I Never Liked Survival Until...

I must admit that I was never a fan of survival for hunters.  I never even dabbled in it much.  Maybe for a tiny bit here and there on an alt hunter, but never seriously.  I am a hunter, and that, to me, meant one of two things.  I am either a killer with a beast at my side or a sharp shooter taking my enemies down from a distance.

Needless to say I was a beast mastery hunter and a marksman hunter.  They felt like what I believed to be what hunter specs should be.  Survival never made sense to me.  It seemed like a spec that was still in development.  Like it should be melee but it was not, like it should be more tank like, but it was not, like it should be more stealthy, but it was not.  It never felt right to me.

That was all until I got the four piece set in SoO.  Sure I had changed to survival earlier, because at some points it was the best spec to be.  At the beginning of cataclysm for instance.  I played it because it was better. Not because I liked it and most definitely not because I wanted to.  I played it because it was the best spec to be.

However with that four piece set I fell in love with survival.  Admittedly not as much as I loved the end of wrath armor penetration marksman spec, which still remains my favorite ever, but I really did start to feel as if survival had an identity.  It felt like it belonged, for the first time to me, as part of the hunter repertoire.

So that is when I gave survival an identity in my mind.  It was the fast paced rapid fire spec of firing off shots in rapid succession as fast as possible ripping apart my enemies with machine gun like efficiency.  I grew to really enjoy that play style in that long long long span of time we spent raiding SoO.

So now, as my mind envisions it beast mastery is the hunter and pet as a team killing machine, marksman is the sniper spec that kills from a distance with ruthless efficiency, and now survival is the fast paced never let up spec.

Sure they all change over the years, marksman now is merely a shadow of the spec I fell in love with many years ago and what made me enjoy being a hunter more so than anything before it.  But those basic break downs will forever be how I see each spec should be.

Was there ever a spec you disliked but you played anyway because it was the best spec to be?

Did you ever begin to like a spec you had never previously disliked?

I know for me, some specs just do not click with me as a player and I am sure it is the same for others.  But the survival 4 piece from SoO finally broke my dislike for the survival spec.  Maybe your opinions about some specs have changed over the years too.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post:  Next up, Should Specs Need Tier Sets to Feel Complete?