As much as I miss ranged survival I enjoy having a melee option and would like to see it improved upon. I mained SV through all of Legion and BFA and here are changes I would like to see:
Carve and Butchery are both capped at 5 targets so just make Butchery baseline and the talent give charges. Short and simple.
Chakrams as a final talent is pretty boring even when put against 2 passives.
A) First, I would like Chakrams to be a focus generator that replaces Kill command mostly to keep from cluttering my action bars but also to provide a more exciting option for a generator that doesnt have a super long cooldown like Flanking Strike and it would also receive extra charges from the Alpha Predator talent.
B) Second, if Chakrams passes through a target effected by Serpent Sting it then spreads it to every other target hit. This would provide good synergy with the Wildfire Infusion talent if moved to a different row.
Flanking Strikes is still not an ability I would take even after the cooldown was reduced.
A) The Leap is cool but with all our ranged abilities it’s not very useful and removing it will open up options for potential changes. That will also allow the animation to be reverted to Legions which is what made it my favorite ability
B) For a shorter cooldown I would much prefer Legions version of Flanking Strike combined with Legions Way of Mok’nathal talent. A 6sec cooldown focus spender that applies a short duration buff refreshed by using Flanking Strike
C) To keep a longer cooldown, on use it could activate a free, empowered Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite/Butchery similar to the Vipers Venom talent and during Coordinated Assault those abilities also reset the cooldown of Flanking strike. It would need to cost focus to avoid capping during CA but also to benefit from our mastery potentially making that a more desirable stat.
Swap these two talents.
A) Chakrams would be on the same row as Mongoose Bite and Tip of the Spear. You’re then picking between an exciting Spender (mongoose), exciting builder (chakrams), interesting passive (tip
of the spear). It can then be combined with Wildfire Infusion since they’re in separate rows.
B) Flanking Strike becomes a final row talent where it deserves to be and can be combined with Mongoose Bite.
Weapons. I would like to be able to equip ranged and melee weapons simultaneously again but at least let us dual wield. We have ability animations that fire different weapon types but can only wield 2 handers.
Death knights dont even have that and they got dual wielding back. Being a melee class with so many ranged abilities it would make sense to scale the ranged damaged off a ranged weapon
Outside of Hunter specific changes, I think Blizzard should add “Azerite” slots to each talent for when new ability altering traits get unlocked in future expansions.
The talent tree is very boring compared to how it used to be. This would bring it back to life while making a nice QoL change in my opinion.
Thanks for reading.
Won’t see changes this expansion. Doesn’t look like anyone is paying attention to hunters in Shadowlands Alpha/Beta. Most likely 0 feedback. My opinion? Reroll now to a different melee class.
As much as I love SV, then do need to being back RSV to at least keep part of the hunter community happy. But blizz doesnt help us worth a damn. Bm is gonna be the meta for another god knows how many expansions
My own issue with BFA SV is that Blizzard threw the baby out with the bath water from what we had during Legion, which needed fine-tuning and adjustments instead of an outright replacement.
Something else to note is that SV does not have a baseline mechanic like other specs. Having to spec into Mongoose Bite/Fury would be like a Fire Mage having to spec into Hot Streak or an Arms Warrior having to spec into Tactician. When the spec lacks a central mechanic, you have almost nothing you can build off it aside from talents that try to act in lieu of mechanics.
The spec at the minimum needs the Mongoose Fury mechanic baseline along with a spender (this could be Eagle’s Fury or we could do a jumping attack if we want to copy FFXIV’s dragoon; Mongoose Fury already has some similarities to Blood of the Dragon).
Carve doesn’t need to have a CD and should spread serpent sting baseline. Hydra’s bite should be replaced with Latent Poison and Guriella tactics should have wild fire cluster baked into it.
We should not have to grind legionaries for azerite traits that needed to be baseline when they were announced.
Wilderness survival, Wildfire cluster, and latent poison should either be baseline or talents, not legendary effects.
I wish more people realized this. As much as i like MSV as a idea, the current iteration is very sloppily designed, compared to what we had in legion. Hopefully blizz comes to their senses and makes mongoose baseline so we can find a nice medium between legion and bfa survival.
I also have been saying that we need a strong spender back like FotE. I think i would actually cry tears of joy, if they gave us a dragoon like jump ability. (not as dramatic as the ff iteration tho)
I agree they threw away something good when they changed it from its Legion iteration. While I prefer the old ranged version of survival over the Legion melee version, I would still prefer the Legion melee version over the current watered down compromise spec that seemingly tries to satisfy both ranged and melee camps but fails. They really should make up their mind and choose one or the other.
Right now it has too many mandatory talents. Two charges of Kill Command and Wildfire Bomb are just too hard to pass up. Mongoose Bite is the only choice in it’s tier, nothing else comes close. SV’s talent choice needs work. A lot of them are either useless or just too far undertuned.
Here’s my gripe with the talents:
Terms of Engagement is pretty bad. the 20 focus over 10 seconds doesn’t even compete with 2 charges of KC.
Steel Trap Should either be Baseline or moved to a PvP talent. It’s amazing in PvP but doesn’t do much in PvE situations.
Mongoose Bite - Make this Baseline already. Raptor Strike hits like a noodle and this feels mandatory as a talent.
Tip of the Spear - I love the concept of this talent, a hit and run playstyle is interesting but it’s not nearly strong enough as is. Not even the buffs to it in SL are enough to fix it.
Chakrams feels kinda… eh… It’d really like to see it pulled or moved to an earlier talent tier in favor of a more interesting choice.