I'm a BFA Survival Hunter main, 480 ilvl, 6/12 M, all m+15 as SV, and 2k double dps in 2's with a Fury Warrior (A fun but not viable comp). BFA Survival Hunter currently plays really well in PvP because you can actually take advantage of the hybrid nature of the spec. You can rot the enemy from range with Serpent Sting and Wildfire bombs, burst hard with Latent Poison and Mongoose Bite, and control the enemy team with a plethora of roots, snares, and crowd control. Most of the talents are viable in PvP, and the honor talents offer even more to the spec. Survival doesn't last one on one with classic melee classes, and it shouldn't, so finding a balance of melee and ranged in your play style is a critical part of your success. It's a unique, challenging, and high-risk high-reward spec with a high skill ceiling.That hybrid uniqueness that makes Survival a blast in PvP doesn't really work in PvE, and there isn't currently anything in the spec to compensate for this. Buffing Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb damage could push the spec toward being more of a hybrid, and emphasizing them in the core of the spec would help. Having 2 bomb charges by default, and Wilderness Survival's cd reduction worked in, would allow for a greater uptime and a better flow. Chakrams could be moved up to fill the spot left by Guerrilla Tactics in an already aoe-focused row. With a slow added to all targets hit like the old Glave Toss, Chakrams could be a beneficial piece of ranged utility. If there is going to be a greater focus on the melee side, Mongoose Bite being baseline would open up the possibility of talents working around Mongoose Fury stacks. For instance, a talented ability that grants 3 stacks immediately on a medium cool down for a bit of burst. Tip of the Spear could also be made equivalent to Mongoose Fury stacks, allowing for a faster damage ramp-up and a higher potential cap on Mongoose bite damage. Fury of the Eagle could also return for a bit of AoE burst. There are a lot of possibilities. Mending Bandage being a part of the baseline kit (or being Conflict-and-Strife'd in somehow) would give Survival a unique utility. I also do not see the philosophy behind the author's suggested talent shuffle. The first row is themed around focus (generating or saving it), the second around AoE (Guerrilla Tactics happens to be the best single target option), and the forth around different types of dots (consistent lower damage, medium damage with a root, and high damage/long cooldown). Rows one and two have talents that are switched depending on the situation, with only the fourth lacking choice because Bloodseeker heavily beats out the other two. A re-tuning of the alternative talents would have a greater impact on choice than a shuffling of the talent rows.
My favourite thing about survival on PTR was getting through the starting area, get to level 10, swap to survival and... yeah... you don't have Kill Command until 11, so you don't have a builder, just a spender. I was like "okay let's be smart here" and swapped to the bow whenever I spent everything but... steady shot DOESN'T build focus as survival. Yes this is 1 level, it's completely meaningless after what? 5mins? And in the grand scheme of things, but it just shows again how little thought they put into survival. Pretty embarassing tbh.
Clearly this was written by someone who rarely plays hunters in general, let alone survival.
Wish they would revert survival back to legion's iteration. I love it as a melee spec, but the BfA iteration is this weird hybrid, neither here not there. It's not too terrible, but not great either. Also, it's kinda RP breaking for some of my characters.
REALLY miss the old ranged survival hunter, i felt like blizzard took a super fun spec away from us when they changed it to a melee spec and i know alot of hunter feel that way that being said i think Melee Survival is a failure in my opinion and blizz have 2 choices,keep the melee surv and improve the spec and bake in the black arrow/explosive shot into the MM spec so we can have pre-legion ranged surv feel or make a 4th spec that is like the survival pre-legion just like they did to druid,while they also work on ways to improve this really clunky spec. I also like the idea mentioned above of survival becoming a tank spec, would be really nice to see a mail wearing tank in raid and dungeons.
It‘s just disappointing to see blizzards attempts at trying to make SV this weird hybrid spec, but fail at it.It would work IF they remove the requirement for killshot to need a meele weapon (why a ”shot“ needs a meele weapon, we never know), and changing our interrupt to also don’t require a meele weapon and giving it range (best to just give the BM and MM interrupt to SV, removing muzzle).with that you could technically play range SV, don‘t know if this would be viable dps-vise (no beta access and PTR sucks without working dps meters and stuff)
Well here is the hunter community and we have 3 totaly different camp. 1. "Bring ranged SV back" 2. "Keep SV melee" 3. "Keep SV a hybrid ranged / melee with throwing axes". They just can't satisfy everyone. What is sure that a lot of people care about hunter even if they don't play it atm (because of reasons). They still want to be a good viable spec again so they can main or at least "main alt" it.Everyone admits that hunter is one of the most fun class in wow with almost one of the highest skill ceiling (outside of BM of course). While I miss a bit the old ranged survival I see a lot of potencial in the new spec design. In pvp you have everything you need. You can do decent damage from range and decent damage from melee aswell. SV doesn't have much DR or immunity spell so its forced to kite and outplay enemy players with traps, stun, root etc. You always have to think forward not just go full mongo on one target. For example: if I use tar trap for dps I can't use it for faking freezing trap on priest so priest gonna have easier time to outplay my cc so I just save it and use wing clip/stun on the dps and harpoon after that. or... DK has grip and icebound forti so my stun would be useless anyway so I can use it on the healer and throw trap from distance. and these are just the basics. With hunter you have to use your brain.I would be really happy if we would get this complexity in pve aswell. In m+ latent sv was a bit like this. We had to manage latent stacks on multiple target, serpent uptime on multiple target, mongoose uptime, mechanics, dispelling, interrupts and peeling from tank for example with binding... ohh and pet management. I really don't want hunter to be as popular as DH, DK or Warrior because that gonna mean that we got a boring melee BM spec with 2 buttons rotation and high dps. I want that if you learn to properly use the class you became as useful as those classes (do as much damage while bringe utility to the team).What I've realised in bfa if we reached the magic number of haste the class became really strong. Your GCD lowered and your focus regen was just fine (you still had to use kill command but you could do 5 mongoose with 120 focus without using KC) So what I think the class needs to be fun again: 1. Make 2 or 3 azerite powered latent poison baseline (or at least a talent choice for example instead of wildifre infusion) 2. Make mongoose bite baseline so you have a slot for a new mongoose buff. 3. Increase focus regen 4. Make wildfire infusion baseline. "unbuffed" wildfire bomb just not fun. 5. Do something with murder of crows. It looks so cool and fits SV fantasy so well that I really miss that its useless. Example solutions: Remove from gcd and lower focus req. so its a good addition for your burst - or add it as a passive % chance to proc talent to kill command and nerf the damage: Your pet's bite cause your enemy bleed and the smell attracts the crows. (also some glyph could switch crows to snakes or something) so it adds to your rot your enemy with poisons and animals playstyle.6. Make camouflage baseline (just look at our spec icon it just make no sense) 7. I really like the fast paced gameplay with high haste so it would be cool to make hunter a faster paced spec from baseline.Example solutions: If mongoose should be baseline the mongoose talent should buff our stacks so it not only increase MB damage but give us a certain amount of haste like Meta does for DHs.option two: Just decrease the GCD for sv (hard to balance option) 8. SV depends too much on pets. Revive pet's 4 sec cast time just makes no sense9. Serpent sting uptime shouldn't be lowered as your haste increased 10. New spells like Tranq shot, arcane shot, steady shot shouldn't req. ranged weap (but I think its not intended) +1 if you tie latent poison to MB and keep Raptor Strike aswell, RS should be the easier option for more casual hunter players without poison tracking.-Sorry for the grammatical errors english is not my first language-
At this point, they might just delete the spec and admit they have absolutely 0 interest in making it somewhat viable and enjoying to play. Since the rework in Legion (that literally nobody asked for), the devs have no idea what they want to do with this spec...
Meme spec ok but very viable spec in BfA. People should refrain from comenting on how bad it is and how it should go back to WotLK standards as it shows they did not try the spec and did not try to push it to what it can do, especially in PvE.I very much like SV to be a melee spec but I agree that as a melee spec we cannot compete against others (like Rogues or DKs or DHs for instance).On the other hand, competing within the Hunter world against MM and BM, we cannot compete against BM as it is the shining spec of Season 4. However, this is not due to SV being bad but to BM being too powerful.The success of me playing SV was playing in the same guild for the past 10 years so I have the liberty to show off what a SV can do.For Mythic+, I had the chance to meet people along the way and have a small contact list that let me play with them.On the other hand, going into pick-up groups, I got refused 80% of the time because 'You should play BM', 'I need a range, why are you melee?', 'Go back to PvP'...BfA showed us that we are the most flexible with the most number of viable builds in different PvE content. Just look at Warcraft Logs and Raider.io you can see SV hunters perform just well in every end game content. (Well you probably not be in a World first race or in a 30 mythic key but you could have good time in mythic+ and clear Nyalotha in mythic difficulty without any issue).However, we still lack many things to compete with others, first is the recognition from the player base. Especially, the understanding of the player base that World first progress and MDI just dictate meta for that specific context. You can probably run anything in Nyalotha mythic is you are not in a hurry of clearing all to be top world and can run probably anything up to mythic 23 keys.My fear from Covenant feature is just confirmed. I saw coming the day where there would be 1 good Covenant to play per spec. It seems to be Necrolord for SVs. However, writer have a focus for convenant on unique skills waiving totally the Soulbind trees. Death Chakrams seems to be a better skill but Venthyr Nadija's tree seems better. My understanding was that Covenant is an immersive and taste choice but not an optimization or performance choice. Blizzard told us that the balance of the covenants would be so that you choose without feeling penalize. They failed.While, if you play a very powerful and useful spec, you could sacrifice a bit of power by choosing a less optimal covenant. As SVs, you dont have that liberty.In addition, min/maxing is inherent of RPG so where is the fun in being sub-par?I would not be mad to switch back to ranged again as I have no voice in the direction of the spec but making SV ranged is not a fix. It is a recognition of failure or a nostagical dream of pre-MoP players. Being ranged does not solve magically everything, you could switch back to range and still be a sub-par. A bit of tweaking to be on par with melee spec and on par with other hunter spec is enough.The feedback the SV community provided was fairly simple, biggest one being to make Mongoose Bite baseline and find a new talent to replace it. (I mean this skill is so Iconic that my raid mates call me the Mongoose). Other tweaks could be welcome to improve quality of life like a talent to increase melee range (we use a freaking long polearm or super huge swords and axes), rogues and feral druids have that option already.Having a mass stun like a DH could also bring value to the spec.With a bit tuning here and there, you could translate this spec into Shadowlands pretty smoothly without hurting its identity or richness that was created from BfA or from being melee.All we need is a listening ear from some devs at Blizzard.
they should give us back the WoD survival hunter
I played it during BFA because of MM being the most bad-design spec ever.PVP was ok for me. I was destroying peeps with it even though, it doesn't feel really rewarding. It really needs some skills to be able to push it in arenas and you're defo not a tower like some chaosboltdudes.PVE was a bit harder, as the rotation is a bit difficult (for me at least) with the Wildfire Infusion Build I was playing with. But overall, it was do-able but still not rewarding when you look at the efforts you have put out to be able to reach some good DPS when others are literally cleaving the hell out of mobs with one button.I don't mind the spec being Melee. But I liked it better during Legion. I really think they should focus on the Traps/Throwings axes and fantasy around the class. For me, it just feels like a warrior in mail with a pet. That's it, nothing more. I don't mind it becoming even more difficult to play if it is as rewarding in the grand scheme of things.I had high hopes for hunters this expansion. And I'm afraid MM isn't going to shine this time again after the tuning. So I was counting on the SV. If they don't change the design slighlty and improve the class fantasy, I guess me and my friends will stay on ESO decoring our houses.PS : Mongoose Bite Baseline for the love of N'zoth
The grammar, syntax and style is particularly atrocious in this one. Pretty sure it's a cobbled up afterthought... just like the spec itself. Still, expecting something more from Wowhead at this point.
So putting together... Arcane Shot and Steady Shot is off the bar, and can do weapon swapping but it's useless. Chakrams from talent is useless for add gcds. That IMO Starter Build: AP, GT or Hydra's Bite, ur choice, Bloodseeker, ur choice, TotS, WfIFuture Build: VV or AP, GT(with AP) or Hydra's Bite(with VV) or Butchery(with AP & Legendary), ur choice, Bloodseeker, ur choice, MB, WfI or BoPIdk, if there is limit to equip Legendaries in the SL and like Legion expansion. Rylakstalker's is so good for all environments with GT and WfI. So if does then u can combine Rylakstalker's and Latent Poison for Single Target, World and Raids. Wildfire Cluster and Rylakstalker's go for AoE Targets, Dungeons also Mythic Plus, and however never bring WfC in Bolstering Affix. I was thinking Butcher's Bone Fragment for Bolstering Affix and maybe that u can do AoE Executing.Anyway if u demand MB, u gotta have more haste % for Focus Regen and reduce gcd. I was thinking pass 20% or 25% haste and then u can switch to MB from TotS. Covenant... Necrolord is good to have Death Chakrams for Focus Regen into starter build. Other Covenant is okay and rather use it for future build.Soulbind Calculator, it's like copied from the Artifact Weapon that u can filling each slots from farming AP. Now u know AP... Artifact Power in Legion, Azerite Power in BfA and now in SL that u farm up Anima Power. So another World of Wargrind : \
Well I think Survival could also be a very special Tank Spec. It makes a lot of sense to empower the Melee with Pet Class lore to the next Level.BM is about bringing a Party of Followers. Survival could be about having the Pet get all the Aggro while the Hunter always passively mirrors the damage of his/her attacks on the thread of the pet. I could have some special defensive CDs that are share among both.I picture it like a build in miss direct in every attack (or maybe AOE miss direct by traps/bombs?) and certain attacks put leeching dots on the enemy. healing hunter and pet while others reduce the damage of both or transfer the hunters damage to his pet. It would be an aggressive Tank. Having the Polearm lore (I dont like that but here it would make sense) to always have the hunter keep the distance while swinging in close as opportunities open up. Or swinging widely arcs with his Weapon to cover a retreat (kite).I think this would be an awesome totally new approach. I can picture it as a kind of different approach but also similar to DH Tanks.The pet would be the active maintained absorb shield of its master.