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
Kill Command (and thus
Tip of the Spear) on top of optimizing your
Wildfire Bomb which relies on proper
Butchery usage with
Frenzy Strikes, 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:
Deathblow. This talent standardizes a
Kill Shot reset mechanic across the class instead of each specialization having its own version of a reset, which in our case has been
Sic 'Em. 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.
Kill Command 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
Deathblow replaces the old talent (Improved Kill Shot—a 25% critical damage amp to Kill sHot), the 25% crit damage bonus is lost entirely.
Sic 'Em has been changed to increase the chance to gain a
Deathblow 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
Sic 'Em (and put into
Deathblow).
Sic 'Em 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
Kill Shots, but less damaging.
More importantly, this puts the value of
Sic 'Em 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
Sic 'Em to keep some of the value of this talent node intact! Perhaps
Deathblow 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
Tip of the Spear 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
Sic 'Em or
Fury of the Eagle 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
Butchery. Prior to this patch,
Butchery 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,
Frenzy Strikes 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
Butchery (and you're in an average sized AoE pull) you're effectively getting an entire
Wildfire Bomb for free instead of a more granular approach.
On top of these changes,
Merciless Blow has also received a large revamp—instead of causing your next
Raptor Strike/
Mongoose Bite to cleave (its function prior to this patch), it will cause your
Butchery to inflict a very powerful bleed on all targets hit. While this bleed does great damage, it also greatly increases your stacks of
Bloodseeker, which we previously struggled to activate. It's free attack speed!
In addition to the baseline buffs to
Butchery, 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
Raptor Strike through the dramatically more GCD-intensive pre-rework
Merciless Blow, which greatly frees up your GCDs to use other abilities.
Finally,
Fury of the Eagle 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
Fury of the Eagle,
Ruthless Marauder also received small redesign, generating
Tip of the Spear charges instead of
Wildfire Bomb charges. Overall, these changes make
Fury of the Eagle 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
Tip of the Spear.
Single Target Butchery
The
Butchery buffs and changes certainly aren't just AoE changes, however. The new base damage of
Butchery now actually exceeds that of
Raptor Strike. Our current
Lightless Scavenger's Necessities and some hero talent nodes such as
Wild Attacks tip the scales towards
Raptor Strike, but even more powerful nodes such as
Scattered Prey and
Merciless Blow tip the scales back towards
Butchery.
Using Cooldown-based AoE abilities in this manner for Single Target isn't exactly unheard of. For instance, Feral Druid's
Brutal Slash has been used in Single Target rotations for a while now, and even within our own kit,
Wildfire Bomb is a staple ability for both AoE and Single Target rotations.
Although powerful, the whole butchery-kit consists of
Frenzy Strikes+
Butchery+
Merciless Blow and will take us 3 talent points to obtain, it will likely end up competing for other talent-sets such as
Mongoose Bite+
Bloody Claws or
Sic 'Em+
Sulfur-Lined Pockets 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
Wild Attacks and
Howl of the Pack, but there's a bit more going on here under the hood. As we mentioned earlier,
Butchery is changed to a far heavier hitting ability with a longer cooldown. Pack Leader has a choice node talent offering you
Covering Fire. The cooldown reduction that
Wildfire Bomb provides here is very invaluable as it greatly increases the frequency of your
Butchery—more frequent
Butchery results in higher uptime of (potentially)
Cull the Herd-buffed
Merciless Blow AND through
Frenzy Strikes, more frequent usage of
Wildfire Bomb. 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
Merciless Blow based bleed build, which could very well shape Pack Leader's identity for Survival Hunters. Sentinel can still utilise
Merciless Blow fairly well, but stays more true to the more traditional
Wildfire Bomb and
Raptor Strike gameplay.
Final Thoughts
While some miscellaneous quirks still exist, such as
Harpoon dropping you down the platform (and kind of resulting in death) on
specifically static bosses such as
Rasha'nan and
Voidstone Monstrosity. As well as our noisy
Lunar Storm owl-friend being invisible to tanks. (can we pretty please teach our owls to slowly follow our targets like
Entropic Rift?)—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!