Almost max level on the hunter I’ve been leveling, tried BM and MM hunter but despite loving bows/archers in most games I can’t stand those two specs unfortunately, having a lot of fun with survival though, you guys think it will be competitive this season?
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Hi friend!
Survival is currently fun to play with 3 major solid gameplay loops. The spec does suffer in terms of community perception but can still do very well on content that it is suited for.
Further then this, survival did recently receive a rather large nerf that broke its damage pretty heavily when 4-set is acquired. The spec is okay but it is a fairly large hit and you wont see survival pump like it did in shadowlands season 4. You’ll likely never see that kind of power ever again, frankly.
Additionally, survival will always be strong in 3s due to the immense amount of control it brings to its two most popular comps: Jungle and Cupid.
Taming pets is also fun, but that’s just me.
Take this information with a grain of salt and have fun with it!
~Doaflip
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I appreciate the insight, 1st major patch in and I am still jumping around characters trying to find a main, trying to see if my favorite class fantasy in most games can hold me but I don’t know, kinda scary that I only like one spec out of the three, same reason why I ditched my Paladin midway through heroic progression in VotI.
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Give survival and beast mastery a try once you have reached max level and gotten some haste.
I enjoy them both but just make sure to keep moving to find something you like.
Good luck!
How bad is Survival Hunters with it’s defensive abilities after 10.1? Has been more difficult with leech being reduced?
It seems alright for now, depends really on the content you are doing. Having roar of courage as a baseline ability actually does a fair bit to keep things okay and can even be used on tanks like dh or dk to mitigate crits! That’s actually a big deal!
For survival itself, it still has the tools it had and the new 8% stam buff from .7 but for right now we will need to see what happens next week when the new endgame content comes out. We may swap over to a stam pet for some higher end content.
Survival is still fairly frail into melee mechanics as it doesn’t wear plate or have other talents or passives such as shamans earth shield or evokers armor increase by 75% of base. So for a melee, its frail but as i hunter its fine.
For most open world content, you can’t feel the leech nerf at all. Go tame that lesser dragon kin or scale hide and send it!
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Only Leech rating was nerf. Leech from talents or % increases like Predator’s Thirst was not touched.
Same as the other specs (y)
Unfortunately tanks actually can’t be crit in PvE, so as of now roar of sac is prtty not great in PvE 
Currently it is stronger than BM in all PvE situations and very competitive with MM. 
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NOOOOOOOO That’s a bummer. Ah well, at least its a freed up PvP talent for sticky tar bomb when needed.
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Survival is pumping right now in mythic keys and one of the best ST. Don’t know how it will scale with new season but the tier set looks really good from testing. I think it will be a top 10 dps spec. As for survivability, for most it’s good but not great. If you push for 20ish keys and raid heroic, you will be just fine.
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I can’t invest in classes I only enjoy one spec in, I feel like having that second spec to jump to helps a lot when you get bored and need to switch it up a bit.
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I agree, though I did start enjoying MM hunter more as I got more gear but yeah, I don’t know, I mostly go for the class fantasy, figured I would try hunter out because, well, Aragorn and Legolas being my “heroes” growing up so I always liked Rangers and Archers.
But unrelated, it’s not even the class I believe, I’ve just not been enjoying WoW and I guess class hoping was basically a “coping” mechanism so I would always have an end goal I care about if that makes any sense.
I feel that, as dumb as it may sound, I have found that ever since RSV was removed, I don’t play for long stents anymore. Nothing is quite as fun as that used to be for me unfortunately. On the plus side I save money this way I guess lol
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I can understand that, while I personally find Melee survival very fun, I feel like RSV probably captured the fantasy of the old Hunter design way better, a guy good with the bow and had a faithful companion. MM and BM are way too specialized for my taste, MM is your “military archer” and BM hunter is straight up a closeted druid. Neither scratch that itch for me either.
isn’t the whole “fantasy” of RSV a highly specialized munitions expert?
Surv is fun, perhaps the most fun spec in the game, but even though performance is “ok”, community perception is such that pugging anything will be a disappointing endeavor.
TLDR; play it if you like it but prepare yourself for long wait times and early kicks in pug content.
Exactly, I don’t personally enjoy MSV (I am not a big melee dps fan), the rest is pretty spot on. RSV hit that spot of wilderness archer with a pet. It just made sense and felt great to play.
Basically, to me that fits an archer perfectly, using munitions and things he could find in the wilderness to his advantage (traps, poisons etc), really had the whole “survival” feel.
Yeah, it’s been that way since MSV was introduced and will probably never change. There just aren’t enough melee slots to go around, which to be fair, was an issue before MSV too. For whatever reason, WoW dps players just seem to flock to melee, which makes them turning survival into yet another melee spec make even less sense. They took away one of the 3 specs we had to do ranged physical dps and added a melee to the 13+ melee specs we already had.
I ask, how is this any different than current MM? The hunter you’re referring to still uses her munitions and things she finds in the wilderness—the latter in the general class tree and the former in the specific MM tree.
The often mentioned “fantasy” of RSV directly overlaps a ton with almost any possible MM fantasy. Which could possibly be a very big reason why SV was changed in the first place.
Ranged absolutely sucks to play in DF.
Uptime is atrocious.
What? BM Hunter has no huge uptime issues and is safe to play as.
Survival Hunter needs help Surviving. Blizzard seriously needs to address that. They’re Melee yet cannot survive well compared to the safer ranged specs.
SV is fun and DMG profile we’re up there on top of the meters. Some may disagree with this, but so long as you learn to position yourself correctly during combat to get the most effective wildfire bomb throws, you’ll do just fine.
You also get the lovely melee interruption CD that the other two specs lack- that’s a bonus.
Looking forward to the new tier set. I think once it’s obtained and with a few talent tweaks the DMG will be nuts.
That’s my two cents.