As I write this post, dragonflight season 4 is now 5 weeks old. During those 5 weeks, survival hunters’ set has been underperforming compared to season 3 set. By a lot. This situation has been the subject of nearly half of the posts of the hunter section of this forum, without any statement made by Blizzard. Some other specs had similar issues but they have been fixed, while survival hunter has been ignored.
It was already unacceptable after week 2, now it is nothing else than pure disrespect. It is clear from all the calls that has been left unanswered that Blizzard is not even reading hunters’ section. Just as it was already suspected since a long time.
For those reasons, I am making this post here, in General Discussion. Currently concerned spec is survival hunter, but it can happen to every spec in the game, and season 4 being a filler should not be a reason to let this be. This situation directly ties to how Blizzard is treating their player base and everyone is concerned by this.
Thus, I am calling everyone who will read this post to speak up and to act. Thanks to everyone who will support this post, by being loud enough we can be heard.
I can’t speak for PvP, but in PvE survival has been at best “ok”. If we are generous for the naming. But right now we are talking about a spec who have to carry pieces of equipment that at a season old, 40 ilvl down compared to what we should have equiped. Otherwise, it is a 10 to 15% dmg loss in multitarget, and barely a SINGLE % gain in singletarget.
And honestly, even if the balance will never be perfect, having such differences in specs is the exact reason why players should be standing together and not being like “Meh, why are you complaining when we had similar situation some time ago”.
Class design and spec design has been at its worst through this expansion. Plenty has been buffed and then completely demolished. Look at Feral druid for instance…
Affliction… has had a complete fiesta through this whole expansion. MM and Survival has had issues too. Warrior? Bah… There’s a few that has been insanely giga strong and been meta by far… But way too many has been pretty much bottom tiers now…
Main reason is, the redesign of the talent trees… They’ve just been so insanely BAD, every single one of them. Combined with a lot of BAD tier bonuses too, Idk what to tell you.
I completly agree with you on that. IMO, talent tree redesign was a mistake and a one which was easy to forsee when you take a look at pre-MoP talent trees.
But the survival hunter set issue doesn’t come from this redesign (at least not completly). S4 set bonus is the one from S1, which revolve around mangoust bite. Both the set bonus and the spell have been nerfed since then. Some players prefered this set (I am not among those, but eh… everyone has their taste) and vote for it while Blizzard was making it clear that winning bonuses would be buffed to be roughtly equivalent to others.
And it is against this I am mainly speaking up today, them not respecting their words (not the first time, but should be a matter that is more discussed everytime that happens) and a disastrous lack of communication (which is kinda ironic when they say they are trying to improve on it, and can’t even do the basics). At this point, more and more survival players are more concerned by the fact they are completly ignored by Blizzard than just having smaller numbers than other classes.
Blizzard is just in the typical “push new stuff, don’t care about it once it’s live!” kind of development process, which many other IT companies are tbh… But they keep pushing new stuff, and refuses to ever fix all the bugs they bring. We got severe bugs still in game that has existed since Legion etc…
They refuse to do anything about class balance or so through the whole expansion too.
The Affliction warlock tree has been strongly hated since Beta, and Blizzard has refused to do anything but give warlock some small buffs instead. Which has done nothing.
Same with some parts of the survival hunter talent tree, with some spells that people ask for a rework.
This kind of development process can’t be apply to everything, and seeing they are doing it more and more make me very worried for the future of the game (which wasn’t already bright lastly).
Unfortunately, I don’t see much balance changes happening this tier because it’s as you mentioned, filler.
It was the same I recall in SL season 4, they are just simply focused on pre-patch and TWW + remix atm.
Your best fix is to just play BM or MM for now and hope survival is good in TWW, as I saw some people seem to be happy with survival in the TWW beta, but i’m not a hunter main.
There’s been 0 changes to fix the Affliction tree since S1. They don’t really change it for the better in next expansion either, if they go with what they’ve already shown off… It’s absurd.
Most people who voted for it, are PVP players. Most people who voted for Survival, wanted it for PVP. Nearly no one plays it in PVE, as BM is just 123 braindead.