Regardless of damage, do you find survival fun?

[Flaryon]

Is the rotation interesting to you and enjoyable? If so / not, why?

[ohgasauraus]

No, nada, never, nope. All other words that can convey the word "no".
How is it fun, when you are a melee and still need to juggle 7 to 8 buttons in order to dps while monitor your buff and enemy's debuff.

That just my take.

[Ashmiel]

In my opinion it's the most fun I've had with hunter since up to the end of TBC. Love it

[TheWindWalker]

I want to like it but it feels like a garbled mess someone put together in a hurry. Explosive trap being a rotational spell you use in melee against a stationary enemy, Talonstrike being Fists of Fury that requires a build-up, generally just the constant "should I or should I not hit my buttons or will I suddenly realize I should have held these?" It's kind of awkward no matter what you do.

[Deleted]

It's very enjoyable, but I dislike the strange setup and length of the Fury window, in that I feel it's too long and puts far too much weight on the very first Mongoose Bite you press even though it does nothing but start the fury timer. I sometimes get the feeling that the right play would be to /cancelaura what's going to be a mediocre window and start over.

---

With that said as a solo player I also have slightly different concerns that prevent me from using this spec when I play, not for lack of power/strength/fun but rather for dungeon bosses being immune to growl. Survival is doubly punished by this as they lack any sort of misdirection, causing mend pet ticks to snap aggro away from their pets on Mythic difficulty, when pets actually take some damage. Even a 400% threat buff on Flanking Strike when you're being attacked by a boss is seemingly not enough to overcome your healing aggro, as you will inevitably grab it back a tick later or two. It makes soloing mythic dungeon bosses as Surv exceedingly hard compared to MM/BM (which is already hard enough), and it turns the pull into something clunky where you play cat and mouse with mend pet and feign death for several minutes and hope your pet won't die before it has a threat lead that allows you to press a damage button.

I initially thought the damage reduction bonus on Aspect of the Beast in 7.1.5 would help, but I quickly realized that it won't; you can't use Flanking Strike unless you're in range of the boss, and any use of Flanking Strike on a dungeon boss when the pet has aggro will cause *you* to immediately gain aggro with such a sizable lead that even with animal instincts, a 400% threat Flanking Strike won't be enough for the pet to grab the boss back.

It's very clunky and pretty much an edge case, but it makes the spec sadly unusable for me, since it's the edge case I live in.

[Exerionx]

I really like it despite what most hunters say.

[Sastank]

No. The spec is terrible. The "go to build" has too much to do and you often feel like you're neglecting other abilities' CD. WOTM duration is too short. No Disengage (Ya, they realized that was dumb and are adding it back in 7.1.5 finally, good job) Harpoon is just a worse version of the grappling hook rogues get.

They missed this spec in the ability pruning I guess

[Raugnaut]

It's very enjoyable, but I dislike the strange setup and length of the Fury window, in that I feel it's too long and puts far too much weight on the very first Mongoose Bite you press even though it does nothing but start the fury timer. I sometimes get the feeling that the right play would be to /cancelaura what's going to be a mediocre window and start over.

---

With that said as a solo player I also have slightly different concerns that prevent me from using this spec when I play, not for lack of power/strength/fun but rather for dungeon bosses being immune to growl. Survival is doubly punished by this as they lack any sort of misdirection, causing mend pet ticks to snap aggro away from their pets on Mythic difficulty, when pets actually take some damage. Even a 400% threat buff on Flanking Strike when you're being attacked by a boss is seemingly not enough to overcome your healing aggro, as you will inevitably grab it back a tick later or two. It makes soloing mythic dungeon bosses as Surv exceedingly hard compared to MM/BM (which is already hard enough), and it turns the pull into something clunky where you play cat and mouse with mend pet and feign death for several minutes and hope your pet won't die before it has a threat lead that allows you to press a damage button.

I initially thought the damage reduction bonus on Aspect of the Beast in 7.1.5 would help, but I quickly realized that it won't; you can't use Flanking Strike unless you're in range of the boss, and any use of Flanking Strike on a dungeon boss when the pet has aggro will cause *you* to immediately gain aggro with such a sizable lead that even with animal instincts, a 400% threat Flanking Strike won't be enough for the pet to grab the boss back.

It's very clunky and pretty much an edge case, but it makes the spec sadly unusable for me, since it's the edge case I live in.

Indeed - The easiest method to fix this is just give Tenacity spec a +900% threat toggable modifier, akin to what Voidwalkers, Felguards, and Infernals have for Warlocks. Given that hunters can no longer dump their threat through infinite MD, and blizz has designed hunter's soloing capability around having their pets tank, this is simply a QoL change for solo players

[Ealyssa]

Certainly one of the most brilliant melee spec in the game.

If I still played DPS as main (I'm tanking for 5 years now) survival would be my main 100%.

But I agree it's a complex spec. I like complexity in my gameplay. That's not everyone's taste. The only way Blizzard could improve it to me is better balancing of some talents row which have too obvious best picks. The core gameplay is nice, but the lack of talent choice is deceiving (but that's a curse of Legion for a lot of specs).

[Airbag888]

I love it.. It's not the survival I had in mind (and no I didnt want range but more mid range melee-20yards fighter which IMO would be even better)

Damage could be much better.

Then again I loved the old Wotlk Aff Warlock and Kitty rotation people called complex

[Hiricine]

Its a lot of fun when you're trying to wind up mongoose stacks and get a whole bunch of combod hits in at once. What stinks is the nagging feeling you get with moknathal tactics (if you use it), explosive trap, and dragonsfire grenade. They need to consolidate the dots so that it can focus on the "star" of the spec.

[Airbag888]

Its a lot of fun when you're trying to wind up mongoose stacks and get a whole bunch of combod hits in at once. What stinks is the nagging feeling you get with moknathal tactics (if you use it), explosive trap, and dragonsfire grenade. They need to consolidate the dots so that it can focus on the "star" of the spec.

I agree, that's why I dont use moknathal.. screw it

[Deleted]

Indeed - The easiest method to fix this is just give Tenacity spec a +900% threat toggable modifier, akin to what Voidwalkers, Felguards, and Infernals have for Warlocks. Given that hunters can no longer dump their threat through infinite MD, and blizz has designed hunter's soloing capability around having their pets tank, this is simply a QoL change for solo players

That or simply make Misdirection baseline for Survival as well. This would be enough I feel, without trivializing the threat game, and would probably feel more in line with the class.

Just as an addendum, for some bosses Survival is still the way to go regardless of growl working, for instance Rokmora or Ularogg, due to the synergy between the encounter mechanics and the Survival spec. Rokmora requires absolutely no skill and no prior knowledge of the spec to defeat as survival regardless of your gear (within reason of course, don't get two-shot). Any other boss on the other hand is an impossible mission until the next couple expansions.

I just find it sad that one spec would be either completely, absolutely terrible or completely, absolutely godlike on given fights for arbitrary reasons, while the other two specs can have fun figuring out the proper tactic and gear to defeat pretty much any encounter in the game.

And it all boils down to pet threat, a problem that could always be worked around by all hunters of all specs since the early days of Vanilla Beta.

Anyway, that was my little solo pet peeve. Back to your normal schedule of gameplay/rotation/raiding/partying/melee/ranged debates!

[Barnagma]

I have just recently picked it up for some fun outside of our mythic raids. While my DPS sucks with it I do enjoy it quite a lot. And I can't wait to play it better than I do now (barely pushing 250k DPS on Ursoc).

[Not A Cat]

I think it's fun, but it definitely needs improvements.

I don't mind a lot of buttons, but some abilities look to be there just for the sake of having more buttons. I like the mongoose gimmick, but once the buff goes away the spec is just a mess of damaging abilities and a dot while you wait for cooldowns.

But I hope they don't just get rid of it, I like the idea of a lancer style damage dealer. Although I secretly wish it was a tank spec.

[Hiricine]

I agree, that's why I dont use moknathal.. screw it

Mok is just the tip of the iceberg. Does sv really need 4 dots with higher DPCT than mongoose bite? When you have 3 abilities and a mastery that relies on it, theres absolutely no reason the rotation shouldn't have mongoose biting at 3 stacks as the highest priority. A huge chunk of the talent tree even lends itself to that.

[barackohmama]

It should be the strongest single target spec in the game

[Deleted]

Mongoose is the only thing that's bothering me, 6 stacks with such a short duration is too much and I'm not sure if anyone can even consider that truely fun to play. What's the point, gameplay wise, to make it 6 stacks? Why not 3? It's just as "deep" but less frustrating.

Butchery/Traps/Grenade/Axes/Harpoon and all the other stuff is cool as it is imho.

Raptor Strike could use some love though. Can't find the GCDs for it right now, but that would be much less of a problem if I didn't have to spam the fuck out of MB.

[Deleted]

I never really enjoyed Melee DPS until Survival was changed. There are some QOL things that need to be looked at, like resource costs, general balance and Mongoose Strike, but other than that it's the only DPS spec I've liked in quite a while (probably since WotLK).

[Deleted]

Coming from someone that has literally only played Fury since Legion launch, and have played the game since vanilla, Survival is the only other specc next to Fury I do incredibly enjoy at the moment.

I wouldn't for a second consider going MM or BM for any PvE content, with MM being the only fun BG spec. If people need me to pull top tier dps in dungeons, I'll log my Fury warrior, so there's that. I understand the frustration many people have with the specc since it is a specc with a metric fuckton of variables and what-if's. It's in no way as fluid as Fury for example, but it is by far the most tactical specc in the game at the moment, so they've definitely delivered on the class fantasy. Unfortunately, tactics do not compute with the zerg mentality of the game in its current iteration, which would not affect the specc in a vaccume, but it does now.

Al in all, I reckon they need to shift their attention from trying to make Survival even more tactical, to actually having stats other than agility matter for Survival. A little bit of synergy would do a lot of good for the specc right now.