Survival Hunter Suggestions

Classes Hunter
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Suggestions that I feel might improve Survival somewhat.

First talent row: You have two powerful, rotation-shaping abilities in Viper’s Venom and Alpha Predator. And then you have whatever Terms of Engagement is meant to be. It’s uninteresting and completely useless.

  • Possible replacement: A strike with a 1min cooldown that costs a small amount of focus, maybe 15/20, does damage similar to a 3-5 stack Mongoose Bite and refreshes the duration of the Mongoose Bite buff. It changes your rotation in a meaningful way, allowing you to use it strategically to create a large 5 stack window.

Second talent row: A lot of survival hunters are clamoring for Butchery to be baseline, and for a good reason. While it doesn’t seem necessary now with our tons of haste, Wildfire-based aoe will be very slow without it in Shadowlands.

  • Possible replacement: Passive - Every time you use Butchery, your pet cleaves up to 6 nearby targets for X damage. This cleave should cost Focus for the pet so it’s amplified by Mastery. If coupled with a legendary or a conduit this could create a viable pet-based aoe playstyle wherein Mastery isn’t so bad. Some might say it’s “too beast mastery”, but let’s not forget Survival is also meant to be attacking in tandem with their pet. We both have Kill Command, after all.

Sixth talent row: Mongoose Bite has no business not being baseline. It’s a spec-defining ability. If anything, Raptor Strike should be an optional talent for those 5 people who feel Mongoose Bite is somehow too complicated to deal with. Flanking Strike is also not ideal, but it’s possible that it’s just massively overshadowed because it’s next to an obviously necessary ability.

  • Possible replacement: Bake Raptor Strike into Tip of the Spear for those who want to keep it for some reason. Replace Mongoose Bite with a passive effect that reduces the focus cost of Mongoose Bite by 1 (or 2) per stack of Mongoose Fury, or alternatively, grants 2% haste per stack. Either of the two effects would be quite good, I think. This would make pooling resources and staying at high Mongoose stacks more rewarding if you can pull it off.

Seventh talent row: Wildfire Infusion is a lot of fun and gives flavor to a spec that somewhat lacks it. However in most PvE scenarios it’s not worth taking over Birds of Prey. Its boost to aoe damage is minimal and the loss to single-target is massive. I won’t even touch Chakram, it’s terrible and no damage increase can save it, but I can’t come up with a replacement.

  • Possible solution: Wildfire Infusion made baseline. Its talent replaced by a passive talent that slightly increases the power of the Infusion effects and turns it from one ability that cycles randomly into 3 separate abilities that share a cooldown. So you can always choose which Bomb to use, but they all go on cooldown at the same time. This way the talent has greater value for an aoe build, allowing you to use either a Volatile/Hydra’s Bite/Latent Poison combo or Shrapnel/Guerilla Tactics/Wildfire Cluster (or even Shrapnel/Butchery/a Butchery-boosting legendary, if you take my earlier suggestion), and use Pheromone strategically for rapid Focus generation. Furthermore, Shrapnel and Pheromone give it value for single-target as well. It also makes the spec feel like it has a greater variety of grenades rather than just one that is random and unreliable.

Additional suggestions:

  • The Soulforge Embers legendary seems like something that should have been Survival-only, but I guess they went with Flare so it would be usable by everyone. However, it would be nice if it also was activated by Wildfire Bomb, so Survival has at least the advantage of not having to press a dead gcd to activate it.
  • Kill Shot should cost some focus. It’s strange that they’d pick abilities to be excluded from our Mastery when it was already the most undesirable stat.
  • Rylakstalker’s Confounding Strikes legendary might be better and more reliable if it worked like the current Wilderness Survival trait, reducing the cooldown of Wildfire Bomb by 1 sec instead of being a random proc.
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I like alot of the changes you propose in all honesty

As a survival hunter main in legion who detested the changes (before someone says something I’m aware some things had to change. And it did feel clunky til you got used to all the spinning plates)

In all honesty they could baseline the entire talents as they are now and recreate a brand new one and it would likely be a massive improvement.

In all honesty my additional ideas of returns would likely be

  • bring back caltraps.
  • remove kill command and bring back flanking strikes
  • buychery back to baseline
  • revert aspect of the eagle back to what it was in legion.
  • revert harpoon to its legion version.
  • baseline most of the talent tree for survival and simply recreate it to fit better themes.

I’d love to see more DPS traps in the talent tree and things which will allow you emphasis on the fantasy and work around your core rotation. ATM survival feels almost like shadow does pre it’s rework

Like it’s a half baked class which leans on it’s talent tree to give it some form of completion

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I just want to add: killshot should be usable when you using bow in surv spec. It’s nice that we can choose how to play surv (range or melee) but without killshot its not very “full”.

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Mongoose Baseline is a MUST, I see it everywhere on the forums, it is always taken.

Killshot baseline for all weapons

Caltrops would be awesome back for sure

Flanking strike replacing Kill command

Either buff Chakrams a LOT or remove it

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Simply because at the moment other talents are underpowered when compared…

fck traps in dps rotation. They have no place here.

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I just want to go back to Legion SV minus the traps (Caltrops and Explosive) and Way of the Mok’nathal. I’d also prefer Lacerate to Serpent Sting only because I hate the hand Xbow animation so much. If they made a glyph where we could use Carve animation to apply SS I’d be okay with that. There is almost nothing from BFA SV that I would keep.

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I can agree here

The animations for kill command makes 0 sense in melee range

The handbow is also awful.

They really need to thing of something better… why not throwing weapons…

I want caltrops back tho at baseline.

Lacerate would be a welcome return also

And nah ditch carve, butchery baseline.

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I like my dainty wee little crossbow, just make glyphs to change the hand held option easy peesy

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You sure you want to keep survival as a full melee?!

I would prefer to see it has a “two stance spec”, melee and range.
Two daggers or two handed + Bow Or Gun Or pistols (not in game).
Similar to Sylvanas gear.

Game play, you shift between your stances (melee and range changing the spells available), have close gaps, kite abilities, intercept, aim shots, vault to go back to range distance(D3)… but who knows… Maybe I am just crazy

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It’s all fine and dandy on paper, but what tactics would such iteration have to follow? Ranged or melee? Because if you are at range and get targeted by melee mechanic, you could wipe the ranged folk and the same could happen if you are in melee and get hit by ranged mechanic

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I guess you are asking Raid wise @Taigertraps? It’s up to the Devs to decide how to deal with it. My guess. when shifting stances, the hunter could gain something like “cloak of shadows”, “avoidance”, to null any spells transferring between range and melee or “1 sec invisibility” so it cant be targeted during transition… Could be entirely to player Skill in making decisions.

Your argument is kinda strange tbh… Because the transition between range and melee should be almost instant. Like a teleport, intercept or vault.

I always thought this was a future spec for Hunter, due to Sylvanas gear. She always carries a range weapon, and melee weapons

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That’s not how it works. Do you even understand how overpowered sv would be if they could just “swap stances” to avoid mechanics?

“Oh a mechanic that only targets melee is coming up in 5s lemme switch to ranged stance so I avoid it”

1min later
“Oh a mechanic that only targets ranged is coming up in 5s, lemme switch to melee stance so I avoid it”

It goes against all rules of current raiding. You are either a melee or ranged in pve, you can’t be both.

Though it would kinda cool for pvp.

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That wouldn’t even be good.
Most such mechanics target ranged only. I cant even remember a single ability which targets melee only. And usually if there arnt enough ranged in a group mechanics like that will go on melees which depending on the mechanic can easily wipe your raid

Survival probably needs something similar to that or some other unique utility to ever be viable in raiding

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people make these really huge statements about how survival needs something insane to be viable in raiding, but the actual fact is 1. It’s completely viable already for 99.99% of guilds and 2. If you want to use a weird definition of viable, then all it needs is to flat out do more damage than comparable specs.

Unless you are raiding in a top X guild, if a survival hunter plays properly they will be absolutely just fine in most cases. If you are in a world 100+ guild and you are not being brought to a raid because you are survival, your guild is either silly or you simply aren’t playing well enough to justify a spot. But if you pigeon hole yourself into a single spec out of a class of 3, you can sort of expect to limit yourself anyway.

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It doesent matter if a spec is viable for 99% of the players for certain content.

Warlock is currently also viable for 99% of the players in m+ yet its still considered a bad class for m+ which trickles down to warlocks IN the 99% of the players. So every warlock even in lower keys heavily struggles with getting into groups now.

Even when survival was the best performing spec in uldir and cos it was still considerd a bad spec. Melee raid slots are already scarce and classes like dh/war/ww and even dk in sl have some kind of raid utility which make them better than sv.

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No it wasn’t? It was very well known it absolutely pumped. Take a look at my logs, I can’t stand survival and have never played it outside of Uldir that tier. Why? Because it blasted. The only people who considered it bad are people who had no idea what they were talking about.

That’s less a survival problem, and more a problem with how dumb warrior/monk debuffs are. But even then, this can be fixed by survival simply doing more damage. Unlikely this will happen, but we don’t need some kind of ridiculous convoluted way to make survival viable when in reality they should just remove warrior shout/monk debuff.

If you play survival to a very high level (which everybody should strive to) you will have no issue in finding a raid spot at almost any level.

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Unfortunately there is little that can be done about peoples’ perception of specs.

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It’s interesting how no one apart from the first reply commented on my suggestions, and instead the topic took a weird turn into “melee vs ranged” territory (the original post is obviously about melee, nowhere is a ranged skill mentioned), and then to the viability of survival as a spec.

You sure you want to keep survival as a full melee?!

Yes. Survival already has Aspect of the Eagle so they can do dps when they have to be away from the target. If they also make Arcane Shot usable with the hand crossbow (as they should), you can have a filler rotation with Kill Command for Focus generation and Arcane for focus dumping. Not great dps, but more than other melees can do at range.

Simply because at the moment other talents are underpowered when compared…

No, it’s because it’s been the basis of our rotation since forever. It’s a skill you base a rotation around. Flanking Strike can never be that, and Raptor Strike is just an easier option for when you can’t be bothered to put in any effort. In the original post I even mention keeping Raptor Strike as an option by baking it into Tip of the Spear for those who do want to keep it.

<snip - Blizzard> traps in dps rotation. They have no place here.

This I agree with. I don’t know what the fascination with traps is, when everyone ignores the fact that we have bombs. The last thing you want to do as melee is have to target ground. And what’s the flavor of it anyway? We throw tiny metal spikes that hurt their toesies? No, we throw grenades that go boom.

If they made a glyph where we could use Carve animation to apply SS I’d be okay with that.

Let’s use a melee animation on a 40 yard skill, why not.

The animations for kill command makes 0 sense in melee range

Zero is harsh, they do make SOME sense.

The handbow is also awful.
They really need to thing of something better… why not throwing weapons…

It’s kinda cool tbh, and really adds to the image of a resourceful survivalist. Throwing weapons are so out of place, we’re not ninjas. I’d be even happier with a glyph that turns it into a pistol, but I do like it as it is.

Lacerate would be a welcome return also

But why though? So many suggestions seem to be along the lines of “it was there, so I want it back”. Explain what it would add to your actual rotation. How would it fit into the current one and how would it make it better? Not just your feelings about missing it, but an actual objective assessment.

people make these really huge statements about how survival needs something insane to be viable in raiding, but the actual fact is 1. It’s completely viable already for 99.99% of guilds and 2. If you want to use a weird definition of viable, then all it needs is to flat out do more damage than comparable specs.

I only picked up my hunter again in Ny’alotha, but I can say it was quite ok. I did 10/12 Mythic with it with no problem apart from having to switch to a ranged spec for Ilgynoth, which is fair, because our other melees switched to ranged classes for it too. I didn’t go all the way because I had to go back to my Mistweaver main for the last 2 bosses, but I think it would still be good on Carapace, and it might have strugged a little on N’zoth simply because of the way Coordinated Assault works. The damage was fine, way better than my Windwalker’s, and in line with the other melee. And I’m not even as good as people like Thyminde, who is a legit world class dps as Survival. The perception of viability is very very different than viability itself. People have some preconceptions of what is viable or not simply because of what they read from “elitist” streamers or youtubers. There’s no amount of tuning that can fix that. It can only be fixed by people having open-minded and educated opinions about things, not being sheep, and realizing that what applies to +25s and Mythic raids doesn’t necessarily apply to +10s and Heroic raids.

The post was originally about giving Survival more meaningful talent options and suggesting actual replacements for the voids left by the spells that everyone asks to be made baseline. It would be nice if even some of you would actually read it instead of rehashing the same debates from every other thread.

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Blizzard can if they actually tried balancing the game. More often than not the reason why player perception about some specs is the way it is is because they do indeed suck compared to other specs at a high level.

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That doesn’t mean that it’s actually bad.

It’s just a problem with player mindsets.

This effect will always be present as long as there’s a “top performer” and a “bottom performer”. It doesn’t matter if the gap is as small as a few percent.

Sure, balancing between specs and even between talents can be a lot better. But even if it was like above, some would still consider the ones not at the top to be “bad”.

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