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Niix

Survival and Explosive Shot. (WoD Beta)

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So I just got done messing around with survival hunters on the WoD beta and I want to do a short write up to discuss the way it feels and my very first impressions of it, to give those of you without the beta a little insight as to what survival is going to be like if it stays in it's current form.

 

The reason I say this is because obviously the expansion is months out, and basically anything I write right now is highly subject to chance. So take all of this with a grain of salt because it might not be in the final release.

 

With that being said, let's begin.

 

So the first thing I noticed was that we completely lost serpent sting, it was baked into our Arcane shot. So it will naturally keep 100% uptime unless for some reason you're spamming cobra shot, which is never good. The second thing I noticed was the change to the focus cost of Explosive shot. 25 -> 15, this isn't too big of a deal gameplay wise, just means we have a little more freedom with our focus balance. 

 

So those are two things that don't really matter too much. Let's get into the things that changed the way the class felt entirely. Losing serpent sting felt weird at first, but no where near as weird as getting a lock n' load proc and only casting one explosive shot, which cost me focus and didn't reset the cooldown of Explosive shot when I got it. When this happened I had to do a double take at my screen. Now, again, /beta. So I don't want to jump to conclusions, but what the spec is starting to seem like to me, is a destro lock currently. We save up Explosive Shot procs for a trinket proc, then we dump them (Chaos Bolt). Keep up black arrow (Immolate). Glaive toss on CD (Conflagrate). Weave in Cobra Shots and Arcane Shots to balance Focus. It felt shockingly simillar to a Destro lock, and I didn't like it. Explosive shot wasn't hitting nearly hard enough for me to feel like it was a Chaos Bolt and it's a little bit annoying that Black Arrow doesn't have a guaranteed proc of Explosive Shot during it's uptime. Imagine the uproar at Blizzard if they were to bake ember gen. into Immolate and give it a "chance" to proc, with no guarantee of getting it at all. This means people could get fucked entirely by RNG and perform awful. Now I don't mean to make it seem like Explosive Shot in it's current form with our 4pc isn't RNG based at all. Because it is. However you can at least guarantee you will get 2 free Explosive Shots per Lock n' Load proc. 

 

Now I see where Blizz is going with this, they want us to save up Explosive Shots for Burst phases, but if we do that, we lose out on our main ability. Not casting Explosive Shot waiting for something to proc, or waiting for a burst phase seems stupid to me. It's not a chaos bolt, it has a cooldown not a different resource cost, saving it is completely undermining our own DPS for, at this moment in time, what seems like a very very tiny amount of damage.

 

My solution for this is as follows. Have a separate ability, similar to Fire and Brimstone for Warlocks. It could be something like "Locked and Loaded". As you get lock and load procs they stack up as a buff on you, toggling this ability on would allow you to use explosive shot without a cooldown for as many stacks as you had. I'm at a loss for how to do this without a toggleable ability because if it wasn't toggleable you would have to fully commit to using every single one of your stored explosive shots. This would allow us to use our Explosive Shots on cooldown like normal, but also give us an incentive to save them for meaningful times. It would take some getting used to but god damn do I love the idea of an ability you can turn on to apply a buff to yourself that lets you absolutely unload into your target.

 

This was mainly a write up about Explosive Shot but I'll be posting more in the coming days about other specs/lv100 talents once I get a chance to play around with them. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below and let's get some discussion going.

Edited by Niix

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Edited to include more info about the ability I proposed.

Edited by Niix

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As im still on my 1st cup of coffee , ill try to add my own 2 sense .

 

1: I liked the destroy lock comparison and as suck make explosive shot HIT like a chaos bolt would but also make it cost us the same amount of resource  ( 1 ember per CB )  so what ever the focus cost by comparison w/o leaving us focus starved would be my only request.

 

2: Take away explosive shot's CD rebalance our other shot's dmg / focus  around this so this way we cant spam ES on cooldown w/o hurting ourselves and leaving us starved for focus and for burst / execute phases it'll feel more rewarding

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Ok guys, I wrote a pretty lengthy post discussing alot of my concerns with 6.0 SV hunters, and shortly after lost it all to a computer crash. Nixx highlighted a good amount of my thoughts but I will continue with additional suggestions and concerns. 

 

 

SV so far is lacking a CD and there are some real concerns with ES and its new functionality.

 

 

There is a methods to the madness with these LnL changes and how it affects ES.

 

Q: Why this change (referring to LnL no longer resetting CD, no longer focus free, and no longer 2 charges)? 

 

A: It is safe to assume that somewhere in the second tier (I imagine) we would have enough MS to make SV seem like we are always using T16 4pc bonus. This would cause a real problem with SV rotationally and make it about as boring as playing Ele shaman in BC.

 

 

The bad about this change:

 

 

The LnL change is overkill. It reminds me of the mindless and ridiculous change to Stampede in ToT that made it completely worthless. Now just wait for it as a tie everything in. I had a few ideas regarding CD’s for SV and one could potentially solve this problem.

 

 

New Ideas:

 

 

Idea #1; For NO SV COOLDOWN:

 

Revert some of the LnL changes to:

 

Now grants 1 charge of LnL, focus cost of ES reduced by 50% per charge, continues to reset the ES CD.

 

 

This would solve the issue of LnL feeling like it does nothing; because to me that’s the current feel.

 

 

Idea #2; TnT (Cooldown)

 

TnT: Modifies your explosive trap to consume all charges of LnL and applies s heavy dot on your target for the next 30 seconds. (1.5 min cooldown)

 

 

This solves the issue of SV trap flavor and brings some usefulness to the, let’s be honest, pointless damage of explosive trap.

 

 

Idea #3; Readiness (Cooldown)

 

Readiness: For the next 15 seconds all abilities cost 50% less focus. (1.5 min cooldown)

 

 

This would push hunters more into a Destro Lock play-style (as Nixx stated earlier) and it would require a large DMG increase for ES; or it would push SV to a REAL DOT CLASS and require a large damage buff to SV dots and make SV mastery more effective than it currently is.

 

 

Let’s be clear that SV DPS currently is not #1, but it’s not last. If RnG goes perfectly for you, chances are you still will be #5-7 on a 25 man fight if other classes get equivalently good RnG. I am worried that while trying to make hunter specs feel different, SV and MM are seriously lacking and at this point in the beta we should be seeing some of these things changed.

Edited by Fortyz

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How much multistrike did you have when you tested it out?

 

See, the way I went about this testing is different than some might do. I did it for myself mainly, and as of right now I don't care about damage simply because all classes are all over the place, they haven't done a single numbers pass yet. So my complaints about damage are just me talking about it in it's current state, which I hope blizzard will change. If not, after the numbers pass I will go in with a more solid stat priority and do more testing, but for this test I did this mainly to see what the class feels like, not how it performs.

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after the numbers pass I will go in with a more solid stat priority

 

Unfortunately with reforging gone, and the pretty much 0% chance for them to backdate gems and enchants to have MS on them, the only MS you will get is off Haromm's Talismon and baseline stat.

 

Celestalon has been asked about this before as well and he said something along the lines of "i know it will suck but 6.0 wont be too™ long"

 

Also here is my 586 LvL 90 hunters's secondary stats on the Beta w/MS buff from wind serpent

 

qQ5NBRM.jpg

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It wasn't a damage question it was more of a question of did you test to see how multistrike affects black arrow.

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Well with the current gear there's not much I can do to get more multi-strike. I'm sure that, as Fortyz has already mentioned. High levels of MS will yield more explosive shot procs. That still doesn't fix the feel of the class, it seems like they are unclear of the direction they want to take the spec. They said they wanted sustained damage, so they gave us no cooldown. Then they change lock and load to benefit from holding on to them, practically undermining our entire rotation by not being able to cast it. My solution is a simple fix that I feel would differentiate the class even further from the other two.

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It wasn't a damage question it was more of a question of did you test to see how multistrike affects black arrow.

 

with that 23% MS at lvl 90, i hit a test dummy with 4 BA's

 

the  LnL spread looks like this:

 

BA #1: 0 procs

BA #2: 4 procs

BA #3: 3 procs

BA #4: 1 proc

 

 

You should know that about 3 weeks ago i did the same test on a lvl 90 with 3 BA's and only saw 1 proc of LnL between all 3 casts. This latest test to me seems what i would call very good RnG

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The fact that there is no guarantee, and that we only get one proc is awful. The amount of damage it does currently, for how little we get the proc. Is absolutely dog shit. I really hope when we see some tuning Explosive shot gets a massive buff.

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Well with the current gear there's not much I can do to get more multi-strike.

 

Make a level 100 pvp character and go through all the pvp pieces and try to stack a stat you want.

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Make a level 100 pvp character and go through all the pvp pieces and try to stack a stat you want.

Sro9GLF.jpg

 

15% from a scope proc is...awesome. 

 

Same test, 4 BA's

 

BA #1: 4 procs

BA #2: 6 procs

BA #3: 4 procs

BA #4: 6 procs

 

I did notice something that I hadnt realized at the time; If you naturally keep 1 charge of LnL (since it has a 30 second duration) you will never have a ES CD. with a MS% around 50, you will have a good amount of LnL procs to satisfy you. i could see the potential of that "hold onto 1 charge" method to have better sustained DPS.

 

They need to just give us a CD >.<

Edited by Fortyz
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That's an interesting find. I do feel if they give MS a higher weight for SV it will even out in the end. I just hope they don't make it like our mastery on live. Where 600 points is 1% mastery.

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Multistrike scaling is going to be the same across all specs, as far as I'm aware. Mastery is the only stat with different scales.

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Multistrike scaling is going to be the same across all specs, as far as I'm aware. Mastery is the only stat with different scales.

 

I hope that isn't the case. Different classes use different stats to a different effect, some classes will get way more out of Multi-Strike and some wont get as much.

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Sro9GLF.jpg

 

15% from a scope proc is...awesome. 

 

Same test, 4 BA's

 

BA #1: 4 procs

BA #2: 6 procs

BA #3: 4 procs

BA #4: 6 procs

 

I did notice something that I hadnt realized at the time; If you naturally keep 1 charge of LnL (since it has a 30 second duration) you will never have a ES CD. with a MS% around 50, you will have a good amount of LnL procs to satisfy you. i could see the potential of that "hold onto 1 charge" method to have better sustained DPS.

 

They need to just give us a CD >.<

 

 

Ok this is why your testing was different than mine. I was wondering why lol.

 

IMO I feel that survival will be the least played survival spec. The changes make it play completely different than the RNG fire away fun it is with the current tier set bonuses. The die hard fans will still play survival but most will convert to BM or MM for the first raiding tier. My hope is that Blizzard will see the low survival representation and make changes by the second tier.

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IMO I feel that survival will be the least played survival spec. 

 

Currently MM is a 3 button procless rotation excluding glaive toss. It is the worst example of a hunter spec. it is just has no flavor at all. MM currently reminds me of BC ele shaman.

 

SV just needs to be given a CD. I feel that with the new exotic munitions (poison) and either some mastery tweaking, or a useful CD, SV would be in a great place.

 

I would personally love to find a completely different stat priority that doesnt match with BM or MM. Ex: MS > Mastery > Crit >and so on

Edited by Fortyz

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After doing what you mentioned Kattii, and using more MS gear. I actually liked the way SV played, I'm sure with enough MS we can have a huge supply of Explosive Shots to use. With a decent cooldown, preferably something other than a trap, I'd actually love the spec. I don't like the idea of our CD being centered around a trap. It might be okay as long as the damage tuning takes into consideration the lack of a cooldown. I feel like this is going to be the reason nobody plays the spec, blizzard has never made a class without a cooldown before. I'm afraid the burst will be lacking, and in the later weeks of the tiers when players kill times drop, burst is everything. I feel without a proper CD we will scale very poorly into the tier.

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blizzard has never made a class without a cooldown before.

 

Something to note here and make a comparison. All 3 warlock specs had individual CD's. Even affliction which (if blizzard plays their cards correctly) SV could turn into a real dot class rather than a "somewhere in between" class. Maybe centering a maxed stacked ES dump into a trap wont work, but everyone can agree they need to do something. Whether that something is giving us a reduced focus cost of everything CD or a increased MS CD it needs to be something. in the past it has never been a great idea to sit at a very low focus during fights, and to drop 5 explosive shots all costing focus takes to much focus.

 

If blizzard leaves us with no CD, they need to make LnL reduce focus cost of ES by half as well as give SS and BA some serious buffs for any amount of consistent damage. 

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We also should know at this point that the wizards at blizzard know far more than we do , so we should just accept the changes UNTIL midway through the next x-pac WHEN IN A PATCH they give SV a CD because they thought SV needed it based on the numbers /parses they've been reading. I mean come on it took them how long to get rid of the dead zone and that's just for starter's.

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