Is survival good for raiding now after the buffs?

[Draugnakh]

If your raid has a free melee spot...sure.

Its not good in any sense. It doesn't do anything niche. Turtle is on a 3min CD, which during a boss fight is basically an eternity. Rogues can use Cloak way more often. You have garbage traps and slows but other classes do the same thing. You basically have nothing else, you just whack the boss.

3min ?

Embrace of the Aspects -20%
Call of the Wild -35% (50% before 7.1.5)

It also reduces Aspect of the Cheetah, more mobility.

Did some content yesterday with my SV, gotta say DPS jumped quite a bit. I really felt competitive, maybe it's not enough to be the go-to spec in Mythic, but it's certainly in a better spot damage wise. Still, two complains:

1) SV was already pretty complex, micromanaging a lot of stuff. Now, the optimal talent combination also involves Way of the Mok'Nathal with Serpent Sting and Caltrops, and the spec feels almost impossible to play to the full extent - not enough global cooldowns to make sure everything stays up AND you use Mongoose Bite to the fullest. Testing Spitting Cobra for focus regen (yeah, in this build focus management is a thing), seems pretty damn good as well.

That's the point, more dps now but harder to play than before 7.1.5...

[Deleted]

Not everyone has Call of the Wild. But everyone eventually reaches Embrace so yeah.

[globenstine]

I don't understand why survival would have to topple all the other melee specs in the game. There is no reason for that. Utility wise, you can't say arms warriors or feral druids are giving the raids they are in insane utility yet you see them everywhere too.

We got to the point in which one should just play what they want. All specs are able to perform adequately in a mythic raiding environment. Are you in a mythic raiding guild that aims for top whatever? If the answer is no, why bother to abandon a spec you like to play in favor of one that is less enjoyable if they both perform good enough? After all, the raid ain't gonna wipe because you dealt a bit less dps than you would with the most optimal spec.

the reason for this is because we have viable ranged specs. no one is going to sacrifice having an actual hunter for this meme spec. especially when it brings nothing to the raid another melee cant do better. after all why would you have an sv hunter when you can have a rogue, a demon hunter or a warrior? not to mention the spec take like three times the effort of any other melee to play effectively.

[globenstine]

I tried to play survival today. I dunno if it's just me but the spec feels really really hard to learn. Feels like there's too much going on and i'm not sure if i'm supposed to use explosive trap/caltrops off cd or not along with whatever other stuff they have. that mixed with the spells that make your pet also have a chance to proc something also confuses the hell out of me. I tihnk it's too much for me and it's not really giving me AMAZING damage. But then again it's probably just my experience with it. Same with Feral druids (Though I see a lot of people mentioning the same thing about them. Hard spec compared to others and you still wind up doing less than everyone else)

Where as I can literally press 1 button as Arcane and do more damage than i'd ever hope to do as a survival hunter

also this.

[Gaaz]

The answer is simple if you follow a basic algorithm:
1. Does it really do more damage than either of the alternatives (MM and BM in our case)?
2. Does it give substantial utility bonuses over other two specs?
3. Does it have certain advantages due to spec mechanics?
If the answer is a "no" to all three questions, spec viability is very questionable. Of course, you can add point number 4:
4. Is the spec fun to play?
If you enjoy it and are not in a competitive environment, then feel free to go SV if you want to.

[Yuyn]

explosive trap/caltrops off cd or not

Yes to the first, no to the second. Explosive Trap should be used on cooldown -- it's one of your highest damage-per-execute-time abilities (outside of higher-stack Mongooses) and costs no resources. Caltrops is a different story, as the mechanics of it are unusual. It has a 12s cooldown, the ground effect has a 15s duration, and it refreshes a 6s debuff every 1s while an enemy is inside the ground effect.

The short version of that, is that you recast Caltrops roughly every 21s on a single-target (just before the buff falls off -- 15s ground effect + 6s debuff lingering after), but it will vary with movement and if new targets have spawned. Basically, recast it whenever the Caltrops debuff is about to drop and Caltrops is not on cooldown.

On the bigger question of Survival, it's fine. If you're not doing top-end mythic raiding, there's nothing wrong with it. Its downsides are (1) being melee in general, and (2) having less defenses than other melee. It does, however, have one of the strongest slows in the game (Caltrops), good sustained AoE/cleave damage (esp. with the Fingertrap ring), and respectable single-target damage. If you're with the best-of-the-best-of-the-best, other specs may outperform it (it's hard to say, since there are basically no Survival hunters even at that level to compare with other specs), but it's not far enough behind that player skill is negated, not even close.

You also ignored the 2 specs that had 0.

Check the list closer, the specs with "zero" parses are duplicates. Probably leftovers in Warcraft Logs from where Fury and Frost had two 'sub-specs' with different weapon choices. It does mean SV is rather definitively the least-played spec, at least as far as raiding goes, in the entire game, though.

[Deleted]

Where as I can literally press 1 button as Arcane and do more damage than i'd ever hope to do as a survival hunter

That is why the diversity of the WoW specs is appreciated. The fun/output factor is perceived in a different way for every player. When I'm playing this game, i'd rather have a complex but joyful rotation than a dull 2-button cycle. But I respect people thinking the opposite.

[Not A Cat]

Mythic raiding? No way.

Heroic? If you're good at it I'm sure you could find a place in a raid group. Chances are you'd have to be established in a guild before they'd let you play it though.

Normal? Anything is viable in normal so long as you aren't terrible at it.

[Okacz]

That's the point, more dps now but harder to play than before 7.1.5...

Yeah, it just seems it's slowly reaching the point of "too much". In "perfect world" a spec would do proportionally more dps depending on its difficulty, which is still not the case.

Just a small complain, but it's kind of discouraging when playing a spec where a 0.5s mistake can bring your DPS crashind down, and still seeing all the other classes just yoloing through, doing more.

[Deleted]

Mythic raiding? No way.

XD

/10char

[Khrux]

Survival isn't really harder to play than the most "difficult" specs such as Feral, it just has alot going on at once which seems overwhelming at first but its relatively straight forward aside from just pure volume of skills.

Lets break it down in 3 stages;
1. You have 3 maintenance buffs, the atk power buff from Way of the Mok'Nathal, the dot from Serpent Sting and the dot from Lacerate. So step by step these are 10sec, 15secs and 12sec durations respectively that any decent weak aura or tracker mod can monitor for you and with pandemic effects you can just refresh Lacerate at 10secs right after you Raptor strike to keep Mok'Nathal up which also in turn keeps Serpent Sting up "for free". Quite simple.

2. You have 3 skills you just use on cooldown. Caltrops every 15secs, Explosive Trap every 30secs and Crows every 60secs(or whenever it resets). Again a decent weak aura can cover these Cds and you pop them whenever they light up.

3. The core mechanic, mongoose bites and Fury of the Eagle. This is where it feels overwhelming at first in my opinion, as you have an already busy rotation before even getting to the main part. The idea here is to stack mongoose to 6 and then use any additional mongoose you get while at 6 stacks until the duration of the buff is about to run out then use Fury of the Eagle(which adds 4 secs to the duration) to finish. After this mongoose becomes a skill you just bank for now until you hit 3 stacks again, then dump and keep dumping new ones while working on phase 1 & 2 of your rotation.

So yeah, sounds like alot to do and it is but once you get into a rhythm is relative straight forward. I would definitely recommend a good weak aura package, I use the one below for all 3 specs and love it. Made managing Survival in particular alot easier.

https://wago.io/NyGCkdLK-

Includes short gif previews

[barackohmama]

Survival is good in everything outside raids and some dungeons, sadly.

You sure about that? Survival seems to outdo MM/BM atm on single target so should be the best choice for many raid fights now

[Gaaz]

You sure about that? Survival seems to outdo MM/BM atm on single target so should be the best choice for many raid fights now

Only hypothetically. In practice, survival tends to be much weaker DPS wise than the other 2 specs. I have not seen single target simulations for 7.1.5 yet, but I doubt that SV has a significant enough damage advantage over BM and MM to warrant being melee and having one of the clunkiest rotations in the game atm. Not even considering that there are too many melee characters in general, some of whom are vastly superior to SV in performance and stability (due to easier rotations and better mechanics).

[Alvito]

Yes to the first, no to the second. Explosive Trap should be used on cooldown -- it's one of your highest damage-per-execute-time abilities (outside of higher-stack Mongooses) and costs no resources. Caltrops is a different story, as the mechanics of it are unusual. It has a 12s cooldown, the ground effect has a 15s duration, and it refreshes a 6s debuff every 1s while an enemy is inside the ground effect.

The short version of that, is that you recast Caltrops roughly every 21s on a single-target (just before the buff falls off -- 15s ground effect + 6s debuff lingering after), but it will vary with movement and if new targets have spawned. Basically, recast it whenever the Caltrops debuff is about to drop and Caltrops is not on cooldown.

On the bigger question of Survival, it's fine. If you're not doing top-end mythic raiding, there's nothing wrong with it. Its downsides are (1) being melee in general, and (2) having less defenses than other melee. It does, however, have one of the strongest slows in the game (Caltrops), good sustained AoE/cleave damage (esp. with the Fingertrap ring), and respectable single-target damage. If you're with the best-of-the-best-of-the-best, other specs may outperform it (it's hard to say, since there are basically no Survival hunters even at that level to compare with other specs), but it's not far enough behind that player skill is negated, not even close.


Check the list closer, the specs with "zero" parses are duplicates. Probably leftovers in Warcraft Logs from where Fury and Frost had two 'sub-specs' with different weapon choices. It does mean SV is rather definitively the least-played spec, at least as far as raiding goes, in the entire game, though.

For 2 days or raiding out of people that logged their fights and made them public. If you want a larger sample size you can click it down to heroic still leaving it at the same % and SV ends up being the top hunter spec for 1 fight and right on MM tail for the other 2. Meanwhile BM is sitting in the dust.

[Deleted]

There seems a bit of confusion about the damage and rotation so I'll just vomit everything I know into this comment.

I am at ilvl 887. Stats and build can be seen here. Progression wise 7/7 mythic en. Our guild leader decided that tov progression is not worth doing (dunno if he is simply lazy or whatnot but whatever) so I got 0/3 mythic ToV.

http://prnt.sc/dui1ux

http://prnt.sc/dui2dv

http://prntscr.com/dupt40

Unbuffed I do 450k raid target dummy dps. If I get a bit more lucky with my trinket or procs in general, 480k is rather easy though the average seems to be 450k. I like to think I have really poor relics (2x Flanking strike, 1x lacerate) thus there should be a lot more possible.

As for the rotation itself:

For the pull, I start with caltrops from a distance. It has considerable travel time so 2-3 seconds before the pull is good. Follow up with a explosive trap since that too has good travel time (less than caltrops from my perspective) thus it can be used before the actual pull too and since pots are off the global cd, you can use that at the same time. Then harpoon, do a raptor strike, cast murder of crows and then start mongoose biting all the while trying to refresh ways of the mok'nathal shortly before it runs out. Aspect of the eagle is used as late as possible. It is important to note that at 6 stacks, with pre pot going on and probably blood lust too, I pay little to no attention to raptor strike any longer. A fully charged mongoose bite has higher priority to me than maintaining the buff during that time so I occasionally drop it in favor of that.

That is my opener and it seems to be the most optimized one. Continuing the rotation, I started to view the other skills as filler and thus treat them as such. I don't hit lacerate, explosive trap and caltrops constantly when they are off cooldown. Saving them for the moments when you are deprived of sufficient mongoose bite charges is what I think the most optimal way to deal with the RNG involved. So if you start viewing it like that, then everything seems to fall into place and everything starts to make sense.

Start mongoose biting at 3 charges, use fillers when you can't mongoose bite any longer, maintain ways of the mok'nathal and finish it off with a fury of the eagle. Use your second potion once fury of the eagle and aspect of the eagle are both ready. Easy as that. The individual timings are quickly learned, like refresh mok'nathal if it has 4 seconds or less time active before you use fury of the eagle. Having a nice WA setup is crucial too, to make this spec easier to play. If you look for a post named "[Weakauras] Hunter Complete Suite (Legion) " in this forum then you find a very decent one. It's not updated yet but with a few tweaks using templates I got it working.

- - - Updated - - -

Ok thats not even remotely true. If something is "good" then something else has to be "bad". Its better than it used to be, but we're not really talking about how things WERE. Its not like BC hunter doing a few k dps is a decent comparison to current SV.

SV is melee, which is worse than ranged all other things being the same, does DOT dps as well as "buff contingent" dps, which is basically the worst way of doing dps compared to instant or steady or reliable burst dps, and doesn't do as much damage as basically any other class, which even assuming its utility was equal makes it worse than any other dps class.

I mean, its hypothetically playable in pve, but so is a player that afk auto shots. And actually, I suspect the more casual guilds are MORE sensitive to low outlier specs like this, since a less skilled player of another class can do more damage than SV to cover that gap.

Gotta argue semantics then. I don't think OP wanted to know if it is better than other specs but rather meant good in a sense of "good enough". Though we won't know unless he reads this and answers.

First of all, many people like to say "Bring the player to the raid, not the character.". It couldn't be more true. Assuming I have a drastically inferior kit compared to Fury warriors, feral druids (oddly enough, they don't get the "why do you play this melee spec if you got a fully functioning, similar performing ranged caster spec which on top of that is easier to play" kind of treatment but whatever) and what not, I should be theoretically speaking being the person who takes the most damage and deal the least amount of damage. Turns out, I ain't. I dodge like a champ and I spent enough time with the spec to understand it's nuances. I spent more effort but I achieve good results. Of course one could argue "if you are this good, then you'd be better with x y and z" but then again, I wouldn't continue playing the game if I were forced to play x y and z.

"I mean, its hypothetically playable in pve, but so is a player that afk auto shots." That is just silly of you to say here. People can be carried, we all know that is possible. Does a survival has to be carried in a more average mythic raiding guild though? I'd say no.

A real shame you dodged my question at the end though. I asked you if survival could have a spot in a high end raiding guild. I even went through the effort to give out some information on the spec. No reply but instead, you focused on the first 3 sentences I wrote. A shame.

[Hiricine]

A real shame you dodged my question at the end though. I asked you if survival could have a spot in a high end raiding guild. I even went through the effort to give out some information on the spec. No reply but instead, you focused on the first 3 sentences I wrote. A shame.

Well if you're going to have a response that your post is predicated on which actually addresses the question that was asked, you really shouldn't throw out false information as your first point.

Also your part about "bring the player to the raid not the character" while it addresses the relative nature of the problems with that statement, fails to address the relative severity of that problem. A survival hunter in a raid of like-skilled and geared players is being carried by any definition, and the skill level of that player is relatively insignificant, and they are being rewarded less for good gameplay than other people in that raid.

I would like to mention though that I keep a collection of off spec Survival gear and I am ENTHUSIASTIC about playing it in endgame content, however, its so far removed from anything plausible you can barely play it for FUN at this point.

[Aggrophobic]

Survival is probably the worst spec in the game. There is no reason to play it at all.

[cLax0n]

The rotation is aids, I mean talk about button/ability bloat. This spec is probably the most complex in the game, yet the results are the worst, very unrewarding for the amount of effort put in. So you're pulling your hair out trying to min-max all these different things, meanwhile other melee class are just pushing 3-4 buttons as they come off cooldown, have a decent amount of wait time so they don't cripple their hands, and do over 100K more DPS than you. So like, if you want a pet-class, why not just go super easy (by comparison) MM, or super easy BM ( In 7.1.5 you also need to target not just Explosive Trap, but also Caltrops.

They need to make traps only utility, and the damaging ones available only in PvP or applicable only to Waylay. They shouldn't balance Survival PvE damage around their traps. They also need to either remove Raptor Strike or Flanking Strike, having both is stupid. Way of the Mok'Nathal should at least also apply to Flanking Strike as well. Same with Serpent Sting. The only cool thing mechanics-wise about this spec is the Mongoose Bite, but with all the other extra shit you gotta be constantly tracking/wary of, you can't even enjoy it.

This spec was literal shit. Can you imagine how this spec even came about?
Developer A: Hey, I noticed that a lot of Hunters love the Survival playstyle.
Developer B: Yea, totally. They also really like the Marksmanship playstyle.
Developer A: How about we merge those together, and then make a new melee spec. Everyone wins right?
Developer B: Wouldn't that effectively fuck both specs?
Developer A: Nah dude, trust me. AND the melee spec is gonna be awesome, all the vanilla hardcore boys will play it. I'm gonna make it very complex to appeal to the hardcore fanbase.
Developer B: Why not just make a fourth spec?
Developer A: Hunters ain't fucking Druids, nah fuck that shit. Trust me bro. Trust. Anyways, I'm gonna bring this up to our boss tomorrow, you better have my back.
Developer B: Nah dude, I can't have your back. It's a dumb idea, fuck that shit.
Developer A: Dude, if you don't do it I'm gonna fuck your life up, don't test me. I'm crazy!
Developer B: Whatever fine, I don't even main a Hunter.

[Deleted]

Well if you're going to have a response that your post is predicated on which actually addresses the question that was asked, you really shouldn't throw out false information as your first point.

Also your part about "bring the player to the raid not the character" while it addresses the relative nature of the problems with that statement, fails to address the relative severity of that problem. A survival hunter in a raid of like-skilled and geared players is being carried by any definition, and the skill level of that player is relatively insignificant, and they are being rewarded less for good gameplay than other people in that raid.

I would like to mention though that I keep a collection of off spec Survival gear and I am ENTHUSIASTIC about playing it in endgame content, however, its so far removed from anything plausible you can barely play it for FUN at this point.

What do you mean by "false information"? I am quite sure that I didn't lie nor have I exaggerated a thing. Please elaborate.

[Sastank]

Even after the buffs SV is only good for target dummies and world questing :/ If you're in some casual whogivesafuck guild you can play whatever you want, for funsies though. So there's that.