Ok you got me, I'm still a bit salty that they gutted my favorite hunter spec and turned it into a melee one. Having said that, how do you guys feel about the overall success of it? Tbh, I have seen maybe 1 or 2 in a dungeon since Legion launched. I'm not a big PvP'er, so maybe they're more viable in that regard?
Just looking at the warcraft logs data, https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#difficulty=4, which is 75th percentile DPS parses in Heroic EN over the last 2 weeks, you can see what I'm talking about.
282,492 Marksmanship parses
63,637 Beast Mastery parses
6,049 Survival parses
So out of all of those hunter parses, 1.7% of them are Survival.
In Mythic, only 0.7% of all hunter parses (75th percentile again) are Survival.
I'm not sure if it's because they're not in a good place right now, dps-wise, or because of the fact that either a) people don't want to play a melee hunter, or b) raid leaders don't want a melee hunter. When the early sims came out, Survival was at the top, so you can tell that certainly didn't sway people to pick up that artifact weapon first.
Overall, in my opinion, survival hunter is a big failure in Legion. The last 3 new races, Death Knight, Monk, and Demon Hunter have all been melee. Adding another melee to the mix wasn't a good move, as most encounters generally favor ranged dps.