I think if Survival was just fun we’d see a lot less complaints. If it was the most fun melee spec in the game people would play it just fine.
As it stands it is (in my opinion) the least fun spec period in the entire game. It needs all of its BiS talents to feel good.
All other melee specs have something interesting in their base kit. Survival has nothing interesting without talents.
I’m so glad I have other people to tell me my class isn’t fun. I’ll go reroll right away!
Imagine having your favorite spec taken away and then turning around and demanding the same thing unnecessarily happens to someone else. IMAGINE.
We all have our preferences when it comes to the specifics, but I could not agree more. RSV should be brought back to once more allow all of those who prefer that playstyle over what the other specs provide, to enjoy it again.
Although I would personally prefer if they add it as a 4th spec. Not as a replacement for what is currently here.
There’s a difference between what is presented through lore and written history in general compared to what specific classes have been about in terms of design, in the past.
But yeah sure, there’s ofc a basis for a melee-focused hunter, if you look at certain archetypes and not the class itself(it’s history).
Not really. For one, “fun” is subjective. And second, most complaints in regards to current SV, when on this topic, stem from issues that cannot be solved by simply looking at which of the spec’s talents should become baseline.
Could it “fix” MSV for those who enjoy the melee-aspects? Sure. But that’s a different story.
Right? I swear people are convinced that SV is the worst at everything. SV’s damage was never the issue, the issue people have is that its melee.
If blizz has the data then you have their answer; they are aware and they don’t care.
looks at RSV
Sorry to this man 
I suspect that they haven’t checked because they are already convinced they know the truth, or because it would undermine their position. They are human, and subject to denial.
The intention of this post is not to divide the hunter community further, on the contrary, is to address the elephant in the room. Survival currently feels like an unfinished, neglected, and abandoned spec. I don’t think anyone who plays the hunter class wants that.
Some players, including me, want the old iteration of the spec (RANGED). Others prefer the newest iteration (MELEE). At the end of the day, we all need to stop attacking each other and creating more division. What we need to do is join forces, unite as one solid community, and demand Blizzard to do their job and work out the issues that exist today with the spec and the class in general.
Many players in this forum had suggested amazing solutions and ideas that would improve and fix the spec, and we all need to continue doing so until BLIZZARD listens and takes action.
Either we get a 4th spec as RSurv or we keep the current Surv iteration, but instead of forcing players to choose between Melee or Ranged, they allow us to play both by simply modifying every ability and talent in the spec to be used on both melee and ranged weapons. A good example of this would be the champions Jayce and Nidalee from League of Legends.
No. Just no.
We want ranged SV back like it was in WoD or MoP. Simply making a spec ranged doesn’t solve anything. It just gives us another spec we don’t want.
Also, combining different playstyles in the same spec is a terrible idea. They’re already cramming 5 different play-styles into 3 specs, and that’s why we have the mess we have now. They either need to make a 4th spec or make a hybrid class and move MSV to it.
Survival being melee is fine. Much of the core kit is fine. The grenades shouldn’t be a cone, the spec deserves more burst and sustained AoE, and Raptor Strike / Mongoose Bite just needs to die already and get replaced with something better. The worst part of the spec is the depressingly dull and underpowered single target. The toolkit is already subpar for raid & M+ so spice it up, put more damage into the grenades so they feel awesome to use and build ways into the play to better harness their power. Serpent Sting works pretty well but it too deserves a little love. The pet interaction is thematically ok but functionally meh.
None of this matters though since Blizz put focused on rogue and mage specs per the usual (Arcane, Frost, and Sub) and ignoring the other dumpster specs (Survival and Feral) so we’re yelling into the abyss.
Anything revolving around traps too heavily will be trash in pugs & pvp where you need something to stand on it unless the trigger circle for traps is massively increased and instantly trigger. It will always be too power on stationary targets, too weak if they miss which only traps would suffer.
It’s a fun spec, plays pretty fast, it has fantastic interactions between the abilities but the kit is weak, especially for one of the pure dps specs. Compare the kit to rogue, mage, or lock and you’ll see just how lacking it is.
The people who hate melee survival are not current Survival players. They are dissatisfied BM and MM players. If BM and MM had talent trees with as much synergy and harmony as the SV talent tree, this wouldn’t even be a conversation. Ranged hunters would be happy, and we could continue to let spear hunters throw spears and bombs to their hearts content.
Let’s fix BM and MM before we scrap the best designed hunter spec.
Its not even kind of bad. The badness is that it has to compete with melee that bring other utilities to the raid while it has none that a ranged hunter doesn’t bring. If you take away say… mystic touch, suddenly surv looks 50% better. BM and MM hunters are just mad that both of those specs are not fun to play and have very uninteresting talent trees while survival has row after row of great talents with synergy between rows for interesting builds and playstyles. BM and MM need reworks, not unpruning.
They might be dissatisfied BM and MM players now, but I’d wager many/most of them are RSV players who lost a fun and unique spec to make room for an underplayed niche spec.
If not scrapping the best designed Hunter spec had been on the minds of the developers in WoD, then we would still have RSV and we would not be having this discussion at all!
This
/10char
Edit:
And this.
Just no.
To be fair SV barely has any baseline passives so basically all of its synergy comes from its talents
Signed: Current SV hunter
When I say “synergy” I am implying that a choice you make here has a connection with a choice you make there. Baseline can’t give that because its not a choice. SV talent choices give SV players the opportunity to pick between a few playstyles. Adding borrowed power, the best choice can change depending on gear or even just day to day preference (oh, I feel like being a bomberman today) and it is extremely satisfying.
There is nothing in BM or MM that is as interesting or satisfying. There is pretty much one “right” choice on many rows of those two trees. Both of those specs are outdated, and MM is a bad collection of old MM and RSV shots. MM doesn’t feel like the sniper spec it was supposed to be, and BM feels like it is perpetually stuck in starting zone rotation training with scaling numbers.
While this is true, it still doesn’t distract from the fact that, baseline SV doesn’t have any synery to speak of. I mean in legion we had a mongoose bite charge system that functioned with our mastery and had high procs with kill command and aspect of the eagle allowed for even more procs with our artifact weapon adding on to that with our auto attacks having a chance to trigger more pet attacks for chances at even more charges. The synergy involved in just that system was very interesting.
Compared to what we have now which is we spend focus, kill command generates more focus to spend, during coordinated assaults we can get more kill command resets to generate more focus… yay.
So while i do see how BM and MM can be cookie cutter they at least have more going on baseline than we do. Im not saying they’re better but I’d be blind not to see SV’s fairly obvious design flaw. If they wanted to progress the spec, they could make things like mongoose bite baseline and build on the spec even further with another talent. Perhaps One that retroduced Mongoose bite being free with the change system and had procs based of pet damage and kill command. 
I love ranged survival as much as everyone else. But we would be kidding ourselves if for a second we thought we would even get something close to MoP survival. In my eyes, it legit felt perfect.
Played since the beginning and no class to me in any xpack ever felt as good and fun as MoP survival. Actually sad when I think about it.
I enjoy melee surv very much. Would welcome ranged back though too in a heartbeat. I really don’t see it happening though. Not enough noise being made imo.
I play hunter since Vanilla and i’m happy to have different gameplay options rather than swapping to fotm spec every update and changing 3 abilities on my action bar.
Does that mean i enjoy current specs ? Not really, but at least it feels refreshing going from MM to SV.
I’m sad to see SV didn’t get any attention for Shadowlands and i suspect it’s due to the few very vocal conservationists on the US forum who think they are the majority simply because they assume competitive pve logs actually show overall specs popularity.
Something close to MoP? I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by “close”.
But I would not call that a major issue. It’s very much doable to create a spec where the foundation involves the same core abilities and effects as the MoP iteration did. Or at least most of them.
The core spec itself was indeed fun.
I just did not like how talents were compiled and designed in MoP.
I like to have talents that build on/allow you to delve deeper into your chosen spec. And it’s intended theme.
This is what’s unfortunate 
I’m in the same boat and honestly have liked SV aside from it’s obvious clunkiness and being so dependent on the mongoose bite stacks. I also wouldn’t mind ranged back either. I just want a workable third spec that feels refreshing to switch to after the monotonous pendulum swinging between BM and MM.