Ion about Survival

Classes Hunter
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Copy paste from reddit by user named Shelassa
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/hol82b/we_want_to_keep_melee_as_part_of_survival_ion/
Ion Hazzikostas participated in an [interview] where he said the following:

Question: The Hunter community is still split on the issue of the melee spec even two expansions after its introduction. With your new stance of “class over spec” and more ranged abilities returning to the class, what does it mean for Survival in the long term?

Ion Hazzikostas:

That’s a good question. I think part of what led Survival to a melee space to begin with was trying to differentiate Survival from Marksmanship. The rotations over the years had become very very similar — OK you might have a couple more magical-seeming shots in the Survival space. Beast Mastery was very clearly its own thing with its clear niche as the pet-based spec. But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.

Some of that is actually fallout from the shift that we did in Cataclysm going into Mists. We moved from the old-school talent trees that could probably better support types of play styles and utility without having to build a whole spec around them. Having a tree like Survival that was about traps and utility and a little bit of melee stuff in there — that worked when it was something that you could put points into as a broader class initiative. But then turning it into its own spec ultimately led us down a path of duplicating a lot of Mark’s abilities.

We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means

I’m okay with that

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Survival has a lot of problems.

For one, almost all of their AoE capability depends on TALENTS. Aka without Wildfire Infusion and Butchery(/Hydra’s Bite) you’re left with Carve which deals literally no damage (it’s there just to reduce WB CD), and Wildfire Bomb itself is one of the worst AoEs in game. I mean, it’s okay putting a CONE AOE on a ranged class. Putting a CONE AoE on a MELEE class’, especially one that starts from a MOB not PLAYER, is just ASKING to miss majority of the mob in front of you.

In addition, a lot of TALENTS feel like a must-have choice to even complete the spec (like Alpha Predator being mandatory until you reach uncanny amounts of haste or you end up with no focus and unable to get any for couple of seconds every once in a while).

Then there’s the 4th talent row which has the superb Bloodseeker, while the Steel Trap and A Murder of Crows do not even approach Bloodseeker’s value in single target combat, let alone for AoE. It’s just all around bad talent design. Same with Chakram - it’s a DPS loss compared to the other two talents in that row no matter the situation, and it doesn’t even LOOK good.

Some suggestions:
1st tier (flavor):
Viper’s Venom - change it from 3 PPM at 250% dmg to 4 PPM at 200% dmg so the focus saving on refreshing Serpent Sting is more noticable
Terms of Engagement - turned baseline, replaced with
Strikethrough - Replaces Kill Command with Strikethrough, which 2 charges and 40% more damage than Kill Command and is used by YOU instead of your pet (so that YOU can generate focus regardless of pet - so you don’t get locked USELESS by pet being feared or the extremely annoying NO PATH AVAILABLE error). The downside being that YOU have to be in range (while pet could be commanded to do it from considerable range)
Alpha Predator - 2 charges of Kill Command should be baseline, instead increase the KC damage from +30% to +50%

2nd tier (AoE):
Guerilla Tactics - 2 charges of Wildfire Bomb should be baseline (and explode in radius, not a cone). Change it to ‘up to 300% increased damage based on distance traveled’ so the talent compensates for lack of autoattacks during the time you have to be away from the boss (also to encourage opening fights with Wildfire Bomb -> Harpoon to gap close for a more ‘dynamic’ feel)
Hydra’s Bite - one of the better talents, good AoE, somewhat decent single target increase, no change needed
Butchery - turned baseline, replaced with
Chakram - throws a chakram for 15 Focus on 12 sec CD with 100% bonus damage to main target that bounces between enemies (like DH’s Glaive Throw). Hitting 3 or more targets refunds half the cooldown

3rd tier (utility):
Camouflage and Natural Mending - no changes
Trailblazer - turned baseline for SV spec and replaced with
Wild Pact - doubles the passive effect of your pet type.

4th tier (general throughput):
Bloodseeker - no change
Birds of Prey - moving to this tier to replace Steel Trap
A Murder of Crows - same old, but while the DoT is active, you and your pet deal 15% more damage to the target (as the DoT damage alone is too weak)

5th tier (movement):
Born to be Wild - made baseline and replaced with
Flanking Strike - same as now but focus generation replaced with 1sec Stun (purely a charge-type skill)
Posthaste - also reverts the direction to jump forward (jumping backwards as survival never made much sense)
Binding Shot - made baseline and replaced with
Acrobatics - while airborne, damage taken reduced by up to 100% (while airborne using Disengage or Harpoon you ignore 100% dmg, random number between 10 and 25% while otherwise airborne - falling, jumping, gliding on glider, fly mounted, etc)

6th tier (extra damage):
Tip of the Spear - no change
Mongoose Bite - old functionality made baseline, now 10% chance for Raptor Strike to hit an extra time (this extra Raptor is a guaranteed crit)
Take Down - Kill Command had deals 150% extra damage on targets above 80% HP or below 20% HP. This effect can only happen twice in 10 seconds

7th tier (open for experimentation):
Wildfire Infusion - made baseline
entire tier needs new abilities - possibly taken from current Azerite Gear - like Wildfire Cluster, Latent Poison and Dire Consequences

I put this together in like 2 hours just thinking about the lack of mechanics in Hunter’s playstyle…
I mean, really. As a hunter, you have grand total of 5 abilities and you use only 4 of them regularly. Kill Command is only for focus generation and doesn’t interact with anything. Serpent Sting as a DoT and it doesn’t interact with anything, Raptor Strike as a focus spender that doesn’t interact with anything. Literally the only things that interact in BASE survival spec are Carve reducing CD of Wildfire Bomb. That’s it. SV NEEDS, desperately, about half their talents as baseline just to fill the eternal boredom of it’s base. You have no procs, no changes… just one static rotation all over again.
In addition, the talent tree was put together very weirdly with abilities all over the place instead of grouped together in tiers by their nature.

I’m not saying this thing I wrote here is without faults, but it would surely still be better (and more engaging) than what we have now.

2 Likes
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Shame no one asked him if he actually intends to do anything with survival gameplay wise.

They gutted it in BFA launch and left it with nothing, now they’re gonna let it go another 2 years with just some damage buffs…

If they’re trying to kill a playerbase for the specc they are doing well at it.

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problem with a lot of these things is that they would just make survival crazy overpowered, survival is looking really good with the things they’ve added so far

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From what I’ve seen they added nothing and changed VERY LITTLE. In fact, just the lack of Azerite traits will make SV the most boring spec ever in the game.
Like I said what I wrote is not perfect, but a little numbers tuning would make it okay.
Right now, Survival only shines while leveling in dungeons for AoE situations (IF you take Butchery AND Alpha Predator). It’s very average for single target fights. That’s it. After that, it’s below average in all aspects. Not to mention talents are non-choices as choosing non-ideal one will practically reduce dps by 20% or more.

SV was mostly good in Legion, but since then SV lost like half it’s arsenal, and it’s only been replaced by worse things.

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What did survival get? I only saw 1 actual usuable abilities, 2 abilities u need a bow/gun for and some damage buffs :stuck_out_tongue: wouldn’t really call it a gain.

There like a 3 button class? XD… I mean I really wouldn’t call it appealing. I mean I suspose you can weapon swap to try increase that… but it’s a DPS lost so it’s gonna be rare where it’s worthwhile

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A boost to the weaker talents. Thats what we get. And that is nice

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It’d be nicer if we could see some of the cores of them based.

Wildfire infusion
Mongoose bite.
Flanking strike

Would be welcome additions to base kit

And given the resource problems survivals having on alpha the addition resource gains would prolly fix the issue

They can always repurpose raptor strike or just outright replace it entirely.

I’d also like caltraps back to give us some baseline consistent aoe.

And a revert coordinated assault to work like aspect of the eagle from legion. I think would be a welcome addition

ATM the specc is gonna walk into SL bare boned, and I’m ngl alpha testers aren’t speaking positively on its gameplay… We are considered a losing specc so far gameplay wise.

Specc doesn’t feel near complete. And at core is a really disfunctional 1 button specc, it’s only specific talents which actually build it up to have some functionality and that’s bad design realistically. The core specc should be able to stand on its own two legs and it’s talent tree double down on different parts of that Build

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They already did so… when they changed survival to melee.

After wasting resources on 2 reworks no one asked for, ignoring cursed spec seems like improvement tbh.

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But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation
Mages has 3 specs that basically do a lot of ranged spells and that is somehow doesn’t make you think that mages need melee spec.

Survival was range spec that did mostly magic and most importantly – dot damage (serpent sting, black arrow, explosive arrow). Marksman had no dots (aimed shot, arcane shot, chimera shot).

Why not just add 4th spec if you really wanted to hunters to have melee spec. Why ruin good range spec for the sake of what? Two expansions passes. Do you see a lot of survival hunters? You actually killed some of us favorite spec.

Very sad.

5 Likes
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yea but all of em look different :slight_smile:

Because of the crapshow that will start from other classes

I’ve run into more sv hunters than mm hunters or enh shamans that’s for sure

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Just for comparision to see popularity and damage out of the specs. I take 2 different mythic bosses: Shad’har (single target fight) and Hivemind (AOE fight).

Shad’har

top BM - 152k
top MM - 149k
top Surv - 133k

Hivemind

top BM - 236k
top MM - 153k
top Surv - 160k

This shows that BM better on AOE, but other specs generally are viable as well.

Now lets see the popularity. Lets see the amount of parses where each spec participated. We open https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/24/ and sort by column Parses.

BM - 173,591 parses (!)
MM - 3,037 parses
Surv - 1,562 parses

So, MM 2 times more popular than Surv.
And BM 50 times more poplar than MM.

Basically, this stats shows that roughtly among 100 hunters there are 97 BMs, 2 MMs and 1 Surv.

So, yeah, maybe you see more Survs, but not me.
P.S.: i can say for my guild: we have 0 Survs, 1 MM (me) and 6 BMs.

3 Likes
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Your top parse at 477ilvl 82k
My top parse at 473 ilvl 97k

Simple reason why bm is that much more popular than both other specs combined is that it is fully mobile.

3 Likes
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You play very well as you have nice logs. I just want to add that my fight was 3:44, and yours – 2:46. My point is that, your rank (and overall dps) depends not entirely on your personal performance :slight_smile:

And yes, i absolutle agree about BM popularity comes from top damage and having full mobility. I also only look into raiding, but there are m+ and pvp areas as well. I’m not following those closely.

p.s.: and yes, how absurd it does sound when i say “i dont follow m+ closely” while my RIO shows that i’m 71 MM hunter is the world. That is all only because of huge unpopularity of the spec.

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THANK YOU!
That’s exactly it. A lot of your performance depends on your group in general. If your team runs around like headless chickens your performance will also suffer alot!

Nah. Actually it sounds perfectly reasonable. You can do m+ just fine and not give a dang about rankings.

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Precisely.

So did the Hunter specs. Not everything has to have the grandest/flashiest of animations.

That’s not a valid excuse. Other classes have nothing to do with the Hunter class. If something’s missing from a class other than hunters, it should be considered for a 4th spec as well. But it shouldn’t be about “all or nothing”. It should be about what makes sense for a class and it’s fantasy as to what ties to the game.

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You can’t really compare SV or MM with any other spec right now because the outlier is actually BM, acting as a 40y range melee that’s monopolizing most of the class.

But what they need to do imo is adding more class that can use ranged weapons. Hunter is fine that way.
Even though i loved WoD’s MM and SV it felt very boring after a while because of the lack of gameplay variation when i wanted to swap spec.

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Not sure how you can say this. MM and SV shared abilities sure but the gameplay was like night and day, one being mosty stationary and the other being fully mobile DoT’er.

3 Likes
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The focus management was exactly the same.
Both specs used abilities on cd : chimaera shot and black arrow (yes i know not exactly for black arrow but waiting for the debuff to fade out is the same).
Both specs had a proc on their filler / small cd : ToTH and L&L.
Then you used filler : aimed shot and arcane shot.

I know MM was frontload damage and SV slow and steady but the difference between my 2 bars were 2 abilities (not counting rapid fire).
And MM was very mobile, you just had to manage your mastery a little.

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I’ve been trying out survival recently and I can say that I love the class fantasy of the spec, melee base with utilities like traps, poisons, the pet and all that, it just feels good it reminds me of Drizzt from D&D and I hope the core values stays the same for future expansion, The spec obviously lacks something, it just needs some tweeks.

PD: I wish they make it so we could wield dual 1h like rexxar.

1 Like