Patch 11.0.5 (happy 20 years WoW!!) brings some moderate changes to Hunter, some nice buffs to the Pack Leader Hero Tree, and a pretty substantial revamp of Survival's AoE kit. Most of these changes address a very prominent point of feedback for Survival —many players feel that our AoE GCD economy is very busy and feels almost too full. Before this patch much of our AoE loop involved properly managing your
(and thus
) on top of optimizing your
which relies on proper
usage with
, as well as other a few powerful abilities with short cooldowns. This leads to a very, very full rotation where it entirely eclipses other potential appealing talents or builds.
Down below, we'll discuss how the 11.0.5 changes impact the gameplay and overall feel of the spec.
Deathblow
Starting off with a deceptively simple addition to the Hunter class tree for 11.0.5 is the brand new talent:
. This talent standardizes a
reset mechanic across the class instead of each specialization having its own version of a reset, which in our case has been
. This change is interesting as it can open up interesting design spaces across spec trees, hero trees, and forms of borrowed power such as tier-sets or cantrips.
is already a staple in our rotation, so an effectively baseline proc built off of that can feel nice.
However... we do have a concern with this talent switcheroo. Since
replaces the old talent (Improved Kill Shot—a 25% critical damage amp to Kill sHot), the 25% crit damage bonus is lost entirely.
has been changed to increase the chance to gain a
proc
to 15%, which is the same 15% chance we have always had before these changes through the old Sic'Em talent.
Effectively, a lot of power was possibly inadvertently stripped from
(and put into
).
is now effectively just a 5% increased proc rate in Single Target, while also not having the increased Crit damage bonus we used to have under the old talent combination for either Single Target or Cleave. Basically, equally frequent
s, but less damaging.
More importantly, this puts the value of
at the lower end, which is perhaps less ideal given its position in the talent tree. Perhaps the old Improved Kill Shot can be merged back into the new
to keep some of the value of this talent node intact! Perhaps
can simply have a slightly raised proc rate to offset the raw damage loss, or perhaps this simply isn't even that big of a deal given that there are a bunch of other cool changes to offset this damage loss anyway!
AoE GCD Economy
As touched on earlier, prior to patch 11.0.5 our AoE gameplay loop is extraordinarily busy. You're managing several powerful and short cooldowns, you're managing your Focus, and you're managing your signature
mechanic. A lot of your abilities have cooldown reduction for other abilities baked in, which while very satisfying to learn and master, can lead to a very hectic situation where you're spinning a few different plates at once. Our current optimal AoE loop is so busy in fact, it completely pushes out talents such as
or
because you simply
do not have the time or GCDs to press these abilities.
Patch 11.0.5 addresses this concern with a rather significant change to
. Prior to this patch,
had a 9 second hasted cooldown and 3 charges. Now, it has a 15 second hasted cooldown with a single charge and deals far more damage per cast. Additionally, to offset the greatly increased cooldown,
has been buffed from 1 second CDR per target hit to 3 second CDR per target hit to compensate. This means that for every time you press
(and you're in an average sized AoE pull) you're effectively getting an entire
for free instead of a more granular approach.
On top of these changes,
has also received a large revamp—instead of causing your next
/
to cleave (its function prior to this patch), it will cause your
to inflict a very powerful bleed on all targets hit. While this bleed does great damage, it also greatly increases your stacks of
, which we previously struggled to activate. It's free attack speed!
In addition to the baseline buffs to
, you're essentially getting the damage and the cooldown reduction effect of a handful of butcheries in a single GCD, while also no longer having to manage
through the dramatically more GCD-intensive pre-rework
, which greatly frees up your GCDs to use other abilities.
Finally,
had its channel time reduced by 25%, and its damage increased by 25%, giving it much more "oomph" while occupying less GCDs, which was its primary weakness. The total damage feels much more in line with the amount of time you spend channeling now. In addition to the changes to
,
also received small redesign, generating
charges instead of
charges. Overall, these changes make
feel much more straightforward, with much more room to breathe in an otherwise GCD-locked spec.
All of these changes greatly frees up our time and GCDs in AoE, which in turn frees up space to consider other AoE builds as well as lets you take a more measured pace at managing your
.
Single Target Butchery
The
buffs and changes certainly aren't just AoE changes, however. The new base damage of
now actually exceeds that of
. Our current
and some hero talent nodes such as
tip the scales towards
, but even more powerful nodes such as
and
tip the scales back towards
.
Using Cooldown-based AoE abilities in this manner for Single Target isn't exactly unheard of. For instance, Feral Druid's
has been used in Single Target rotations for a while now, and even within our own kit,
is a staple ability for both AoE and Single Target rotations.
Although powerful, the whole butchery-kit consists of
+
+
and will take us 3 talent points to obtain, it will likely end up competing for other talent-sets such as
+
or
+
to try and make its way into our Single Target builds, which can definitely be a very interesting situation for buildcrafting!
Pack Leader Viability
While at first glance the Pack Leader changes may seem nothing more than a flat 20% tuning node slapped on to the tree with Survival specific changes to
and
, but there's a bit more going on here under the hood. As we mentioned earlier,
is changed to a far heavier hitting ability with a longer cooldown. Pack Leader has a choice node talent offering you
. The cooldown reduction that
provides here is very invaluable as it greatly increases the frequency of your
—more frequent
results in higher uptime of (potentially)
-buffed
AND through
, more frequent usage of
. As you can tell, this engaging gameplay loop of CDR meshes very well with the mechanical identity of the spec and, unlike previous iterations, doesn't overwhelm your GCD economy or mental load.
These synergies allow Pack Leader to build
heavily into a
based bleed build, which could very well shape Pack Leader's identity for Survival Hunters. Sentinel can still utilise
fairly well, but stays more true to the more traditional
and
gameplay.
Final Thoughts
While some miscellaneous quirks still exist, such as
dropping you down the platform (and kind of resulting in death) on
specifically static bosses such as
and
. As well as our noisy
owl-friend being invisible to tanks. (can we pretty please teach our owls to slowly follow our targets like
?)—We are overall
very happy with the changes and constant iteration and response to feedback Survival Hunter has received over the past months! The impacts of the exciting changes coming our way in Patch 11.0.5 appear to make Pack Leader much more competitive with Sentinel, ontop of making our AoE rotation dramatically less GCD-intensive. Our rotation plays incredibly well and our talent synergies are in a great shape.
Honestly, Survival Hunter looks incredibly fun and more intuitive to get into than ever! If you have been itching to play a new alt (or main?) in 11.0.5 then you should definitely consider Survival Hunter!
