i think a major problem in regards to why we’ve seen little change to the spec is because everybody is asking for 10 different things. as someone who’s never played ranged survival, i imagine its legion incarnation when the change to melee occured bore no resemblance to sv as it once was. i see no reason why they couldn’t have made a 4th spec.
my idea to provide some improvements. i think the current way the spec is built is serviceable, and my idea would basically to just baseline a lot of current talent abilities. talents shouldn’t be necessary for your spec to function.
everyone knows that picture of the bfa spriest talent tree with the car and the talents as crucial components for the car.
anyway my idea for new abilities would be:
Favored Terrain
a buff you can swap around that has a significant cooldown. outdoors if you favor pvp/m+, indoors if you favor m+/raid. something like the dark iron racial and the night elf racial that gives you buffs depending on if it’s day or night.
Encyclopedic Lore
a button that would work like beast lore + hunter’s mark but provide a buff to a specific enemy type (humanoid, beast, abberation, etc) to prevent cheese this would have a cooldown tied to it if you swapped from one type to another, and tried to swap back to the previous one.
Dual Wield
just let sv use dw ffs
and as for baselining
viper’s venom or terms of engagement, both underused talents, with vv only really seeing use if you are building around ST and using nesingwary’s trapping aparatus. replace with dire beast from wod, or axe toss from legion, both of them ogcd. (i’m aware that there are no dps ogcds, but, i think this could be something unique to sv)
next is to baseline guerilla tactics which has been a mandatory pick. replace with deterrence + counterattack
next would be to baseline camouflage. interesting ability but it’s not a very good pick compared to the other talents in its row. replace with master tactician, and allow it to work with aspect of the eagle, wildfire bombs, and serpent sting
same deal with steel trap. replace with black arrow trap, which would in turn replace steel trap. i would imagine this working like black arrow once did…but as a trap
in the next row i’d baseline posthaste, and replace it with narrow escape from wod with the caveat of it increasing the cooldown of disengage
and for the penultimate row, i would baseline tip of the spear. i personally find mongoose bite to be a bit too restrictive for my taste since it favors st and not much else. tip of the spear on the other hand is a lot more general use. unsure what i’d replace it with.
and last but not least for the final row:
baseline chakrams and wildfire infusion, scrap birds of prey and give it a new row of talents, which i would make:
aspect of the beast, a returning talent
exotic munitions from wod, which would essentially be wildfire infusion except for your serpent sting. it would either cast viper sting, scorpid sting, or spider sting.
throw glaive, which would serve as an upgrade for chakrams.
ultimately the goal here would be to give sv a booster shot in the arm to make it a more viable choice in world, pvp, pve (raid/m+) content. it would also make it highly distinct and give it a little more flavor or sense of identity
tl;dr fix sv by baselining abilities that are generally considered to be mandatory picks in those rows, and replace with more competitive talents. bring back old talents instead of just cutting and discarding them and trying to reinvent the wheel.
if you’ve made it this far, thank you. i know i said “we need a unified voice” and it might seem like “my voice is the correct one, you should support this” but these are just my personal thoughts on how sv could be reworked. at the end of the day, asking for 10 different things will continue to fracture our voices and truly get across what we want for this god forsaken spec