Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Survival Gets an Eleventh Hour Call

There has been a lot of talk of the early sims that were released last week and of course the blizzard employees asked about it said the sims were wrong, as they are supposed to do because they work for the company.  Through the history of early sims there were always things they missed and sometimes there was one class that they completely missed something that the top level players noticed and used to get more out of a class than expected, but over all they are usually, for the most part, close to how things will turn out if not in exact numbers than in order of where classes would appear.

So for survival hunters simming under tanks it mean thats the spec was scheduled for execution.  An eleventh hour call from the governor however has given survival a stay of execution because maybe blizzard noticed that no damage dealing spec should ever be under tanks and surely no pure damage dealing class should be under tanks.  But hey, at least we always had the slow, boring, clunky and caster feeling MM spec now right?

Just before the 6.0.2 patch was going to be released blizzard announced that there were some things the sims missed.  Surprising isn't it?  Tin foil hat going on here.  The sims did not miss anything, blizzard is just covering their asses right now with some last minute changes.  Tin foil hat coming off.

The changes that apparently everyone missed show that the bottom specs like retribution paladin, shadow priest and survival hunters all apparently got buffs no one noticed while the top specs from the warrior, warlock and mage classes got nerfs that were also missed.  Amazing coincidence isn't it?

So now we will enter 6.0.2 when it comes online with no idea where survival will really be.  It is actually kind of fun to think about testing things out on live but who knows if the changes were enough, or too much.  Only time will tell.

The other hunter specs did not receive any changes but survival received some decent buffs on their most used, and most powerful, abilities which should help their AoE a little and their single target even more.

Black Arrow, Explosive Shot and Serpent Sting have had their damage increased by 12%

Some how, if you believe blizzard, everyone missed this.  If you ask me I say it was just added before the patch as a way to save face for such a mismatched damage dealing line up from top to bottom that saw the top spec doing double the damage of the bottom spec.  Increasing the bottom and decreasing the top should do a lot to close the gap, but will it be enough?

I plan to test out survival with the 12% buff when it goes live to see what it looks like, at the worst that 12% should be more than enough to get us over tanks, but will it be enough to get us more than bottom damage dealer.  Only time will tell.

Happy patch day.

16 comments:

  1. i was kinda expecting number tweaks for a bit now, but they came really late. to me they haven't looked finalised at all. regardless i still think that we're missing something or i dunno, especially for MM/SV. maybe some internal factor. maybe a mechanic.

    what are you guys doing first when logging in at 6.0?
    i'll probably spend 3+ hours in completely redoing my UI, remapping keybinds, and so on. i don't like doing it but appreciate the result of a clear, tidy UI (i've kept adding/moving stuff around hastily throughout the addon), therefore it has become part of my pre-launch routine. i will try to make a keybind profile that works with all 3 specs. oh, and als, i'll make LOTS AND LOTS of room in my bags (i have, like 5 open slots at the moment, with biggest bags, full void/bank and all). then, pre-launch event, although i might wait a bit for that until the field clears a little...

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    1. I think MM needs some sort of instant filler when need be, another 2 seconds on the mastery and maybe a proc or two, something to react to. I think SV needs some sort of cooldown either for the burn phase with the loss of KS or something rotational on maybe a 1 minute cooldown. BM seems fine to me, even if I believe the numbers are a little on the soft side.

      I have a post coming up on that, it was my intended post for today but noticed the SV thing and had to make a small post about that. Bags, bags and more bags.

      I am going to try out my sigil or rampage on my horde hunters. I have a heroic one and only an LFR AoC being I have never gotten a better one. AoC was always better than even a heroic sigil or rampage but now, as MM, the heroic sigil "might" be better. So I am dropping SV on my horde hunter and picking up SV and going to take the heroic sigil out for a test drive. Might be pretty awesome on a fight like shaman if they are tanked together.

      But bags, yes, bags. I am going to open my reagents tab on all my characters and stack everything to 100 and put my junk in my toy boy and be happy that I have a little space at least for a short time.

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    2. yeah MM feels a bit empty on this side. at worst we'll have to resort to MS. SV sounds so uninteresting i won't pick that spec.

      interesting point about the trinkets. will AoC be any good for non-BM? i doubt it. what about haromms? why would it be worse than the sigil?

      The new bag slots will probably help me get through levelling phase at best. I've already got a few xmog sets i'd like to work towards. my bank and part of my void are alerady full. all non-bop items have been on twinks for years already. we really need leranable xmog sets (account bound, pretty please, so i can go get BC quest rewards&co with a twink).

      "put my junk in my toy boy"
      teehee.

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    3. I made the same typo in the post I just made but I was able to fix it because, unlike the reply, I read it before posting. lol

      I am not sure about AoC for anything other than BM. It lowers black arrow and that now hits like a truck for SV so it might be good for them too. But I do not see it being of any use what so ever for MM.

      Sigil is just crap, always has been. My LFR trinket was better than that, but with the loss of AoC being as useful for MM the cleave, even if rare, might be great for MM considering their hard hitting shots and the double shot chimera on multiple targets. That is why I want to give it a try. Have to find a group that will tank shamans together and see what I can do with that trinket and MM now having the cleave chimera.

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  2. Well I guess I am glad there is new content. Not crazy about having Orcs shoved up our ass...not crazy about Orcs. Don't like it they have removed so much stuff just to call it content. Plus all the actual content they removed. And I really don't like the way that blues and cm,s come across as condescending assholes when you are critical of something. Hopefully everything will be OK but I'm afraid this one is going to be worse than than the great FUBAR of 2010.

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    1. The blues have been very rude and condescending for a very long time and it is getting worse. I am not defending them by saying this, but I think it is in part to twitter. It is hard to actually have a conversation on there, so they end up giving short snide remarks instead. It is still no excuse.

      I hold much of the same fears that this is going to turn out worse than the mass exodus of players after cataclysm release. They are making many mistakes I believe in warlords and added to so little content and so much removed content, it will not bode well for their bottom line.

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  3. Interesting, because playing on the PTR yesterday I seemed to get marginally higher numbers as SV. Than I had gotten a few days before. I chalked it up to getting more familiar with the new rotations. So I am glad to hear maybe Blizz is finally starting to notice.

    That said, I think -- no matter how much it may eventually get buffed -- SV will remain broken in my eyes. The total absence of any player-controlled burst damage (I do not count Stampede because it loses out in almost every circumstance to the other choices in that talent level) relegates this spec to efficient button mashing. It still leaves the hunter with almost zero choices to make.

    When you combine this with the horrible clunkiness of MM, it makes me wonder if Blizz has anyone who actually mains a hunter. They certainly have no one who really loves the spec and understands how to make changes that retain the feel, the fun, the joy of huntering.

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    1. while i'll probably be enjoining most changes, i agree very much with you about the stampede change. it was a signature ability we (as a community) have been asking for for a long time, and now it's removed from baseline? same goes for scatter shot, an useful tool in many situations just gone. those two changes bother me most.

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    2. You were probably experiencing the buff they gave us, even if they say it was always there and the theory crafter just missed it. lol

      I do not think there is a hunter voice in blizzards office any longer. It could partly be the reason for such a screw up like this. There is no one there with real experience that can say, this does not feel right. They just do changes and say, this seems good on paper, and never realize that what works on paper does not work in action sometimes.

      @Ril

      Make that a 3rd on stampede. It should never have become a talent. And scatter should have never been removed.

      I remember in the mists beta fighting to get concussive back. Glad we got it, but it seems this time around we fought and still lost every battle for hunters. It was a sad beta cycle for hunters and might be a bad expansion cycle to follow.

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    3. @TGE: maybe we didn't fight enough. Hunters seemed very quiet this beta cycle, or maybe i just missed it?

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    4. It was not like it was back in mists. There was such a vibrant hunter community, frost had the ear of ghostcralwer, WHU was active, the pod cast was active, the hunters hall was active. So many bloggers have quit, pod casts ended, connections to the GMs gone, that we never got our point across.

      I did as much as I could on beta putting in informative information how how I felt rotations felt, how I felt the character played. I did mention numbers but did not harp on them. And I kept it all professional and did not call them assholes like I wanted to. But apparently me and everyone else that did that, and there were still a lot, were not enough for them to notice or even care.

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  4. Your tinfoil hat is correct. Blizzard made some last moment changes precisely because of the sims. The blues coming at the sims and showing an image of pre-SoO sims being wrong on warlocks is just a cheap shot. Sims aren't all there is, for 6.0.2 there are actual logs from the game and they show largely the same things as the sims.

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    1. To clarify: of course, the sims aren't accurate. Profiles for some specs are optimized better than others and consistently show higher damage ranking than it turns out on live. That said, whenever sims, for example, show a couple of specs to be huge outliers, it absolutely makes sense to investigate this further, and more often than not, it does turn out that there's some kind of an issue there. Blizzard heard lots of noise about sims on the forums -> they decided to look into this -> they immediately found several things which were visibly broken right at the outset -> they made some fast fixes which we now see and are, hopefully, continuing to investigate.

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    2. Yet you notice how multiple times the GMs, even during the convert to raid cast, said that the logs are wrong and everything is fine.

      Then they put this in and tell everyone, you didn't notice these things, that is why your sims were wrong. No, that is not why. They were not there to begin with.

      What would be so wrong with blizzard just saying, thanks for the information, we will make some adjustments. They always have to lie and say everyone is wrong and things are just fine.

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    3. "They only are able to do this when we make new builds. However, we've hotfixed some more tuning changes in, since the last beta build." They said flat out it wasn't in the latest build.

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    4. They said that is why the theory crafters did not pick up on it, because it was not part of a beta build. But they did say that it was already in game. As someone posted here, they noticed it yesterday, so it was not already in game. Blizzard is still trying to wiggle their way out with words. Either way the end result is the same, they changed some stuff at the eleventh hour that they should have changed a long time ago. Better late than never I guess.

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