Thinking to main survival....

[Khrux]

It's fair, why bring survival when you can bring a rogue/warrior/ret. All with good utility.

Same reason Method did I guess, because its sustained dmg is top notch and its burst AoE is incredible?

In a guild that has people playing 3-4+ fully geared out characters they can easily replace Noggah with another rogue/warrior/ret/DH/DK if they wanted but they didn't. I'm also quite confident they didn't just choose to penalise themselves by slotting in a Survival. Noggah is a quality player, who could play Survival well and had Bracers/Pyrdaz with 54 traits.

Any other hunter willing to commit to maxing the artifact and has optimal legendarys can play Survival in any raid group without dragging them down. Even a world #3 guild.

People need to get over their Survival hate. Its a top spec right now, the sims show it, the logs show it and actual top guilds respect the spec.

[Kirbypro]

Doesn't matter because Way of the Moknathal is a BS playstyle. Incredibly tedious, boring, and very punishing if you mess up.

[Emerald Archer]

Same reason Method did I guess, because its sustained dmg is top notch and its burst AoE is incredible?

In a guild that has people playing 3-4+ fully geared out characters they can easily replace Noggah with another rogue/warrior/ret/DH/DK if they wanted but they didn't. I'm also quite confident they didn't just choose to penalise themselves by slotting in a Survival. Noggah is a quality player, who could play Survival well and had Bracers/Pyrdaz with 54 traits.

Any other hunter willing to commit to maxing the artifact and has optimal legendarys can play Survival in any raid group without dragging them down. Even a world #3 guild.

People need to get over their Survival hate. Its a top spec right now, the sims show it, the logs show it and actual top guilds respect the spec.

Method did not have a huge pool of players to choose from. Survival is strong yes, but other melee specs do equal and have more utility. They don't have that many people in the bench with enough gear to reach such a tight enrage.

Survival is a good spec yes, but expecting MM/BM hunters, to go Survival, when it really doesn't bring much utility and its damage is equal with the other few top top melee specs, eh. If you have the options, do it.

I could bet they didn't bring that guy BECAUSE he was survival, they would have brought him because he was an excellent player who could do very high dps, and they didn't need more/have more utility melee.

Fact is, if Survival was that much better than other hunter specs, more of their hunters would be playing it.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

Sounds like a lot of people were waiting for someone to validate the existence of the SV hunter and now that someone has in a world #3 kill, it's less of a weird taboo.

[Khrux]

Hopefully Roger is back on http://www.huntingpartypodcast.com/ for the next episode now that the race is over. I'll be particularly interested to hear from Method's raid strategist on why Noggah played Survival.

Until then its all speculation, but the bottom line is the spec is the strongest on ST and arguably strongest in burst AoE so it fits well in a fight that needs to deal with empowered eyes and the large hp pool of gul'dan.

If Roger confirms anywhere that Noggah played Survival only because they needed another melee and didn't have any other class/spec available, I'll humbly accept that, but I'd be very surprised if a guild vying for world 1st had to just fill a spot with a survival hunter because they had nothing else.

[Nnogga]

On an average pull there was no class in our raidcomp that did anywhere near the small eye damage that survival did. You want to bring minimal amounts of ranged dps for this fight, i had bis legendaries and 52 traits so survival was the natural choice.
In hindsight i should have played survival for more fights especially pure single target fights like star augur and trilliax as survival's sustained ST damage is higher than MM atm.

[Hatexon]

On an average pull there was no class in our raidcomp that did anywhere near the small eye damage that survival did. You want to bring minimal amounts of ranged dps for this fight, i had bis legendaries and 52 traits so survival was the natural choice.
In hindsight i should have played survival for more fights especially pure single target fights like star augur and trilliax as survival's sustained ST damage is higher than MM atm.

I'd love to see a PoV of you playing survival. It seems like so much to keep track of in a lot of these fights. Good job though!

[Agallion]

It's fair, why bring survival when you can bring a rogue/warrior/ret. All with good utility.

Because your average guild and even a lot of above average guilds, you bring the player not the class.

[Deleted]

It's fair, why bring survival when you can bring a rogue/warrior/ret. All with good utility.

Awww, sooo cute ! Now that SV are pulling excellent numbers, you talk about utility *_* Continue the self-persuasion, it'll work one day.

[Bepples]

[I]Technically, you still can in 2 of the specs, so it's not completely valid.

No, because neither of those two specs play the same/similar way Survival did back in MoP/WoD. Also, they both have a laundry list of their own issues, most of which are due to lack of developer attention during the testing phase which in turn was due to developer focus on.... Survival. So we still have our favourite spec removed and we are left with 2 crappy ranged specs just so that we got a melee spec when most of the class was not willing to play melee. So the complaint is still valid.

Because a good player behind a Surv Hunter is better than a mediocre player behind another melee class.

Why are you comparing good v.s. mediocre? A good player of any class will beat a mediocre player of any other class. Not that this is very relevant because Survival's damage isn't at all the issue now (read: no longer an excuse for its unpopularity).

Survival hate certainly wont. More and more people are trying SV out, with a SV hunter in play in the world 3rd Gul'Dan kill. The rest is just angry that other hunter specs suck so bad.

Lol? SV presence in raiding right now is still just as shit as it was last patch and finally getting an SV hunter on an important mythic kill isn't exactly a victory considering Survival is a perfectly viable spec so there's no throughput reason that justifies its unpopularity. 100 people have killed Gul'dan on mythic now, ONE of them was a Survival hunter. Funnily enough, that's actually pretty accurate when compared to SV's actual share of the total raiding population.

Maybe given enough time people will EVENTUALLY accept Survival, but that doesn't exactly make the revamp a good idea. Why spend all that effort (at the expense of the other two specs, mind you) to make a spec that is GUARANTEED to be unpopular for the first expansions and then MAY OR MAY NOT develop a healthy population in later expansions? To me that's just people getting used to a bad thing. When Survival was remade in 3.0 people actually did flock to the spec IMMEDIATELY during that expansion, so clearly that revamp back then was successful and this one in 7.0 was a failure.

People need to get over their Survival hate. Its a top spec right now, the sims show it, the logs show it and actual top guilds respect the spec.

Who cares? Survival's damage is not what people hate about Survival. It wasn't in 7.0 either. Melee is unwelcome to the hunter class.

Sounds like a lot of people were waiting for someone to validate the existence of the SV hunter and now that someone has in a world #3 kill, it's less of a weird taboo.

The amount of people playing it is still just as low as it was before, though.

Because your average guild and even a lot of above average guilds, you bring the player not the class.

This is pretty ironic considering Nnogga posted above and said the reason he picked Survival was actually bringing the class (Survival's mode of damage).

Awww, sooo cute ! Now that SV are pulling excellent numbers, you talk about utility *_* Continue the self-persuasion, it'll work one day.

You know what else is cute? How Survival hunters spent all of EN saying that no one was playing it because it's damage was low, and now its damage is not low yet people are still not playing it so the only part that actually changed was the part where SV hunters no longer have that excuse.

[Ashmiel]

No wonder SV hunter is played by so few when people still think they're shit tier DPS.
Most don't look at World first. Especially not to the point of seeing what specs are brought for the kills.
And the hunter community seems hellbent on steering anyone away from playing SV to keep the population playing it as low as possible.
So they have something to complain about probably.

As for myself. Playing SV hunter is the first time since the end of legion MM I've had fun playing the class. Since between end of TBC and now hunter have been horribly boring to play. In my personal opinion.

[Deleted]

I have to admit, I'm starting to get a bit miffed with people STILL shitting on SV after how long and how many patches, don't like it? Don't play it. Also, claiming that 'most hunters don't want/like SV its utter SHIT LOLOLOLOLOL' is fair when its YOUR point of view, which I expect is shared by others, a lot, most, WHATEVER. There are those who enjoy it, I enjoy all 3 specs, can play them well enough, & pull decent numbers compared to the other DPS I come across, accounting for different scenarios against other specs & whatnot.

TL;DR It's not changing any time soon. & When someone asks about it don't force 'popular opinion' just try to answer their queries or say nothing if you hate SV that much.

[Bepples]

What about when they gutted Hunters Melee capability, that fucked me off so much I had to quit for awhile.

Calling what they had "capability" is extremely generous. I doubt your story.

- - - Updated - - -

don't like it? Don't play it.

I could have said the same thing about people who didn't like ranged SV but apparently their opinion was warranted enough to radically change the direction of the spec I liked to play. So this attitude that people are unfairly encroaching on Survival now can fuck right off because originally it was a spec that hunters liked to play but people of other classes decided that it needed to be changed. You don't get to run off with the spec and then turn around and say "oh well, it is like it is, can't change it now" without getting called out on it.

Also, claiming that 'most hunters don't want/like SV its utter SHIT LOLOLOLOLOL' is fair when its YOUR point of view, which I expect is shared by others, a lot, most, WHATEVER. There are those who enjoy it, I enjoy all 3 specs, can play them well enough, & pull decent numbers compared to the other DPS I come across, accounting for different scenarios against other specs & whatnot.

It doesn't matter that there are people who enjoy it, what matters is how many people enjoy it. You can go to any iteration of any spec ever and you will find at least some people who enjoy it. That doesn't mean they were all successful. When you take a spec that was once very popular and then proceed to take it in a direction that guarantees niche unpopularity, that makes it a failure whether or not you personally enjoy it.

TL;DR It's not changing any time soon. & When someone asks about it don't force 'popular opinion' just try to answer their queries or say nothing if you hate SV that much.

I didn't start it. Someone in this thread was talking about how "people just don't like Survival FOR SOME REASON" which was clearly feigning ignorance and garnering sympathy. I'm gonna respond to that.

[Sliske]

Check Methods Guldan Mythic kill video.

Look at dps, find the Survival hunter and the "real" dps under him

this logic is stupid.

You're comparing one of the best players in the world, to a guy having to ask others what he should play on a pretty casual pve based website.

Fragnance played Feral in SoO and ruined people on ST bosses, that doesn't mean it was a good idea to avoid gearing for boomkin for you know, the other 10 bosses that are mostly aoe / cleave.

[Sliske]

I have to admit, I'm starting to get a bit miffed with people STILL shitting on SV after how long and how many patches, don't like it? Don't play it. Also, claiming that 'most hunters don't want/like SV its utter SHIT LOLOLOLOLOL' is fair when its YOUR point of view, which I expect is shared by others, a lot, most, WHATEVER. There are those who enjoy it, I enjoy all 3 specs, can play them well enough, & pull decent numbers compared to the other DPS I come across, accounting for different scenarios against other specs & whatnot.

TL;DR It's not changing any time soon. & When someone asks about it don't force 'popular opinion' just try to answer their queries or say nothing if you hate SV that much.

In a world of 2-3 button specs, there exists Survival - one of the most clunky, tedious, busiest specs in the game. And what did it replace? Well, one of the more fun specs in the game, in my opinion.

I play survival (in pvp mainly) and I would go back to previous survival incarnations in a heartbeat.

Survival is just yet another bastard spec, in a long line of bastard specs (6.0 arms, where all you did was wait for 20%, then top dps with execute, Gladiator warrior, 6.0 survival (doing less dmg than healers), enhancement 6.0 (where all you did was spread flame shock) )

Blizzard for some reason just has a hard on for retarded specs, and they refuse to iterate on the spec after the first main design push (ego, most likely.)

Whether you like it or not, survival is flawed. If having 2-4 seconds of down time can put your entire rotation down the toilet, thats bad design. If it takes you 10 seconds to ramp up every time that happens, thats bad design. Survival is the new, even more tedious version of feral.

WoTMN needs outright removed - its tedious and clunky on a regular spec, putting it on a meticulous, RNG centric one like Survival is utterly retarded. On top of this is the artifact ability, which is clunky as fuck as well. You have to time it with so many other abilities and cooldowns, that its effectively a boring version of 5.0 combustion. Mistiming it is a gigantic dps loss, as all of your other buffs and debuffs will fall off. Timing it perfectly is a negligible dps gain.

Survival just shouldn't exist in the current game. Its as meticulous as 5.4 fury warrior, and as RNG as 5.0 fury warrior combined - the gain of playing this spec should be the highest single target in the game by at least 10-15%, but no, its not even top.

I wanted survival to do well, and I enjoy it some what in pvp (although with the recent change to make explosive trap targetable, it got a lot clunkier) but I still would trade it for 4.3 survival or 5.4 survival in a millisecond.

[Segus1992]

That's a completely fair and valid complaint given the circumstances.

No it isn't. You doing it for that reason doesn't make it fair and valid. It's ridiculously dumb.

[Sliske]

I actually had a melee Hunter twink at one point.

You mean you had a twink revolving around your pet 2 hitting people 4 levels below you?

Bravo!

Survival was useful for entrapment, clever traps and MAYBE impoved wing clip - nothing else pre 3.0.

3.0 made survival a real spec.

[pkm]

It's all about the YouTube players. That's what people follow these days. Preach ended up quitting his survival hunter, so that's what everyone else is doing, and echoing his words to the community.

[Sliske]

Whatever fits your narrative I suppose.

Translation: My skewed view of survival as a melee spec of old was just corrected.

[threads]

Check Methods Guldan Mythic kill video.

Look at dps, find the Survival hunter and the "real" dps under him

you mean the kill video where a warrior, ret, dh, and rogue were higher?