OutDPS!

Gear for success, and, well, no promises. Just do it.

Gearing a survival hunter is much simpler than gearing for beast mastery was before patch 3.0.8. Back then, we were all haste capped without any haste rating, and our life was a struggle to find stuff that didn’t spend all its’ itemization points on haste. Survival these days is much easier. All the stats you would expect us to gain from benefit us. I’m going to go down the list and talk about caps and diminishing returns when I have to.

• Agility is king. More than it was in burning crusade, and more than it is for any other spec. Here’s why: expose weakness takes your effective agility and gives you a bonus 25%. Two points in this survival talent and you’ll have near 100% uptime. Agility increases your attack power and crit%, which directly determines the dps of your shots. It also gives you armor, dodge, and epeen rating. There are no diminishing returns from agility- it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
• Attack power is the workhorse of agility. Mouse over it in your character screen and it will tell you how much it increases your base dps. In addition to auto-shot dps, it increases the damage done by all your special shots. Like agility, there are no diminishing returns on attack power.
• Crit will determine how often you crit. The more often you crit, the more focus you give your pet, the more mana you return to the raid, and the more uptime you have on your 25% bonus agility. There is a tested descrepancy between what your character sheet tells you your crit is, and how much you’ll actually crit. Most tests put this difference between 3% and 6%. Also, as you will learn when you get the spore buff from Loatheb, we’re well within the range of diminishing returns with our raid buffed crit. My main competition for top of the dps charts is a fury warrior (grrr…) who loves that fight because he can turn 50% crit into about 50% more dps. I turn it into about 10% more. I’ll just go ahead and say this now- if you play a fury warrior, go play in traffic.
• Intellect does two things: increases your mana pool, and with careful aim, increases your attack power about half as much as agility. This stat will not start to suck if you get too much of it, but the stuff we roll on doesn’t give us too much of it.
• Stamina makes you harder to kill by giving you hit points, and with hunter vs. wild maxed out, you get 30% of your stamina back as attack power. No caps or diminishing returns here, but this isn’t exactly going to help you top the dps charts.
• Hit will determine your chance to not miss. When you miss a boss, that’s damage that you don’t do. If you get 1% to hit from an upgrade, until you’re hit capped, that’s a 1% increase in hunter dps, as all of our attacks have an 8% chance to miss a boss. Most importantly, hit is itemized much cheaper than other stats we want. For example, you can get a gem that does 16 agility, 8 agility and 8 hit, or 16 hit. 16 hit rating is about half of a percent to hit (for the exact formula, see the elitist jerks thread), and that’s half percent increase in your dps. 16 agility is considerably less than that. You’ll find that you get your hit cap (263 without a draenei in the group, 231 with one) fairly quickly once you start getting gear from heroics and entry level raids. If you aren’t capped from your gear, for the love of god, don’t take focused aim. Gem and enchant for hit first. Save your talent points for, you know, actually doing damage.
• Haste is a stat that’s way less important than people think. It only effects your auto-shots and stuff with a cast time (like steady shot and revive pet). It does not allow you to fire more explosive shots because those are instant, and for non-casters, the global cooldown is not effected by haste. That said, steady shot is what we cast when we have nothing else off cooldown, so getting enough haste to bring the cast time on that shot down under 1.5 seconds will ensure that we don’t have to wait to cast something else. Get that shot there, and you’re haste capped. If you run without a boomkin or ret paladin (who provide 3% haste), you need 523 haste. With them, you need 413. If you put some of your floater points on improved aspect of the hawk, that’s 3% haste per point when its up, and it should stay up pretty consistently.
• Armor penetration is red headed stepchild of all the other stats. It’s not worthless, but it will underperform compared to items equally itemized for attack power or agility or whatnot. The reason for this is that bosses have a fixed amount of armor (13083 in 3.0.8, maybe going down to something like 11900ish in 3.1), and the armor penetration rating will allow your shots to ignore a percent of the armor remaining after sunder and a minor armor debuff.

When you see a piece of gear, there is an addon that can tell you exactly how much rating and percentage you gain or lose per stat called Rating Buster. It will not tell you how much a stat is worth compared to another stat, but it will tell you that (for example) that after you consider the agility, int, stamina, and AP rating, the attack power on this new drop you won is 30 higher than the equipped one.

If you need to compare one item to another in absolute terms, the best way to do it is to enter your character into the DPS spreadsheet from elitist jerks, and use the gear tab to compare the dps from different pieces. This can be a daunting process, and I’ll probably write up a nice guide with screenshots eventually. In the meantime, you can read Larrissa’s post on shot macros to get an idea of how to set up the tool. Just don’t try to take her advice about setting up a shot rotation macro- those will wreck your dps and teach you bad habits that you will never overcome. More on this later.