I'm a (Surprised) Survivor!

Ok, so last night I gave my new Survival Spec it's first proper run for it's money on a Guild run to Steamvaults and some solo-questing afterwards.

The Survival style is a little more "active" than Beastmastery, since it relies on my skill with traps much more than the pet's AI.

I have to keep a close eye on my trapped target in case the trap breaks and it then makes a run for me or (worse) the healer. I have to work out where to place my trap so that only the intended mob will get trapped. Dealing with trapped mobs correctly is something of a learning curve for the group in general as well. The tank I normally work with has the basic mentality of "if it's loose, it's mine" and he's occasionally hit a target just as it's made it into the trap, or one that's left the trap and I'm trying to coax into a second trap. Still, we were starting to get the hang of it pretty much by the end of the run. Having the ability to take a mob out of combat for up to 26 seconds every 20 seconds is exceptionally useful in the higher end dungeons, where even the best healer and tank are going to struggle with more than 2 mobs.

Wyvern sting, my other CC move, is an ok opener or useful if you get an unexpected add. However, the 12 seconds it gives you is rarely enough to down one mob in an instance, and the poison effect it applies afterwards makes trapping difficult.

Damage wise, it's also a big change. When I was Beastmastery, I fired a lot of fast shots that added up to respectable damage, but one without as many damage spikes from critical strikes to draw additional aggro. Survival feels slow in comparison and you crit a lot more often. The crits seem to make up for the loss in attack speed, but it also means that your output's a lot less dependable and you have to be careful with your aggro early in the fight.

Soloing is now more of a chore. The effect of weakening my pet and increasing my own damage is that my pet now struggles to hold aggro off me and I'm often finishing a mob in melee range. Downtime isn't as much of an issue as I feared though, as I'm killing mobs faster and not using as much mana, although I do need to heal my pet every third or fourth mob.

All in all, Survival spec's pretty fun. It's too early to say if I'll enjoy it enough to stick with it, but it definately gives me an interesting set of tools that enable me to be useful in pet-unfriendly environments.