though I think it needs a different ability for generation), and a burst Mongoose phase, where you use Mongoose Bite and Kill Command, and any fillers.
I think a different on demand cooldown as well. “Neurotoxin-Serpent Sting becomes Black Arrow. Black Arrow- A high damage DOT that increases the damage you deal to the target by 10%. Will spread to all targets hit when you cast Carve and has a high chance to reset the CD of Mongoose Bite when it deals damage.” It’s not perfect, but it’s more Survivally.
I can’t begin to fathom what you guys find enjoyable about Mongoose Bite. Arcane Mage with Arcane Blast and Veng DH with Shear spam are there if pressing the same button over and over is what does it for you.
Survival badly needs baseline ability interactions as a foundation. As it stands, the interaction between most of our abilities is simply the opportunity cost of the focus or global in using them. We’re working with kill command, raptor strike, serpent sting, wildfire bombs, and carve.
Serpent sting would be a good ability to target. Baseline, serpent sting’s benefit is purely its raw damage. It has talent interactions with VV, Hydra Bite, and Wildfire Infusion, though this falls flat if any/many of these aren’t particularly valuable. I would personally like to see serpent sting ticks engage with the rest of the kit. Random suggestions could be:
Serpent sting ticks (or crits) have X% chance to reduce the cooldown of wildfire bomb by X seconds.
Could model it after balance druid’s old shooting stars procs, with a lower chance on ticks and a higher chance on crits. SV could also use some stat interaction, as it has a poor mastery and no crit interaction at all. I’m sure there are dozens of more creative ways to make these abilities impact eachother, but throwing that out there as a simple example.
I really dislike raptor strike as the baseline spender. It feels extremely bland compared to most other melee class’ resource spenders. Mongoose bite should be baseline, imo. Carve similarly feels a bit bland, though I’m not sure what could be done there. Pet leech + spirit bond from mastery feels pretty nice for sustain, but I really wish mastery was more valuable as a DPS stat.
Specific to shadowlands, I like seeing latent poison back, but wish it was added to the class directly and not via a legendary. Wildfire cluster is back too, which is nice for AoE/M+. Most conduits are not out yet, so it is possible we’ll see some ability modifiers through that system. Aesthetically, I’d still really like the option to transmog to DW.
The point of Mongoose Bite is damage ramp up over time. The main flaws in Mongoose Bite are not hitting the same button, but how restrictive the duration timer is (since it underlines that SV is stupidly dependent on haste) along with there being no payoff. Legion had a decent idea with how Fury of the Eagle interacted with Mongoose Bite, which is why it’s such a shame Blizz didn’t refine Legion SV and instead tossed everything out the window.
Hitting random buttons with little to no mechanical interaction isn’t better than just hitting the same button. And it’s not like we have a combo system in this game that would at least give the illusion of hitting different buttons, so…
Kill Command 2 charges baseline. Alpha Predator increases the dmg of Kill Command and causes it to generate 15 Focus for your pet as well.
Hydra’s Bite baseline. Replace with: Culling - If there are 3 or more enemies with your damage over time effects within 8 yrds of your pet, Kill Command strikes all enemies within 8 yrds.
Diamond Ice baseline. Replace with Steel Trap. Replace Steel Trap with: Kill or Be Killed - If you have more than 50 Focus, Raptor Strike costs 50 Focus and deals 100% more damage.
Remove Flanking Strike. Replace it with: Cobra Strike - You dart in and out with startling speed, piercing your target to deal X physical damage. If the target is affected by Serpent Sting, Cobra Strike applies 3 stacks of Latent Poison. 30 Focus. 15 yrd range.
Remove Kill Command’s ability to reset itself. Replace with: 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. Baseline Passive.
From the looks of the alpha, it seemed like they were going for SV hunters to equip both a polearm and a bow. I’m not sure how it is in the beta because nobody’s covering it, but I hope they don’t go through with this. It’s old school, but it’s also messy.
It seems fairly simple to me: you want melee, you equip a melee weapon, enjoy a damage bonus to melee abilities, but you’re locked out of some ranged abilities and the ranged you can use suffer at reduced range and damage; you want ranged, you equip a ranged weapon, enjoy a damage bonus to ranged abilities, but you lose access to some melee abilities and remaining melee abilities are weakened.
I would like a clear spec identity, besides the extended tool kit sometimes i feel like a wanna be warrior with a pet instead of a hunter. Also we need a new core rotation, without mongoose bite we have nothing, with mongoose bite we have a one button core rotation.
My interpretation of a survival hunter is … a survivor, they have survived the toughest environments in nature and copied many of the strategies used by nature and the beasts that inhabit it. (the spec should revolve around these ideas)
BM hunters use pets as their weapons, Survival hunters learn how to use the strategies and techniques from nature (including beasts which inhabit it) for themselves.
I think Survival’s spec identity is there, but it isn’t executed well mechanically. But, to be fair, I think Survival’s spec identity is and should be “any tool for the job.” Survival hunters are the resourceful types who can survive anywhere - not just in and on nature. Their bombs and their pets are equal, in their toolkit.
But I agree the mechanical translation needs work. Hunters are built on burst windows and opportunity procs. Where the two mesh well in BM and MM, they run almost counter to each other on SV. On top of that, the buttons we push outside our burst window do basically nothing to bring that burst window around more quickly, because we’re just trying to pool focus to spam the one button.
Plus, throwing filler until we spam that button does basically jack-all to make the specs mechanics stand out.
I’d like to see SV lean into taking opportunity attacks for its burst. Where BM enters a period of rage and MM follows up big hits with little bursts, let Survival follow up little bursts with big hits.
Strip down Kill Command. Rename Coordinated Assault (because we’re changing the CD) or Flanking Strike (because that talent is lame, even outside the bad numbers). Remove the focus generation and reset mechanic. Make it our focus dump. But it also has the opportunity to proc into our Big Hit.
Give us a third, preferably frost-themed DoT (and option to talent into a fourth, because Caltrops was a cool idea). Our DoTs are our Little Hits. Make one of them responsible for proccing our Big Hit.
Make Raptor Strike (and maybe Carve?) our focus generator, probably with a short cooldown. Tie the focus generation to one of the DoTs - either we need to Strike a target suffering that DoT to generate focus, or we get a bit of focus out of every RS and a bit more of we RS someone suffering from the DoT.
Replace our weak CD with something that ramps up our DoTs, increasing their base effectiveness for a period - the damage on the damage-only DoT, the focus gen on the focus gen DoT, and the Big Hit proc on our Big Hit proc DoT.
Replace our Mastery with something that leverages the DoTs - maybe an increase to their base duration, for example. Give that hunter/pet healing back to BM. Seriously.
We now have a spec that spends focus on DoTs as its primary damage while fishing for opportunity attacks where the hunter and pet strike as one for big, sudden hits - I think it would capture the hunter feel without infringing too much on BM’s burst window style or MM’s follow-up style - it exists somewhere in the middle (and some crossover between specs is fine, anyway).
It also gives lots of room for playing with new talent ideas, though a couple I’d like to make special mention of: Keep Mongoose Bite. It’s now a talent that pumps up damage during our focus-gen period a bit more. Put it on the same tier as Wildfire Infusion, but move the Wildfire Infusion effect over Raptor Strike - RS now randomly generates an effect where your next RS will leverage one of your three DotS for an additional effect.
And, since I’m just writing a wishlist now, I’d also like to ask for Mechanical pets to not be their own family. They should be skins of existing families, so I’m not stuck with using only Cunning pets if I want to have a mechanical pet motif. Spirit Beasts too, while we’re at it (but keep them on BM and let them keep the spot heal).
I think that if SV wants to keep the pet coordination thing, then it should be something like for every time you attack, your pet does as well or make SV’s KC like that. Something so it’s a Fury Warrior with a pet, but not BM.
This post will focus on Survival Hunter Talents, specifically on which talents should be made baseline as they are near essential for the spec to play cohesively. He we go.
Greatly increase the passive focus regeneration or make alpha predator baseline.
The reset function of Terms of Engagement should be made baseline and a new talent should replace it
Vipers Venom should be moved to a DPS row and Row One should solely focus on Kill Command and how it impacts focus regeneration. It is our only resource generating ability, so it should get some extra perks.
Guerrilla Tactics or Butchery should be made baseline. The first one makes Wildfire Infusion more impactful, the later one because carve is almost never worth using besides the CD reduction of Wildfire Bombs. If one of our legendary items in shadowlands requires an ability, then that ability better not be a talent. The legendary item is called Butcher’s Bone Fragments, and it requires you to have the Butchery talent for its effect to be meaningful.
Trailer blazer either needs to be made baseline in some form or replaced with something meaningful.
Camouflage, honestly just make this baseline or move it to the pvp talents. It is almost never worth picking this talent when leveling or in end game content. Just turn row 3 into improved self-healing talents
Redo row 4 of talents, Bloodseeker quite easily beats everything, at least in end game pve content, I think steel trap is used in pvp but more for its immobilization than its damage. A murder of crows does not fit the spec.
Born to be Wild should be baseline or buffed significantly, eg: reduces CD between 40-50%
Mongoose Bite is made baseline, Talent Row 6 is changed to give additional effects with Mongoose Bite
Honestly, I would love to see Wildfire Infusion be made baseline, but it is not necessary. However without certain azurite traits Birds of Prey might become less meaningful and Chakrams is still pretty bad, even with its buff. I would recommend either buffing the 2 alternative talents, significant buffs not these tiny ones, or replace them with something new.
The whole list is great but I would like it for this one alone. When soloing I would like to have one of the other two talents but it’s painful to have harpoon on cooldown moving from mob to mob. In group PvE I never use this talent. I only want it for the reset so even if that was the only part that was made baseline it would be a big improvement to QoL.
Reduced Trap CDs. We’re the trap spec, that’s our gimick, we should do it better than other specs, maybe not down to 12 seconds as they tried in Legion, but at least in the 20-24 seconds ballpark.
Rework Sticky Tar into Entrapment. Sticky Tar is worthless, seriously, do some base napkin maths, its barely noticeable as a debuff, its not vanilla, classes don’t rely on autos anymore to do most of their damage, specially in PvP. Entrapment is sorely missed and with how much mobility melees have now, not having it makes trying to peel for our healers miserable.
Uncap Butchery’s AoE. Survival is worthless in AoE scenarios, its workable in cleave ones, so giving it a real AoE option would keep it relevant there. AoE is an obligatory part of PvE, specially now. A spec will never work without an half decent AoE option.
Bring back Readiness as a Talent option for MM and Survival, in place of Camo that should be now baseline. A nerfed version of Readiness ofc, only working on Camo, Exhilaration, Disengage and Traps, making it consistent with the surviability/mobility themes of the row.
Potentially OP Ideas, would require extensive testing/tuning :
Rework the various “Stings” PvP talents and bake them into Serpent Sting/Arcane Shot/Cobra Shot.
AFAIK these talents are rarely used as they’re cumbersome in their current iteration, Spider’s Sting being the only useable one agains’t spell cleaves (maybe?).
Hunters being also an incredibly keybind heavy class already, people just don’t bother with these in favor of passive effects who tend to be just as good if not better.
Spider’s Sting would become a Mana Drain, Scorpid Sting’s effect would need to be nerfed to 25% (or lower, depending on the testing’s results) and Viper’s Sting would become just a regular MS effect, freeing our pet slot or allowing MM to play Lone Wolf.
At least these are all things i could see myself use situationally unlike the current iterations.
Not really. Arcane Shot and Steady Shot existing in the spellbook doesn’t mean they are intended to be rotational, and they’re pretty clearly balanced around not being included.
I think an earlier build had a ranged weapon requirement on either Tranq or Kill Shot, but that appears to have been removed (as well as the Polearm requirement that was on one of them, or at least it isn’t in the tooltip anymore, I don’t have a staff on my hunter to test it with).
Blizzard seems to be onboard with this notion of having abilities/spells in our spellbooks that we don’t actually use in given specs. That wasn’t exactly what the community meant by “unprune”, but that’s Blizzard for you.
That said, SV does have the relatively unique benefit of being able to throw on a bow and do most of its DPS from range. Raptor Strike gets replaced by Arcane Shot, Steady can fill in during rotational downtime, 2 of the 3 talents on all of the DPS-increasing rows, except level 40, are useful at range. SV has Aspect of the Eagle to handle occasional out-of-range, and it has a bow-swap macro and Arcane/Steady for those situations where it needs to be at range for extended periods for some reason (or for more casual players that simply prefer it, I guess).
Instead of a bow-swap macro, I’d have liked it if SV was able to use those abilities even with a polearm equipped, but at reduced damage. On the flipside, if the hunter has a bow equipped, then they do full damage with ranged abilities but reduced damage with melee.
Eh, you can swap weapons in combat, and even in M+ in SL. I don’t see a reason to make them cross-usable. It’d be very weird if your hunter had a bow equipped and was using, say, Raptor Strike. Would they swing the bow? Pull a random polearm out of their rear end? How would Arcane Shot animate if you had a polearm equipped?
I posted this on another thread, but it works well here.
I would return Lacerate as a strong DOT that is not meant to be applied and maintained something like: Deal 400% Atk Power over 6 seconds. 10 sec CD 40 Focus.
Haven’t thought what Deterrence would look like, but having a 2nd defensive would add a nice extra little something to SV
I would also like to Wyvern Sting make a comeback. An original ability from the classic Survival Kit
Talent tunings would be:
15 Row-
Incorporate Terms of Engagement into Harpoon and replace with Deep Cuts: While lacerate is active your focus spending abilities to refund its Focus.
Level 90 Row-
Tip of the Spear- Improve: Kill Command, Harpoon, Chakrams increases the damage of Raptor Strike and Carve by 25%, stacking 3 times
Flanking Strike: Redesign: 15 Focus, Casting Raptor Strike and Kill Command in sequence cause you and your pet to deal (35% Atk Pwr) damage. Additionally Flanking strike will either cause your next Raptor Strike to critically hit or your pet will use it basic attack on your next Kill Command. Increase Kill Command reset chance by 5%.
Level 100-
Have Chakrams count as a Raptor Strike (Mongoose Bite)
I think with these changes it will open up the different play styles for the SV hunter and the incorporation of Terms of Engagement into Harpoon can help increase some of our Focus woes.