Overall, was Survival a failure?

[Bepples]

Okay, but you're showing a graph that spans less than 20% of wow's time frame. I'm not saying either of you are right or wrong but you can't disprove his claim with that graph.

Considering the fact that the graph goes from November 29 2011 to October 14 2014, that's just under 25% of WoW's time, so both your claim and the original poster's claim are still wrong.

Then consider that Survival was also more played than MM in Tier 17 as well (go look at warcraftlogs parses).

Then consider that Survival wasn't even the same spec before 3.0.

Survival had a pretty consistent model from 3.0 to 6.2. Around half of that time it was more played than MM. It took huge balance issues to make MM more played (see 6.2).

[Serissa]

If the threads were so popular, why aren't people playing the spec?

Who said? You know there's other things beside raiding.

[Deleted]

Let's see in details how Waylay and Guerilla Tactics would work in current raids :

(I'm talking about Mythic Raid, just to be sure)


Nythendra : It won't work at all since the dragon doesn't move. That sucks.

Ursoc : The bear is first pulled so we can toss a trap at pre-pull for maximum damage. Then, it's brought all over the room so we can always predict in advance its path and launch a good trap (that could even damage the add too)

Dragons : That's obvious. Each time the dragons are exchanged, the explosive trap will hit them both in the middle of the room.

Elerethe : The boss is pulled from the center of the area to the raid at the beginning of the fight so it will walk on the trap. Then, all the round-trps we do in Phase 1 will allow us to toss a few more empowered traps. Phase 2 is much more difficult to predict though.

Il"gynoth : With the exception of the two big first tentacles, we can predict the timing and the place where all the other mobs will pop, especially the big nightmare horror. Unfortunately, ,no waylayed traps on the boss itself.

Cenarius : Phase 1 : The traps will be triggered not so by the boss but by the mutiple adds : dragons, treants, sisters, even wisps... Phase 2 : if you anticipate correctly its path, the boss will walk in them.

Xavius : Similar to Cenarius, the traps are useful for the massive flood of adds coming from all around the room + Maybe 2 empowered traps for the boss at the beginning of each phase.

Odyn : Toss a trap on the runes and the adds will have their heads blown. Much more difficult to anticipate Odyn's pathing with the randomness of the glowing floor

Guarm : Same as Nythendra, worthless here, except when he rushes throughout the room. Poor use.

Helya : Just like Il'gynoth, we know where all the adds are coming from.


Bear in mind that I'm not implying that all the explosives / steel traps you may toss will be empowered. Bear also in mind that as a mythic raider, I'm not especially, to say the least, enjoying these changes. I'm just saying that it could kinda work, in a weird, annoying way haha. It will certainly reinforce the use of Steel Trap though for all the Nythendra / Guarm kind of fights.

I just can't stand the fact that there're still so much garbage talents left for SV. The 100 talent line is sickening.

[splatomat]

I dont play it, so I won't comment on the spec's actual functionality.

It was a conceptual failure from the start, though. There didn't seem to be much demand for a hunter melee spec so I kinda wonder where it came from. Was it some dev's pet project? It was an answer to a question nobody asked.

They should have made it a tanking class. Adding more tanks to the game is never a bad idea. Giving offspec utility to a pure dps class is never a bad idea.

[Karzakk]

I dont play it, so I won't comment on the spec's actual functionality.

It was a conceptual failure from the start, though.

You haven't played it yet you call it a failure, it is a perfectly fine dps spec with perfectly fine dps capabilities. Everyone treats it like a sub-par spec when in fact it can be better than the other two specs you are just more likely to encounter a terrible survival hunter than the other two specs considering they take zero skill to be competitive with.

[Gurg]

snip

i agree.. and for a fact i never said it wont work.. its just soooo much extra effort and stuff to consider when.. well you can roll, for instance ret paladin, or even better enhace shaman as agi class too and have NO issues at all.
Theres so much more stuff to consider with new Waylay + GT build that.. well, is it worth the effort? Also keep in mind that our traps lost 50% Cooldown so.. yea... you really need to get the timing right or hold onto them for quite the time.

I was actually ok with IT+waylay, its burst on pull and PvP QoL, but GT makes it really.. well.. srange.

Dunno.. im not quite giving up yet, but im there.. and well.. with artifact knowledge shortcut its a about time to consider... a reroll.. im not in a mood to wait for another 3+ months for 7.2.5 to correct bad Dev decisions made in 7.1.5 that will obviously, if they stay as they are now, reduce representation of SV in group content even more.

[Deleted]

I wouldn't consider the enhanced traps as extra work. It really is more about knowing the fight and I think it's excellent in terms of "optimizing" your gameplay.
It similar to positioning your pet/hunter correctly to hit all the mobs with SW/Beastcleave.

It's kinda cool, doesn't adress any of SVs problems though.

[Kwaai]

Who said? You know there's other things beside raiding.

Obviously. Go find the statistics for hunter questing. I won't hold my breath. In the meantime, the rest of us will look at real data for the part of the game we care about. The question is "was SV a failure." If no one is raiding as SV then it's a failure to people who care about raiding. If the defense is that it's a leveling/questing spec I don't even know what to say. Is that a joke?

[Deleted]

Well, I tried it out not that long ago, and actually do enjoy it. The problem in my opinion is the fact that it is melee. If someone picks Hunter as their class, they very rarely want to play melee, at least that's what seems to be the case for me.

[Deleted]

Hey there SV hunters!

Any thoughts on the recent changes to traps? And I mean not only the (wait 2 seconds to get a enhanced effect of your trap) but rather the fact that all of our traps have AT BEST 38secs CD. This includes Tar Trap and Explosive Trap..

Talking about Explosive trap, now is essencially a mid cd ability like Tiger's Fury, it's no longer part of our core rotation and further more now explosive trap is a "skill shot" ability like Tar and Freeze trap are, this means that even if you want to use it on CD you'll have to select a spot for the trap to land.

I know that trusting numbers on early PTR builds is silly but it seems like they are transfering a lot of power to the enhanced version of explosive trap from the regular instant explotion explosive trap..

In a PVE perspective: For Mythic+ and Solo it might be a okay change, where you can lure the adds to the sweet spot to hit them with a nuke trap, but I'm affraid that in a raid enviroment this change may hurt the already lackluster performance of the survival even more.. Yes, we can get a nice nuke trap from pull (in some bosses) and even some nuke traps for predictable adds spawning but in a pure rotation fashion it seems like we are going to have lots of: "I don't have any abilities nor focus to the anything now" moments (which we already have several).

In a PVP perspective (I'm not a real Pvper, I just do the ocational BG and Arena) it seems like a pretty fun change, in a BG you can plant a nuke trap on objectives like flags and trigger Aspect of the Eagle just before the explotion goes off to One shot any ninjacapper, and in Arenas I can see some plays with nuke traps behind pilars or even on your very spot so rogues must eat lots of damage in order to engage on you.

I would appreciate much more this changes if they keep them as follows:
1. The old [Improved Traps] talent (the one that reduces the CD of Tar and Explosive by 50% and Freeze by 15%) should be a baseline passive for survivals, since now all hunters have traps back, if blizzard wants to keep the fantasy about the Traps masters it seems pretty obvious that we should be using traps as often as possible.
2. Making explosive trap to function in 2 different ways:
First one: If you have a target and you are at melee range of that target, explosive trap will be automatically deployed at melee range. Second one: If you have no targets, or if your targets it's not on melee range you can deploy your explosive trap anywhere within a 40yards radius.
3. Make an active talent called something like: [¿Red wire, Blue wire!]: Your sudden hurry to deploy your next 3 traps makes them trigger their enhanced version instantly rather than waiting 2 seconds. 1min CD.

What do you think about my suggested changes?

[Gurg]

snip

Well, for me, thats the most reasonable way to go with them.
If nothing else, old Improved Traps should be our 3rd golden instead of that AA nonsense or that Harpoon dot, something you need to work towards to earn it, having a NUKE trap plus IT baseline would be too much op. This will instantly create Grand Canyon like DPS performance gap between good and Survival who knows what hes doing, or between PUG wheres policy "every man for himself" and Premade groups with far better organization. Its quite opposite to Blizzard constant claims that they want to lessen the gap between good and expert players. The gap will still be there tho, just not as MoP like.

For instance Halls of Valor dungeon, PUG tank will just charge into dining room and pull main door mobs, Premade groups tank would most probably corner pull them allowing their Survival to set the traps on top of eachother just around the corner and.. BOOM HEADSHOT!

I do agree that this will be innovative change to WoW and interesting change in Survivals gameplay. What im afraid of is that NUKE talent will be quite dominant in that tier, in fact it will probably rule over all talents, making it less important which every other talent you pick till you pick GT.

Increased CD on ET makes our, already underperforming cleave/AoE even more bad, again making it that EVERY trap counts and again making survival even less desirable in group content. Specially with GT talent.
Further more.. what about static bosses? How will those traps work on them? Because, from the current perspective and game content available well.. look at this post off the bad 7.1.5 survival valuability for current content.

I dont like idea of having to hold onto my offensive CDs for quite some time to make most of them. Specially IF their effectiveness is not dependent on us, rather on our tanks.
Personally, its Retries Blessing of Might all over again.

Following.. My even bigger issue, as it stands now, is that the rest of our talents arent even looked at. Theres no change in unusable talents, or even small buff to underperforming ones, like Mortal Wounds.

Take note also that with new way our traps function (need to set em up) this will take additional time off our DPS rotation.
It would be awkward for blizzard to make the spell in a way that EVERY Survival HAVE to use it as a @cursor macro, something like:

#showtooltip
/cast [@cursor] Explosive Trap;

Dunno.. ill wait and see, currently im in state that theres nothing more to do with my Survival except daily quests (NOT a Mythic raider, HC one) so ill take some time to gear up my Retri or level one enhance/fury just in case. As i said, im not giving up on Survival, but with these new changes incoming i dont see how this will help Survivals representation in raids grow, rather i think that new gameplay around laying nuke traps will decimate it even further to the point where Survival will be called "best solo class." By the looks of things as they are now on beta.. simply every other melee spec does what you do better with less hustle. MAYBE number balancing (buff to RS/FS, lessen MB stacks to 3 with 100% buff per stack and buff to carve/butchery), aka moving most of our DPS away from traps to active buttons would fix this issue, but still, keeping on traps, for instance for 15s since you know that adds are incoming would be in any case DPS loss. Buffing traps to that point that holding onto them for ~30s would not present DPS loss would make opposite effect if your traps get off CD in right about time to set it for incoming mobs. We do speak of 38s cooldown on traps, not 12, not 15 or 20, its 40s cooldown.

[threads]

I think there is some mixup here, Rexxar is a Survivalist hunter - he prefers to be in the wilderness and prefer animals over people, the beastmaster thing is more a name for him because he has an affinity for beasts. Thematically it fits perfectly.

except rexxar doesnt run around throwing shitty traps and grenades on himself.

[Khrux]

There didn't seem to be much demand for a hunter melee spec so I kinda wonder where it came from. Was it some dev's pet project? It was an answer to a question nobody asked.

Seen this mentioned alot, so just for newer players who may not have been playing since Vanilla. The hunter class originally equipped both a melee and ranged weapon, so the likes of raptor strike(big hit) mongoose bite(activated on parry/dodge) and wing clip(melee snare) existed as melee tools and you would use when something got up close to you. The reason you had these tools was also because ranged shots had a minimum range(like warriors charge) so you were effectively "deadzoned" if a melee got on you as you couldn't use ranged skills on targets within 5-8(?) yards of you.

The "meme" back then was that everything was a hunter weapon, as hunters could use 1h(dual), 2h and ranged weapons so naturally could roll on everything. However melee weapons were mostly stat sticks and never actually used outside of niche pvp cases, but a raptor strike with an endgame 2h hurt so sometimes you would get a nasty surprise when you close the distance with a hunter and get rekt by a big raptor strike melee crit. Plenty of hunters back then with the imfamous Ash'kandi from Nefarion in Blackwings Lair

So while nobody was specifically asking for a melee hunter, the concept existed in some form long ago and I guess blizz thought giving a true melee spec to a class that has some melee history to it was a fun idea with some fantasy behind it.

[DeicideUH]

Seen this mentioned alot, so just for newer players who may not have been playing since Vanilla. The hunter class originally equipped both a melee and ranged weapon, so the likes of raptor strike(big hit) mongoose bite(activated on parry/dodge) and wing clip(melee snare) existed as melee tools and you would use when something got up close to you. The reason you had these tools was also because ranged shots had a minimum range(like warriors charge) so you were effectively "deadzoned" if a melee got on you as you couldn't use ranged skills on targets within 5-8(?) yards of you.

The "meme" back then was that everything was a hunter weapon, as hunters could use 1h(dual), 2h and ranged weapons so naturally could roll on everything. However melee weapons were mostly stat sticks and never actually used outside of niche pvp cases, but a raptor strike with an endgame 2h hurt so sometimes you would get a nasty surprise when you close the distance with a hunter and get rekt by a big raptor strike melee crit. Plenty of hunters back then with the imfamous Ash'kandi from Nefarion in Blackwings Lair

So while nobody was specifically asking for a melee hunter, the concept existed in some form long ago and I guess blizz thought giving a true melee spec to a class that has some melee history to it was a fun idea with some fantasy behind it.

Just to theorize further, I think the big culprit behind making Survival melee was the artifact. All the talk about "class fantasy" was caused because they needed to make pretty unique artifacts for each spec. They probably toyed with a crossbow or something for Survival, then decided it wasn't different enough from MM's "class fantasy". (Which is why I think the big failure was MM, not Survival. MM should've allowed players to "revive" old Survival gameplay within its options)

[Icehotshot]

Survival is just the hunter PVP spec.

Arms war was that way for a long time. Just a PVP spec.

Good day.

[Khrux]

Just to theorize further, I think the big culprit behind making Survival melee was the artifact.

That's a valid point, they already made up the ranged artifacts just for legion so I guess they couldn't think of 3 legitimate artifact choices for ranged weapons. Even though they could have went with gun, bow and crossbow.

I would have loved if Survival used 1 handers as thrown weapons, so for example Survival would be a medium range class using throwing axes/knives(Axe/Dagger artifact) with a range of 15/20yards. They could dual wield and throw them each one by one as an auto attack from left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand etc. like Rexxar in Heroes of the Storm for example.

They could still use traps/grenades while using various throwing skills to cause bleeds/snares. Could even have Axe main hand and dagger offhand and abilities could be based on either one like enhancement that has different skills using the main or offhand etc.

[Okacz]

Giving offspec utility to a pure dps class is never a bad idea.

Completly false. People pick pure DPS class for a different reason than when they pick a hybrid. If you go pure, you dedicate yourself to DPS, hybrid - you accept that part of your gameplay is support roles, and even when your dps specs suck, you can do something that is good no matter what - tanking or healing. Even tuning reflects that - pure classes, minus Warlocks, have a dominating spec, while some hybrids don't.

And yeah, nobody wanted a melee hunter, but it was a thing that came out pretty good. If anything, the devs failed on Marksmanship, which was supposed to provide players with both MM and old SV playstyles and instead provided none of those. But hey, it rocks the meters on almost every fight, so MM playerbase seems to like it.

[Nouk]

That's a valid point, they already made up the ranged artifacts just for legion so I guess they couldn't think of 3 legitimate artifact choices for ranged weapons. Even though they could have went with gun, bow and crossbow.

I would have loved if Survival used 1 handers as thrown weapons, so for example Survival would be a medium range class using throwing axes/knives(Axe/Dagger artifact) with a range of 15/20yards. They could dual wield and throw them each one by one as an auto attack from left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand etc. like Rexxar in Heroes of the Storm for example.

They could still use traps/grenades while using various throwing skills to cause bleeds/snares. Could even have Axe main hand and dagger offhand and abilities could be based on either one like enhancement that has different skills using the main or offhand etc.

Oh God, a throwing weapon class is my dream right there. just will never be implemented in wow since the unique animations/projectiles would eat up too much resources and thus not feasible for a single spec, sadly...WoWs development is too focused on efficiency for such things to be explored (new melee animations mirrored across all races/classes, for example)
its possible though as GW2 Ranger (for example) has shown: was my main too until HoT and elite specs.

[akaTheDude]

Yes, hunters are a ranged class

[Deleted]

Well here is our answer.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/7...rvival-hunter/