NO MORE DOUBLE TRAP???Follow

So much for any reason to ever try out Survival.

I just did heroic ramps tonight, and double trapping would have saved wipes.

It really pissed me off.

North, I'd like to see what you come up with in terms of builds.

As for the double-trapping nerf, you're right... it hurts the entire class, not only SV hunters. It's just too bad that we're going to have to sacrifice more DPS for better utility. But those are our only options... adapt, re-spec, or re-roll.

Ooh. So the nerf, then, is that the first trap expires as soon as you drop a 2nd, and not when the 2nd is triggered?

That is dumb, I'm sorry Hunters :(

Of course you can. Like Resourcefulness. And I said CC, not Trap. Wyvern Sting anyone?

My point was this, Survival wasn't ruined even for a second by this. Readiness, perhaps. But every single talent before that hasn't been changed by this nerf, only one or two of the possible applications of it. There's nothing a Surv Hunter could do that got affected by this nerf, that other builds didn't get in equal measures.

Survival's strength in instances has always been the ability to keep one mob 100% incapacitated even if a trap should break early. You can still do that. Those funny videos of Triple trapping while Wyvern Stinging two mobs was just that. Funny videos with little practical application. Removing the Oh Shi-! group saver of a double trap was definitely a bad move by Blizzard, but it was hardly a Survival breaker.

I am staying Survival, because in a Raid I provide the most powerful Raid buff a Hunter can give while still being able to do Heroics and CC two mobs at a time, and one indefinitely. Survival Hunters still rock the Hunter world for CC, and we aren't broken.

But we are most certainly pissed off as hell.

Oh, and someone asked me to come up with builds. Well, there's two favorite builds of mine when it comes to Survival:
5/20/36 is a pure Raid DPS build with high mana efficiency and Expose Weakness. You can switch around a bit with the lower talentpoints if you don't want Deterrence and so on. The important bit lies in the Trap talents and DPS talents around. This build will also make you completely useless in PvP since every CC talent in this build is void in PvP.
0/21/40 is a complete beast for CC. Losing one single thing, IAotH, gains you Scattershot, Wyvern Sting and reduced Trap Cooldown. Again, some lower talents can be switched around. If you have high mp5, you can go for Imp Hunter's Mark or Imp Conc shot. If you don't like Deterrence, you can have another 2% health from Survivalist and so on.

No, if you have one mob in a trap and then drop another trap and pull a second mob into it, the first trap will break.

Which would be all fine and dandy if it was ranged, targettable, and had no cooldown. Like every other real CC.
But worse, chaintrapping relies on a certain amount of preparation. Dropping the second trap before the first breaks, to get the CD and Arming started. Now before, this could have been done in a way that ensured you could still drop another trap after a short while if specced for it.

Now, if another mob runs over your trap, the first mob will be lose and the second mob will most likely also be smacked out of his trap quite soon. And unless you were extremely lucky with the Cooldown timing, you are now on a Trap CD with no mobs trapped.

Chaintrapping is harder now, because our trap limitations make for unintended breakings of the first trap.

Ok, now I'm totally on the same page. And yes, I agree with you completely; they've made your CC abilities follow the same 'rules' as every other CC, except yours are far less precise, so it really is a problem. I can totally understand them leaving it as one trapped mob onry, but it needs to be handled in some other fashion. This could will get messy in a hurry.

Edit: Honestly I don't understand why Blizzard can't make different sets of rules for PVP and PVE behavior...I know this isn't so much a PVP nerf, but it just brings to mind all the things they change for the sake of one aspect or the other (PVE/PVP), with no apparent regard for the other. They did it for CC duration and DR, why can't they just apply similarly separate rules to all the other mechanics we're dealing with here?

Edited, Nov 16th 2007 4:35pm by Norellicus

They did that because the actual talent trees were re-written; just changing the fundamentals of how certain skills perform is not enough to warrant that, apparently, as neither Rogues nor Warriors got free respecs despite their tree shuffles/rewrites.

My whole theory on this whole thing is that Blizzard was aware of the "bug" almost immediately after it was allowed into the game. They opted to let it ride, however, as it probably didn't seem like all that big of a deal at the time. In fact, over time the ability to double trap consistantly became one of the defining features of the Survival spec Hunter. Expose Weakness is cool, but not a single non-SV Hunter I have played with thus far even knows what Expose Weakness is or what it does for them. Survival Hunters, if anybody knows anything about them at all, are known as the masters of CC. That's their role, their raison d'etre, their bread and butter. Take that away, and we're a mediocre dps class with some physical damage debuffs that nobody knows anything about.

Since Hunters (from the sounds of things) are no strangers to the nerf bat, my guess is that Blizzard intentionally left this "bug" in place...until, that is, they finally gave us a much-needed buff in the PvP area. "OK whew," thought the devs, "now that we've got them all jumping for joy about the buffs we've given them, it's time to address that bug and sneak in the fix..."

Unfortunately, if all SV Hunters ever had was what they are left with now, they'd have been screaming for buffs a long, long time ago. As far as I know, BM is still the PvP spec of choice...I'd give it a couple of months into S3 to determine whether or not that changes. Something tells me Wyvern Sting alone isn't going to bring SV into the spotlight as the Arena Hunter's spec of choice.

If that's the case, you'll have a Hunter spec with dramatically reduced utility in group PvE, still not the spec of choice for PvP, and then what? "Oooo...when I'm dumb enough to pull hate on Gruul I can pop Deterence after he resists FD and last an extra second before he obliterates me!!"

BM is the solo spec for Hunters. BM is the raiding (dps) spec for Hunters. BM is the PvP spec for Hunters. What a waste...

What we can do is trap a target, and put another trap down without it breaking. This is to trap it again as soon as the first trap breaks. However, if a different mob hits the second trap while the first trap is still active, the first trap will break... Likely causing a fair amount of chaos.

And there is already a 2 second "arming" time. It's not a cast with a castbar that can be interrupted, but after you set the trap down, it won't trigger for two seconds. When you're in a raid or heroic dungeon, getting pounded on for 2 seconds can hurt.

I really hope that if they don't want to give us back our multi-trapping, they can at least take away our cooldown.