One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet (and to be fair, applies to hunters in general and not just survival) is Craven Strategem. It removes a lot of debuffs on you by using Feign Death.In case of Karazhan, for example, this legendary can remove some of the nasty boss debuffs like Sacred Ground, Garotte and Unstable Mana (not Flame Wreath though). This is huge, especially since this doesn't consume any of the other defensives.Sure, you can't use Wildfire Cluster while using that legendary and need a different slot for it as well. For pug players who don't engage in record-pushing keys (and thus don't need to focus on damage that much), though, this is a huge boon. As long as you have the tier set, you're good to go.
and SV is dogwater in the 10.0 beta
As someone who plays the mediocre Havoc DH I don't see the problem with this. If it wasn't Survival Hunter it would be something else. Somebody has to be on the top.
its literally just the tier set. the moment that goes away, its AoE capacity goes way down. AoE has always been a strong point of the spec pretty much since its current iteration in BFA, the moment the tier set was released it was always going to be this way. next time i'm sure they'll be more careful about how they design around the spec :P
Full disclosure, i've been a Survival Main ever since legion, and have been theorycrafting the spec ever since. i realise my comments may come across as biased, or otherwise "defending" the specs performance. im not trying to be but i'd like to properly inform why our damage is the way it is right now."Possible solution is to further nerf Survival Hunter's AoE capabilities or nerf the way the spec interacts with Wildfire Bomb."Whilst we can agree that the sustained output could take another look, this comment in particular raises questions, the way the spec inherently interacts with WFB is not so much part of the problem, and should not be tampered with. Rather it is our 2-set causing a disproportionate amount of synergy. and even the 2 set alone increases our sustained aoe output by more than most specs 2 and 4 sets combined.In short: the 2 piece procs bombs, this increases the frequency of bombs and the amount of Wildfire Cluster it ends up triggering. Raising the frequency of bombs increases the frequency of Pheromone bombs, which drastically increases the amount of Flanker's Advantage procs. This in turn, again increases the frequency of bombs, because the 2-set relies on Flanker's Advantage to trigger, creating a feedback loop. This feedback loop is further enhanced by haste, giving reducing the base cd of bombs, carve, and increasing the GCD amount per pheromone bomb. We have been no stranger to stacking haste even beyond the 2nd DR breakpoint, but there are limits to how far we would ideally "push" into DRd stats.With the shrouded affix, this is no longer a problem, external haste not only increases your entire haste pool (including your base haste) it also does not diminish at all. For example: having 40% base haste, with 10 stacks of the haste shrouded affix results in 68% haste, rather than the "expected" 60% because the entire haste pool is amplified.This entire interaction on top of our pheromone bomb feedback loop shenanigans is what is causing our immense sustained damage. infact, the interaction is so powerful we give up how we would "normally" play the spec. resulting in us spamming our generator ability, kill command just to bait these procs to stay in the feedback loop, resulting in the degenerate playstyle we have today.to summarize, it is the Frequency of the bombs rather than the quality of the bombs.So, what is the solution then?If Blizzard ultimately decides that SV performance is still too high in keys, they should look into breaking this feedback loop synergy just like they have done with Destruction Warlock and their set interacting with Rain of Chaos. This can easily be achieved by throttling the 2pc in some way, either giving it an ICD or simply moving the proc trigger to RPPM.Breaking this synergy would be an absolutely insane nerf, and the question is, whether tuning this would even be worth the hassle this late into the expansion, in a "bonus/fated tier". Every key component to this synergy is leaving the moment Dragonflight is released, Wildfire Cluster gets disabled, Shrouded as an affix is gone, our set bonus will not compete with lvl 70 gear. (If they don't straight up disable it at max level anyway.) Again, the Spec does not need to change in the way it interacts with bombs, if anything the set bonus needs changing.
Big aoe, 3 button rotation, really don't need a deep dive article about it. Make no mistake, this article reads as nerf plea, especially with the ''solutions'' paragraph when there's nothing to fix really
the post fails to mention the main reason survival is strong, it is because of the 2p set bonus combined with Lego wildfire cluster not the Bomb themselves. Without the set bonus, the dps is kinda meh. This goes for all classes, however if we were to strip all legos and set bonuses of all classes and compare their damage profile, survival is at a lower tier
Blizzard is either incompetent or doing it on purpose, and I'm leaning towards the latter. "Yeah, let's have them have their really good AOE do less damage after 8 targets and not 5" OK? There's no way this isn't on purpose. They don't care about actual balance. They don't even care about population sizes of specs. It's probably a currently-used spec among managers/developers and they don't care.
Damn Affliction 0.6% M+ representation.I wonder why they won't just admit they're wrong and buff the spec or it's tier set.
A detailed written article but clearly forgot to mention the main culprit of their AoE damage being UNCAPPED number of targets Wildfire Bomb hits. Here's the description of that ability...
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What annoys me to no end is that the two easiest dps classes to play are also the ones with the highest damage profile. At least make it a challenge.
Meh, we've got a whole new expansion out in a few months. Let Survival have it's glory days.
The reason is because the balance team did a poor job, like they've been consistently doing through all of Shadowlands
Same old story. Something’s actually fun in this game for not even a year and everyone is crying about it. Get over it - there’s always going to be „better and worse“ classes in specific scenarios like M+, PvP and raiding. Nothing special. The good thing is: You can still see the differences between the good and the bad SV hunters and it actually makes a huge difference. Despite any nerfs, it’s actually showing now who is a good player and who‘s just brain-afk „bomb thrower“. So I thanked Blizz for the nerfs to my class. Now it actually matters how you interact with Serpent Sting for example. You can separate good hunters now from their serpent sting damage on the overall-dmg. When it’s high, he/she most likely did a good job maintaining the dot on multiple targets which got buffed quite heavily. That’s been close to irrelevant in S3, now it isn’t anymore. When the dmg is low (beneath 4./5. place on overall dmg), you found yourself a guy who thought it’s soooo easy because everyone can play it. But can they?By the way: Thanks for the article but you‘re clearly one of the melees who doesn’t get invited. I don’t find it to be fair either but please - don’t mantle your desperation in wrong information. SV hunters weren’t represented in 100% of the dungeon runs of the „TGP“. There have been several teams who chose to pick rogues over SV in Upper, Workshop and Streets. Some teams played double warlock + mage (no hunter). One team even played every dungeon with mage, WL + Frost DK. No hunter. Please don’t spread wrong information just because your life is harder because of our existence. But is that the reason, tho?
It's sort of funny how this article explains how it's not just the damage that makes them valuable, and then the first page of comments is literally people yelling about the damage. Yes, the tier bonus and the AOE is too good. But it's all the other stuff that makes them crazy enough to bring 3-of.
Love it to get kicked from mythic+ as a hunter cause I don’t play survival :D