If you’ve played any Mythic+ dungeons during the first season of World of Warcraft Dragonflight, you should know there’s a handful of class specializations that rarely make appearances. Whether it be because of their weaknesses, low player count, or some combination of the two, some specs are completely ignored on the DPS ladder.
This season, specs such as Frost Death Knights, Affliction Warlocks, and others have been pushed aside in favor of stronger options, although one spec has stood head and shoulders above all others as the most-ignored specialization.
This season, Survival Hunter is the least-played spec in Mythic+ runs by a wide margin.
In Dragonflight season one, only 38,000 Survival Hunters are playing Mythic+ in WoW. That number is representative of just 0.6 percent of the player base, according to WoW stats site Raider.io. Survival is just one of two specs to have a number of players that make up less than one percent of the M+ player base (the other being Assassination Rogue).
Survival Hunters, which are a unique Melee option for the usually-ranged Hunter class—fail as a viable spec in comparison to other Melee specializations at the top of the Dragonflight meta, while also serving as the weakest option available to Hunter players. Players who specialize in Melee DPS will often look toward stronger options, while Hunters have been looking toward one of the class’ other two specs instead.
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Survival Hunters are a particularly unsavory option in the face of Hunter’s other two specs: Beast Mastery and Marksmanship. Those two specs are among the two most popular DPS specs in the game, largely because of their strong class tuning, as well as their accessibility to Neltharax, Enemy of the Sky, which was one of the strongest weapons in the game during the early portion of season one.
In comparison to the 38,000 Survival players, the other two specs have a combined 505,000 players between them, according to Raider.io. That means less than one in every ten Hunter players is playing Survival in M+ this season.
Some slight buffs are scheduled for Survival Hunter in WoW Dragonflight Patch 10.1, which could make the spec seem more favorable to certain players. The spec, like all others, will receive a new tier set bonus when Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, launches on May 9.
