I was so excited about this post, I used two exclamation points in the title. That’s one over my budget, but I’ll just have to try and save one from another post sometime.
Well, the servers have been up and down like a toilet seat. I haven’t been able to play for long, and we couldn’t raid or anything, but I got my auctions up. Today I’m going to go over the raw changes to the hunter class and start laying the groundwork for how to hit top DPS in this patch.
The biggest changes first:
- We can’t trap dance any more. Frost traps won’t trigger lock and load unless they’re hit by something that is vulnerable to the snare effect.
- That’s not too bad, because you don’t need to be at long range for sniper training any more! You just have to be standing still to get the 6% bonus.
- Speaking of a 6% bonus, we have a new ability called black arrow that can proc lock and load and gives us a 6% boost to damage 50% of the time (or more if you spec resourcefulness).
- Serpent sting no longer triggers lock and load procs.
- Kill shot is back on the global cooldown.
- You want a wolf. (Edit: here‘s Here‘s the pet build I’m suggesting for survival. Wild hunt > shark bite unless your gear is quite low)
- Our ammo stacks like crazy now.
- The quiver haste has been taken off quivers and rolled into the base stats. It affects at least auto shot and steady shot, but I haven’t tried measuring it with stuff like the teleport on my band of the kirin tor.
- You can buy a second spec, but you won’t need it unless you pvp.
Now, lets go over black arrow. First off, it’s going to make huntards out of a bunch of us, because you’ll need to go and train all three levels of it after you take your talent point. It shares cooldowns with traps, and is equally effected by resourcefulness. Its effects last for 15 seconds, so talented for a 24 second cooldown, you will have a 62.5% uptime. The effects you get for this are a nice DOT that has a chance to trigger a lock and load, and a 6% DPS increase while it’s active. This means you’ll be averaging 1, maybe 2 lock and loads per minute, instead of forcing them with traps and getting 2-3.
Now, since kill shot is on the global cooldown, you can’t macro it to automatically fire any more. You’ll have to completely redo whatever macros you use to make sure none of them have more than one ability that triggers a global cooldown. As always, don’t even bother trying to write a castsequence macro- it will only cost you DPS when it screws up. And it will screw up.
Talents and Glyphs
Here’s the tentative best DPS spec for raiding at the moment. I left the floater point out, but according to the DPS spreadsheet, that’s best spent in hunting party. The glyphs are also really close- you can sub the kill shot glyph into any major slot other than explosive shot and your DPS will be similar.
Edit: on short fights where you don’t need to bring replenishment with hunting party, and you have no mana problems, this might get you better results. If you’re anywhere near the enrage timers on your weekly runs though, don’t take it.
Edit: Shot rotation
That’s it for now folks- I’m going to write some more tomorrow, but I wanted to dash this off before I leave for work.
Very nice summary of the Survival changes. I went with the 0/15/56 spec as well (I put the last point in Hunting Party).
I only had a chance to run one heroic last night, but it seems like Black Arrow procs Lock and Load a lot less than it should. I was pretty vigilant about keep it applied and I got four Lock and Load procs for the whole instance (we ran Old Kingdom).
I’m still adjusting to the changes so hopefully it was just me doing something wrong :)
I’m sure that’s right- you can expect about one per minute of fight, and heroic fights are fairly short. They want it to be much less important than it was before, but they paid us back for nerfing it by giving us a set of stackable 6% boosts to damage in black arrow and sniper training.
Could you please tell me what is best wolf talent build?
Linked at the end of the post- I’ll go and move it somewhere easier to notice :)
You say its at end of post and your gonna move it….
Where the hell is it now?????????
It’s in the list of changes- in italics. Here‘s the link :)
Hey,
Since i’m really low on hit rating. wich talents do you think i should drop for 3/3 in Focussed aim ?
Thnx for this guide :)
I would guess hunting party and master tactician, however you really should plug your character into the DPS spreadsheet (http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t30710-wotlk_dps_spreadsheet/) and compare there to see what loses you the least DPS.
Will do. thnx a lot :)
And one of the most important thing-what rotation of skills i should use to max out dps?
I was going to write that tomorrow, but I may as well post it now. I’ll update my reply with a link in the next half hour.
Edit: more than a half hour, but here: http://outdps.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/survival-rotation-for-patch-31/
[...] World of Warcraft raid geek elitist hunter jerk « Survival in patch 3.1! Pun intended! Survival rotation for patch 3.1! April 15, 2009 Due to popular demand, I’m [...]
Isn’t Wild Hunt pretty severely glitched at the moment?
I hadn’t heard that- I’ll look into it and if it is, I’ll put a note on the post.
I recall reading that people have been having problems getting the buff to show up on their pet. I can’t remember just which hunter thread on EJ was talking about it however. I’ll see if I can find it again.
[...] Survival in patch 3.1! Pun intended! I was so excited about this post, I used two exclamation points in the title. That’s one over my budget, but [...] [...]
This build looks good. With the changes to Armor penetration are SV hunters still supposed to gem agi or go for some armor pen? I use maxdps.com and they seem to be crazy about armor penetration…. Lots of gear bumped up because of it, and all gems armor pen.
Thanks, KFM
Still agility, for several reasons. First and foremost, maxdps is always wrong about everything. I don’t know why, but they just are. Second, explosive shot (full 40% of my DPS) is not magnified by armor pen.
Is it really worth speccing Aimed Shot? I know Sniper Training boost your Aimed Shot dmg but if ur using Multishot u will hit adds too. Why not place that talent on AoTH or something instead?
Sometimes you aren’t allowed to kill adds. Also, you can’t cast a multishot while running. Lastly, that 6% is nothing to sneeze at.
I’m thinking glyph of aimed shot will be better than glyph of steady.
Considering we already shun steady and don’t want to use it, why buff it with a glyph? Also, the more aimed shots we do the less steadys we do!
Win win win
Reducing the cooldown of a shot that does barely more damage than what we spam while it’s on cooldown is not worth a major glyph. The glyph of steady shot, however, turns a horrible shot into a bad one. Much more of an increase of final DPS there.
Thanks for all your amazing work. I, too, am low on hit atm, I think at 167, and I was wondering if it was better to shift talents or gem and enchant my way up? I have old mac Excel so can’t run the DPS spreadsheet, but for now I general sense would be helpful…
Well, that’s hard to answer. My gut reflex is to say gem and enchant, however in my build, I have a floater point I can’t make worth more than 20 dps whether I put it in improved aspect of the hawk or in hunting party. You might just want to use it in focused aim, and then gem for the small amount remaining. The ideal, though, would be to try out the spreadsheet next time you’re on a computer with office and double check which config would be more DPS.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cxoZ0eVoZx0ci0cIhedVhsz:NbAMz
This spec does more than yours according to the spreadsheet. It could just be with my gear but it’s worth considering. I tested the two specs on a 2 min and 10 minute fight and the shorter fight there is just a larger gap. The 10 minute fight my spec was still about 200 dps higher. The reason for going your spec seems to be the mana efficiency. I’ve been raiding with my spec and with a good raid composition you dont have mana problems anyway. I’ve also tested aimed shot over multi shot and the loss of focus fire is larger than the gain from aimed shot.
That spec is more DPS for short patchwerk type fights. If it’s a longer Ulduar fight, you’ll go OOM very quickly and spend too much time in viper. I did link it as a side note in the post, though.
New survival spec guide, in depth.