I haven’t seen any other specialization in the game have more than 2 or 3 talents that only say something like “X ability does X% increased damage,” where survival has 7 of such talents (9 if you count Ranger and Guerilla Tactics). Not only that but 6 of the 7 (or 8 of the 9) are in the bottom two brackets of the tree, again for points that you would similarly only see in the first section of a specialization tree.
Not to throw any of these under the bus but just as examples of what the extreme cases of this manifests itself as for other specializations, again only having 2 or 3 of such talent options:
Affliction’s Dark Virtuosity and Kindled Malice
Windwalker’s Touch of the Tiger and Flashing Fists
Devestation’s Lay Waste and Arcane Intensity
Then you look at Survival’s tree and you have:
Ferocity - All damage done by your pets is increased by 10%
Improved Wildfire bomb - Wildfire bomb does 12/25% increased damage
Spear Focus - Mongoose bite damage increased by 5/10%
Sharp Edges - Critical damage dealt increased by 2/4%
Tactical Advantage - Damage of Flanking Strike increased by 10/20% and all damage dealt by Wildfire Bomb increased by 4/8%
Killer Companion - Kill Command damage increased by 5/10%
Sweeping Spear - Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Butchery, and Carve damage increased by 5/10% (This is in reality only two of these four because one replaces another of the first two and the second is a choice, though I also am genuinely baffled that Carve is even a talent with how weak it is.)
It just feels like there are so many generic minor damage increases with nothing else going on in Survival’s spec tree when there are surely abilities that have existed in the past and could easily exist in the present. Caltrops could be one such talent or most of the passives from the legion weapon such as:
30% increased damage during aspect of the eagle
Talon Strike (Your basic attacks have a chance to trigger two rapid additional blows.)
Talon Bond (When Talon Strike triggers, your pet immediately attacks 2 times.)
All of this being said I don’t necessarily intend to relate this to the state of Survival’s current balance, just more to point out how utterly boring so many of the talent points read in comparison to the rest of the specializations in the game.
It’s because they were creatively bankrupt when they created the spec. That also explains its all-over-the-place “identity”. They don’t know what to do with it and there are different factions of people pulling it in different directions.
The spec gets little attention from the broader playerbase while fans of the spec tend to circle the wagons and the spec is perfect and God’s gift to class design, so the amount of people who both like the spec and openly identify issues with its design is very small.
Bepples wasn’t saying that MM/BM are fine in comparison to SV. As Bepples as explained it that all the Hunter specs share same issues.
The class designers just gave up with Hunters and just gave back all of our abilities, but with high costs to gain them back. We make more sacrifices than other classes, and still do less damage. Talents that should be baseline are talents now, and it either we take them and loose damage, or we take the talents that would give us better survival.
The only group wide utility for us is a leech increase and ignores line of sight. It as no raid use and was designed for pvp. Otherwise we give nothing to the group than damage.
For survivability we need less cool downtime between them. Exhiliration is never ready for next AoE, and I end up having to use each defensive ability to avoid damage.
Survival should have defense on same level as a melee spec. It has to avoid more mechanics than MM/BM. Shorter cooldown time for on its defensive abilities or let it use Turtle and still damage.
Really? The way I read his post he said “they were creatively bankrupt when they created the spec” and went on to just do his normal made-up complaints. I don’t see him mention MM or BM’s immense faults at all
that’s fair, he only talks about the other specs being fine in other areas, that’s on me.
yeah, also fair, but then again the entire class in dire dire need of a revamp it doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend it’s just one spec and that BM and MM in this case are fine
On that note, “fine” means what exactly? Fine, as in they perform decent enough based on their design(areas of strength etc.), or “fine” as in, the design itself, the individual talents are designed well enough, etc.?
Wait…so it’s now okay to “complain” about other specs or concepts of design as well, in topics about SV?
most specs had like 20 years of abilities and old set bonuses to make the talent trees with. SV can only go as far back as BFA because they keep reworking it to try to make it appealing but nobody really cares or plays it still.
I used to disagree with this because survival had ranged options not available to most melee with aspect of the eagle and its kit. And then ret paladin was reworked…now I have no objections.
As a follow-up I do want to say that all I wanted to point out is that there could be alternatives to the bland talents, in the same spots, that essentially do a similar thing but have an actual interesting effect rather than just a small percentage damage increase.
Improved Wildfire bomb could simply be a one point talent that makes Wildfire Bomb be affected by mastery.
Tactical advantage could increase survival’s survivability by proc’ing their Mastery: Spirit Bond heal whenever they hit with an ability like Kill Command.
Sweeping spear could just be “Butchery or Carve also benefit from Mongoose Fury gained through Mongoose Bite” instead of its simple 5/10% increase, which would also probably help out survival’s currently lacking AoE. It would make shorter windows of huge burst instead of a constant flow of “eh,” while still keeping in line with the gameplay aspect of not really having an insane major cooldown to hit and kind of consistently having something decent but not amazing to push.
Talon Bond/Strike could be placed at and directly below where the “reduce the cooldown of Wildfire bomb by 1/2 seconds” talent is.
You could place Black Arrow or something directly below the talent Ranger.
Spear Focus could instead say “Mongoose Fury increases the damage of Mongoose Bite by an additional 1.5/3% per stack”.
I get that I’m not a game designer and any of these things could be wildly more broken than I could imagine but I just want to see actual text on the abilities instead of 1/3 of the tree being like 6 words long and having almost no actual impact on what they do because of how minimal their effect is.
Edit: It’s also not my intention to put anyone down for being “creatively bankrupt” as Bepples put it. The people making all these changes have the weight of however many people play the game bearing down on them and to fix ANY of the Hunter skill trees is a bigger task said than done.
I do think a look at the generic tree would be a good starting point just because there are a lot of talents that BM just doesn’t have access to because of the point commitment to go left at the bottom and there ends up being a lot of same-ness between MM and Survival due to the talent points on the bottom right. The biggest struggle point is that strict DPS classes like Hunters and Rogues seem to have extremely class/spec defining abilities toward the bottom of their class trees where Warlocks and Mages have choices that are generically good regardless of spec. The prior has major offensive ability tied to the bottom talent points where the former leaves most of the offensive ability higher on the tree, leaving defensive and utility closer to the bottom. Sure there are probably more issues going on outside of that but a first thing to tackle for Hunters would definitely be a new approach to the class tree, and though I can’t say the exact same thing for Rogues I’ve heard that they have quite a bit of unhappiness stemming from it as well.
Lol. And people forget that melee>ranged and hybrid>pure. That is still not yet changed.
Kiting is a thing of the past. I can’t even kite anything in Classic PvP. Danaik would cry if he PvPed again in Wrath because nobody plays Hunter in Classic now. There are far better ranged classes. So the sad truth is that Aimed Shot SV(Wrath) sucks. You can say it spells a certain three-letter word. It’s nice having ExShot and L&L, but when other classes have ways to turn off or shave off damage, even magical…
Speaking of that, I get my butt handed to me by 29k HP prot pallies. They had Holy Shield which allows them to BLOCK magical hits, which negates SV’s best attack. On top of that, a stun, a bubble, and LoH when available. I get smoked by Shaman, a class that wears the same armor, but also uses a shield, and has spells that bypasses Hunter armor as well as spells that buff and heal.
Range is nothing when you have less defensives, less self-heals, and less mobility than melee for the same kind of DPS. It’s not like melee EVER had less defensives and mobility than ranged, so I don’t have a reason to be sympathetic to them. Now melee vs. melee, that’s a different story.
I complained about this at length since BFA, and I did it for the Hunter’s benefit as that class was the worst of all ranged pures. Just like kicking an evil garden gnome, it’s the Hunter that gets the point of the boot at the bottom of the tiny pure ranged totem pole. I can see that Hunters came a long way pre-Leg, and even their post-Leg history was far better than it was pre-Cata.
TL;DR: Range as in the distance you can attack never mattered. Lots of other things stopped its mattering.
What has helped Hunter is three things: how hard it can hit, how quick it can hit hard, and how it can either take a hit or not at all…
I like it as it is, hits hard with a simple rotation and works great for solo pve.
That said at least for roleplay purposes more interesting trap abilities would be cool and maybe a few javelin type abilities to add more of a ranged aspect.
Right now I love it though. Me Jojo and my man Tottle just steamroll through all opposition.
I’m still hoping they remove some of those talents and replace with past tier sets: Spear focus become s1 tierset, Flanker’s Advantage becomes s2 tierset, Improved WFB becomes the legendary from SL (the one that made the bombs break into smaller ones).
Of course, it shouldn’t be a copy and paste, tune it properly, remove some parts, add some other. I just wish there were more interesting interactions in the spec. :\
it doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend it’s just one spec and that BM and MM in this case are fine