@kaedys
Agree to disagree on the parses. I absolutely understand that some people will feel compelled to play the highest theoretical dps spec, but, that doesn’t make it true that they need to to progress. Either they are in a top raiding/progression guild and absolutely should bring the spec that does the most damage, or they are not. 98% of the player base is not. For the vast, vast majority of players, If they are in a guild capable of clearing heroic or mythic Nathria, their guild is capable of doing it with them as marksman or bm or sv.
I’m not here to argue about raw dps, and if the issue really boils down to dps for you, then there is really no point to the discussion, wait for a patch. I’m just here to stick up for the spec I enjoy, since the OPs conjecture was it is dead and a disaster, and I disagree.
I am fine with people wanting a different third spec, or a 4th spec, but, making hyperbolic arguments about SV being worse than it is isn’t making the case. Anyone can log in on a SV hunter and see that played right it is just ‘fine’ in the vast majority of content. Definitely an A tier pvp class, in pve, decent aoe and single target dps, versatile as far as being mobile, switching to adds quickly, getting out of fire, helping with CC, heroism. It also ‘feels’ unique both within it’s own class, and across classes which is great this far into the game’s life.
On your 2nd point, I apologize that I wasn’t clear and you misunderstood me. I don’t think that classes don’t need a third spec. What I said was they each spec doesn’t need equal representation in the player base to be considered deserving of existing. There are plenty of locks that will never play demo because they don’t like a pet army, or priests that never plan to heal. Blizzard shouldn’t need to find a way to make each spec played by exactly 33% of that class. Obviously this shouldn’t be taken to the extreme where every class only had one viable spec and the others were missing critical pieces; that’s clearly a design problem… but if there are a few oddball specs out there, I don’t think that is a bad thing.
At the end of the day there are plenty of other classes and specs out there to choose from and while some people may not like SV, that different than saying it is inherently bad.
I 100% agree with you there is space to develop other hunter specs, and, If they were spending loads of development time on survival, I would also agree that probably isn’t a good thing given there aren’t that many people maining it. BUT, it is clear they aren’t spending any dev time on it at all. Almost all of our legendary powers are copy-pasted straight from BFA, our best legendary is a generic hunter legendary, our Torgast powers are exclusively generic powers, and our talent tree and build are identical to BFA. They’ve basically said, “if you like it play it, but we aren’t working on it.”