Blizzard
Greetings, travelers!
In the next beta build you're going to see a familiar ability in your spellbook: Carve! The ability is in a pretty raw state at the moment and we're going to continue to iterate on it if this version doesn't feel right. We'd love to hear about your experiences on Beta after playing with it.
Carve:
- 30 Focus cost. 6 second cooldown (reduced by Haste).
- A sweeping attack that strikes all enemies in front of you for Physical damage. Reduces the remaining cooldown on Wildfire Bomb by 1.0 sec for each target hit, up to 5.
Please be aware that Carve doesn't yet have full talent support. In a future build, things such as
Birds of Prey, or
Shrapnel Bomb from
Wildfire Infusion, will interact with Carve.
Butchery will likely be a Carve replacement, and get tuned accordingly.
We want to give Survival a clear path to take when there are many enemies, whether that's a group of raptor hatchlings, or a double-pull of trolls in Atal'dazar.
Serpent Sting and
Wildfire Bomb don't quite fill that space -- applying
Serpent Sting to more than ~3 enemies (without
Hydra's Bite) is often more frustrating than it is fun, and
Wildfire Bomb's cooldown prevents it from being “the AoE button”.
Survival has a variety of AoE tools through talents, and Carve should add a better foundation for those talents to build around. By reducing
Wildfire Bomb's cooldown it gives you enough to do that spreading
Serpent Stings to numerous targets is far less necessary. It also interacts strongly with the Guerilla Tactics talent, so all of the level 30 talents have a similar level of impact on how you AoE. The short cooldown is there so that your AOE rotation becomes weaving in your other buttons –
Serpent Sting,
Flanker's Advantage ,
Wildfire Bomb, etc – in between Carves, instead of just pushing it repeatedly.
Separately, we have a quality-of-life change for
Hydra's Bite that will arrive in an upcoming build. With Hydra's Bite talented,
Serpent Sting will prefer to select additional nearby targets that are not already affected by
Serpent Sting. This should make it far less frustrating to try to apply
Serpent Sting to a whole pack of mobs.
Again, we're still iterating on the specifics of Carve, and we greatly appreciate your feedback on how this version plays. Thank you!