Why Survival?

Okoloth over at his crazy data mining blog has discovered that of the 5752 level 70 Hunters surveyed, a whopping 7.65% of them are Survival specced. That's 440 hunters (and a .028 of a hunter, and I'm sure that we've all met those) out of the total. Which is not very many. So, why be a survival specced hunter? Clearly to do so makes you a freak, the red-headed stepchild of the hunter world. Or at the very least, a bit different. Well... I wouldn't dare to speak for all survival hunters, but I shall speak for myself. 1. I like to be different. As Mr Okoloth has demonstrated, we're a rare breed, us Survival types. Our Beastmastery and Marksmanship cousins weigh in at 34% and 59% respectively, so are common as muck in comparison with the rarefied company that is the survival community. My talent choice makes me unusual, and I like that. 2. Survival gives me neat abilities. As a survival spec hunter, I get to do some really cool things. Chain trapping, the ability to drop a fresh freezing trap before my previous one has expired, is a godsend, and responsible for getting me invites to many heroic runs with people I barely know. When you remember that traps can be used on pretty much every mob in the game, you can see how my CC comes to be well regarded. I can put mobs and other players to sleep. My wyvern sting is stunning in arena PvP (and it's a shame that the rest of my performance doesn't quite match); allowing me to send the opposition healer to sleep, whilst my team and I nuke down their dps. Expose Weakness is a mammoth buff to my raid. 25% of my agility is converted to AP and added to all physical dps'ers attacks. Also, I get more snakes in my traps, and that is worth the price of admission alone. There are few cooler abilities in the game than the ability to hassle your enemies with a bucketload of angry multicoloured snakes! 3. My dps is respectable. Beastmastery is known to be the hunter dps spec. When you combine reasonable dps from the hunter with awesome dps from the pet, you'll find a hunter talent spec that rules the damage meters. The well known and respected Big Red Kitty is BM, and frequently devastates his raid damage meters. Marksmanship hunters get to watch mammoth numbers scroll past when they crit; which means that their top scores are usually higher than mine. However, I do pretty well in the damage stakes. Sustained dps of 600-650, with none of the mana issues of my marksmanship brethren, makes for a reasonably happy hunter. My crit rate is absurd, when raid buffed, and my agility high, so my AP remains pretty good despite the loss of some of the MM AP buffs. I've certainly never had any complaints about my dps. 4. I am stubborn. I have always liked the idea of the survival tree. I chose the hunter class because I liked the idea of being a ranged physical damage dealer (I usually choose that as my first class in any MMO). The pet thing is incidental for me; so it was always going to be marksmanship or survival for me. I chose survival, and back in the day it wasn't very good. Our top talent was Lacerate, an attack that "Wounds the target causing them to bleed for 133 damage over 21 sec." Uber, huh? Gradually, Blizz improved the tree, adding Wyvern Sting, and pre-Burning Crusade, survival was a pretty kicking spec. Then came the agility nerf. From 2AP for every point of agility, now we had only 1. For a talent tree that had an extra 15% agility added from Lightning Reflexes, this was a big hit to our dps. But did I spec away from Survival? Did any of these things change my mind? Not a bit of it. I am stubborn, and have stuck with it. The survival talent tree is pretty well balanced now (with the exception of the penultimate tier), and is well complemented by lower tiers of the marksman tree. Being a survival hunter may not be trendy, and may not result in that table topping dps, but for me, from the point of view of fun, it's unbeatable.

Who am I?

So, I decided to start a blog about WoW. To add my voice to the million other bloggers posting random, strident, sometimes profound thoughts and opinions on the world's biggest MMO. Whether or not my ramblings represent good value remains to be seen, butI recognise the voyeuristic pleasure I gain from reading others blogs, and perhaps I can contribute positively to the WoW blogosphere. Anyway, I think that the best way to begin is to introduce myself, both in and out of game. In game I am mostly Psia, in so much as she is my main. I have a number of other toons, but she's my first, and the one with which I have the closest bond. She is also the one around whom this blog will focus. Night Elf, hunter, and technology fangirl; she travels Azeroth and Outland armed with her animal companions, shooting things and stealing their stuff. As indicated by the title of this blog, she's a survivalist, and has been for almost all of her career. The survival branch of the hunter talent tree is an oft overlooked, but reasonably versatile, set of talents. They provide for improved traps, extra *gasp* survivability, and the enormously funky Expose Weakness mob debuff. Despite dalliances with Marksmanship, and a very brief stint as Beastmastery, Survival suits my play style and Psia's idiom, and is always the talent tree to which she returns. Out of game, I am John S. I am thirty some, work full time, am married, with a lack of kids as yet. My wife, gorgeous as she is, is a non-gamer (with the exception of the odd bit of Civ 2). As such she doesn't understand the attraction of WoW, feeling it a little immature. Consequently, I have had to haggle for my play time, and have an agreement with her that I play for one evening a week without interuption, and any other play time is subject to distraction, negotiation and completed chores. This makes me casual, in the extreme, and whilst I get a fair amount of unscheduled play time, I tend to end up organising guild runs to make sure my one night a week is used to its maximum. My guild, the Shattered Ravens, is an absolute joy. Formed with the intention of providing a social network of friends with whom to adventure; everyone in the guild knows at least one other guild member in real life. This allows us to avoid the majority of drama that comes from the anonymity afforded by online existence, and yet gives us the numbers to attempt the mid range content (we've recently started regular Guild only Kara runs, and occasionally can muster a 20 person raid to go experience old content in Azeroth). As a guild, we often meet up for beer and frothing about Warcraft. Anyway, that is the introdution over with... on with the content.