SV feels horrible

Classes Hunter
141

In theory, the point of the damage window is to cap your ramp up ASAP and then try to get in as many relevant attacks in before the buff wears off. The thing is, this only makes sense for Mongoose Bite/Fury if they’re a) at the core of the spec (meaning the talents and other skills are built to interact with them) and b) Mongoose Bite is responsible for the bulk of the hunter’s damage.

SV has been moving away from that since the post-Legion rework, and current talent design makes me think we are nearing or have reached the point where the ramp up and damage window have no reason to be there.

Fair enough, but there’s something to be said about hitting the same button over and over. It definitely begins to feel mindless after a while. I’m not expecting a combo system, but just something that breaks the monotony while serving some purpose would be nice.

I don’t think adding a spender would require changing other things in the spec. Could be something like an attack that deals slightly more damage than a 5 stack Mongoose Bite and places a bleed with a duration that scales inversely with how much time is left in the Mongoose Fury buff. So the closer to 0 MF is at, the longer the bleed would be up. I’m aware there’s a possibility someone would figure out a perfect sweet spot for this instead of using it as intended.

That doesn’t really negate my criticism over Blizzard throwing the baby out with the bathwater instead of working to improve the design.

Being lackadaisical about a damage window makes zero sense. Especially when it’s a damage window you can’t extend outside of Bloody Claws (which is a wash unless you’re stacking a lot of haste). This would be like telling a Cata arms warrior to just take it easy during a Colossus Smash window.

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142

No, that first part has never been part of it. It’s solely the number of relevant attacks in total per window, not how quickly you get in the 5th (out of, say, 7–9).

That first part has never been more than tangential or even a trap, even in Legion.

You’re basing far too much here off a faulty understanding.

No one —save perhaps, indirectly, you— is suggesting that one be “lackadaisical” about the damage window. We’re merely noting that there is zero benefit to wasting would-be Focus generation to hit 5 stacks earlier, since doing so would mean getting fewer MBs into the window. As MF only benefits MB, wasting what MBs could otherwise exploit MF to hasten MF stacks is nonsensical. That fixation on a tangential, arbitrary goal over your actual resources would be the “lackadaisical” approach.

No, it would be like telling a Warrior (A) to continue charge-weaving during their Colossus Smash window so long as doing so would increase their effective GCD count therein and (B) not to so overspend on filler damage as not to have resource for their higher potency-per-Rage attacks.

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No, this is not correct. You don’t want to cap your ramp ASAP because then you’ll run out of fuel. Playing Survival is a marathon, not a sprint.

It was never like this. In Legion you were limited on MF charges and in BfA onwards you were limited by Focus. Spamming MB while sacrificing your other abilities was a trap.

I got lost, are you not literally describing current SV?

It makes perfect sense if you look at what your abilities do and think about it for two seconds. Also, Bloody Claws does not need a tremendous amount of Haste to work. Not to mention, if BC was “buffed” or something to make it even more trivial to extend then there’s no purpose in the stacking mechanic or the buff window because it would just always be active.

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144

They need to fix Harpoon.

145

I would. It has worked for Rogues, Kitties, Paladins, etc. for…say it with me, all…for EONS BEYOND REMEMBRANCE.

Every successful melee has had an ON-DEMAND “solid state” style of toolkit. But pre-Mad Bombardier SV, not unlike the USPS, knew only two speeds: slow and stop. DKs even had TWO resource pools by which their already powerful abilities are governed. So no, it never exactly had to be a combo system, but something that, if you need to, you can dump immediately or space it out. HoPo was nice in that way because it’s kept in reserve on the player instead of on a target.

Stuff that takes ramp-up, particularly too long, never worked. So yes, the less reliant SV was MB, the better off, as well as any melee component for that matter. In hindsight, they could have made MB start off at 5 stacks as it decrements down to 1 stack. That way, SV can “conserve” Bites, but can still do damage with more Bites after the first, but know to do other abilities on the side while the decrement cools off. This is especially important when under CC and other duress.

I remember how to do increments and decrements in my college C++ class. Shoot, a Spring Break intern could have made MSV better just like that!

It’s quite too late for that now. MSV failed, it lost, and had it received an emulation of the most successful melee DPS systems, things would have been different. I can quote myself from the earliest, “It wasn’t even a GOOD melee,” because I did try it out in Leg.

Nah, I’ll just spam KC for CD-free MIRV WFBs.

146

Honestly idk if ret and feral are really good example of successful melee. They’re constantly very in n out of meta (for ferals mostly out) and very tuning dependent. I’d say rogues are a better example, but that’s more so due to class design / toolkit rather than specifically combo points.

147

You’ll always have that, the FOTM thing. Yet that’s the key: competitiveness. Do you know how long SV had been at the bottom? You see the difference between being on the right side of wrong vs. being on the wrong side of wrong. Because tuning is the easy part. That’s what I expected out of Mad Bombardier; they only needed to tune down the numbers.

There are records of 3 15+ keys I ran with some old friends in S3. I think the highest was a 17, but I literally waltzed in there as a SV alt.

MSV is the runt of the litter that got no milk, but a human, as if by compassion, nursed it with RSV-nutritious milk. The poor pup was not strong enough to compete with the stronger, healthier pups in the melee litter.

148

I believe that was in reference to some of his spitballs as to what could replace MF / MB as it currently exists. (One idea being that you just build up stacks via one skill and spend them for bonus damage with another, if I understood it correctly.)

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149

I guess I’m confused cause I wouldn’t call the current iteration of the gameplay loop monotonous and one-buttony at all, like you’re weaving all your abilities together

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150

Compared to Shadowlands or even S3/4 Dragonflight, it does feel a bit more one-note to me than I’d prefer, but mostly agreed.

This part, though, I don’t really get.

Compared to even the likes of MM, Sub, Feral, Enhance, Ret, Fury… honestly almost any melee, our abilities aren’t particularly interactive, because what few crossovers we get are automatic and/or just pure damage that procs so uncontrollably that we have little to no agency over them.

It’s… fine(?), I suppose, but it there seems to be far tighter and involved of optimization problems due to how different skills affect each other or varied priorities on MM, Sub, Arms, Enhance, or even Ret.

Or only big remaining tie-together, especially with the near-removal (DF) and then full removal (TWW) of Wildfire Infusions and now of Merciless Blows and more significant value for individual bleed management, is just TotS, and it feels —to me, anyways— more like mere optional CP with a clear and unvaried spending priority than anything truly “interactive”.

It’s functional. It’s decent. It’s by no means a bad or especially dull spec, imo. But if there’s any sort of actual quality to be estimated in saying “you’ve weaving all your abilities together”, then every spec likewise “you’ve weaving all your abilities together” in every spec.

151

I would not like combo points. Tip is like combo points. If you want combo points get Luxthos UI, it puts tip on your screen like combo points or runes.

152

I think he was just referring to MF stacks not wearing off over time (any more so than CP would) nor amping its own generator itself, but instead buffing a MF-spender.

E.g., Raptor however 1–5 times, and then slap someone truck-ish-ly with MB, or MB 1–5 times then slap someone with Mongoose Bite-r-est. Or each Mongoose Bite grants a stack increasing Raptor Strike damage, up to 6 stacks, and Raptor Strike can spend up to 3 at a time. No MF duration/window used. Etc., etc.

Which would be a “QoL” improvement, sure, but also, imo, defeat the whole point of the MF window existing (and essentially just recopy old TotS atop new TotS). For my part, I think what it needs is simply a duration and maximum stack count commensurate to its modern context.

153

Let the record show that the guild in question who invited me do not do M+ “professionally”, but they are core raiders. I misspoke because I thought I got through 17. Maybe it was that we timed an 18.

However, even my measly records show what you practically got for just showing up, or being carried even, as an SV.

Now, why did we lose this? WHY? Was it because a MM main who barely played SV can just get invited and bedazzle a casual group to get as far as 18? That was a GOOD thing, and people in THIS community RUINED it. You know who you are.

I think I checked up on the Malygosian guild that invited me. I would see what their Hunters look like. They never really had more than 1-2 in their lineup and you can guess which spec they DIDN’T pick.

Add: That’s also the thing. Everyone in that guild knew I didn’t touch M+ unless it was a blue progression moon. So in this way I wasn’t all that practiced, I scrounged up Honor and CQ gear(which wouldn’t have been the best). I did have to do so M+ to convert the pieces to get the Godstalker’s set bonuses, because unless you used CQ(which was rare for us unrated PvPers), you got there at a snail’s pace.

Like I said ages ago, the guild didn’t want me to take MM which I was best at, and they were blown away by my relatively meager SV performance. I was a stand-in as a non-guildie, but they knew the power of Mad Bombardier. IT FELT MUY FENOMENAL. If there’s ANY reason SV feels horrible, even right now, is because the BEST itineration got TRASHED.

h ttps://imgur.com/a/fHAAy3g

154

I don’t know if I agree, to me I think it’s just an enhanced version of old (bfa onwards) SV. Then again I don’t miss WFI at all and think it was vastly overrated for the amount of bugs it brought to the spec.

Something to consider is how exceptional tip is to the spec fantasy though.

I think SV is very well designed atm and adding much to either ST or AoE would make it be extremely busy and overwhelming.

again, just imo

155

Fluff is not crunch. If it doesn’t put points on the board, especially competitively, nobody cares about spec fantasy. You can go be your own Animal Crossing hobbyist and do your own thing without bothering the real endgame professionals.

That spec fantasy card has been worn to shreds. It’s never been about that in the endgames that matter. I wouldn’t use my position as guidewriter to argue it’s good enough to play Animal Crossing, because there might be some ambitious people that want to push somewhere as SV without paid sponsorship or in late season. That does them a great disservice. Yet at the same time, it’s already a zero-sum game getting slots. Less SVs means more of anything else. It’s rather ironic.

I know I can speak from personal experience regarding SV in the urban scene that it sucked, and it got dropped harder than two bags of rock salt in each hand. Even Mad Bombardier was slower and not quite as efficient as Marks(but sure was heckuva fun).

3 to 6 seconds, no longer than 10 seconds, to just absolutely DELETE something, because that has always been the truest and purest of all meta. SV was NEVER that fast, either in the melee or in the ranged. Ever.

156

mfw bro thinks killing afk ppl in stormwind is competitive content

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157

Yfw when you get ganked in the city the second and third times.

I would have played SV, perhaps even melee, a lot more if it can drop them like it’s hot. It should not take longer than 10 seconds to down anything in ANY PvP, even in 2’s and 3’s the sheer ability to drop something instead of having prolonged matches is important.

It’s universal; any DPS that can, is a good spec. Any DPS that can’t, is bad. Consider it a benchmark, the same as 0-60 MPH of an automobile.

People expect a FAST CAR to do 0-60 in 3 sec or less. The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 can do it in 1.66 sec. The same standard ought to be applied to DPS specs.

MM solo has never really been that fast; I think I’ve seen an Elem go that fast in SL before and I was amazed. But mboxed MM, iirc, can gank a soft target in barely just under a full second.

Even so, Marksmanship is literally American Muscle, not those silly soups from across the other pond.

Edit: By the way, no real hard feelings, Woödsy, despite that I said some disparaging things about you on my 𝕏 in recent days. You are as I’ve said, sadly, but what’s in here stays in here, and in-game. You have to know that it is also the product of the hardest PvP in the game, as the things I said about you would be Mickey Mouse in comparison to what I’ve received. I already posted more scrnshots of instavacaying nastygrams back in the BFA era.

If you can even take multiple vacations in the chin(which I think 2023 is nothing but a bad memory now) and give it right back in the chin of your detractors, if you got the stones to do that much, that’s just as good to play any Hunter spec competitively. I know the times have gotten soft, I know that it’s a “kinder, gentler Army”, but I’m quite sure it’s the same as I left it that everything else out there is meaner and tougher than us. I’ve done it so long I’m not even fazed by it, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less true.

158

See, that’s my issue. I can’t see how it is particularly “thematic” to SV, at least in its present iteration and per its present contexts.

No part of yelling and pointing our stabby-stick at the enemy for our pet to attack them makes sense why it would increase the damage of our next Wildfire Grenade or Explosive Shot or Mongoose Bite, let alone by the same portion, let alone on an altogether different target.

And at the least, Tip of the Spear doesn’t feel like at all like “coordination with our pet”.

  • There’s no specific interaction between pet and Hunter, let alone typified ones that would be interesting leverageable. It’s at best just the equivalent of the arming period formerly attached to traps for greater damage, just now as a GCD before larger GCDs. More often, it’s overly subordinated by its function as simple resource generation. Outside of a couple rare situations, the effect of optimizing TotS beyond the basics is incredibly minimal.
  • We get so damn many stacks across our burst phases anyways that they quickly feel irrelevant.
  • What little could potentially have given it greater depth by contextual happenstance has been removed, directly or through the cheapening of bail-outs.
    • Alpha Predator is required anyways from its KC damage and pathing opportunities, so there’s no real reward to thinking more than 2 GCDs in advance about when your KC would be ready in relation to what skills you most want to buff, and many of those skills are reset randomly but at too slim a chance for it to be optimal to actually buffer their potential generators with an extra stack if failing to get that proc could —to greater loss than typical gain from margining— mean using the stack on an inferior skill when lacking anything else to do.

To me, playing with and around the pet would involve actual pet actions —say, as simulcastable oGCDs with dash-strikes for immediacy— with, for a few seconds after attacking, our own Focus generation duplicated towards our pet when we’re off the GCD; it’d involve wanting to be actually mindful of pet position and CDs, able to use them to ready leap attacks, to interrupt from afar, to take a hit for us or us for them (at initially reduced damage on transfer), etc. And, it would see certain mirrors or analogs across the use of munitions, poisons, and self-buffs. That, more so than a 1-in-1-out analog to a D4 Rogue’s Combo Points Mastery given seemingly in place of most other opportunities for interesting synergies, would seem far more “Survival” to me.

Tl;dr: To me, TotS is not particularly thematic nor engaging under present contexts and seems to be made overmuch of while therefore (by being overestimated and needing so much else to tie into it) likely shorting us of other opportunities.

159

As a random BG enjoyer, I preferred the sick sustain and the ability to pick off the wounded. Just putting SOOOO many dots out there and getting increased dps from everyone else’s bleeds, and then popping off some kill shots. I didn’t mind the middling burst at all. I get that it was frustrating for Arena players and it didn’t have the sticking power and relentless horror movie Jason vibes that Fury had but it was fun.

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160

Par excellent support DPS, which a solo Killer like me doesn’t have much use for. I have to yield to this because that was a thing.

If I had a dollar for every time I ganked the cities in a raid as a Hunter, even SV, I JUST MIGHT be able to buy something from McD’s value menu.