Survival Hunter GuideMidnight Overview
Welcome to a brand new alpha testing cycle, Survival Hunters! Midnight brings us a lot of pruning and a very deceptively massive weapon change to us. This editorial is based off of the alpha iteration, so as a heads up things may change, but that's what feedback is for! If there is one single piece of feedback we could give to Blizzard, it would be we are really hoping for some some sort of rotational AoE button added.
Survival Hunter Rework
Survival is getting a moderate rework going into Midnight. Blizzard's stated goals are to refine and focus are spec fantasy by giving us a more clear gameplay and visual direction. They've also stated they want to reduce cognitive load for the spec by changing Mongoose Bite. Ironically, this change up to Mongoose Fury has in fact made it slightly more complicated, but it should be much more intuitive to people learning. Additionally, we can now effectively dual-wield or use a two handed weapon, much like Monks or Frost Death Knights. This decision was made to evoke more heavy Rexxar inspired imagery.
Part of this rework includes a pretty substantial pruning as we lose access to things like Explosive Shot, Kill Shot, Flanking Strike, Butchery, and more you may be have remembered from the War Within's iteration. Our two cooldowns in Coordinated Assault and Spearhead have been combined into a brand new cooldown: Takedown. We also now have a very strong passive source of damage in Strike As One which is quite thematic in the whole "fighting in tandem with your beast" vibe they're going for. In a very controversial change Fury of the Eagle (our Legion artifact ability that has been carried forward) has been replaced by a literal shotgun with Boomstick. Also, they're reinforcing our rugged sort of guerilla demolitions identity with a brand new grenade: Flamefang Pitch.
Finally, our apex talent node(s) (Raptor Swipe and Raptor Swipe) focus heavily on overwhelming your prey with a barrage of combination attacks with yourself and pet.
All in all, gameplay aside, it does seem to hit the vibe they're going for very well. We definitely fight in tandem with our beast even more now than we have previously, having a more clear identity of fighting in close quarters and supplementing with demolitions. We ultimately believe this rework has a lot of potential for this expansion and later on down the line, but there are a few major concerns we have to highlight down below. (Please add an AoE button)
Dual Wielding
Dual wielding for Survival seems to very much still be an in-progress feature on Midnight Alpha, with dual wielding being added in the latest alpha version. One concern we had when dual wielding was first announced was that as it stands, there is no off-hand damage calculation tied to any of our abilities, resulting in only mainhand WDPS being used to calculate ability damage. This means that all of our ability's damage is purely based off of the main hand weapon, which effectively could make this new style Blizzard is highlighting a non-starter if it doesn't scale with the second weapon at all.
Assuming all that this formulaic problem is resolved, we need to talk about the actual nitty gritty of this. We have a lot of passives in Midnight that are strictly beneficial to attack speed (this favoring DW over 2h as more frequent attacks=more procs) : Lunge , Wildfire Imbuement, and Lethal Barbs. This could function as a differentiator between DW and 2H, however this falls flat when you consider that daggers simply auto ~25% more often meaning we're arbitrarily getting 25% extra triggers of these talents, pretty much putting swords and axes to the sideline in favor of daggers. For a brand fighting style to evoke Rexxar (two axes), it is a bit odd that daggers are far more powerful and potentially heavily incentivized for us. Perhaps these effects can be tuned to scale with the weapon speed directly, allowing for more freedom of use and player expression.
Blizzard has very recently changed Lunge to no longer have any auto attack interactions beyond its damage, which may indicate they want to steer away from that design direction, although it could also simply mean they weren't comfortable with the sheer difference in Wildfire Bomb cooldown it was providing. Because Wildfire Imbuement and Lethal Barbs are still a "problem" in that they are abusable by rapid attack speeds, perhaps a more broadly applicable solution would be to slow down daggers through some passive (and raise its auto attack damage to normalize them with 1h axes/swords).
Lastly and mostly unrelated to mechanics, Dual wielding looks absolutely wild! During Takedown where all of your Raptor Strikes trigger a Raptor Swipe, it's a very awesome visual.
Some of our animations however still clearly seem to be more tailored to using a 2 handed weapon, most notably Raptor Strikes used during high stacks of Mongoose Fury, and Raptor Swipe itself.
Rotation Concerns
There has been a lot of pruning with Midnight across most specializations in the game and Survival definitely fits that bill. As mentioned earlier, we lost a lot of actives in Explosive Shot, Kill Shot, Flanking Strike, Butchery as well as lost a passive gameplay loop buff in Tip of the Spear. Mongoose Bite has always been entirely reworked to a passive in Mongoose Fury. The quick explanation of our rotation in Midnight is that you build Focus with Kill Command (no cooldown), spend Focus with Raptor Strike (no cooldown), and use Wildfire Bomb usually as soon as you can.
While there are some considerations with offensive cooldowns, positioning, hero talent trees, and buff windows to keep in mind, most of the actual cognitive load happens entirely in the background. Yes, our rotation can be boiled down to three buttons (and roughly two cooldowns in Takedown and Flamefang Pitch or Boomstick). The overall vibe within the Survival community appears to be that this is going a touch too far when it comes to taking away rotational buttons, potentially harming long term replayability of the spec.
Something immediately concerning is that this gameplay loop is effectively identical in both single-target and AoE encounters. While this does make for a good damage profile, there is no real way to interact with multiple targets. This means that it doesn't matter if you're fighting one scary boss or ten monsters at once, your gameplay is the same either way. There has been a lot of feedback in the Survival community that this is could get very boring very fast and we are desperately hoping to at least get a dedicated and rotational AoE button added for variety's sake.
Because the current kit is so streamlined, adding a dedicated AoE button shouldn't be too much additional cognitive load. Ideally, this additional button should be abundantly clear (and tuned to match) to only be used for multi-target situations both to help keep things streamlined while also offering some form of skill expression. We could reasonably look at some of the abilities we used to have in the past for some inspiration, and brainstorm a good middle ground.
With very modest modifications they could seamlessly fit into, and reinforce the new kit without adding too much complexity. For example, Lacerate, a bleed ability with a short cooldown to prevent multi-dotting and make tracking it easy, while giving us an active component of our bleed package and help the player feel more engaged. We could also have something such as Carve, an old simple AoE button that did physical damage in a cone on a short cooldown to diversify the AoE and single-target rotation. Now, these are simply examples of past abilities that could reinforce our new kit without providing a lot of complexity, potential additions could very easily be something else entirely but they would be simple to understand, differentiate ST and AoE, and provide 1 extra button to each, and lifts Survival a little out of the "3,1,2,1,2,1-repeat" gameplay
QoL and Approachability
This section mostly serves as feedback directly, but can also serve as inspiration for our readers, to provide feedback yourself regarding some of the more long standing gimmick issues we have dealt with. There are a bunch of interactions we (occasionally) struggle with that perhaps results in unnecessary complexity, and removing or solving these would perhaps result in smoother gameplay, but perhaps also room for aforementioned (or other) abilities to return.
We believe that Approachability is not strictly achieved by simply reducing the ability count alone, and while class and spec mechanics have been simplified as part of the quest for approachability, there are still some "easy" wins to be had by simplifying certain quirks and mechanics that have some arbitrary friction.
Spirit Bond (our Mastery)
Spirit Bond gameplay is often a non-issue, but it can occasionally be problematic. Pet AI prefers attacking monsters from behind, which is is a good thing to prevent parries. However, this becomes a large problem on large static bosses, which tends to be more and more common both in Raiding and Mythic+ lately.
By default, your pet will try to attack from behind, causing you and your pet to lose the doubled mastery bonus on Kyrioss, Voidstone Monstrosity, Azhiccar, Anub'arash, The Bloodbound Horror, Chrome King Gallywix, Loom'ithar, Dimensius and The Royal Voidwing. More examples exist where this can happen if you are positioning poorly. The only way to prevent this is to lock your pet into follow mode, constantly micro your pet to stay near, or put yourself in harms way to stay near your pet. Either way, due to the sort of "random" nature of this phenomenon (and it only happening on large enough bosses), a big share of hunters are ill-prepared to deal with this sort of pet micromanagement.
If you have been playing survival in raids, you will have 100% dealt with this issue at some point in your raids, however whether you even knew about this would depend on your Weakaura setup and fundamental niche knowledge of the spec and boss design.
The most brute force method to alleviate this would be to simply increase the range of Spirit Bond by a significant amount, or even remove the range component entirely. Although it is very thematic, other effects within the survival hunter tree already manage to sufficiently convey your bond with your companion.
Kill Command Range/LoS checking
Kill Command has range issues that are a byproduct of a combination of encounter design (no issues here) and the tediously slow movement speed of pets in combat situations (big issues here), they simply cannot keep up with typical player movement speeds these days unless you manually control Dash, which is not a minmax or micromanagment component many hunters are prepared, or willing, to deal with. This isn't an extremely common problem, but it is highly annoying if it does occur, as it completely blocks the use of pet-related abilities. Most players don't really have a good grasp of where their pet is at all times, so by the time you run into the problem, it is already too late.
This frequently occurs on bosses such as Rasha'nan, Plexus Sentinel, Flarendo, Queen Ansurek, Prioress Murrpray, Keeza Quickfuse, So'azmi. Some of the ways to alleviate this would be to significantly increase the base run speed of pets in PVE combat, or to increase the Dash duration to have a 100% uptime in PVE combat, allowing pets to more easily keep up with their Hunter whenever significant movement or LoS issues exist.
Along with the Spirit Bond issue, there is no shortage of encounters where it may feel like you're more or less fighting the game itself rather than the boss encounter.
Disengage Glyph / Talent
Disengage as a survival hunter is practically never used to actually disengage in PVE. Most commonly, you'll see a hunter flick 180 degrees, and disengage forwards instead. Similar to how mages can change the behaviour of their blinks through Arcane Momentum, perhaps it might be neat to give Survival or just Hunter as a whole the ability to change their Disengage to leap forwards.
Misdirection Targeting
As it stands, it requires smart use of weakauras or a bunch of macros (or completely manual targeting) to properly apply Misdirection, even though in many cases there is only a single logical target to use it on. What if Misdirection selected a target if self-cast? Similar to how the early versions of Ebon Might attempted to target dps > tank > healer in that order, Misdirection could prioritise active current target > tank > pet > no one in that order. This would still allow for full control, but gives players a simpler method of using it in M+ or solo gameplay.
Hunter's Mark Targeting
Hunter's Mark can be a bit cumbersome in environments where it requires constant reapplication, such as M+ or delves. What if Hunter's Mark would automatically apply (if none is currently active) when the primary single-target ability (Raptor Strike) is used? This would still give control over it to those that want it, but it would be more forgiving to forget about it or just let it play out in the background.
Takedown Auto Leaping
This is likely the most subjective on this list. Coordinated Assault, Flanking Strike, and Spearhead in the past all had a baked in leap, each with very slightly different behaviour. While all of these listed spells are removed in Midnight, Takedown inherits a new leap effect, as part of it being based on the former two abilities. However, would it not be more intuitive to simply grant us an extra charge of Harpoon, taking away the leap on Takedown? We're sure that anyone that has mained or played Survival a bunch can relate to accidentally leaping into deadly mechanics with these leap abilities. It wasn't a great way to go albeit comical at times. Now that we only have a single auto leap left, why not go all the way and give us full control back?
General Concerns
Flamefang Pitch, while very thematically appropriate with perhaps the coolest name ever, is a bit cumbersome to play with. The visual is busy and makes it very hard to see anything under all the fire, which is potentially deadly for a melee DPS especially in a world (of warcraft) where DBM isn't yelling at you. Additionally, we spent a large portion of the previous expansion giving feedback that an immobile ground circle on a 30 second cooldown can be very anti-fun when mobs get moved out of your ability. We think it's very critical that at least the visual gets looked at so we can see what's going on underneath. If there was a way to make the fire mobile or change it from a ground target, that would make the ability feel more impactful and fun to use. Perhaps it could be a massive point-blank area of effect dot, or radiate damage outwards periodically from the main target like old Explosive Shot.
As you can see, this is a very busy visual
Our Apex node, Raptor Swipe + Raptor Swipe + Raptor Swipe is thematically awesome and visually impressive but we have some concerns with the tuning. A majority of our tree and kit strength is through passive enhancements to Raptor Strike, so Raptor Swipe will swiftly fall behind in damage and may not even be worth the 4 talent points in an AoE encounter, which is concerning for an AoE centric Apex. Looking at raw spell attack power % on the abilities, it seems Raptor Swipe is meant to hit for half of a Raptor Strike but due to the aforementioned enhancements this immediately falls short. To make this Apex node provide impressive damage and, more importantly, be an exciting moment as Blizzard mentioned, we feel that Raptor Swipe should either scale directly off of Raptor Strike or receive a portion of all the enhancements to Raptor Strike.
Conclusion
We believe this rework can bring a lot of potential to the spec. A lot of unnecessary fluff has been removed that was around to be around and do damage, which should greatly reduce the need for 3rd party tools to track buffs and several different small cooldowns. However, we are quite worried that the pruning was a bit too much and gameplay will feel very similar regardless of encounter type throughout the expansion. If there was a single piece of feedback to give the developers, we encourage them to look into adding an active and rotational dedicated AoE button. Currently on Midnight, Survival just feels like it's lacking a bit in the skill ceiling and the gameplay is too similar in single-target or AoE.
We're excited to see what's to come!
