OutDPS!

There are two perfectly functional hunter builds that you can use to magnify the effects of your explosive shots. One uses sniper training, the other uses resourcefulness to increase your lock and load procs (remember, these builds are baselines- spend the remainder of your points as you see fit). Both are viable and used by many hunters. Which you take will be based on your own style, but neither will last past the next patch.

Generally, survival hunters will do more damage when they don’t have to move. Not moving allows us to increase the number of auto shots and steady shots we can put out. Of course, some fights demand that we move. I’ve seen log parses where one hunter had almost 30% more explosive shots fired than another hunter, yet was out damaged because the other hunter because he was moving around more. Steady shot used to be the best use of almost any global cooldown, however has since been nerfed to better than nothing, if barely. It’s a shot, though, and it will increase your output if you can keep firing it between the harder hitting shots.

The sniper training build allows you to stand and fire without having to run in and place frost traps. You can squeeze more steady shots into your rotation this way, but you need to ensure you have all the raid buffs possible, and you need to stay at pretty close to maximum range. There are a few buffs you might have to ask for help keeping in range of, so become friendly with your shamans and anyone else giving a buff that you notice is missing when you’re at sniper range.

The trap dancing build forces you to micro manage more things (see the trap-dancing section of my post on survival for details). You need to manage proximity raid damage, agro, and a loss of stand-still dps. You need to stay close enough to the boss to avoid a long damage sucking walk in and out of trapping range, yet positioned properly to avoid any melee range AOE (or hatefull strikes… stupid patchwerk). You normally wouldn’t pull agro until you’re at 130% of the tank’s threat from range, but melee pulls at 110%. It’s harder to save global cooldowns by not feigning death frequently if you have to duck in and out of melee range.

In the end, I chose trap dancing. I still fail at it once in a while (I ate a hateful strike last patch kill), but as long as I can keep my mind on the increased number of variables, I feel that I get better performance out of it on average.

Of course, the next patch changes everything. I plan on writing about it, but I’m holding onto my draft until I feel we’re closer to a release date. I might write something up about how to prepare financially for 3.1 though. There are some steps you can take now to increase your gold pile and not have to worry about farming while learning Ulduar :)