Own Your Spec, or Your Spec Will Pwn You

There has been evidence of Beast Mastery hunters jumping ship and going Survival–or, at least, away from BM. It was bound to happen after the great nerf of 3.0.8, I suppose. Not even the un-nerf of 3.0.9 is likely to change that.

And yet, I don’t feel that Deelee is all that impacted by the changes in instances and raids. She still often beats out non-BM hunters on the damage charts. I recently had a chance to raid Naxxramas (Heroic) with an SV hunter. Being curious, I asked…

Deelee: So, do you like SV?

Survival Hunter: No, but it’s [supposed to be] higher DPS than [the old spec].

/sigh

I was 3rd to 6th on boss fights according to the damage charts. The SV hunter rarely got past 12th–and it wasn’t a close curve. Part of it was gear, part of it was experience in Naxx25, part of it was Death Knights keeping everybody down; but I think the real reason was that I was having fun and they were just going through the motions.

Own your spec, hunters! (And, um, non-hunters too! (: ) I’m not saying go BM (or even leave SV or MM); but, if you enjoy your character, you’ll do fine against the cookie-cutter specs of any class.

Say it with me, “Own your spec! Own your spec!”

p.s. The Ice Stone has melted!

Edit: The above SV hunter sent me an in-game mail a few days later asking about my shot-rotations, and the like. He used to play BM, and was going back because he enjoyed it more. Woot! It always cheers me up when people are having fun with this game.

p.p.s. My shot rotation, for the curious, is Arcane Shot and Steady Shot x3 (unless there’s a lot of movement/fight weirdness). I pointed him to a good post on shot priority/rotation to help him find his own style.