Hello Rogues,
I am going to the various melee DPS class forums to ask about the Survival Hunter.
Clearly rogues are happy with melee DPS. What is it about Survival Hunter you don’t like? Do you have an SV alt? Do you play it? If not, why not?
The hunter forums can be a bit of an echo chamber, I want to hear what melee fans have to say about SV.
SV is a pretty fun spec overall. I like it a lot. It captures a lot of the original era Hunter class fantasy that MM (no pet) and BM (too much reliant on pet) do not capture. It feels like you and your pet are actually working together, and being side-by-side adds to that fantasy as well.
The reason I prefer Rogue is just that Rogue has three melee specs and usually one of them is decent enough, whereas SV is at the whims of Blizzard and any time SV is bad, you are expected to just play one of the two ranged specs. Can’t count the number of times I have app’d to a guild only to be asked if I also played MM or BM. Also the fact that, personally, Rogue just has better gameplay both in raid, in dungeons, and in the open world.
I have a survival alt that I really enjoy. I’m a big fan of the melee ranger archetype.
I have a lot of fun with it in wpvp and bgs. I feel super slippery with Craven, Disengage removing roots, and master’s call, and I also feel like I have decent control over most situations with freezing trap. Track Humanoids is lowkey one of my favorite perks too.
I don’t have any real complaints about the spec, it’s super fun and I really like it. I just simply like outlaw more. I like having stealth on demand, not on a 1 min CD. Another one of my friends also plays a survival hunter and I don’t like playing the same spec as my friends in a group for some weird reason.
Overall, t’s in my top 3 for favorite melee specs, right behind Fury and Outlaw. 
Personally, when I play a hunter, I want a break from melee. Don’t care for casters much so yeah. That and I enjoyed RSV and when they changed it to melee, I lost a spec I enjoyed and ended up being left with two specs, neither of which felt anything like I had lost.
That is probably where a lot of the animosity towards MSV comes from, those who enjoyed the spec lost it for yet another melee spec in an already overcrowded sea of melee specs, and didn’t really gain anything else to fill the gap of what they lost.
This is interesting. Thank you.
I personally am not a fan of having a pet. The last time I tried playing a hunter was during vanilla, and I absolutely HATED having a pet and everything that came along with it (the extra action bar, it’s weird AI, etc).
An interesting point my raid leader made recently was he thought SV should be turned into a tank spec, because it’s in almost every circumstance a big nerf (especially in PVE) to your playstyle becoming a melee over being ranged.
I don’t like SV because it doesn’t have it’s own identity to me. It doesn’t feel polished. It feels like random parts taped together.
It has Kill Command. That’s a BM ability to me. And on BM its a spender and on SV its a builder? That just feels lazy. SV has Serpent Sting. MM can get Serpent Sting as a talent. Again, seems lazy.
As an aside, all 3 hunter specs have different degrees of laziness and lack of polish to me. For example, why can MM get the flock of ravens talent earlier than BM can? MM is better at learning animals than BM? And BM can get Chimera Shot earlier than MM? Its a shot. Why can BM learn a shot earlier than MM. Just makes no sense to me.
But I digress. SV just doesn’t feel like a complete spec. If it had camo, wildfire, and butchery baseline it would be a start.
I have not played my hunter in a vary long time since legion - also i didnt play suv hunter really that much until 9.2 ptr came out, I enjoy how the teir set works and how it makes suv gameplay alot more enjoyable.
Soon we will see alot more suv hunters once everyone gets teir sets they will become more popular then ever before I Suspect. I feel hunters/ any other class can be good / fun when givin enough attention by blizz.
I have no opinion about SV Hunter except that they aren’t Rogues and therefore don’t suit me. That and melee hunter doesn’t seem right, but that’s less of an issue than the fact that it’s just not a Rogue.
Then again Rogues aren’t Rogues either these days. Instead we’ve got Yahtzee Pirate, Poison DK, and Shadow Naruto Cringelord spec. NO THANKS
This is the same dumb attitude which says Gouge is an “Outlaw” (lol) ability and shouldn’t be available to Subtlety or Assassination Rogues despite the fact that we learned it at level 6 back in 2004 and keybound it as “4” for, oh, a decade and a half or whatever. But right it belongs to “Outlaw” a spec which didn’t even exist when this game was actually good.
First, thanks for your comment.
Second, I disagree about this particular statement. Camo is nice, and I think it should be baseline. But its not spec defining. If it was badeline for SV, I think SV hunters should be able to pick up untriggered traps from camo to reset the cooldown. But I digress…
Wildfire Infusion is cool, but it just augments an SV baseline ability… Wildfire grenades. The interaction is neat, but complex and can be a little distracting. Instead I think guerilla tactics should be baseline, leave wildfire infusion as a talent. I dont even take it unless Im doing m+, but I always take Guerilla tactics, and I wouldnt mind playing with other talents on that row. Butchery could be baseline, but it’s still not that cool. I think butchery should also have a chance to apply wingclip, maybe with a talent. If carve had a chance to apply wing clip, then taking butchery as a talent might be worth it, because youd apply even more wing clip.
Just my opinion
Hey man, it isn’t dumb, it’s just how I feel. Just like I don’t think how you feel about it is dumb.
I prefer greater spec-fantasy than class-fantasy. If you don’t that’s cool.
Sub and Assassination can have the functional benefit of Gouge without just stealing Gouge. Call it something different and give it a spec twist. Sub could have something like a 2 sec incap that gives 2 combo points. Assassination could have a 2 sec incap that increases your dots by 5 seconds. I’m not saying these are the best options, I’m just trying to illustrate that creativity doesn’t have to be sacrificed in the name of function.
Its very easy in my opinion to just spend a little more time making things fit a spec rather than just copy/pasting abilities.
The reason I like it is because its complex 
I’m all for more complexity, but I understand that that is just my opinion. Also yeah I don’t even like butchery UNLESS you take Wildfire, because I like applying bleed to everything. That where the fun is for me.
Without wildfire and butchery the spec just seems too boring to me. Not enough going on.
I would agree, from a PvE standpoint, but if you arent taking infusion in PvE, then you are kind of doing it wrong. In PvP, the spec (and its identity) shines, IMO. Thats not to say you are wrong. I do value your position and thats why I made the thread. I actually think that its almost impossible to see what makes the spec interesting in instanced PvE… unless you think huge AoE numbers are inherently interesting.
Spec-fantasy over class-fantasy may not be dumb in a vacuum, but it’s momentously dumb in the context of the Rogue class, which had an extremely strong class-fantasy for the majority of its existence and from the very beginning. One of the most iconic classes in the original WoW, which everyone either loved to love or loved to hate, turned into something that nobody recognizes any longer.
Your take is totally divorced from context, which is why you have this exactly backwards. Sub and Assassination had Gouge from the beginning and for the majority of their existence, prior to Gouge being stolen from those specs.
I don’t want a reskinned or modified Gouge. I want back my Gouge which was stolen from me by the spec-fantasy sycophants trying to re-write history.
If you are truly opposed to theft then the only logical position is to return Gouge to its rightful place in Subtlety and Assassination spellbooks.
Eh we just have a different opinion man.
I’d rather specs share less in common. Similar examples would be not liking frost mages having fire blast - even though they always used to have it. Or Destro having corruption - even though they always used to have it.
I played since vanilla, and played every class when they had all of their spells. Legion was still my fav expansion. I’d rather move more towards specs having all unique stuff.
It’s ok that you don’t think so. We aren’t going to agree. Have a good one!
You’re entitled to your opinion but you’re not entitled to blatantly incorrect “facts” like claiming that Gouge in Assassination or Subtlety spellbooks would be “stealing” it from Outlaw.
Assassination and Subtlety always had Gouge for the entire span of 12 years from the launch of the game until the point where Outlaw was 1st conceived, and stealing means to take something away, which deprives someone of something they once had.
It’s not even accurate to say that Assassination and Subtlety would be copying Gouge from Outlaw, since they had it first. OTOH it’s definitely accurate to say that Outlaw stole Gouge from the other 2 specs, since they originally had it and then it was taken away.
So fine, you’re entitled to your opinion that taking things away from Assassination and Subtlety is actually good somehow, and I’m entitled to my opinion that makes you a selfish jerk that celebrates depriving others of the things they once possessed and loved dearly.
I main rogue and can’t imagine playing anything other than mm on my hunter. The class fantasy of kiting and lining up aimed shots vs double melee trains in 3s is what gives me the reason to live.
But on a more serious note, why play survival after being a rogue main in pvp we have flashier moves, stronger goes, and probably the only thing we are weaker at is 1v1s.
I can understand that. It’s a bursty meta.
Short and sweet: hunters have the worst survivability in the game. Rogue’s have the best.
It is basically impossible to die in even the most challenging PvE content if your competent and familiar with it.
I’m at a point where I spec for elusiveness via Feint, instead of cheat death and it is insane DR. Plus, ya know, cloak, evasion, vanish/cheap shot, grappling hook, sprint, blind, kidney shot.
You can prevent wipes by alleviating tank pressure in keys and practically solo 30-40secs worth of kicks on a caster if you want.
Those are very good points about why to bring a rogue, or why to main a rogue, but I am curious why people (who are the target demographic for SV hunter) don’t even alt SV hunter.