why is no one playing survival. its insanely strong right now

[Biomega]

Fireballs, demons, the power of death itself? A-okay.

BUT WHERE DO THE ARROWS COME FROM SO UNREALISTIC AAAAH MUH IMMERSIONNNN!

[MrKnubbles]

I'm already topping the charts as BM plus I've got to put my legendary bow to good use.

[Chriisto]

Because the legendary system forces you to pick one spec to main and no one is spending their soul cinders on Survival for lols.

[DazManianDevil]

I'm guessing you can't quite read though.

How so? I was linking logs that show Survival isn't being played hardly at all in Mythic, which confirmed your initial point about no Surv in world first in x years.
The following sentence was sarcasm, hence the /s

[threads]

then in pvp youre basically a warrior with a pet and ranged abilities.

or u could just like, play the ranged specs.

[Bepples]

if youre not topping the dps charts youre topping the bg scoreboards. its nuts how strong it is.

cluster bombs for absurd aoe dmg. more movement spells than you can think of (disengage, flanking strank, harpoon, cheetah, goblin rocket jump, plus engineer crap).

then in pvp youre basically a warrior with a pet and ranged abilities.


it seems either people dont know how to play it or they have yet to realize how strong survival is right now and its being kept a secret by survival players. seriously try it.

trust me try it. the fun is real.

I'll help you narrow it down:

basically a warrior

As other people have said, the core problem is that Survival is a melee spec more or less aimed at appealing to melee players for their Hunter alts rather than Hunter mains. There are Hunter mains who like it as it is, of course, but lacking the ranged weapon which is the most central and identifiable element of the Hunter class is a major turnoff. There's also the fact that melee spots are usually far more limited than ranged spots and most raids won't want to waste a valuable melee spot on a spec that could just be ranged with the same utility and damage.

In dungeons both BM and MM are highly competitive when stacked against Survival while also being ranged and having most of the same utility. Survival's major strength comes from its uncapped AoE. The problem is MM is doing a huge amount of 5-target cleave. I've seen the DPS SV pulls in M+ dungeons. It's usually similar to what MM is pulling despite SV's AoE being uncapped. It's no wonder all of the top M+ Hunters are playing MM and the spec is enjoying over 5 times the amount of players in M+.

As for battlegrounds: SV struggles in any sort of team fight because it's squishy as hell (again: mostly the same utility as the ranged specs but without the safety of distance). Even MM is more played in rated BGs at 1800+ than Survival. The spec actually does well in arenas due to its abundance of off-DR CC, but currently BM is just performing better in most brackets and requires way less effort so most arena Hunters are playing that.

In summary: Hunters don't like melee and melee are generally disadvantaged in PvE so it needs to be substantially stronger than both BM and MM for people to consider playing it. At this point it's debatably stronger in certain areas of the game with certain circumstances.

Aside from all that, this is a standard case of SV Hunter fans upselling the spec and trying to drum up hype. SV Hunters on the forums are notorious for this. While most other specs will downplay a spec's strength and play up its weaknesses to solicit buffs, SV Hunters will alternate between that and blatantly advertising for the spec in an effort to get more people to play it. Often this relies on SV Hunters bringing up anecdotal evidence where they played in a dungeon full of unskilled players (which is MOST dungeons, by the way) and beat the others on DPS. You definitely fit this profile. On your account page you say in your description that you topped damage charts in WotLK as BM while clicking. BM was heavily nerfed to the point where it was one of the worst DPS in the game during that expansion. Given that the skill cap of most specs in the game including all 3 Hunter specs was very low back then it's unlikely you unlocked some hidden knowledge that made you blast everyone as BM especially if you apparently hadn't unlocked the knowledge of how to bind your abilities to keys. So it sounds to me like you're exactly the type of person to overestimate their strengths based on your performance in non-competitive environments.

[Venziir]

How so? I was linking logs that show Survival isn't being played hardly at all in Mythic, which confirmed your initial point about no Surv in world first in x years.
The following sentence was sarcasm, hence the /s

Oh my bad, it was very late when I replied to your post. It must've gone over my head hah.

[Sondrelk]

Because Survival is not just melee, which is a point against it to begin with, but also doesn't have any noticeable utility over MM or BM, which themselves are slightly anemic in what they bring to a group in addition to being possibly the squishiest class in the game.

Damage is not enough for Survival. What it desperately needs is utility to make it valuable in groups. At least basic stuff like baseline camouflage and more healing options.

[Djaye]

because FOTM power does nowhere near what it needs to to make up for the fact Surv SUCKS to play.

like seriously, whomever was the class designer for surv needs to be kicked in the jimmies, really, really hard...

[Saltysquidoon]

In summary: Hunters don't like melee and melee are generally disadvantaged in PvE so it needs to be substantially stronger than both BM and MM for people to consider playing it. At this point it's debatably stronger in certain areas of the game with certain circumstances.

It also has the added "bonus" of not only needing to be stronger than mm and bm but also stronger than enough other melee specs for a raid to consider sitting a melee player to shift a ranged player to melee.
Feral has the exact same issue (and resultantly the same issue with low representation) and it has one ranged spec to compete with.

Survival will never be popular in group content unless it is buffed to obscene levels or blizzard finds some way to 'fix' the inbuilt desirability of ranged dps.

[Lucetia]

iit seems either people dont know how to play it or they have yet to realize how strong survival is right now and its being kept a secret by survival players. seriously try it.

Personally I could care less if it is strong. The spec is just not fun at all. I use to love Survival when it was about elemental damage and such and then they changed it to the melee abomination and then I just switched at that point.

trust me try it. the fun is real.

I have. It's not fun one bit. Even got the mage tower appearance and hated every minute of it.

[Lord Pebbleton]

cause it isn't fun for most people. the people in charge of class design have no clue what they are doing with hunter. most people just stick to bm or mm right now since that is roughly still the class they signed up for. there's a reason hunters used to be the class with the most players and hasn't since legion.

This is my reason too.

I do not want to be a melee. If I want to be a melee, I will jump on my rogue. I don't care how powerful the spec is, it's simply not what I want to see in a hunter.
I used survival in Mage Tower in Legion because I had to in order to complete the challenge. It played out ok, but it felt just wrong.

[Subrias]

I stopped playing hunter when they made the spec melee. I played hunter from vanilla to wod. I played specifically survival from bc to wod. Then they made it melee, literally deleting what I liked to play. Marksman felt like a caster and bm just felt like the pet was doing all the work.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Survival is fun af

[saixilein]

I played ot sv hunter in legion, but pvp only. His toolkit and talents were so flexible and cool. In bfa many of them got deleted/reworked and i lost interest to play sv.

In pve i generally dislike DPS, cause its boring very fast. But the fun part abou SV in PvP was defending bases, trap and cc healers and even flagcarriers i could almost kill or at least forced them some cds on 2.2k+ mmr games.

When i was a nightelf sv hunter i cing and defening bases with camouflage amd nightelf stealth was so fun. But now im maghar orc and ist not that fun anymore.

But i guess most dont play sv because its a bit clunky, the fun part is in pvp gameplay and bm/mm are just stronger and easier.

[vian]

Source for topping the dps charts?.

Reading comprehension -5

[Nachtigal]

Surv is fun and viable in every PvE scenario, just not world first/competitive raiding. Problem is, you get too many people thinking they're world first or competitive raiders, and so they have to talk like one. They hear competitive guilds talking about what classes they need to finish asap, and see that survival is nowhere to be found. The problem then spills down into guilds ranked in the thousands and below, where now Joe, Bob, and Billy all think survival is awful and couldn't be played in their little heroic raids. And this happens for every spec not featured in the world first/competitive scene.

[Foolicious]

because FOTM power does nowhere near what it needs to to make up for the fact Surv SUCKS to play.

like seriously, whomever was the class designer for surv needs to be kicked in the jimmies, really, really hard...

I think this is the real problem here. We see it time and time again that players spend hours and hours of gametime grinding new stuff for a 2% dps increase when another spec gets better, so why didn't we see it when it was the case for survival? Because it isn't fun in the slightest.

I think they did a lot wrong with class design in legion, but survival just screams "Our boss said we have to change hunter and we don't know what to do".

[Video Games]

How so? I was linking logs that show Survival isn't being played hardly at all in Mythic, which confirmed your initial point about no Surv in world first in x years.
The following sentence was sarcasm, hence the /s

Hardly at all is an understatment. 93 people is in the "hey, maybe we really messed up in designing this and we need to fix this asap" category.

[Blackmist]

Probably because nobody rolled a ranged class to play melee.