Survival and explosions make no sense

[Aurawyn-bloodhoof]

Spells like explosive shot/wildfire bomb don’t really feel like they belong in the class fantasy. Why would you throw bombs where you and your pet are fighting?
(ofc you’re not really damaging allies and such, bladestorm etc could also fall under this problem)
But to me it should be more fitting of nature, even the caltrops made more sense…

I’m happy with it being melee, I’m thrilled with pets to fight alongside (should bring back pet talents or a way to change their looks like hati), but maybe their aoe/range should be less explosions and more chakrams for bleeds/poisons, or something else altogether…

It also doesn’t really feel like it blends into the rotation, if you’re hacking away in melee range, say building mongoose stacks, to suddenly throw bombs in your own face.

Some ideas to resolve survivals identity crisis?
Mine would be;

-New weapon type/return using both melee and ranged wep for survival only and refresh abilities accordingly (chakrams, bladed bows, stuff that work in both situations)

-Swap survival and beast mastery, fighting alongside your pets in melee, being more wild and primal meaning survival can return to its ranged origins

-Replace bombs with more pet orientated abilities, swooping birds, throwing porcupines or something ^^

-This one will probably be incredibly hated, but more of a support role like augment, send pets to assist allies, a raidwide utility like healthstones but instead grant a mini pets with their own function

-Bigger, ridable pets on cooldown. We’ve got mounted combat with DK now, it’d be cool to hop on to a big tiger and throw spears at people

(in no way am I saying these are the best ideas)

[Scaramance-aszune]

It’s going in two directions at the same time: an engineer and a nature survivalist.
I like both, but not as a mashed up mess so much.

A Survival hunter is less about explosions than it is about stealth, nature, wildernis survival.
Current design is like fishing with dynamite when you expect to be spearfishing…

A simple fix could come from dual weilding axes for example: throw those around in a whirl instead of bombs. Things like that.
Rexxar, yes, he’s the background of our spec tree, holding two axes.

The other direction would be more the engineer. Bombs, explosives, heck, even a flamethrower.
(Guild Wars 2 has e few examples of both the axes and the flamethrower, they’re on different classes indeed).

If it’s a hunter called Survival, I would prefer the nature approach, the axes etc.
That said: I like engineer types too, but I would not call those Survival hunters.

For the record: I don’t expect any changes here.
They could have gone the nature route with Sentinel, but gave us an arcane owl. So not holding my breath…

[Scaramance-aszune]

On the support role in itself: I absolutely believe there either should be more than one support spec in the game, or none at all.

Several options, but since hunters have no healer or tank spec, a Survival support spec would be something I would personally love to play.
Just not sure if we should force others into that. Survival is a unique spec with melee and ranged combined.

Survival could lend itself to helping others survive etc. I can totally see that.
I would play support Survival, but I can understand many others would want the pure dps role to stay.

[Demeriel-argent-dawn]

I agree, I’d rather the fantasy leaned more towards Rexxar type of hunter.

I get the feeling they were going for some sort of a commando / rambo kind of vibe. A soldier / survivalist who is good at making bombs out of simple household items and using other improvised weapons.

But then you also have the whole pseudo beast mastery side to it with abilities like Flanking Strike and Kill Command and Coordinated Assault and then it suddenly falls apart.

[Madeinheaven-terokkar]

why would they replace survival hunter abilities with pet oriented abilities when beast master already exists? it just sounds like you want to delete survival from the game and play beast master…?

[Aurawyn-bloodhoof]

Because of the entire reason for the post, explosions don’t feel like they belong…
Pet abilities aren’t exclusive to bm, flanking strike fits perfectly with the theme of fighting alongside your pet but bm doesnt have that, adding some others more fitting than bombs was one idea

[Kiráah-twisting-nether]

I mean, if your goal is maximum survival, the last place you would want to be is up in melee range you would want to keep your self at a distance using traps and such.

So the whole SV concept makes no sense, but it is what it is