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Survival Hunter Hero Talent Showdown in The War Within - Pack Leader vs. Sentinel
The War Within
Criado
17/8/2024 em 06:43
por
DoolB
Unsure what Hero Talents to play for Survival Hunter in The War Within? Our Survival Hunter Writer, DoolB, pits both Hero Talent against each other in a variety categories to determine which reigns supreme for the content you're looking to do in the upcoming expansion. Join us as we explore The War Within Survival Hunter!
Not sure what Hero Talents to play for your spec in The War Within? Check out all the released articles in the 'Hero Talent Showdown' series:
Hero Talent Showdowns in The War Within
Blood DK
Frost DK
Unholy DK
Havoc DH
Vengeance DH
Balance Druid
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Restoration Druid
Augmentation Evoker
Devastation Evoker
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Marksmanship Hunter
Survival Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Frost Mage
Brewmaster Monk
Mistweaver Monk
Windwalker Monk
Holy Paladin
Protection Paladin
Retribution Paladin
Discipline Priest
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Outlaw Rogue
Subtlety Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Enhancement Shaman
Restoration Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Demonology Warlock
Destruction Warlock
Arms Warrior
Fury Warrior
Protection Warrior
For more information on Hero Talents coming in the War Within, check out our Hero Talents Overview.
The War Within Hero Talents Overview
Survival Hunter in the War Within
With a new expansion comes a brand new system—for the War Within each spec is getting access to two "Hero Talent Trees" that they can freely swap between at any time. These Hero Talent Trees are meant to evoke important and Warcraft-exclusive fantasy archetypes. In our case, these trees are Pack Leader (shoutout to Rexxar!) and Sentinel, a Darnassian military branch. This system is reported as being an evergreen feature, so you can expect to grow more familiar with these Hero Talent trees over the next few years.
During this article we'll briefly go over what you can expect to see on either tree, each tree's strengths and weaknesses, and what sort of improvements could be made for each tree. Finally, we'll discuss what sort of gameplay you'll have overall as a Survival Hunter and help you decide to play our beloved spec!
Hero Talent Showdown: Pack Leader vs. Sentinel
As mentioned above, as a Survival Hunter you have access to two Hero talent trees: Pack Leader and Sentinel.
Pack Leader
focuses more on the dynamics of you and your pet fighting in a deadly tandem, attacking your target with coordination. After commanding your pet with
Comando para Matar
you follow up with an attack of your own from
Caçada Feroz
, which prepared your pet to follow up with a Basic Attack from
Coordenação do Bando
. The entire hero tree focuses on these interactions, with various bonuses for maintaining this rhythm.
Sentinel
on the other hand focuses entirely on the Hunter themselves, utilizing Arcane magic to wear your target down. The entire hero tree revolves around
Sentinela
, a debuff you apply to your targets by damaging them that slowly ticks down the entire fight while you continually build stacks. You also call a temporary magical owl with
Tempestade Lunar
to bombard your enemy with lunar magic and strengthen your own attacks.
Pack Leader
Strengths
Weaknesses
While Pack Leader is very flavorful for Survival's class fantasy of coordinated attacks with your bonded beasts, that is unfortunately where most of the praise stops. The way it introduces changes to your rotation since the latest tuning is
very
unintuitive, to the point where you are essentially just playing a melee version of Beast Mastery without a functional Focus bar. Additionally, it is a bit weaker both offensively and defensively compared to Sentinel.
Mechanically the hero tree revolves around your
Comando para Matar
, your generator, empowering your next
Comando para Matar
, causing you to attack alongside your pet with
Caçada Feroz
, and this is where some of the issues arise.
While the
intended
loop includes other bells and whistles that create cool synergies such as
Coordenação do Bando
and
Ímpeto Frenético
working together to trigger
Ataque Furioso
, these interactions are almost entirely overshadowed by the self contained
Comando para Matar
+
Caçada Feroz
loop, dealing incredibly high damage for a near-spammable generator ability without any input of a spender ability.
Simply put, A rotation shouldn't give payoff to simply spamming your generator, but that is where Pack Leader is at now.
Sentinel
Strengths
Weaknesses
Sentinel is very strong across the board. Its damage output is high in every situation and
Sem Olhar Para Trás
provides a bunch of passive defensive value just by doing your normal rotation, and unlike Pack Leader, this is a very intuitive hero talent tree to learn, leaving room for the intended mechanics of survival itself to breathe.
The bulk of Sentinel revolves around passive damage done through
Sentinela
that operates on its own. However, the capstone
Tempestade Lunar
can realistically be annoying to use for two reasons. There is no built-in in-game cooldown or availability tracking for this and
Tempestade Lunar
relies on a small, hard to see ring on the ground (shoutout
Espíritos Selvagens
) to do a lot of the damage, which means movement can lower your output.
Furthermore, albeit a slightly more technical quirk which we'll get into later in this article,
Tempestade Lunar
triggers on the
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
direct damage event, rather than the succesful cast event which can have some undesired effects.
What's Changed?
Pack Leader
Outside of tuning, nothing has changed about Pack Leader functionality wise since our first glance. However, these tuning changes have had massive impacts, with the highlights being the following two fixes:
- Vicious Hunt damage increased by 50%.
- Fixed an issue preventing Flanking Strike and Kill Command from scaling with Hunter’s Mastery.
While these changes were very necessary for Pack Leader to be brought up closer to Sentinel in terms of performance, these two changes combined have made it so that the damage of
Comando para Matar
paired with
Caçada Feroz
outcompetes the damage of our typical builder-spender loop that consists of
Comando para Matar
and
Golpe do Raptor
, since no involvement of the latter is necessary to complete the loop.
With that in mind, it is perhaps important to note here that because we share Pack Leader with our Beast Mastery friends,
Comando para Matar
serves a different
mechanical
purpose for both specs. To Survival, it is a generator, to Beast Mastery, it is a spender. The reason this is important is because you cannot spend without generating, but the opposite is not true. So even though Beast Mastery only uses their spender ability to complete the very same ability loop, it still requires involvement from their generator,
Disparo Farpado
to be sustainable.
We'll dive into some numbers, effects, and potential solutions in the Feedback section further below.
Sentinel
Aside from a few tuning changes, not much has changed here, However, the keystone
Sentinela
was recently changed to tick down every 2 seconds instead of 1 second, with the damage being doubled to compensate. This does have some implications with the rest of your nodes that rely on the frequency of
Sentinela
, such as
Sem Olhar Para Trás
or
Pulso Revigorante
. Otherwise, this tree is the same its always been.
And the Winner Is...
Class Fantasy & Visuals: Sentinel (Winner)
Starting off with a Sentinel win by very close margins, Sentinel does a fairly decent job at portraying your character using power granted through the Sentinel hero tree with clear usage of lunar magic—
Sem Olhar Para Trás
and
Tempestade Lunar
.
Until now, Sentinel thematically applies primarily to Night Elf (and Worgen) Hunters and not much else, given Sentinel's close ties with the Darnassian military. Although lunar magic isn't reserved for Sentinels only, it would still (as far as our limited lore-knowledge is concerned) look a bit confusing to portray the Sentinels on some of the other alliance races, let alone horde races, so it may perhaps take some used to. At least for now, it appears as if Night Elves can pull off the fantasy and theme by far the best.
Pack Leader is more racially agnostic, however, the hero tree itself falls flat at emulating key figures that fit the Pack Leader fantasy such as Rexxar. Visually, Pack Leader has nearly nothing going for it—outside of a 5-10% uptime secondary pet on a currently very weak choice node:
Fera Oportuna
. You really can't tell you're a Pack Leader by looking at your character in action, which is very disappointing. This also means that while the fantasty itself is great, with barely anything to portray the fantasy it can very well feel as if the fantasy isn't even there to begin with. You can hit the toggler buttons below to see some of the visuals!
Sentinel Showcase
Outside of
Sem Olhar Para Trás
Sentinel has a consistent colour scheme and theme.
Pack Leader Showcase
Unfortunately, the second pet is the only visual effect within Pack Leader. It is currently tied to a 5-10% uptime choice node talent.
Fun & Rewarding Gameplay: Sentinel (Winner)
Sentinel wins this one by technicality alone. Neither of our (
intended
) hero trees impact our gameplay very much at all. But Sentinel definitely impacts the gameplay more than Pack Leader as you need to play around the capstone,
Tempestade Lunar
. Because we can hold onto our second
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
charge until the coooldown of
Tempestade Lunar
ends, we can trigger it more frequently than we would if we just threw
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
it is available. However, this can veer in the direction of obnoxious as your DPS does depend on the target(s) staying in
Tempestade Lunar
. On top of that, the cooldown of
Tempestade Lunar
can be hard to track without WeakAuras. With that said, it is definitely rewarding to properly time your
Tempestade Lunar
and enjoy the huge damage.
Now, once we start to consider the recent changes to Pack Leader and the likely unintended side effects of
Comando para Matar
becoming a primary damage button, this is where things get a little more disappointing for Pack Leader.
As it stands, Pack Leader turns your entire rotation upside-down, and hitting
Comando para Matar
as often as you can while still hitting your
Ponta da Lança
spenders undermines the entire rotation that resulted from the survival rework. The
Comando para Matar
and
Golpe do Raptor
foundation? Gone. Weaving your powerful abilities such as
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
between your foundational spells to use with
Ponta da Lança
? Gone. Focus management? Gone. While Fun is subjective, all the rewarding gameplay is effectively removed as long as this sort of gameplay remains optimal.
Difficulty: Pack Leader (Winner)
Difficulty wise, Pack Leader wins out at it is dramatically easier to play. Don't get us wrong, Sentinel with its
Tempestade Lunar
talent isn't exactly difficult at all to stack onto your default rotation, but as we mentioned above, Pack Leader takes apart the fundamentals of your rotation by devolving it into spamming
Comando para Matar
, taking away any of the focus and
Ponta da Lança
gameplay.
Defensiveness & Utility: Sentinel (Winner)
Sentinel has a powerful passive defensive,
Sem Olhar Para Trás
. It gives you a constantly recharging max health based shield, which is great for a few reasons. As it's always refilling itself (as long as you are doing damage), it stacks up a health buffer whenever you are not taking any damage, and its great against rot damage, which Hunter has traditionally struggled with (which is even more prevalent after the nerf to
Sede do Predador
). Hunter also enjoys a very large health pool, which works great with this defensive as it is max health based. Finally, you do not need to think about using it at all—it is entirely passive.
Before we discuss Pack Leader's defensive node, we do want to highlight the potential usefulness of
Presa Encurralada
. With The War Within's reduction to melee range, being able to regularly flex outside of melee range can be invaluable for certain group compositions or boss mechanics.
Presa Encurralada
lets you get an entire extra 5 yards on all your melee abilities very frequently. This can even couple with
Aspecto da Águia
! Often times the best defensive is not getting hit at all, so you may see some serious value from this node as the expansion goes on. Unfortunately, Sentinel also has access to
Aspecto da Águia
, which can bring the range flex down in value.
Defensively, Pack Leader has
Regeneração do Covil
, which is effectively an emergency HoT when you use your main defensives,
Aspecto da Tartaruga
and
Lei da Selva
. this can drastically improve your effective health over a short timespan, but it does not provide
any
effective health from a single large blow, which tends to be more of a limitation when pushing extremely high Mythic+ keys.
We believe Sentinel sneaks ahead due to its passive and versatile nature of a stacking absorb shield.
Leveling: Pack Leader (Winner)
Pack Leader is the winner when it comes to leveling as its competition deals damage through
Sentinela
which can take a few moments to build up and ticks down once every two seconds. Pack Leader augments your normal gameplay rotation and can even speed up AoE farming with
Presas Dispersas
. We didn't mention this above as its not entirely relevant to your personal defenses, but
Regeneração do Covil
greatly increases the health gained through
Curar Ajudante
which makes your pet effectively immortal, which in turn lets you solo many things other classes could struggle with.
Mythic+: Sentinel (Winner)
Currently, Sentinel is convincingly ahead tuning wise compared to Pack Leader, on top of having arguably stronger defensives in a mythic+ environment. The Single Target gap in an aoe build compared to sentinel is around ~8%, and while the
Comando para Matar
spam rotation does allow for neglecting some of our spender-related talent nodes in favour of AoE talent nodes, as a survival hunter our AoE damage doesn't come with a massive Single Target cost to begin with. With that in mind, our Pack Leader AoE potential extracts very little benefit out of the
Comando para Matar
spam rotation. (which is probably a good thing from a gameplay perspective).
Additionally, without any modifiers to
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
and the lack of other AoE damage effects, the Pack Leader hero tree currently provides very little aoe output outside of
Uivo do Bando
and
Presas Dispersas
. On top of this, unlike our beast mastery friends survival cannot convert additional
Comando para Matar
procs from effects such as
Ímpeto Frenético
into AoE damage as efficiently, leaving Pack Leader at a significant AoE disadvantage of nearly
20%
compared to Sentinel, which is simply too much to give up.
Some downsides to consider with Sentinel is that it has unavoidable and random mob CC nodes in
Captura
or
Atilho
which can be annoying in dungeons or perhaps lethal if a mob ends up rooted by
Captura
, making it temporarily immune to potential knockbacks. Additionally,
Tempestade Lunar
is a large source of your damage, and mobs may have to be moved out in favour of repositioning or kiting.
Raid: Sentinel (Winner)
Currently, Sentinel is ahead tuning wise compared to Pack Leader. by about to ~9% in single target, which is generally the most important damage metric in a raid. With that said, the buff to
Uivo do Bando
does give Pack Leader some hefty crit scaling potential, especially during our cooldowns when paired with
Ponta de Lança
, but it is unlikely we'll be able to reach impressive levels of crit rates without neglecting other important stats within the first season.
Defensively, the upfront effective health from Sentinel's defensives is less appealing in raids than it is in mythic+. Even on Mythic difficulty raids, unavoidable mechanics rarely hit hard enough to one-shot anyone through a defensive. Something else to consider is that Raid bosses tend to move less than Mythic+ packs, so
Tempestade Lunar
will be less annoying to optimize.
Best Overall: Sentinel (Winner)
With current tuning we believe Sentinel will be played for all forms of competitive content, perhaps with the exception of PvP. It has the strongest damage output, it has the strongest defensive available to our Hero trees, and on top of that is marginally more visually impressive. The only downside is that
Tempestade Lunar
can be annoying to play around and play with, but it has enough uptime that you will probably get over it due to the output of Sentinel.
Hero Talent Feedback
Pack Leader
Pack Leader is mostly in need of some extra tuning. It's weaker compared to Sentinel offensively and falls short defensively, so it's hard to justify using it at all compared to your other option. On top of numerically falling short, it negatively impacts your gameplay and it doesn't do much to impact your visuals, which seems to against the entire point of hero trees in general. One of the most common thematic pieces of feedback for Pack Leader would the entire lack of the "Pack" or other visuals, especially for Survival. There is only one talent on the tree that summons additional beasts (
Fera Oportuna
) and it is extremely weak—at its most generous you're summoning an extra pet once a minute that makes three very weak attacks and then leaves, and refuses to elaborate.
Although it is a little late to change any fundamentals this close to launch, some examples might have been for one of the talent nodes to summon a Dire Beast like the
Repercussões Atrozes
azerite trait used to do. it definitely felt fairly unique! Even if its damage output was quite low, it had a reasonable (visual) uptime. Perhaps
Fera Oportuna
could be tied to a higher frequency ability such as
Ataque Flanqueante
instead, allowing us to trigger it much more frequently. Furthermore, Other talents such as
Uivo do Bando
and
Ímpeto Frenético
could perhaps use a subtle visual or sound effect.
Finally, perhaps more importantly some tuning has recently hit the beta servers that destabilized the hero talent tree quite a bit:
Vicious Hunt damage increased by 50%.
Howl of the Pack critical strike damage bonus increased to 7% (was 5%).
Scattered Prey’s Butchery damage increase increased to 40% (was 25%).
Scattered Prey’s damage buff is applied every cast (was every other cast).
Fixed an issue preventing Flanking Strike and Kill Command from scaling with Hunter’s Mastery.
First of all, these were much needed changes to help Pack Leader perform closer to Sentinel. However, some of these changes lead to some unexpected gameplay.
Caçada Feroz
triggers on
Comando para Matar
, both of which are buffed substantially from their respective fixes. So much so that it ends up being favourable to cast
Comando para Matar
over a typical focus spender. While, the buff to
Uivo do Bando
does
counteracts this a
little bit
considering that we need
Coordenação do Bando
paired with
Ataques Selvagens
to reliably maintain
Uivo do Bando
at lower base crit rates. However, this balance shifts as we raise our crit strike chances to the point where we no longer need
Coordenação do Bando
to maintain
Uivo do Bando
for at least the majority of an encounter.
The result of this is that a rotation emerged that abuses the fact that
Caçada Feroz
requires only your generator,
Comando para Matar
to operate, reinforcing this with specialized talent builds revolving around pressing
Comando para Matar
, and ignoring
Golpe do Raptor
/
Mordida de Mangusto
outside of it serving as a filler. The resulting performance of this "build" and "playstyle" is quite frankly concerning when comparing it to the likely intended playstyle of Survival. The toggler buttons below include simulations running the
Comando para Matar
spam rotation and the Default rotation in their respective ideal builds, and we can already see the effects of
Comando para Matar
spam rotations paying off.
KC spam rotation
This is an image of the
Comando para Matar
spam rotation in action, with a whopping 99
Comando para Matar
casts on average. Because you plain and simply spam
Comando para Matar
by following this rotation, Focus and
Ponta da Lança
are irrelevant.
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/5JP4qkwFzeVCBLRq84euqq
if it weren't for the
Golpe do Raptor
you'd never know this snippet comes from a Survival rotation!
Default rotation
This is an image of our default rotation as we know it. It properly manages Focus and
Ponta da Lança
, but falls short numerically compared to spamming
Comando para Matar
.
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/fRJevsuMUzZstYd1y7bHBu
If you are uncertain of what is going on in the above screenshots and links, they show simulated numbers of both rotations, with the
Comando para Matar
rotation already pulling ahead while Ignoring any nuance of the spec: you can simply spam
Comando para Matar
and put out respectable numbers, even higher than "proper" play where you pay attention to resources.
There is actually a fairly simple solution to this—provided that the proposed change is in fact easy to implement—
Caçada Feroz
needs involvement from our main spender. This is already how it works for Beast Mastery, and in order for Pack Leader to function similarly (and not devolve into generator spam), we strongly suggest
Caçada Feroz
be retooled for us so that the loop and resulting payoff cannot be fulfilled by simply spamming
Comando para Matar
, our generator:
Since there is no visual for
Caçada Feroz
, this could still read as, and portray the pet striking in coordination with you, the hunter instead, while also stopping the
Comando para Matar
abuse. This stays true for both inside and outside of
Ataque Coordenado
. The latter is important because
Ataque em Bando
could otherwise skip the spender requirement given that
Caçada Feroz
is always active during
Ataque Coordenado
as well as the fact that our spender still relies on our generator while the opposite is not true.
In any case, there are many different options Blizzard could pursue here to fix the potential
Comando para Matar
spam issue, as well as perhaps some more subtle changes to make Pack Leader more appealing numerically and visually. We're excited to see what happens!
Sentinel
Although we're unsure what the expected tuning level of a hero talent tree should be, Sentinel, on the other hand feels very powerful, and Mechanically in harmony with Survival itself. The way it feels and plays is honestly more or less fine where it is now. Although, we do have a few points of feedback for Sentinel as well.
First, we really hope that
Tempestade Lunar
is given some sort of in-game cooldown tracker or visual trigger, as this can be very tricky to maximize without external tools such as WeakAuras.
And secondly, it would be wonderful if the trigger for
Tempestade Lunar
could be moved towards a successful cast of
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
(which appears to be the case for Marksmanship's
Tiro Rápido
), rather than the direct damage event of
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
. The latter feels very sluggish, and leaves you having to consider
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
's travel time to truly attempt to play around the (hidden) cooldown mechanic. This is especially noticeable on bosses with an incredibly large hitbox, even when in melee range. An example boss would be something like Volcoross, where the activation can delay for up to 4 seconds thanks to stacking
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
's travel time on top of the owl-projectile's travel time. You can see some visual examples below, with Marksmanship on the left and Survival on the right. As you can see, the former
Tempestade Lunar
happens immediately while the latter takes a while to activate.
Base survival hunter Gameplay & Talents
Survival Hunter received a very extensive rework going into the War Within, so perhaps it's a blessing that both of our Hero talents following the
intended
playstyles are relatively simple to understand and don't impact the rotation drastically. The quick summary of our rework is more of a focus on
Tiro Explosivo
and
Bomba de Fogo Indômito
, more bonuses and effects on
Comando para Matar
, and finally a brand new mechanic/effective resource for us to pay attention to in
Ponta da Lança
. You're still a melee DPS and your main loop of building with
Comando para Matar
and spending with
Golpe do Raptor
/
Mordida de Mangusto
is still around.
With the new gameplay loop doubling down on efficient resource management (Focus and
Ponta da Lança
usage) it may be too complex for particularly intensive Hero talent trees. You'll need to make sure you're using
Ponta da Lança
on all of your strongest abilities, while making sure you also don't waste Focus generation or overcap your
Ponta da Lança
stacks as well.
Should You Play survival hunter in the War Within?
We highly encourage you to play Survival Hunter in The War Within. The new rework is extremely fluid, very fun, and its looking to be quite powerful. There are so many exciting things to learn about the new spec, so we hope you don't let two slightly less flashy hero trees dissuade you. Our spec received a ton of quality life changes (our specialization tree is very cheap now and
Arpão
/
Aspecto da Águia
are baseline), we received a host of defensive buffs (greatly reduced cooldown AND a second charge on
Lei da Selva
, on top of
Maestria: Vínculo Espiritual
), and as we mentioned earlier it's just an extremely fun spec to play.
Hero Talent Guides for the War Within Launch
Our Hero Talent guides provide a comprehensive overview comparing your two Hero Talent options for your spec. Get recommendations for Hero Talents including full talent builds for a variety of content. Learn how to optimize your spec with rotation and gearing advice that let's you harness the full potential of your Hero Talents.
Blood DKFrost DKUnholy DK
Havoc DHVengeance DH
Balance DruidFeral DruidGuardian DruidRestoration Druid
Aug EvokerDevastation EvokerPreservation Evoker
BM HunterMM HunterSurvival Hunter
Arcane MageFire MageFrost Mage
Brewmaster MonkMistweaver MonkWindwalker Monk
Holy PaladinProtection PaladinRetribution Paladin
Discipline PriestHoly PriestShadow Priest
Assassination RogueOutlaw RogueSubtlety Rogue
Elemental ShamanEnhance ShamanRestoration Shaman
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