A Look Back at Survival Hunter in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Survival Hunter Writer, DoolB, offers a retrospective highlighting Survival’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Survival and You

With Dragonflight coming to its end, many of us Survival Hunters are looking back fondly on the expansion—it brought us impactful changes to our kit (better defensives and finally a raid buff), further iterated on our now cemented gameplay loop and the identity put forth in Battle for Azeroth, and made us excited for what’s to come in The War Within. We’d like to take this downtime between expansions to look back on how Survival Hunter fared in Dragonflight, briefly discuss the current state of the specialization, and look into what changes could be made to Survival moving into The War Within.

The tl;dr? Survival is fun to play, but our talent tree and current cooldowns could use some TLC. We’re very hopeful for The War Within!

Survival Hunter in Dragonflight

Survival Hunter Gameplay

Survival Hunter’s gameplay and identity have been consistent ever since the Battle for Azeroth expansion was released and the specialization was reworked from its Legion version. Survival is an exciting melee take on the Hunter class, evoking themes of the iconic Rexxar with some added touches of unique flavor and theme from the spec’s roots using explosives. This core kit continues to be very fun, thematic, and opens up a lot of avenues for customization in both talents and tier-set options. This consistent design we talk so fondly of is a base of Kill Command, Mongoose Bite, and Wildfire Bomb—with end game builds capitalizing on this foundation in Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight to varying degrees of success and community reception.

This usually ends up as two main builds we shuffle between when it comes to spec identity and gameplay: single target builds that focus on extreme Mongoose Bite damage or more versatile, AoE oriented builds tied to Wildfire Bomb. Both of these are (usually!) well-received playstyles in the Survival community with people looking forward to playing both in different scenarios. Many are hopeful that the kit itself sees a continuance of the current kit moving into the new expansions, with the focus being quality of life changes and the addition of new and exciting options building up on this strong foundation.

In Dragonflight, Survival Hunter builds towards three distinct playstyles that revolve around the (usually highly conflicting) cooldowns in our talent tree: the exclusively single-target focusedSpearhead, the generally AoE Coordinated Assault, and Fury of the Eagle, which is also AoE focused, albeit less bursty. Tuning wise, Spearhead can be very fun to play with but with the current tuning of Mongoose Bite it feels a bit too weak to bother. Coordinated Assault is very awkward to use and optimize for less than stellar results. Lastly, Fury of the Eagle is a great mixture of fun and simple to master, but is very much propped up by borrowed power of our current tier set.

Having distinct cooldowns is quite nice for build variety and with proper tuning, would be very cool to carry forward.

Talent Tree

The new talent tree system introduced in Dragonflight is quite good overall for Survival Hunter with a few caveats. Our talent builds are very flexible and we have a large number of viable builds (upwards of 3 different builds for each AoE or single target) and we give up very little single-target to excel in AoE, which is something few specs can say. However…this is only the case because a lot of our tree is weak, almost entirely passive tuning knobs, and unimpactful. A third of our very narrow tree (the least amount of talent nodes in the game!) is nothing but passive “X does Y% more” talents and a lot of our talent nodes boil down to a few % gain. Our talent builds are defined purely by the capstone talents (Spearhead, Coordinated Assault, and Fury of the Eagle) and little else.

While not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, it can really take the wind out of your sails when you look at other talent trees (especially ones reworked mid-Dragonflight) and you’re reminded how less than exciting talent trees can be, especially when the below image is almost 1/3 of our talent tree.

Oh, these are all 2 point nodes by the way—we spend a LOT of points to get these talents. There’s nothing inherently wrong about expensive talent nodes or nodes that are “X does Y more”, but when so many of the tree are these less-than-exciting nodes, and these nodes don’t act as a gateway to anything impactful or exciting, it can certainly feel not great.

Survival Hunter Tier Sets

Survival Hunter has been incredibly fortunate throughout Dragonflight when it comes to borrowed power. All of our tier sets (even going back to Shadowlands!) have been very fun to play, they’re impactful to our gameplay and build options, as well as extremely powerful. We’re crossing our fingers this trend keeps up! With such a fun to use core gameplay kit, there are many exciting things to think about. We even got the real powerhouse of the Season 2 tier-set bonus (the Wildfire Bomb primary target modifier) added baseline to our kit, so here’s to hoping we get some more of the Dragonflight tier sets as a normal part of our abilities or talent tree

As a refresh, we started out in Dragonflight in Season 1 with exceptional single-target and priority damage due to our Mongoose Bite focused tier set (Hunter Survival Class Set 2pc/Hunter Survival Class Set 4pc). This was followed up by an underwhelming Season 2 patch without any real areas to excel in as our tier set was very middle of the road, but we were able to do AoE and ST damage without needing to sacrifice one or the other. However, Season 2’s tier set bonus was an experiment on adding a primary target modifier to Wildfire Bomb, which effectively solved all balancing concerns with the ability, so much love was given to this tier. Finally, Season 3’s damage profile was a lot like Season 2 (above average ST and AoE) but with much better tuning, with a tier-set bonus revolving around Fury of the Eagle turning into a mini burst window—Hunter Survival 10.2 Class Set 2pc / Hunter Survival 10.2 Class Set 4pc.

Survival Hunter Utility and Viability

Beyond our damage as a Survival Hunter, there has usually been very limited reason to truly consider bringing in a Survival Hunter in any sort of high end content when you consider optimal compositions. Melee DPS in general are very Raid-Buff heavy, for instance, melee brings along buffs/debuffs such as Chaos Brand, Mystic Touch, and Battle Shout. In addition, other melee also carries other stackable situational defensives or movement speed boosts such as Anti-Magic Zone, Rallying Cry, Darkness, Wind Rush Totem, or Stampeding Roar.

Survival Hunter struggles to truly compete as a Melee DPS when it comes to these forms of unique utility. Aspect of the Turtle is one of the strongest effects we can bring to a raid, however this does not set us apart as an immunity is shared by many specs, including other melee.

While we do have Hunter’s Mark, this too is typically already brought by our ranged counterparts. If we really need Aspect of the Turtle or Hunter’s Mark, it generally is not ideal to specifically bring a Survival Hunter in for these two abilities when melee spots generally have stronger or similar forms of the same utility instead. Because we lack unique or interesting utility, our “spot” has to be strictly justified by damage alone. While Melee specs sharing utility with their ranged counterpart is not unique, the utility these specs bring are generally more “Stackable”, or have something extra to set it apart. for instance, Enhancement has access to Windfury Totem to set itself apart from elemental. The closest thing Survival Hunters have to stackable utility/buffs to compete with the likes of the mentioned abilities effects is Sentinel’s Protection, which is nowhere near the same power level and is sadly often forgotten about.

Now, a lot of this applies primarily to Raids, but is an issue in M+ as well. Despite most of our Hunter talent tree focusing on mob-control, our means of controlling mobs are actually quite limited and mutually exclusive talents. Neither Binding Shot nor High Explosive Trap are practical AoE cast-stops. Scatter Shot can be used as a short CD stop but its DoT-clearing properties can be incredibly punishing for our allies. Freezing Trap has hitbox issues to reliably use as a stop in bigger pulls or on big mobs, and we generally lack a way to assist the group elsewhere. Especially when our “raid/group buff”, Hunter’s Mark, has very limited value across an entire key with its 1-target limitation.

This has been one of our primary issues since the very beginning of our melee journey, and while we are not looking for another Windfury Totem or anything that affects raw throughput in a way that can be seen remotely as “mandatory”, it would be neat to have access to something that also makes people go “Hey, that’s cool!” While this sounds incredibly selfish, this would ideally be a tool that neither Beast Mastery nor Marksmanship have access to, as this would simply bring access to those tools to Ranged rather than specifically help us set ourselves apart to compete with other Melee.

So what could this be?

• Aspect of the Eagle / Ohn’ahra’s Blessing

A (weaker) group wide Aspect of the Eagle! This could be a throwback to Talonclaw our Legion artifact. Perhaps we could call upon Ohn’ara to bless ourselves and a few nearby allies with a neat 15-20yd extra melee ability range for a short amount of time or an aura granting a 3 yard bonus to nearby melee (not stacking with similar effects).
When Exhilaration over heals on your pet, a % amount of the over healing is redistributed (as an absorb shield?) to nearby allies.
There are plenty of other options to explore, of course. Ideally anything that addresses our usefulness in content to help us break out of the occasional “meme spec” or “what does SV even do?” territory

The Cooldown Problem

Let’s just lead off with how odd it is to have a competitive build around not talenting into traditional cooldowns at all. Wowza!

Our traditional cooldowns (Coordinated Assault and Spearhead) in general lack severe “oomph” and can be incredibly awkward to utilize optimally or even suboptimally. This lack of power is especially noticeable when you consider that our so called “No-CD” builds (quite literally, no-cooldown) have been part of our talents builds since the beginning of Dragonflight, and in most cases are less than a 1% damage loss compared to actually talenting into a cooldown. This is true for both Single Target and AoE builds.

Coordinated Assault – Coordinated Assault

In the case of Coordinated Assault, which seems more tailored to AoE you might be inclined to argue that this lack of single target “oomph” is okay, but even for AoE purposes it barely pulls ahead of these “No-CD” builds. Given the overall awkwardness of the cooldown (more about this below), it is often considered a waste of effort to talent into all together, not even considering some of the other issues with this cooldown. The summary of this cooldown is every 3 seconds or so when your pet uses their Basic Attack, you get a single stack of an empowerment buff that lasts 5 seconds, strengthening your next Wildfire Bomb or Kill Shot. The Wildfire Bomb empowerment is far too weak to use, so the optimal way to use this cooldown is to ensure every empowerment goes to Kill Shot. There are 3 main concerns with this cooldown moving forward.

• The “Coordinated Assault” empower buff (which is also named Coordinated Assault) will fade when consumed by Wildfire Bomb before all targets you hit with said bomb have taken benefit from this 20% damage buff. This is clearly a bug, but has been a thing ever since the rework of Coordinated Assault.
• The least annoying / most efficient way to play this cooldown is to simply ensure your Kill Shot exclusively gets empowered. This is primarily done with the help of a set of Macros that make sure this happens. This undermines the idea of the cooldown but given how incredibly weak the Bomb Empower is, it is worth it.
• One of the components of Coordinated Assault is to effectively accelerate the cooldown recovery of Wildfire Bomb by 100%. This sounds great, until you realize that the DoT of our Wildfire Bombs cannot actually stack/ignite. While Wildfire Infusion can partially fix this by switching around which “ID” of a bomb you end up throwing, this amount of acceleration will inevitably cause overlapped DoTs, thus wasted DPS.

Spearhead – Spearhead

In the case of Spearhead, our new shiny cooldown added in Dragonflight, the power depends a lot on the importance and “oomph” of Mongoose Bite itself, which has decreased drastically as Dragonflight has progressed. Even in its “prime” (Season 1) Spearhead wasn’t that far ahead of the no-cooldown builds or the “AoE focused” Coordinated Assault build. The power level simply isn’t worth the 5-point total investment (two points in Killer Companion to access the cooldown, one point in Spearhead, and two points in Deadly Duo ) to get the full version of the cooldown in most cases. Other issues with this cooldown include:

• Spearhead is still on the GCD. Most cooldowns that are still on the GCD do something “extra” to compensate, such as direct damage. This is also the case for Spearhead, except the damage this ends up doing is give or take 6k, which is less than your average auto attack. Seeing the 6k hit appear on your screen is far from a satisfying payoff for it being on the GCD..
• The overall power level doesn’t feel like it fits a 90 second CD, but rather a 60 second CD. Although lowering its CD to match doesn’t seem worthwhile as it would make it awkward with other abilities, such as Death Chakram.
• Spearhead is extremely specialized in single target and single target alone—it provides near-zero value in AoE. This is fine by itself, however it is not fine when its current Single Target output which it is specialized in, struggles to outperform simply not talenting into Spearhead or even any CD at all. On top of that, it plain loses to these alternatives when it comes to AoE.
• One of Spearheads Core mechanics relies on extensions through Kill Command resets. There are several ways to achieve a higher chance to reset including Deadly Duo, which creates a loop that is tied to Spearhead itself. The problem with this arises when you would ideally want to use a high impact ability during Spearhead that does not directly contribute to these resets, such as Kill Shot, Wildfire Bomb, or Flanking Strike

Survival Hunter In War Within

Quality of Life

As said, the most important changes for the spec moving into The War Within (numbers aside) are relatively minor quality of life changes. The most frequent request in the Survival community would be a second pass at the Coordinated Assault cooldown. While Coordinated Assault is thematic and fun conceptually, in practice it’s very awkward to use.
For the entirety of the expansion, we’ve strongly encouraged a three part macro being set up to alleviate said awkwardness. Furthermore, there is a rather annoying bug with this cooldown. The empowerment buff can actually fall off of Wildfire Bomb and only impact the damage of a single affected enemy.

Speaking of Wildfire Bomb, the DoT on the base ability does not ignite. This is quite odd, as with the low cooldown in AoE you will inevitably end up losing a lot of free damage. This in turn makes Wildfire Infusion practically mandatory, as each different bomb has a different DoT and won’t overwrite itself like the base bomb. That said, with enough CDR through things like borrowed power or Coordinated Assault, you can definitely roll bad Wildfire Infusion RNG and get the same color bomb up before the DoT falls off, wasting more damage.

The leap that Flanking Strike uses can often put you in dangerous situations based on the bosses hit box or anchor point. A large issue is that the leap-trigger-distance is not impacted by Lunge, meaning you can be outside of base melee range, but still within Lunge melee range. This will still trigger the leap however, and when unexpected can often lead to deaths, such as using it during Tindral’s Fire beams. It would be immensely comfortable if this was standardized across our leaps and made with Lunge in consideration.

Predictable Rotation

Among DPS, Survival’s normal priority or gameplay loop, involves very little variance. We have an incredibly small quantity of RNG or proc based elements in our gameplay loop, and the ones we do have are overall unimpactful to our output. While this is generally seen as positive, it can make the gameplay feel very predictable without much to think about our plan for. It could be nice to have some slightly stronger proc based elements added as options in our talent tree—something like our season 1 tier set (Hunter Survival Class Set 4pc) or other options discussed below.

Future Survival Hunter Gameplay

We touched on this earlier, but many in the Survival Hunter community love the current gameplay loop. We’re very much hopeful that The War Within takes this core foundation and builds on it with a slight talent tree refresh making our selections more impactful, exciting to play with, and hopefully less expensive to bring our tree in line with other DPS specs.

Many hope that Serpent Sting can find its way back into our rotation as the prominent venom user of the class because as it stands now, Serpent Sting is an entirely passive ability, applied automatically by Volatile Bomb and Viper’s Venom. The only reason we talent into Serpent Sting at all is simply to get to Poison Injection. The automatic Serpent Sting applications through Volatile Bomb and Viper’s Venom also devalue Latent Poison’s competitor, Hydra’s Bite, as a large portion of the free uptime this is meant to provide to multiple targets is already covered through the automatic applications. One solution to these gameplay concerns would be the addition of the old Viper’s Venom (a PPM proc that made your next Serpent Sting hit harder and cost 0 Focus) as a talent to replace more unpopular and weak options such as Energetic Ally or Bloody Claws as well as add a proc to think about as mentioned above.

Just as many still would love to see more Mongoose Bite and Mongoose Fury related talents with more spec-wide synergy, as large parts of the community feel as if this ability and gameplay loop is the defining aspect of melee Survival as it’s one of the few gameplay holdovers from the initial Legion rework. Speaking of important abilities, Wildfire Bomb is also a much loved ability that could use a bit more active engagement or synergy on the tree. As seen from the Season 4 Dragonflight tier set bonus, many Survival gamers look forward to abilities that interact with our bombs.

Lastly, with Flanking Strike, we’re on our hands and knees begging that the ability interacts with the abundant Kill Command synergy in the tree—as it stands now the ability isn’t much more than a hard hitting Kill Command with a longer cooldown, except that it is missing one of the key interactions that Kill Command possesses: Flankers Advantage, or more specifically the ability for Kill Command to reset. This causes a little bit of awkwardness where suddenly it is no longer worth using Flanking Strike in certain niche situations, such as:

Overall, these interactions are a bit unintuitive, and a simple fix could involve allowing Flanking Strike to always proc Flanker’s Advantage (the Kill Command reset) as this would include Flanking Strike with the majority of our Kill Command interactions.

In a fun turn of events, this ability could also be changed to something inspired by the the WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery version of this ability, which can be seen just below. This would give you a fun proc to play around while also giving you and your pet a tandem ability to use, which is something appealing to many players of the specialization and is a key component of the spec’s identity.

Mastery: A Weaker but More Specific Versatility

Our Mastery (Mastery: Spirit Bond) has historically been a problematic and undesirable stat for us for several reasons. Our Mastery doesn’t affect any abilities without a resource cost. Notably, this is the (usually) powerful Wildfire Bomb or a cooldown such as Fury of the Eagle.

Numerically, it is just not good. It is entirely fine for a stat to just not be super strong, but the extent matters, and we’ve avoided Mastery for going on 8 years. Our Mastery has only ever been reasonable (but still our worst stat) on two occasions: The first was when Venthyr Survival was the primary Single Target damage option in Shadowlands. The second was when we almost completely neglected Wildfire Bomb in Single Target due to the poor tuning of Wildfire Bomb In both of these cases, mastery-affected abilities were contributing over 65% of the single target damage, which in any typical scenario just doesn’t occur. Even so, it was still the worst possible stat to have on our gear.

As explained before, when the damage contribution of non-mastery affected sources increases, the value of mastery drops significantly. As of writing, Mastery has just under a third of the value versus our best stat in sustained AoE, or slightly over a third of the value of our second worst stat. This is an absolutely enormous gap, to the point where it is definitely worth equipping an item that is double digits item levels lower just to avoid equipping an item with Mastery. In the case of jewelry on sustained AoE, you’d be better off equipping a ring or neck over 100 ilevels lower, just to avoid Mastery, which is not very intuitive to newer players.

It would be really, really nice if our Mastery were to change in The War Within to close this performance gap between the different stats, especially when it comes to AoE.

Survival Hunter Hero Trees

The Hero trees we’ve seen so far are really quite something and it’s made many in the community a buzz with thoughts and hopes for what new talents Survival Hunter gets in the new expansion. As a reminder, the Hunter hero trees are Dark Ranger, Pack Leader, and Sentinel. While some classes’ Hero trees are safe bets in which spec gets which tree, Hunters is definitely one of the trickier ones. That hasn’t stopped anyone in our passionate community from talking about what we want and hope for with this new system! We’re excited to see what pans out on Hunter Hero talent reveal on February 7th.

Pack Leader: We’re making an assumption here, but due to Marksmanship not utilizing a pet at all, it’s looking like Pack Leader will be for Survival and Beast Mastery. The easiest tree here would be making your pets stronger, making you tankier (via splitting damage taken with pet), and almost assuredly summoning Dire Beasts based on procs or RNG. Both BM and SV have stacking self buffs in our talent trees, both specs have abilities with resetting cooldowns, so there are a lot of opportunities here for a true Rexxar experience that seamlessly slots into both specs. Unless…what if Pack Leader was a support-lite tree, like Lightsmith? Utilizing your leadership and pack tactics, who’s to say you don’t push your parties and allies to excel?

Dark Ranger: Due to the popularity (or notoriety depending on who you ask) of Sylvanas Windrunner, this Hero tree will certainly draw attention. Dark Ranger can really go to any spec on the class—Survival used to have access to the iconic Black Arrow, but both Marksmanship and Beast Mastery have access to the Wailing Arrow talent, which is almost guaranteed to be one of the focal points of this Hero tree. Expect to see Shadow damage and a lot of it, which is a certainly nice amp to damage. Some hope that this hero talent tree evokes elements of ranged Suvival from pre-2016 (namely the DoT offering a proc to reset a CD). We would not be surprised if this also included a juiced up version of the cantrip from Dark Ranger’s Quiver.

Sentinel: What would a Hunter Hero talent tree be without an Elf centric identity? This is another Hero tree that could definitely go to any spec of the class and the flavor/abilities of the tree are just as hard to guess. The most likely talents would be amplifiers to things like Kill Shot (perhaps turning it into pure Arcane damage?) and Arcane Shot. This spec could even heavily amplify Sentinel Owl which would certainly be interesting! One thing is for certain—you can expect Arcane damage and you can expect Elune.

About the Author
Hello! My name is Doolb and I am a huge fan of Survival. I’ve been playing WoW since 2006 and have been a huge fan of Survival ever since Legion’s pre-patch and we picked up the spear. You can always find me hanging around one of my favorite places on the internet: Trueshot Lodge—the best Hunter Discord server around. This guide is a collaborative effort between myself and Thyminde (aka Velratha) and will be frequently updated. Feel free to stop by TSL and ask anything you need!