No you can’t. You really can’t.
Survival in vanilla was basically a pvp-only spec designed so that you could survive melee better to get back to range due to the deadzone. And literally nobody went past 30 points in survival in vanilla, because the 31 point talent for survival was the worst ability in the entire game - not just the worst hunter ability, but the worst ability, factually speaking.
No, it’s really not. I played a 31/20 MM/Surv build in classic, and then once survival didn’t suck I went survival and stayed survival through the expose weakness/wyvern sting days in BC into the lock and load era and until the survival spec that I’d grown to love over ten years literally disappeared.
There was never a time when melee hunter wasn’t a literal joke before Legion. The only thing any hunter ever wanted to go into melee for was to put a trap at your feet before trap launcher was added.
Once survival had stabilized in focus, it stayed largely the same for many years. It was a spec focused around using elemental arrows, being mobile, and managing resources and dots around procs. It offered a very agile, quick, and reactive playstyle that forced me to constantly be aware of my resources, my buff bar, and my dots so that I didn’t waste damage. It was a unique playstyle unlike anything offered by almost any other class… and when it disappeared, I literally lost all motivation to play the character I’d been with since day 1 of burning crusade(I rerolled Draenei in BC after being a NE Hunter for Vanilla). I managed to level that character through Legion and BFA but never really enjoyed it and didn’t play much. And I can’t even bring myself to log into it now… as you can see, this character is still 50.
The ‘Survival is a melee spec’ joke existed because its 31 pt talent was Lacerate - a melee bleed that did 133 damage over 21 seconds and didn’t scale with anything. And… well, it was the worst ability in the game. Nothing else boasted that low damage. So, naturally Lacerate went away a few patches into Vanilla when they did the first hunter rework.
This is what frustrates me the most. I played both survival and MM. I tried MM frequently because it was almost always parsing at slightly better numbers. But it was such a different playstyle. MM was a stationary turret feel. You stood still, used a lot of slower abilities that individually did more damage. While Survival was all about quick, agile abilities. You rarely used cast time abilities and rarely had to stand still… but none of your stuff hit particularly hard upfront.
Saying they’re similar is like saying Affliction and Destruction are similar because ‘they both cast spells and are warlocks’.
The ONLY people who thought they were similar were MM hunters who had never really learned how to maximize survival. Anyone who was ACTUALLY a survival hunter knew how different they were because that was why they were survival despite survival typically parsing slightly lower.
