Survival Hunter 12.0 Retrospective
With the current season nearly ending and 12.1 about to hit PTR soon (tm), we want to take today to discuss Survival's performance, design, and some actionable feedback we've gathered over the last few months. Thankfully, Survival has been in a great spot this expansion! The gameplay itself is generally fun, we have solid viability across Raid and M+, and our population is in a spot far higher than we historically have been. Our fantasy continues to iterate on the roots planted in the melee rework more than 10 years ago, so it's nice to see things naturally progressing.
Single target gameplay
One of the design goals of Midnight was to streamline specs, remove bloat, and make things more digestible in a World (of Warcraft) without external tools. Like many specs, Survival lost some active abilities, buttons were compressed, and mechanics removed. The abilities we lost were mostly fine to lose as they didn't really impact our gameplay too much, generally being buttons you pressed when they were available without any noteworthy synergy (other than Butchery existing purely as a tool for more bomb spam).
However, many players in the Survival community believe that we may have lost a bit too much all at once, especially in single-target. Outside of using your cooldowns, your single-target loop is a three button back-and-forth. Many feel that is far too simple, and a lot different than what the spec has been since 2016 and on. This can start to feel routine, especially as we lack any sort of proc at all to introduce variance. It's so routine in fact, that our single-target Pack Leader rotation can be mapped entirely out on a spreadsheet, as there is absolutely no mechanical RNG at all to respond to.
This is less of a problem in AoE, as one of our main cooldowns, Boomstick, has a greatly reduced cooldown in AoE and is effectively a fourth rotational button, and one with a positional requirement too!
We believe adding a new ability intended for single-target would go a long way at keeping the gameplay exciting and adding something to pay attention to. There are a wealth of things to pull from Survival's history for this much-needed ability, with plenty of options to seamlessly fit into our long standing spec identity and current talent tree. A very frequently suggested idea is an active DoT with a short duration and moderate cooldown and resource cost, with a proc involved for the cost/cooldown. This would prevent us from becoming an AoE tab-targeting multi-dotter, while still giving us something to fun to react to and pay attention to in single-target. Whether this is a 2004 throwback with Lacerate, or a 2018 reference with Serpent Sting/Viper's Venom, we would be thrilled as a community for the addition.
Dual Wield vs Two Handed Weapons
Our fighting style has been a rollercoaster since pre-patch. We've gone from exclusively two-handed fighting, to dual-wielding being marginally worse, to dual-wielding utterly eclipsing two-handed the entire expansion. There are a few tuning knobs Blizzard has slotted in throughout Midnight that can be used to iterate further.
Auto-Attacks and Synergy
Ability Damage
Lunge
All of the above can in theory work in tandem to make both of our fighting options very competitive and balanced. Dual-wielding naturally favors auto-attack and effects that work off of that due to the frequency of the attacks. Ability damage itself can be used as a tuning knob for two-handed weapons, because when you're dual wielding your off-hand WDPS does not contribute to ability damage, so naturally 2-handed does more damage with abilities. Finally, the talent Lunge exists as a master tuning knob for both, as it directly changes if you're dual-wielding or wielding a two-handed weapon.
If Blizzard used the above more aggressively as tuning knobs, both fighting styles would be extremely competitive and balanced. Currently, we've been dual-wielding for months, and the existence of both dual-wielding and two-handed weapons gives us little more than loot pool pollution, so having either be viable would be great.
For example, if Lunge was changed to a 3% Agility bonus while using a two-handed weapon, with a 1% Agility bonus while dual wielding, the two would be much closer. Furthermore, if the primary culprit, Lethal Barbs for dual wielding's dominance was amended to be more effective for two-handed weapons, the difference between the two would be almost negligible for most players. Utilizing these tuning options this way would make looting more exciting as Survival, as right now it's a massive gamble to have your lootspec set to Survival, as you could loot a very suboptimal two-handed weapon.
Primal Surge, Flamefang Pitch, and Talent Tree Real Estate
Currently, Survival has a capstone talent that is utterly centralizing: Primal Surge. This talent makes or breaks the spec and turns it from an awkwardly paced and very weak performer to a fluid song-and-dance of "builder, spender, spender". Primal Surge existing in the very bottom of the tree blocks many different talent builds from being explored as you really need to spend many talent points and fully invest in the bottom right of the tree for the spec to play smooth. We believe this talent existing so far down the tree in its current location is oppressive for the spec's design as it is mandatory to pick at all times.
If this talent were made baseline or even moved up to the second gateway of the talent tree, there would be a lot more experimentation and build opportunities opened for Survival. However, with the current design of the spec, it's super important that the double stacks of Tip of the Spear still exists.
Speaking of talent tree real estate, our other capstone branch leading with Flamefang Pitch has been not so hot all expansion. Partly because of tuning, but mostly because other talent options are fighting for investment, Flamefang Pitch finds itself in a very awkward spot. As we just talked about, you'll literally always want Primal Surge which is an expensive talent to buy. With Takedown's position in the tree (and its related enhancements in the two point Savagery and powerful Flanked) you will simply never have the talent points to buy Flamefang Pitch. This is a bit disappointing because the ability has an amazingly evocative name and it would be interesting if we could explore other talent tree builds instead of moving 1 or two points around each encounter.
Flamefang Pitch desperately needs aggressive tuning or remade entirely, because even if it was strong...a static, ground-targeted AoE with lingering damage effects can be quite obnoxious to play with....even more so with a long cooldown.
Wishlist for 12.1 and Beyond
One can surmise from the paragraphs above that Survival is in a very solid spot at the moment, with only a few gameplay changes needed to make it truly exceptional. We believe an additional, baseline rotational button would be a great idea for the long-term health of the spec moving to future Midnight patches and even beyond to The Last Titan. An extra ability would further cement the spec-fantasy and give extra options for tuning and real-estate for tier-sets or other borrowed power to interact with instead of Wildfire Bomb for the 9th time.
Other than fundamental gameplay loop feedback, as mentioned above, we think it's very important that our weapon fighting style is further balanced, because an extra season of dual-wield (and Pack Leader!) supremacy will start to feel very same-y and it's frustrating as a player when your personal loot pool for things like Great Vault or Mythic+ is filled with suboptimal weapons (read: two handed weapons).
Speaking of things feeling similar, Primal Surge definitely needs to be repositioning in the spec tree, if not made baseline entirely. The extra stack of Tip of the Spear entirely changes the gameplay dynamics of the spec and it really feels like the priority loop of Survival was built around having two stacks of Tip of the Spear to spend per Kill Command use.
A quality of life piece of feedback that's been discussed before is how slow our pets move compared to the general speed we have as a player. Currently, there are many situations in raids or Mythic+ where our pet is catching up and you're missing out on damage, resources, and your general gameplay. Some examples are Chimaerus, L'ura, and far orb spawns on Saldahaar for raid. In Mythic+, you can see this on dungeon layouts with spiral stairs in Windrunner Spire or the last boss of Maisara Caverns if you have your pet set to follow you. If there was a PvE specific way for pets to passively move faster a lot of this friction would be alleviated.
Finally, some other things the Survival community would deeply appreciate is a customizable appearance for our Boomstick ability. Whether this is a glyph that changes it into a generic bow or something more involved (using the ranged weapon slot on the new Transmog system? A glyph to pull a random ranged weapon from your bags?), this would be massive for Survival players. While some of us really enjoy the spec fantasy of mercenary, there certainly are players who would prefer a more naturalistic flavored version of the ability with a bow instead of a gun.
We're definitely excited to see where Survival grows after Midnight's first season and we hope some of these pieces of feedback are considered!
