Hahaha finally you’re good for a laugh! For all your saltiness and crying, every now and again you’ll have a brief moment of something funny or witty.
But yes, logically indeed. Make dumb statements, get logically pointed out that said statements are dumb. Go figure lmao.
So “nobody” doesn’t actually mean “nobody”, and I just imagined reading this stupidity.
How about no?
MM is it’s own thing and shouldn’t have RSV shoehorned in to appease a tiny fraction of a percent of players who play MSV.
I mean Raptor Strike becomes a choice node with Cobra Shot.
Based off how Blizzard treats the spec… They don’t care for Survival either.
Do we honestly need both Arcane Shot and Cobra Shot? There’s not a single Arcane Shot synergy, nor even any other form of Arcane damage, in any Hunter tree. Why not just… have Cobra Shot be the level 2 skill, with it then taking on additional synergies on a spec-by-spec basis? It’d still be a filler, not a modulator like Multishot is for BM or MM, after all.
From there, just make melee capacities baseline. If you have a melee weapon equipped and are in melee range Cobra Shot becomes Raptor Strike. (With a melee weapon equipped but out of melee range, the hand-crossbow is used instead.) From there, supporting a MSV build is as simple as increasing the efficiency bonuses of the initially almost identical melee skill.
Similarly, (independently of using a melee weapon), if you’re in melee range, Countershot becomes Muzzle (comes off CD more quickly), Concussive Shot [made baseline] becomes Wing Clip (no CD and usable regardless of Concussive CD), etc.
No need to spend a talent just to replace Arcane Shot with a near-identically functioning skill nor to make that function workable with a melee weapon. You’d have both, and any talents would be to the benefit of amping the compensatory utility and damage profile benefits of occasionally having to melee when their benefits (and spending talents towards that) would situationally exceed the net costs of doing so.
Much like there’s no need to make Lone Wolf a talent instead of just something you choose by actually balancing the passive and making it baseline, there’s should be no need to spend talents just to unlock the basic functionality of either choice.
Lust is the best raid buff in game. Turtle is a great utility, as is FD.
after seeing ret rework in PTR and making 20-30 yrd ret paly builds, it’s weird that they haven’t tried something similar with SV. they could make a choice node with melee mongoose bite vs like a 20 yd raptor strike or something.
I don’t think the developers care enough to rework or address the issues with Survival. The fact the rogues and ret paladin have more range than us is beyond my understanding.
you don’t seem to be playing any spec at a high level, let alone survival. so respectfully, i’m not quite sure where you insistence that survival is bad is coming from.
Whether I’m playing at a really high level or just casually this xpac, doesn’t mean that I’m wrong.
responding to bepples, not you. they just seem to be so ridiculously and constantly negative about melee survival, no matter how good it is in any given patch. I run keys with people higher ilvl than me, started raiding mythic, and prog heroic and I have always been punching above my ilvl or top dps. that survival is bad this patch is a meme based on logs, but not true in practice in my experience. You can beat BMs with Rasz bow even if they are 10 ilvls ahead of you, I’ve done it.
it has solid and flexible ST, a really even damage profile between AOE and ST when running an AOE build in mythics, and a ton of mobility. It will never have those massive 200k spikes like Warrior, Warlock etc. But what it DOES do well is that it’s always doing pretty much the same amount of damage, with no real high or low points. What it really needs is more survivability, and for Lunge and Aspect to be in better spots on the tree (or baseline), and perhaps Terms of Engagement removed entirely or folded into baseline. Played all of SL as survival, and swapped to Survival from Arms 3 weeks ago and I have been having a stellar time with it.
He’ll probably respond to you at some point as well. But generally, he’s talking about design, not tuning and pure numbers.
Again, same as above. Having said that, anecdotal evidence(your personal observations from a select few M+ runs, or boss kills, or PvP) doesn’t matter for much on a larger scale. You can tune any spec to be good, numbers-wise, regardless of any potential design flaws.
Besides, he(Bepples) usually doesn’t argue performance. More so, countering arguments used to justify the rework to melee, from a design perspective.
I apologize for misunderstanding what you said earlier. I enjoy melee survival, I think a spec lacks something. I hope Blizzard sooner than later starts reading the forums and the many concerns people have with the spec as well as taking notes of some of the concepts and ideas that are being thrown.
What’s my own gameplay involvement have to do with anything?
Since you’re so interested, I have multiple CEs in previous tiers but I’ve decided not to raid in Dragonflight.
As I expected. Count 1,866,252 for SV Hunter confusing good performance with good design.
I do not care one bit how SV is performing. I care that its design is total nonsense from concept to implementation. In fact, the fact that it’s performing so well yet it’s still deeply unpopular should tell you that the spec has deeper problems than just tuning. But evidently you’re sticking to the tuning perspective (and assuming that I am too) because that’s what’s easy for you.
What it needs is a ground-up revision back to being a ranged spec based around special munitions.
The entire direction of the spec since and including Legion has been, at best, non-existent. It’s easily the greatest failure of modern class design. If you don’t think so, ask yourself why we get these threads begging for attention and reworks constantly for the last few years while the spec languishes in niche obscurity. After all, it can’t be the tuning. You said that yourself.
P.S. Didn’t you already try this in the thread a few days ago?:
It’s very rare to hold on to it for any significant amount of time given its short CD. Basically it’s only for situations like the 2nd boss of CoS where there’s a periodic low-HP add spawn, and even then lining up ES so that it actually hits them is hardly significant since they melt so quickly regardless.
In just about every case it’s AoE damage on a static 30 sec CD and it has no interaction with any spec’s mechanics. That’s why it exists on the Hunter tree. Now that’s a fine mechanic on its own, but critically it is not the same thing as ranged Survival’s Explosive Shot. It’s neither better or worse without context. It’s better at being an AoE burst, but it’s worse at being a core spec ability.
The thought input of the old ES was its top-priority. That meant that ensuring that every available usage of it was executed while also pumping out as many Arcane Shots as possible, and balancing the focus regeneration to be able to keep that up. It sounds trivial, and it really wasn’t that difficult, but it was a skill cap and I came across many Hunters that didn’t meet it. It wasn’t nothing. It was certainly a lot more dynamic and engaging than the mana-and-cooldowns-based gameplay that came before it.
What does “more significant” here mean? Because as the core of a spec, it objectively isn’t given it’s a 30 sec CD that interacts with nothing else. Given that it’s much further down on the list of damage sources by proportion, the penalty for messing it up is a lot lower than the penalty for messing up ranged SV’s focus/GCD management leading to multiple missed ES over the course of a fight.
The modern Explosive Shot is a fine mechanic on its own. But it’s not a substitute for that of ranged SV. They’re entirely different mechanics with different purposes so any direct comparison is meaningless. Ideally they would both exist in some capacity; a classwide talent for AoE situations plus a core spec mechanic for ranged SV. Whether one or the other gets renamed away from Explosive Shot doesn’t matter.
As for what intuitively counts as an explosive: the only reason ranged SV’s Explosive Shot didn’t do AoE was because of balancing. When it was first added in WotLK it DID do AoE, but they removed that because having that level of passive cleave in the single-target rotation back in those days was game-breakingly overpowered. However it wouldn’t be outlandish in modern WoW given many specs (including SV itself with Wildfire Bomb) now have extensive passive cleave.
I’ve thought about this, within the scope of my own suggestions for a concept of a modern RSV implementation.
If anything, if people feel that they’d want a substitute to fill the spot of ES in the class tree, for AoE purposes, I’d take something like the ability I included in my concept; Cluster Shot, and make that a part of the class tree instead. You could simply strip out the interaction with ES which I included as part of that ability, leave that in the RSV tree. Or you could find something else to fill that spot in the tree, such as an interaction with Kill Shot, similar to what the other specs have.
Edit: An upside with this would be potential interactions with talents such as Serrated Shots, which affects bleed damage, and the potential leverage it would now have when it comes to execute damage as well.
For clarity, here’s the suggested ability:
Cluster Shot
25 Focus
Instant cast - 15 sec cooldownFire a shot which explodes on impact, instantly dealing Physical damage to the primary target and all other nearby enemies, and causing them to bleed for - damage over 3 sec.
Explosive Shot-charges which are still active on any target(s) hit by Cluster Shot will instantly erupt, dealing all remaining damage at once, to all enemies near the target affected by Explosive Shot.
If you have the opportunity to hold for even a single extra mob (i.e., an extra 100% damage), it’s worth holding for an extra cooldown’s time (again, 100% extra time). A little more than worth actually, as now you’ve recovered a GCD’s worth of uptime while doing the same damage.
You’d be better off achieving 10 hits in 5 minutes time via just 5 GCDs of investment (half the frequency, but twice the value each) than achieving 10 hits in 5 minutes time with twice that opportunity cost.
If Explosive Shot had additional damage to the primary target or additional effects beyond itself — synergies given over to other skills, then doubling the number of targets hit would no longer double its damage dealt… but it doesn’t; it is that direct. As such it requires very little to make it worth holding, “short” 30s CD or no.
Correct. It is, in itself, more complex, as late RSV Explosive Shot was single-target and never worth holding (consecutive uses didn’t even risk anything, unlike any other DoT).
Old RSV’s ES interactions was instead more akin to MM LnL, but again with less complexity. ES’s triggers had a single GCD of prep (generally, BA) and bits of downtime on the chance to proc it independent of the Hunter’s overall uptime, but it had no way to skillfully leverage the proc (be that by bypassing contextual complexity in AiS’s immobile cast or in prepping it for greater value via Trick Shots); after proccing it, you’d just do as you did any time BA was out without exception and 95% of the time even when BA wasn’t out: you prioritized ES.
There was no thought input. It just replaced Arcane Shot over that time. That’s it. That’s all it did. You could put Explosive Shot and Arcane Shot on a macro together and nothing would change. They both consumed that proc; you couldn’t simultaneously prioritize ES AND pump out Arcane Shots. That’d just have been a DPS loss because of lost ES. And under procs, the Focus was a non-issue.
No, the only complexity that went into ES was keeping up a margin of Focus. And if not for Multi-shot, that would be purely rote. Put a WotLK MM on a Focus system but all its same CDs (6s Arcane, 10s Aimed, 10s Chimaera, 15s [12-18 effectively w/ pandemic] Serpent) and you’d have that same “complexity” (but greater, since there’d be four spenders, across three different rhythms).
I don’t disagree that something used on average every 6 seconds is likely going to feel more “core” than something usable every 30, but which would you say is more core to MM, Aimed Shot or Arcane? Frequency isn’t everything, nor that something flashed. LnL AiS is not more core than regular AiS, and a debuff you would have maintained identically even if not for its proc is not adding any special kind of synergy.
What you can do with a skill, too —how you can better leverage it effectively through planning and prep— is vital to making something feel core.
No, current Explosive Shot doesn’t have that, but neither did the old. At all. There were no constraints upon it nor bonuses available to it; there was nothing to leverage beyond just spamming it whenever possible, which you already did regardless of that proc.
In terms of resource management, maybe. In terms of rotational/CD-management? Hell no. That’s the equivalent of saying BfA rotations on Enhance were more complex than in ShL/DF. It replaced syncopation that occasionally incentivized breaking priority order in order to get out more damage out over time, and managing one’s soft-CD (Serpent Sting) to allow for that… with just a static priority order. Rotationally, it was objectively less dynamic, as it replaced 4 CDs to juggle with effectively just one (and/or a soft-CD in single-target), at which point one cannot have any conflicts from which to incentivize any changes. That is the opposite of being dynamic.
A combination of the above:
Never said it was. I said only that I much prefer the newer direction for that skill because I prefer having the “core” or anchoring skills for a “munitions” theme to be more choiceful, deliberate, and impactful (in the sense given before, of actually impacting surrounding play, both through prep and follow-up, in ways that one wouldn’t have otherwise already done).
But yes, I also consider it a step up, however small, regardless of my preferences for any Munitions theme, as it at least has more of that impact. And literally all it took to do that was to give it AoE damage and not to purposely strip away all potential priority conflicts. Because yes, contextual complexity is important.
Which is why this becomes more a historical argument between us; naturally an Explosive Shot wouldn’t be bound in quite the same ways, but the fact that it didn’t survive as an AoE for more than a hotfix’s time is just one factor among many that make me believe its place in RSV is a very, very poor example to look at.
But that said, I still prefer a longer CD (even if just… 15 or so, or 12s but with only a single extra charge on proc so it averages out to per-8s, or more control over the conditions for the proc, etc.). Put an AoE that’s also your best single-target on a very short, often-charge-stacked CD, and it leaves you very little room to leverage it. You end up with the Mad Bombardier fiasco, but without any of the additional mechanics of WFI to keep at least a small level of interest on leveraging that AoE itself.
Moreover, the shorter the CD, the more sharply and consistently it’d overtakes or fall beneath other priorities, leaving it less dynamic. The 30s Explosive Shot can be held to a high priority in order to sync up to a cast just prior to every other Death Chakram, or once can allow themselves to desync it in favor of less risk of LnL overcap, etc., depending on how they’re also syncing up Volley, Double Tap (before its removal), etc. It could provide multiple options which would in turn affect later priorities.
To recap, what I’d like to see from Explosive Shot is that it kinda trucks, it’s worth holding enough to allow very deliberate use (which would trend towards being a pure AoE), and its CD is long enough and its single-target damage decent enough to rest above or fall below time-sensitive actions (like RF, on MM, especially with Lethal Shots, or when it can be used before AiS with Surging Shots) depending on their interdependent skills / procs.
Spitball for a context in a full-on Munitions spec:
Let’s say you have three Munition charges. Multiple skills use these charges, all on a shared CD. (And maybe one of these even costs 2 charges, and may have a hard CD—maybe, maybe not subject to CDR, in order to help center up/anchor it all a bit. Whatever.) You regenerate a Munition charge every 20s, with the possibility of proccing an extra charge from certain rotational elements. That proc can be typal (Poison, Explosive, Shadow, Lightning) or a Wildcard, and they’re frequent enough that you’re really spitting out maybe 5 per minute, instead of 3.
Additionally, though, this spec would have a fair number of middle-ground (6s to 15s) rotational tools that are themselves of high enough priority to overtake these less often used but powerful skills (who are obviously very bankable). In this sense, a Munition spec wouldn’t need a burst CD; it inherently is bursty CDs.
This Explosive Shot would open up some things (such as replacing Poisons, categorically, with a mechanically-augmented “Caustics” type while its fire DoT effect is active), but would especially capitalize on certain things prepared in advance and which could be used for more purposes than just extra ES damage (able to detonate for extra damage the +Physical Damage Taken (From You) effects of, idk, your Mailmasher rounds, or able to set off latent charges already added, or to have DoT time extended by Emulsive Rounds [Tar Rounds? Idk].
That is the kind of stuff I’d want from an Explosive Shot, not just —as it was on RSV— another form of occasionally-reset Kill Command equivalent (but damage dealt over 6s, but not really, because it pandemics endlessly, so it doesn’t even attempt anything like DoT gameplay…).
Unique mechanics, primarily, that alternate between rapid prep or interim phases and burn phases that sort of slide around and past each other (even if, unfortunately, less so in DF than in ShL), giving the spec a sort of variable rhythm with frequent decision-making that’d have impact both the given GCDs and thereafter.
Legion Arcane and certain builds of Subtlety, Ret, Enhance, or Arms come close to some parts of its equation, but none of them to the whole of it.
Granted, there’s a lot more I’d want from it, and certain things I’d prefer to have removed (Terms forcing Harpoon on CD, Mongoose being positioned/tuned to be a non-choice, with no equally-weighty-but-very-different mechanic that could be taken instead), but all in all, it’s fun, and not of a sort I can quite get elsewhere. Which is all that can be concisely stated for just about any other spec I enjoy (which is… pretty much all of them, save perhaps Discipline and either Evoker).
I didn’t read beyond this point here because you’re obsessively nitpicking again.
I didn’t say it never happened. I said it rarely happened. Usually Explosive Shot is something that’s used every 30 seconds. I can count on one hand the M+ contexts where I would seriously consider holding it, and 0 hands for the raiding contexts. You specifically need a situation where you have Explosive Shot ready, the adds are coming soon (within 10 seconds), and they won’t be around for the next explosive shot after that.
Ah yes, a simple yet effective core mechanic that served the spec well in its most successful years was “crap”. You really are something else.
“Worth holding” isn’t the single variable that decides whether it’s complex or not; contrary to what you apparently believe.
Are you seriously going to pretend that every single case of “signature priority ability that you want to keep on cooldown” is a bad mechanic every time it shows up in this game?
The complexity came from the resource management. This is something that distinguished good and mediocre SV Hunters back in the MoP/WoD era and you could see it from logs. Satisfying the priority and maximising output, adjacent to fight mechanics, was a skill ceiling. It was a very fast-paced spec with zero downtime, a 1 second GCD, and a strict focus budget. On top of that there was the Lock and Load interaction. Yes, most of the time it was just a matter of priority, but importantly it also procced off CC traps and that mattered in many contexts especially PvP. It was a very effective and successful mechanical interaction, and all that was missing was extending the interaction to the realm of multidotting; something that was on the table and in the works until they abruptly decided to throw it all out.
You can dismiss this all you want and try to gaslight everyone into believing what we actually had was a terrible and boring spec, but this was one of the most celebrated and popular ranged playstyles of the time. The likes of Preach Gaming and Gingi point to this playstyle as the most fun Hunter iteration, so it’s not like it was the realm of pet-collecting wine mums who couldn’t handle more than 2 mechanics in a spec’s gameplay.
I didn’t read the rest of this paragraph because this is a ridiculous statement.
Also a ridiculous statement.
You’re again fixating on Explosive Shot in particular and not looking at the entire toolkit and priority system in which it fit. ES was a maximum priority ability that accounted for some 40% of the spec’s damage, so the challenge was getting the maximum number of casts for a given fight length. That meant GCD and focus management. Lock and Load itself was easy to handle, but what if you capped out on focus or didn’t keep Serpent Sting rolling before Lock and Load procced? That would mean lost DPS potential. And the gameplay was fast paced enough for that to matter over the course of the fight.
According to your understanding of the spec, no one would ever over/underperform and we’d never see a bad SV log. But there was evident variance in performance from exactly this sort of thing. I distinctly remember a conversation with a Hunter in WoD over why his DPS wasn’t as good as mine when it looked like his ability priority was correct, and we found he had the same ES cast count as me but on a fight 30 seconds longer. He had these inefficiencies and small delays in his ES casts which, while individually not too significant, added up over the course of the fight.
Damage breakdown and aesthetic prominence matters, and ES was very important for both. It was SV’s largest damage source by far and the most aesthetically iconic and recognisable. It was also intertwined into the spec’s mechanical interactions. It’s comparable to MM’s Aimed Shot.
I don’t see why it needed leverage beyond “use it whenever possible”. It wasn’t an AoE or a setup. It was the end result/finisher. The spec could use more mechanical interaction, for sure. But what it needed was more ways to get to that finishing point that was Explosive Shot. The ability itself wasn’t the problem.
I extensively played both. I’m currently playing the WotLK version. I played the MoP version very recently. The post-focus version is absolutely more dynamic and engaging than the WotLK version, aside from trap dancing weirdness.
WotLK’s model was a massive step forward from BC, but it’s still ultimately pretty static as it’s all entirely cooldown reliant. There’s a Steady Shot filler but it doesn’t amount to much. The resource management being an entirely separate “phase” of the gameplay via Aspect of the Viper removes much of the engagement. In the focus version, you had to be paying attention to your resource at every moment. The building and the spending was intertwined. With the mana version they’re separate, and what’s worse is that most of the boss fights are short enough for you to be able to ignore regenerating mana entirely.
You’re treating them as separate matters here but they aren’t. The resource management is relevant to the CD management in the focus version. It doesn’t work to say “well if you ignore the resource part it was the same engagement”. It’s a meaningless statement.
It’s not one-or-the-other because they’re entirely separate concepts.
What are you talking about? They didn’t just “give it AoE damage” and call it a day. It’s an entirely different ability. It has 5 times the CD and NONE of the mechanical interaction SV’s Explosive Shot had. I can’t set up a trap and Lock and Load burst with the new Explosive Shot.
This was in a totally different era of the game, though. This was in 2008. Very few specs had an interrupt, many were missing CCs, mobility was scarce, and one thing that was practically non-existent was passive cleave. SV was utterly broken when it dropped in 3.0. They hit it with 2 massive back-to-back nerfs to keep it in line, and that resulted in an awkward situation where it was still overpowered in multitarget situations but its single target was extremely lacking. So they took out the AoE component in 3.0.8. There were other ways to approach it but evidently they wanted the spec to be a solid single-target option and not have to deal with the balancing nightmare that was passive cleave at the time.
In modern WoW it wouldn’t be too OP. BM gets significant passive cleave for every Barbed Shot cast, for example. It’s common now. So a modern ranged SV could easily have a 6-second signature Explosive Shot that AoEs, perhaps via a talented option. It was just extremely problematic in the context of 2008 WoW. It doesn’t make sense to hold such archaic design constraints against the concept of ranged SV with Explosive Shot.
It could be a light ammo/heavy ammo situation where you talent into reduced ST damage in exchange for passive cleave. In any case if we had ranged SV I would consider explosives too important to the them/goal of the spec to be locking behind a long cooldown. But hey: I’ve said before that ranged SV should just straight-up have Wildfire Bomb and Wildfire Infusion, so maybe they could just have that in the place of Explosive Shot rather than 2 separate explosives in the same rotation.
You’re just talking about an entirely separate ability at this point, though. What I want is an aesthetically distinctive explosive munition that’s central to the spec. It had a great visual and was very satisfying to use, and being able to trap something and follow up with an ES burst was far ahead of its time when they first added it. It was by far the best attempt at making trapping an important part of the spec’s broader resourcefulness identity. I’m not interested in treating a 30 second CD alternative as a replacement. It’s just an entirely different mechanical space.
This is an interesting take on a possible ranged SV; it really emphasises the special munitions aspect. I would just hope it didn’t have a lot of downtime. 5 per minute wouldn’t be frequent enough.
Which is wrong in any and all cases that won’t have an additional mobs within 30 seconds. Effectively, all but single-target scenarios. In all other cases, it happens frequently.
That’s not a nit-pick. It’s the most basic of distinctions.
I never said it was; that’s why I laid out multiple.
But “always use whenever possible” is certainly not one of them either.
It’s not bad, in the sense that having a pure filler skill is not bad. But neither a mechanic that we should “Always use as soon as possible” provide any more depth than one we “Use only when nothing else is available.” For it to have any depth, it must have conflicts.
Which means nothing when one can simply float ~60 Focus without loss, knowing that you could optimally spend all procs without overcapping while still being able to afford BA + ES on CD.
You had more than enough time for which you had only a single spender option remaining to simply reach 60 Focus again before reupping Serpent Sting with at least a second left until any natural ES. You did not have to think about any of it. You just margined to the same degree as any other spec, no part of which was dependent on a fixed-priority rotation.
Which did nothing for your burst. You had the exact same ppm. It was at most small compensation for a damage-less CD (Freezing Trap). You had no reason to spend a GCD on Freezing Trap in raid settings unless you actually needed that Freezing Trap for an interrupt or hard CC, so why are bringing this up like it actually did anything for ES?
I don’t know who Gingi is, but Preach literally explained preferring simpler specs and that he gets finds no appeal in the actual execution of a raid-fight beyond its original problem-solving, nor any from the specs themselves beyond the basic appeal of their visuals and button-flow.
That’s not exactly a source whose review would indicate that, to have garnered the giver’s respect, a given spec would have been complicated. None of the WoD Hunter specs were, and I don’t know why you’d pretend otherwise.
Why do you keep bringing this up when I’m the one insisting it ought to be open to more depth and capacity? I know. I was there. I’ve played since Vanilla. I raided on SV until ICC, when I switched to MM primary and occasional BM offspec for cheese when helping friends in PuGs (stun-resist, snap-tanking / repositioning, Spirit Bond) when the tanks or healers couldn’t cut it.
I never said they were the same. I merely pointed out that even a generic 30s CD is going to have support more depth than did RSV’s Explosive Shot as it was. Add to that a context that actually has conflicts, and it picks up even more relative to ES within RSV as it was.
I’m not the one saying to. You’re the one who’s been insisting it was preferable to any sort of alternative or adjustment.
How is 5 uses per minute of something with what would typically be the weight of a 30-45s CD, in place of having any 2- or 3-minute CD… insufficiently frequent? Again…