A new tier of Dragonflight means another tier-set bonus for us to chase after! Much like the previous two tier-set bonuses this expansion, Survival Hunters get to enjoy a build-defining, powerful, and fun to play tier-set bonus. Today, let’s take a quick look at the tier-set bonus we get to go towards and discuss some initial impressions.
The tl;dr? Feel happy! The tier-set is fun, really helps your damage, and focuses on our old Artifact ability from Legion, which is a nice trip down memory lane. There are only a few (hopefully easily fixable) concerns and bugs.
2-Piece Set Bonus
While it may seem simple on first glance, this buff window provided by our two-piece bonus () is exactly the sort of thing Survival has been looking for—a frequent and powerful damage amp. One of the best things about this about this bonus is that the buff itself is equally powerful in both single-target and AoE encounters and as it applies to you directly, you can target swap without any fear. Something to keep in mind is that the buff refreshes itself while you channel Fury of the Eagle, so you’ll end your channel with the maximum duration of the buff.
4-Piece Set Bonus
The four piece set bonus really helps Survival Hunters with something we have struggled with in 10.1: single target damage. The immediate and free Wildfire Bomb (now enhanced with a baseline 40% primary target damage amplifier) can deal some surprising damage with the 15% critical strike chance + damage amplifier from our two-piece, and the further 40% primary target damage amplifier from the four piece puts our Wildfire Bomb at a very respectable damage level against a single target.
Bugs
Unfortunately, there seems to be a pretty significant bug with our 2-piece bonus . A large portion of our spec’s damage output (between 18-20%) is not affected by . These abilities include both our and our pet’s auto-attacks, your pet’s basic attack (Claw, Bite, or Smack), the pet portion of Flanking Strike, Kill Command and Bloodseeker, Poison Injection (looks to be the wrong Latent Poison Injector), and Internal Bleeding (the DoT from Shrapnel Bomb).
None of these seem intended to not work with the tier-set bonus, as it specifically lists you and your pet’s damage.
Concerns
Some slight concerns would be that the Wildfire Bomb amplifier on our 4-piece bonus does NOT refresh its duration as you channel Fury of the Eagle unlike the 2-piece bonus. This can be awkward as you waste uptime of the debuff as you channel the focus of the tier-set, which can feel unintuitive. Another small concern would be that, depending on how numbers end up, you may cancel Fury of the Eagle after a single GCD in single-target, to optimize this debuff the 4-piece applies. Normally we do not pick or use Fury of the Eagle in single target at all, so including it in our single target builds means it has to overcome a damage deficit before the set bonus starts to benefit us in single-target.
The biggest concern we have about this entire tier set is the free charge of Wildfire Bomb from the four piece-set bonus. As it stands, we are frequently using the Ruthless Marauder talent in AoE (and it doesn’t look like this is changing after acquiring our new tier set)— this talent provides an extreme amount of CDR to Wildfire Bomb while we channel Fury of the Eagle, which means the free charge is immediately wasted and we can’t help but avoid over-capping on resources. You can see just how fast the cooldown recovers with the talent below. It would be excellent if this bonus changed to something else, such as your next Wildfire Bomb does not incur a cooldown.
