Hello fellow hunters!
This will be my initial feelings and opinions on the Survival hunters talent tree preview we got last night. Be warned, it’s quite a long post.
So, first thing first, the below linked post lifts some huge issues about the tree. For example survival is by large and FAR the least developed tree by blizzard. The tree is drowning in bland weak numerical multi talent choices. And not only is a lot of the picks bland/weak, they are 2-3 talent point picks. And the whole tree in itself has vastly less actual talents to pick, further making those bad numerical talents make the tree feel lackluster. Just wanted to start with this, since it explained well why I felt the tree was so lackluster, even before we get to the actual builds.
Secondly, before we get to my opinions about the builds. I want to emphasize that I am a survival main that while I like the melee survival I would like to get back ranged survival in some fashion (was old survival main). And I would also love if they loosed the lame restriction of forced 2 handed weapons. This is merely cosmetic though, I just hate the combat animations for kill command and 2 handers, and I am having a hard time even finding a decent 2h transmog. So very sadge that they seem to keep turning a blind eye to the quite vocal requests to get dual wield for survival hunters…
On to the opinions: I will try to keep it short since the post is already long enough. But I personally feel there is some quite nice things about the survival tree, even in it’s really lacking and lackluster state. Yes, they are doing a lazy-boy and are “just” giving us the choice between current AoE bomb throwing spec (which I find fun but not at All very thematically accurate to the spec/class) and the older ST focused Mongoose fury/fury of the eagle spamming spec. So the positive about this is it seems we should have a viable ST spec and a viable AoE spec (if numbers tuning is right) and that is nice. But again, it is so lackluster that all they actually are doing is bringing back some old stuff to give us the choice to play like now-ish Or play like old-ish with very very few additional options/talents/abilities. Makes the tree and class feel very lackluster and unintuitive.
As if this all is not enough… it also seems like they have built the whole tree Very weird and almost wrong. For example early in the tree it is very clear you have a ST build to the right and a AoE bomb build to the left with some mish-mash of abilities/buffs in the middle. But if you keep looking down the tree you will find some of the core talent picks for the ST build to the left hand side…the AoE build does not bleed over to the right as much but that is probably because the AoE build is Really lacking… it’s literally wildfire bomb and a bunch of 3-point numerical picks to enhance the bombs…yay! There is barely any abilities/talents that intuitively and positively interact with either builds.
I personally think this whole issue is a very real result from the huge lack of talents in the tree. With the barely 30 picks. This makes it so the “larger” ST build has to bleed into the left side with middle being some weird mish-mash of KC/buff area.
And so many of these barely 30 talent choices Need to be 2 or even 3 point talent picks because they have to make us spend those 8/20/30 points. If they actually did as they have done with other specs (for example outlaw 1 talent point for 3 yard range increase vs survivals 3 talent points for 3 yard range increase) there would be more than 1/3 or 10 points of our talent points unspent when we have “achieved” a build.
To put it into a picture: If our talents looked more like the other classes/specs talent trees with mostly 1 talent point picks and some occasional 2-3 point picks we’d be able to pick almost Every single talent in the tree. Which would give us a spec with a double build feeling with both strong AoE and strong ST focus. Which obviously is not intended.
What I think must happen: Yes, I have to restate that I absolutely would love blizzard to add dual wield to survival. There is nothing stopping them at all, Death knights already got it (but reverse) and it’s been fine. It did not break the game, shocker! And if people want to go thru the pain of getting 2 weapons for the aesthetics, let us?
On a more serious note, I think what the dev. team/hunter team needs to do is perhaps not scrap the whole tree but I personally think they need to rethink most of it. Scrap the whole bomb AoE build please. I like it but it feels so wrong for survival hunter. And they clearly are having a hard time figuring out decent talents for it. It feels like they had a hard time getting a trap build to work and just decided to ignored the whole theme of the spec and create a kind of explosives expert build… Please rework this.
Raptor/mongoose as a ST focused build, while old news, is ok. It worked and probably will work now.
They Need to, and I really mean Need to add a bunch of more talents that interact with our different builds abilities and preferably add some more abilities to create 2 cohesive builds. Currently there is barely any interplay between abilities and within the build. And with this they need to change almost all 3-point talents to 1 or in a few cases 2-point talents. We should Not pay 3 points for a 3 yard increase for example. Or 3 talent points for a laughable 6% increase to crit Damage.
I love survival and I’ve been happy that it’s actually quite strong and had a semi-cohesive build this patch, even if I personally don’t feel like a hunter but more like a tinker or explosives expert. But for the love of god, let’s make our voices heard so they actually don’t just pat each others back for a work well done and ship as is. Out of all the classes/specs we’ve seen so far survival is so incredibly underdeveloped and lackluster that it’s alarming.
All of us Hunters and fans of hunters, let’s make our voices heard for the betterment of the class and especially the spec! Whether you miss the old RSV or prefer the MSV I think we can all agree that the spec needs work! And plenty of it!
