The on again/off again relationship between Survival and a burst DPS cooldown is once again off, and probably for good this time.
@reesigaming @Aniroel Not beyond what’s in the talent tree and effectively available through ES pooling.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 23, 2014
So what Celestalon is saying if you want burst as Survival you’ll need to take Stampede, and learn the art of holding on to Lock and Load stacks.
Stampede makes sense as the only other options on that tier are A Murder of Crows and Blink Strikes, and Beast Mastery is almost certainly going to favor Blink Strikes.
The big concern is Lock and Load stacking. Delerium tackled that earlier this week in his post The Lock and Load Question.
Right now it’s too soon to tell if it’s worth hanging onto stacks versus firing as soon as you get one. A lot will depend on how much Multistrike you have, and how quickly you generate those stacks.
Once Blizzard starts doing a numbers pass there will probably be some usage guidelines established, and maybe even an addon to tell you what to do, which as Delerium points out, “Blizzard won’t like so they’ll change the mechanic”.
I haven’t played enough Survival to get a good feel for it yet. Between pooling Lock and Load stacks, managing Focus and Serpent Sting, there may be enough complexity to make up for the lack of buttons.
In theory pooling LnL stacks is more elegant than having a “burst dps now” button.
It all depends on the implementation and tuning though.
At this point it looks like they’ve settled on a lot of the hunter changes for WoD and this worries me. Blink Strikes feels out of place in a burst cooldown talent tier and so does Dire Beast in the focus regen tier, Chimaera Shot doesn’t really fit into the Marksmanship aesthetic and certainly has little to no synergy with the rest of the spec. The only thing that looks in any way complete, bar some number tweaking, is Beast Master and the level 100 talents.
Maybe Survival can do without a raw burst cooldown, personally I think it fist the spec’s aesthetic, but everything is desperately in need of talent changes in the aforementioned tiers.
So, here’s something fun that I’ve been playing with (well, fun in a spreadsheety sort of way). At really high (possibly higher than we’ll see) MS levels, you’ll get more total ES throughout a fight if you only ever use your non-LnL explosive shot during the time between the end of the duration of BA, and the end of the CD of BA. This will be the only way to keep from losing stacks to the five stack limit.
We’ll have to be pretty close to 100% MS to see that happen, but since I can get up to 47% MS on my 660 pvp geared hunter on the beta, perhaps getting to 100% by the end of the xpac is conceivable.
I’m liking the distinction of the SV feel, compared to cooldown heavy BM/MM, and its focus on sustained damage. I think that the option to pool is a good player skill mechanic in the spec design, you use on cool down until you are coming to a change in the fight:
*Add popping soon to be focused
*Boss enters a phase where they take increased damage
*Boss coming to a burn phase where a soft enrage mechanic is triggered
You pool for right before situations like that and then go for it. You aren’t penalized for not doing it and you’re rewarded for doing it well.
I’ve only dabbled a bit on the beta. I rolled a BM hunter (which I’m still futzing with the rotation and miss serpent sting) and a survival hunter. I think in ok with survival not having a burst. A burst would probably be cool, but I don’t feel like I’m missing something.