I can only speak for myself.
In TBC I stared out playing Marksmanship but switched to BM when I began raiding. BM was OK, but I have never cared for it thematically. The idea that most of the hunter’s damage comes from the pet just isn’t my thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t like pets though. So when Survival got better in early WotLK, I swapped and never really looked back. I fell in love with the mobility, DoT playstyle, and reacting to the LnL procs. As I began to PvP more I also loved the improved traps/entrapment.
When it was revealed sometime after 6.2 that SV was going to become a melee spec in Legion, the wind really went out of my sails. I stopped playing for a few weeks. When I came back I rolled MM. It was a lot different to me and it took a bit to adjust to the more deliberate, methodical, and slower playstyle. Once I was acclimated I did learn to love WoD MM though.
So then Legion prepatch hits… MM and BM lost their traps and neither spec really resembled what they were before. BM became a Yodeling Zookeeper and MM a Bowcasting Mage. I stopped playing my Hunters and didn’t really play much at all for about a year.
So ultimately you have to look at the state of the class as a whole to understand my dissatisfaction. If MM had been largely left alone coming out of WoD, I wouldn’t have been nearly as bitter.
The real irony for me was they said they needed to change SV because the 2 specs were too similar. I never agreed with that thinking. But after they overhauled BM to be all about beast summoning and MM to not even have a pet, SV could have stayed similar to what it was. All 3 specs would have been very different and I don’t think there would have been nearly as much outcry from the longtime Hunter mains. SV would have represented the original Hunter class fantasy of Bow, Pet, Traps.
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I think the problem is that survival has changed so much from xpac to xpac. Launch hunter was a different beast and changed from patch to patch. I’m thinking at this point most people can have completely different viewpoints on how they remember Surv… and they’d all be right.
To the current, I dislike melee and I’ve never been a fan of MM. BM suits me fine, but it’s no range survival. They should have just tweaked DPS to keep it inline with the other DPS specs and we could avoid the whole current mess.
From the amount of people who weigh in it’s obvious not everyone is happy. Except for the trolly chuckleheads who only pop in to keep bleating that it’s perfect now as is and you’re wrong if you disagree.
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I’d have to disagree. Those who think that Survival was meant to be a melee spec were simply wrong. About as wrong as you could be by suggesting that Mages are meant to fight in melee range because of Cone of Cold, or that Subtlety Rogues are meant to be a ranged DPS spec because of Shuriken Toss. Just because there were talents that affected melee abilities in the SV tree doesn’t mean that those Hunters who specced Survival should bypass the ranged attacks and just run up to the enemy to attack.
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That can I agree with. Those guys are flat out wrong and when they say it started as a melee spec they just outed themselves as never having played back then.
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And sadly this would include at least one Blizzard developer (Travis Day)
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Well at least I’m not the evil one this time.
I like melee survival, but I wouldnt mind them making survival ranged again if we get a melee spec that is more melee focused or melee support.
The haters just keep saying all these people used to play survival and I just don’t think that is correct. Survival was always the least popular hunter spec. I honestly don’t ever remember seeing you many pure survival hunters going back to vanilla. So I’m sure it was a candidate for a rework to draw people to it.
If you like the spec I would say play it!! 
I too enjoy the hybrid style as well. The people who want pure range then they can go play mm or bm. Sv is fun as it is to me and I’ll stick with it. I’m sure I’ll play mm or bm for variety time to time and then go back to sv lol.
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… From Vanilla - Cata I can guarantee you never saw a pure BM or pure MM either. There were always more talent points available then it took to get to the final talent in each tree, so branching into other trees for specific things was something everyone did…
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Always? Vanilla and TBC you’re probably right. WotLK to WoD 6.2, there were plenty of times when SV was popular or even the most popular.
Nope. It was only unpopular at the end of WoD (6.2) due to being nerfed hard and the announcement that it would be going melee in 7.0. Since then it has been one of the least popular (in not THE least popular) spec in the entire game.
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So Blizzard opted to delete the ‘least popular spec’ of the most popular class? What kind of logic is that? Why not a Rogue or Warlock spec? They’ve historically been pretty low in representation. Following the logic of “It wasn’t popular”, Survival would have been one of the last specs to axe.
That said, Survival was popular. In fact, Survival was the most popular Hunter spec in Wrath as shown by datamining posts linked in another thread.
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I remember that. I had to raid as feral cat cause the raid team had 4 survival hunters xD. I would of been number 5 lol
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If you hear about objective data and then reject it because you think you remember differently, you need to seriously re-evaluate your priorities in life. It’s your memory that’s fallible, not the data.
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So wrong. Surv was probably the most popular spec in LK (At least on my server). I mained it through WoD when they really started to mess it up. I know it was popular because the hunters in my guild were SV and so were the people I pugged with.
I was freaky about dps meters then and I always compared myself to the other hunters and more often than not they were also SV. Til Wod it was odd to see BM hunters in raids, and it was probably at worst a 50/50 split with MM.
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I always get a surprised high five from other hunters in M+ for playing survival. I used to be Marks way back in MoP but with how much they’ve gutted it since, I switched off.
Honestly I really like Survival. It’s a lot of fun to play, there’s always something to do, and it’s pretty good in PvP. I know I’m in the minority, but I’m really glad for the melee hybrid switch.
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Glad you enjoy it. Would you be opposed to letting RSV come back as a 4th spec?
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Nope. Go ahead and get another ranged spec - so long as I get to play this wacky fling myself about harpoon and poison wackadoodle thing, I’m happy.
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P.S. You get that response because they pity you and being the spec that gets pity from the community isn’t exactly a great position.
Cool, so some stinky neck beard cares what someone else is doing with their pixels. 
I play survival because it’s fun, I do okay DPS and Survival is really the only competitive PvP spec right now since BM is over nerfed (thank god) and Marks is designed like a dumpster fire.
I hope you get your ranged spec back so you can stop being so miserable.
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