Smart how they made Kill Shot cost focus so it benefits from SV mastery stat (BM excluded) but the decision to nerf Flayed Shot so much that it is borderline weaker than other AOE effects on a single target is a dumb one.
Flayed Shot is almost a non-choice for BM. Kill Shot damage isn’t bonus on top of anything baseline as many would consider, you just deduct the damage of a filler spender ability from it to see how much you gain, because you still need to spend a GCD and you have a limit on those.
I’ve read that haste increases the frequency of FS ticks to allow more free casts, but everyone can see how big the gap becomes if you for example decide to pick MM or SV. Over 10min boss fights the numbers add up.
SV FS seems to use the Venthyr themed hand crossbow, unlike the default pandaren theme skin from 10 years ago. Cosmetic inconsistency, could use an upgrade.
Under 20% if you’ve wasted your regular KS cooldown, FS proc will instantly refresh it allowing you to instantly cast another, but not the other way around. This might not be problematic in tunnelvision combat but makes the ability feel very awkward in open world and dungeons.
The 14s duration also makes it impractical in PVP. I can’t remember if DOTs still get removed by crowd control effects or if they instead stay and break Freezing Trap. One situation cheats you out of procs and the other makes it awkward to use CC at the most convenient moment.
Cosmetically it looks appealing, but FS could be more subtle and the spell effect little bit smaller. It feels like casting off a red Chaos Bolt with an appropriately loud sound effect.
On top of everything, I now understand why they capped AOE to five targets, because of the nonsense AOE scaling from Kyrian and Nightfae in combination with cooldowns. The entire class and expansion design philosophy is nonsense. I’d prefer covenants to be a role play factor and an aesthetic choice, how long until they turn all the covenant abilities into a talent row for convenience?