I've been sv since my first day of wow because my 2 friends had bm and mm hunters.....told me no1 picks sv cuz they suck. I kept playing sv anyway and loved it... Although i feel i out-dps most ppl my lvl if others start playing sv i feel i will lose my originality. =/

---

Q u o t e:
Players generally do a great job generating numbers with what they have. They don't always have the most up to date numbers, and we don't make a herculean effort to get numbers to them. PTRs are our best shot, but even they can lag behind our most current builds.

As a most recent example, Elemental shamans were perplexed by why their numbers were different from ours and there was some amount of shouting that we didn't know what we were talking about and why couldn't we just accept the community's numbers and balance around those? It turned out that the shamans had misunderstood the way a talent worked (almost certainly because of unclear statements on my part) and that when they were able to test on the PTR, their numbers were close to what we predicted. Happy ending.

I don't know know why the EJ hunter numbers you cited don't match ours. It would take a great deal of time for us to dig through all the numbers that we are presented with to understand where the disagreements occur. In this case I suspect it is because Explosive Shot does less damage now than it does on the PTR, but I don't know. Survival is a miniscule percentage of total hunters out there, so we really won't mind them getting a significant bump, but it isn't our intent that they are far and away the highest dps hunter spec (BM shouldn't be either).

---

I'm sure if you posted how you got your numbers, there would be dozens of hunters that would be ecstatic to pore over them and compare.

I have always been Survival spec. From my lvl 10 days of "lol who goes Survival, it's dps is so weak" to the great time I had buffing everyone substantially with Expose Weakness, to even now when I get my Hunting Party off every blue moon while my Pally friend shoots it off every 10 seconds (that part being a joke, but dang is it faster).

However, I wholeheartedly agree with what people have said about Sniper Training conflicting with Trap Dancing, which makes a pure Survival build seem like it has wasted talents. This as well as the still placeholder talent of Trap Mastery begs me to ask: What do you guys have up your sleeve?

I will gladly accept a bit less DPS than the other two specs. I love Survival for my ability to freeze one enemy, wyvern another and, before it got moved (oh joy..), using Readiness to have two more enemies under the same effect. I was an assist character. This is what I wanted. I'd love to have less damage than the other two specs, but vastly superior in aiding my comrades and staying alive. This is the style of gameplay I want back. So I really hope that the changes you devs have in mind aren't just "More damaging attacks!"

---

Q u o t e:
Although i feel i out-dps most ppl my lvl if others start playing sv i feel i will lose my originality. =/

---

This is the same way I felt during the transfer from Vanilla WoW to Burning Crusade....except for BM instead of survival.

---

Q u o t e:
I have always been Survival spec. From my lvl 10 days of "lol who goes Survival, it's dps is so weak" to the great time I had buffing everyone substantially with Expose Weakness, to even now when I get my Hunting Party off every blue moon while my Pally friend shoots it off every 10 seconds (that part being a joke, but dang is it faster).

However, I wholeheartedly agree with what people have said about Sniper Training conflicting with Trap Dancing, which makes a pure Survival build seem like it has wasted talents. This as well as the still placeholder talent of Trap Mastery begs me to ask: What do you guys have up your sleeve?

I will gladly accept a bit less DPS than the other two specs. I love Survival for my ability to freeze one enemy, wyvern another and, before it got moved (oh joy..), using Readiness to have two more enemies under the same effect. I was an assist character. This is what I wanted. I'd love to have less damage than the other two specs, but vastly superior in aiding my comrades and staying alive. This is the style of gameplay I want back. So I really hope that the changes you devs have in mind aren't just "More damaging attacks!"

---

That, my good friend, is how I always saw SV. They may not have done damage, but by gods they could keep people alive. I always thought MM and BM were to be equal but in two vastly different ways: BM relies more on pet damage and MM hunter damage.

If SV does become top spec, I will admit that I may try it out (though I JUST respecced to the 51/11/7 spec). Having that extra hundred DPS, coupled with the nerf to my Cobalt Slicers, would probably keep my DPS in the area I want it to be (Which is around 1.7k atm).

GC, just do us a favor, okay? Don't let us BM hunters be hundreds of points below MM and SV. :)

---

Q u o t e:
Survival is a miniscule percentage of total hunters out there, so we really won't mind them getting a significant bump, but it isn't our intent that they are far and away the highest dps hunter spec (BM shouldn't be either).

---

I think it's cool and all that Survival is being bumped. Survival for the first part of the expansion was once again "Utility with Lower DPS" I know in the case of my guild that we couldn't justify spec'ing Survival because we already have 2 Retadins and a Spriest in every raid, so that leaves us with just lower DPS. I didn't get to spec Marks till Unholy and Dual Wield became all the rage for Death Knights (Our only remaining Enhancement Shaman is one of those players that got lost in the "Take the Player not the Totems" change).

But we didn't have 1 SV (me) and 5 BM hunters for no reason back in T6+. The hunter world didn't just one day decide to go spec BM from Marks between Vanilla and TBC, we were led there. We didn't all want to use "the macro" the game decided that for us through results. We weren't all running around with rarespawn cats and ZG bats because we wanted to be just as cool as the other 20 hunters sitting around IF.

Anywho, I think that sums up my thoughts at the moment.

GC, my guild is pretty "casual hardcore" if you will, and I am the only hunter atm.

Premonition is a well known guild and takes it's DPS pretty serious. Take a look:

http://wowwebstats.com/1xxovgclcj5i5?m&s=395013-416623

So hunters need a nerf?

Yes, it's Patch, and yes they only used 3 healers. But still, c'mon.....

If you use 6/14/51 on the spreadsheet with ptr changes you can get it to showing almost 6500 dps. There is no trap dancing mechanic for the spread sheet which may end up being more dps with the buffed explosive shot. It is possible dps is going to be even higher than before just more sustained instead of bursty like bm is. You are going to see survival jump to most used spec the day patch goes live.

Just out of curiosity, are talents such as Piercing Shots and Improved Steady Shot being looked at due to the significant change in DPS and overall Steady Shot damage representation?

Both of these talents fall fairly deep in the MM tree and are already on the under-budget side of the coin.

---

Q u o t e:
Just out of curiosity, are talents such as Piercing Shots and Improved Steady Shot being looked at due to the significant change in DPS and overall Steady Shot damage representation?

Both of these talents fall fairly deep in the MM tree and are already on the under-budget side of the coin.

---

Improved Steady shot is extremely underbudget now as it will not even be a primary shot. Please look at it. Perhaps either increase its chance to proc significantly or change its name and have it proc off of arcane shots as well.

What does the term "rebalancing" mean and should it worry me?

---

Q u o t e:

Fair enough. Just buffing dps isn’t always enough to change something from not fun to fun. There are however some hunters even in this thread who want to play Survival and just can’t justify it at the moment.

---

I feel like I need to give a bit more info then "clunky" for you to understand. Survival isn't fun for a few reasons:

1. Unfinished: Needs a 41 point talent that doesn't blow hard.
2. Contradictory: Breakable cc mixed with dots. Survival would be more fun if you could use traps/ wyvern sting in a pinch. Right now you have to wait for serpent sting or explosive shot to wear off.
3. Limiting: All specs demand 18 points in the marksman tree. Allowing survival to be used with the beast mastery would make people feel like they had more options. Right now your survival spec will be 0/18/53 OR 5/15/51.

Just a suggestion from my big book of hopeless dreams; 41 point survival talent would make all traps shootable. Trap mastery would go back to 11 points and scatter shot would become trainable.

---

Q u o t e:
Source: http://elitistjerks.com/1048802-post337.html



Source: http://elitistjerks.com/1049199-post343.html



I know Blizzard's stance on spreadsheets and PTR theory crafting modeling is that it isn't accurate because only they have the "true, most updated" builds, but I find this information a bit disconcerting.

However, based on the above info it seems SV damage is still too high compared to BM and MM, which are closer.

As a BM hunter, I'd really like to see the gap in damage between BM and MM closed even more. . . I hate seeing BM relegated to Vanilla WoW DPS status :-(

What is the damage range Blizzard ultimately wants to see across all three specs? What is your goal for how close each spec will be to the other?

---

I got to ask the OP. Why don't you please wait till the changes come through in the patch. EJ is a wonderful site and assumes the best in slot for everything. Perhaps your own talent may not lead to that kind of a DPS disparity. CAN you please stop using words like too high and inviting anymore trouble?

No one here wants to be OP but be competitive. BM /MM are balanced around the so called steady shot which has taken quite the beating already! ES has already seen one 10 percent nerf... do you want it to be relegated back to its current state on live?

---

Q u o t e:

While 400 dps is low, you are making the assumption that anything that isn’t a raiding pet is a waste of code. Those pets weren’t intended to be for raiding – that’s what Ferocity pets are for. Thanks for all of the numbers though, Neruse.

---

They're not all that useful outside of raids either, to be honest. I know they they're toted as the 'Utility' pets, in particular they're trying to be sold as PvP pets, but in pretty much any scenario-- PvP or PvE-- they don't offer any benefits that that are a good trade-off for either the increased damage of Ferocity or the increased survivability of Tenacity. They could stand to be made a bit more appealing.

---

Q u o t e:


2. Contradictory: Breakable cc mixed with dots. Survival would be more fun if you could use traps/ wyvern sting in a pinch. Right now you have to wait for serpent sting or explosive shot to wear off.

---

On this point, there was a point in Beta where freezing trap could take some damage before being broken, letting you trap dotted targets. It was because of this change that you removed Bear Trap. This change was removed-- allegedly temporarily-- because there was some code conflict where pets would still attack CC'd targets.

Any update on when we can expect this to be reimplemented?

MY biggest concern with this upcoming patch and the changes to SV is; are you balancing it around Trap dancing or not. My concern is that if you do then on fights you can not efficiently perform that technique SV hunters will fall far behind in terms of balance. Perhaps you could consider freezing trap proc'n LnL even if the target is immune so that hunters actually take advantage of Sniper Training.