Volatile Bomb causes your Wildfire Bomb to do double damage against targets with your Serpent Sting on them and provides synergy with the Viper’s Venom and Hydra’s Bite talents.Pheromone Bomb causes you Kill Command to reset its cooldown and works in concert with the Alpha Predator and Tip of the Spear talents.Shrapnel Bomb causes Raptor Strike and Carve/Butchery to apply a Bleed and provides synergy with with the Bloodseeker talent.Wildfire Bomb plays into one of my favorite talents, Wildfire Infusion, which gives you three different Wildfire Bombs, each with a different effect in addition to the normal damage and DOT: This spell hits in a small circle around the target and then a cone behind it, which is a little funky at first, but after a little while you get used to the odd targeting. Carve reduces the cooldown of your other AOE spell, Wildfire Bomb. Survival Hunters look to be a hardy melee DPS in Battle.Ĭarve is Survival’s primary AOE spell and it can be upgraded through talents to Butchery. This will be like having the Roots of Shaladrassil on all the time, but you don’t have to stand still to take advantage of it. Survival’s new Mastery: Spirit Bond increases your damage similar to Marksman’s and includes a bit of healing which scales with your Mastery. Coordinated Assault (and Bestial Wrath for Beast Mastery) are on the Global Cooldown in Battle like most other major DPS cooldowns. Coordinated Assault can be extended by the Birds of Prey talent and I’m sure there will be screenshots and log parses as each Hunter tries to keep Coordinated Assault up the longest. Survival gets its own version of Bestial Wrath called Coordinated Assault (you and your pet even get all big and red). As mentioned, Survival gets its own version of Kill Command which is a Focus builder for Survival rather than a spender as it is for Beast Mastery. It’s not quite Beast Mastery levels, but your pet will be responsible for 20-30% of your overall damage, pending tuning. Still, Survival has some DPS options when pushed out of melee range. One thing you’ll lose at range: auto attack damage at range, which is significant. Auto Attack is is a bigger part of melee DPS in Battle than in Legion and should account for about 10-20% of your damage. It takes getting 4 stack of Mongoose Bite to equal one Raptor Strike. It’s now a talent, and at present, is either undertuned or bugged. If you play Survival on live, you no doubt noticed the omission of Mongoose Bite over on the beta. There are a couple of bosses in Battle’s dungeon’s which have a similar mechanic to this. Once the debuff drops off, you Harpoon back and get your Terms of Engagement buff (if talented), or you can use a new talent that stole the Flanking Strike name. You would continue your rotation, minus your auto attack damage for a few seconds. The new Aspect of the Eagle lets you cast Raptor Strike from range for 15 seconds on a 90-second cooldown (and the cooldown can be reduced by 20% with the Born to be Wild talent). To use a current example of where Eagle might be handy, if you got targeted by Toxic Wound during the Serpentix fight in Eye of Azshara, you could Disengage, which is now baseline, to get away from the boss and hit Aspect of the Eagle. The only spells you can’t cast from range are your main nuke, Raptor Strike, and your AOE spell, Carve. You have your own version of Kill Command (more on that later), and as long as your pet is in melee, Kill Command can be used from range. Serpent Sting is back, and Dragonsfire Grenade is now Wildfire Bomb. Survival is still a melee spec, but it can use many rotational abilities from range. Sims, and theorycrafting about rotations, and talents analysis also depend on tuning, which just hasn’t happened yet. Blizzard hasn’t done final numbers tuning on the beta, and until then questions about performance or how Survival compares to other melee specs are, at best, guesses. So let’s take a look at the state of Survival, but with the standard beta caveat: anything you see here is subject to change. If the numbers work out, I plan on Survival being my Hunter’s primary spec in Battle. So what is the new Survival Hunter like, and is it a fun class to play? My own Hunter has been Beast Mastery for most of Legion, but I’ve been interested in the Survival changes since I first saw them on alpha, and I’ve been playing Survival on both alpha and beta. Though the spec hasn’t gotten the same sort of extensive rework it did in Legion, it’s seen some significant changes. But Survival Hunters are one of the big exceptions to this. If you like the playstyle of the Legion iteration of your class, you’ll probably like the Battle rendition. For many classes and specializations, the Battle for Azeroth version plays similarly to the current Legion version, minus the Artifact traits, tier sets, and Legendaries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |