compromise for SV hunters

[Deleted]

Half? You're giving Blizzard too much credit.

I would be surprised if more than 15% of the entire Hunter population likes Survival.

I like the idea of a Hunter melee spec but Survival is simply poorly done and plays tediously having to place the traps in melee in your rotation etc and a buch of polearm attacks that could be merged into less. There is no reason to have Raptor Strike and Lacerate for instance, that could be one spell.

I recently simmed my Survival Hunter, it used Raptor Strike exactly 1 time I think and it was 0.X of the dmg.

I think Beastmaster would be the better melee spec dual wielding axes like Rexxar.

Revolve around companions and your melee rotation would be a combination of Hunter/Pet attacks like Flanking Strike, Kill Command etc.

[Delaios]

And SV is for questing, a far better spec I think. Why try to keep things at a range when you go toe-to-toe with them and smash them down easily? Especially with the powerful AOE/cleave SV has.

MM is the best spec for questing by far. It's only downside is with the hard-hitting rares on Argus (they're all immune to CC). Everything else is much easier than the other specs. It's got better burst and better AoE than the other specs. Survivability isn't an issue with the huge cooldown reduction for exhilaration on killing blows, I haven't bothered with kiting anything in a long time. Tagging is much, much easier than the other specs. You've got two ranged abilities without cooldown and no resource cost, and you've got the longest range in the game.

[Spiral Mage]

MM is the best spec for questing by far. It's only downside is with the hard-hitting rares on Argus (they're all immune to CC). Everything else is much easier than the other specs. It's got better burst and better AoE than the other specs. Survivability isn't an issue with the huge cooldown reduction for exhilaration on killing blows, I haven't bothered with kiting anything in a long time. Tagging is much, much easier than the other specs. You've got two ranged abilities without cooldown and no resource cost, and you've got the longest range in the game.

I don't agree with that myself. MM lacks the same kind of on-command AOE and sustained damage SV offers.

[tanksin the enhance shamy]

i always thought bm shoulda been the melee spec and had it been based around buffing your pet and yourself with different attacks...survival feels kinda meh with traps in its rotation

[Deleted]

How a smart person fixed Survival.

Remove Explosive trap and Steel trap from the rotation.
Explosive trap is now a knock up CC tool
Steel trap is now just a froze trap that breaks after 3 seconds of damage.

Lacerate Now lasts for 15 seconds.

You can now do a full mongoose rotation without having lacerate fall off.

There, smoothed out the rotation, it's less clunky and rewards the "max out Mongoose fury" playstyle without all the insane dot juggling.

Anyone claiming for it to be ranged should go back to MM.

[Saulburn]

(...) Half of the hunters seem to love it (...)

Half of the hunters love it? Really? I'd like to see some numbers back this up because I don't quite see half the hunter population walking around with a kayak paddle on their back.

Nothing against you, personally, mate. I just think you're being too nice here.

[Eleccybubb]

Meh I enjoy Survival personally.

Could use some work but I'm glad I finally get to be a Melee Hunter.

[Thage]

Even if it stays melee, it needs changes so it can have an actual direction. The current SV is back to the whole recycle bin garbage, just with melee skills now. It's a disjointed amalgamation of individually interesting, and some redundant, mechanics, that end up fighting against each other and becoming a mess.

This. Melee survival isn't a bad idea in and of itself. It had potential--a unique niche (a hunter who fights in melee and coordinates with his pet), skills that wove you and your pet into working as a cohesive unit in melee, and a good gap-closer. Unfortunately, the final result was a complete mess at 110. Hunter specs in general need a serious second look overall, but Survival's the worst offender of the bunch.

[Eleccybubb]

This. Melee survival isn't a bad idea in and of itself. It had potential--a unique niche (a hunter who fights in melee and coordinates with his pet), skills that wove you and your pet into working as a cohesive unit in melee, and a good gap-closer. Unfortunately, the final result was a complete mess at 110. Hunter specs in general need a serious second look overall, but Survival's the worst offender of the bunch.

To be fair they have tried to fix the clunkiness of it over Legion. It just needs more work for BFA.

Definitely feels smoother than it did in 7.0.

[want my Slimjim]

I like the concept of hunters fighting with spears like they're fighting big game animals more than fighting with duel wield weapons, it's like they're nomadic mammoth hunters which looks asthetically cooler than the latter, I bet it's what blizzard imaging when they decided to make them fight with polearms. They're not just plain rangers. They're hunters. It makes makes more sense to fight with a spear.

Why not just add another 4th spec already? The balancing issues aren't that dramatic. I've played games where class balancing is way worse than wow can ever hope to fuck up.

[Nythiz]

To be fair they have tried to fix the clunkiness of it over Legion. It just needs more work for BFA.

Definitely feels smoother than it did in 7.0.

True, but I'm not sure if that is because of blizzard input or simply the fact that the spec feels better with higher stats. I think the latter seeing as blizzard has barely even touched the spec in 7.0 even though it was practically a brand new concept.

I have to say: I'm a BM/MM main, but the new survival is pretty decent once you get some gear. The moment you have enough haste to push that GCD down to 1.2 seconds or so the rotation starts to smooth out a lot. When you get a good proc rate on the mongoose bites the rotation also becomes a bit better as by the time you refresh your dots you have 3 charges ready to go again.

I mostly just use SV for questing or some EN/ToV/NH/ToS shenanigans, so nothing hard core. But I've got some gear and some legendaries that work well with the spec and it doesn't play as bad as it used to.

I think blizzard just needs to fix a few things.
The spec needs a bit more direction instead of being this halfassed DoT spec with "meh" DoT;
with this clunky Mongoose Fury mechanic with a 1.5 sec GCD instead of 1.0 sec;
overcomplicated and somewhat cluncky Trap system (e.g caltrops and steel trap should change how Explosive Trap work instead of the utility traps and you instantly remove some bloat and add some more flavor that makes sense);
and bloated abilities (e.g raptor strike)

I like the concept of hunters fighting with spears like they're fighting big game animals more than fighting with duel wield weapons, it's like they're nomadic mammoth hunters which looks asthetically cooler than the latter, I bet it's what blizzard imaging when they decided to make them fight with polearms. They're not just plain rangers. They're hunters. It makes makes more sense to fight with a spear.

Why not just add another 4th spec already? The balancing issues aren't that dramatic. I've played games where class balancing is way worse than wow can ever hope to fuck up.

I don't think a 4th spec would make it any better. And why would we get one and not rogues or shamans or paladins? We'll probably see 4th specs on classes eventually when blizzard runs out of other ideas for expansion selling points.

I personally would have prefered Dual Wield. I understand your vision of hunter, but I like the "ranger/trapper/tracker"-concept more where you're dual wielding short swords or daggers.
I feel like a spear or big ass sword would be so cluncky for a trapper/tracker.

[Arrashi]

Return it to MoP version.

[Lightbull]

I'm not naïve enough to ask the dev team to do a complete 180 and go backwards. It would upset the players that do enjoy the spec, and I've never known the developers to completely revert an idea implemented into the game.

Finally, someone with a level head.

Your suggestion isn't that bad. I personally can't see how it fits the class fantasy, but that's subjective.

My suggestion for making a compromise, since ranged Survival was a pretty simple spec, was to add a talent that gave the Hunter access to Explosive Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi Shot, Black Arrow, Serpent Sting, and Lock and Load. Kind of like how Druid affinities work. But, I couldn't see that talent becoming viable, depends on how many people want ranged Survival to be a viable Mythic spec.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I’d much rather they just tweak what we have now then rework it to be a weirder hybrid or make it ranged again.

[God Save The King]

I've always liked the concept of a mixed attacker. Your implementation.. leaves a lot desired, but it's an interesting starting point.

What'd be nice if they opted to add disengage back to SV (they may have, haven't played mine in a while), and mixed with harpoon, it would allow you to cycle between attack styles. I.e. after disengage, ranged attack is increased by X%, and after harpoon, melee is increased by Y%.

I don't think this playstyle would satisfy new SV fans nor old SV fans. It would appeal to someone else entirely.

[Ghost10491]

I've always liked the concept of a mixed attacker. Your implementation.. leaves a lot desired, but it's an interesting starting point.

What'd be nice if they opted to add disengage back to SV (they may have, haven't played mine in a while), and mixed with harpoon, it would allow you to cycle between attack styles. I.e. after disengage, ranged attack is increased by X%, and after harpoon, melee is increased by Y%.

I don't think this playstyle would satisfy new SV fans nor old SV fans. It would appeal to someone else entirely.

I agree. My original concept was that I thought it would be a lot of fun to constantly disengage/harpoon. I like your idea that those two spells would increase your damage as it would still require you to change every few seconds to switch between melee and ranged, without my idea of having to wait a lot of gcds to max damage. I know my idea is very incomplete, what I posted is something I and up with in literally like 10 minutes, I just wanted to know what people thought of e concept. I disagree with people saying it's 2 half assed rotations, with a little more thought I feel like it will just feel like 1 complete rotation. As for people saying it goes against class fantasy, my answer to that, duck class fantasy. If the idea of class fantasy makes class less enjoyable, there's no point. And as for the people saying if you miss old sv just go to mm, you've clearly never played old sv, because current mm is not old a.c.. It was my favorite spec, and they completely got if of it. I did come p with a much more complete mm build to play a lot more like old sv, which I would like to see from blizzard in the future. But in current times, mm is not sv, so stop telling me to settle for less

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My phone auto corrected the shit out of this, but you get the point

[God Save The King]

I agree. My original concept was that I thought it would be a lot of fun to constantly disengage/harpoon. I like your idea that those two spells would increase your damage as it would still require you to change every few seconds to switch between melee and ranged, without my idea of having to wait a lot of gcds to max damage. I know my idea is very incomplete, what I posted is something I and up with in literally like 10 minutes, I just wanted to know what people thought of e concept. I disagree with people saying it's 2 half assed rotations, with a little more thought I feel like it will just feel like 1 complete rotation. As for people saying it goes against class fantasy, my answer to that, duck class fantasy. If the idea of class fantasy makes class less enjoyable, there's no point. And as for the people saying if you miss old sv just go to mm, you've clearly never played old sv, because current mm is not old a.c.. It was my favorite spec, and they completely got if of it. I did come p with a much more complete mm build to play a lot more like old sv, which I would like to see from blizzard in the future. But in current times, mm is not sv, so stop telling me to settle for less

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My phone auto corrected the shit out of this, but you get the point

I was sad because I fell in love with Survival Hunters around BRF, only to discover that they were getting completely changed during Legion. I didn't have much interest in the class after that, so it's sat on the shelf, only leveled and forgotten.

[want my Slimjim]

I don't think a 4th spec would make it any better. And why would we get one and not rogues or shamans or paladins? We'll probably see 4th specs on classes eventually when blizzard runs out of other ideas for expansion selling points.

Make it for all classes then, hunter traps should get fixed and allow us to just drop them like before instead of a forced trap launcher, its great for pvp when you have to strat. But really horrible when at close quarters.

[Nythiz]

Make it for all classes then, hunter traps should get fixed and allow us to just drop them like before instead of a forced trap launcher, its great for pvp when you have to strat. But really horrible when at close quarters.

Well that kinda works with an @Player macro.
I for example have all 3 traps (Freezing, Tar, Explosive) on 3 seperate binds for when I want to launch them from afar.
And then 2 seperate binds for dropping right under me. One bind is:

#showtooltip
/cast  [@Player] Explosive Trap

The other bind is:

#showtooltip
/cast [talent:4/1 @Player]Caltrops
/cast [talent:4/3 @Player]Steel Trap

And those work just fine for my needs, but it could indeed be simplified.

[twistedmynd]

Always thought it would be cool if new survival's mastery did more damage the more stationary the target was.

Like you do 20% additional damage if the target is stationary. You do 10% additional damage if the target is slowed by 50%.

It would at least make traps relevant and part of the rotation sometimes. Would probably piss of a lot of frantic tanks though.