Survival is the spec of choice these days thanks to the buffs it received in 4.3 and 4.3.2. This means that the spec is receiving closer scrutiny than it has in the past. The consensus build appears to involve SV taking three points in One With Nature, two points in Sic ‘Em! and none in Careful Aim. However, often left out of talent discussions is how this build’s optimality is conditional upon pet talents.
Edit: Post updated to include Frenzy builds. Thanks to Harvoc for the suggestion.
Because (1) Sic ‘Em! is a discretionary talent for SV and (2) Sic ‘Em! interacts in an interesting way with the pet talent Wild Hunt, we need to look at player talents in conjunction with pet talents to determine the best SV talent distribution. Throughout the post below I will be using this femaledwarf profile, which largely uses the default settings for SV except that Arcane Shot is disabled during CA phases and shot interleaving is sometimes enabled for the 3/2/0 builds. The gear level is around 395, includes 4p-t13, and generally follows a Crit>Haste>Mastery priority. The relative benefits of Haste and Mastery for SV are on my to-do list to investigate, and preliminary investigations suggest slight gains for me were I to prefer Mastery in reforging. It is also worth keeping in mind that the levels of both crit and Arcane Shot usage obtainable with raid gear may result in different findings than those obtainable with just dungeon gear; they both result in more Sic ‘Em! procs and increase the value of having two rather than one point in Wild Hunt. If you are still in dungeon gear, you may find that having only one point in Wild Hunt is best.
The table below looks at the various combinations of SV’s discretionary player talents of One With Nature (OWN), Sic ‘Em! (SE), Frenzy, Bestial Discipline and Careful Aim (CA) with distributions of ferocity pet talents, Shark Attack (SA) and Wild Hunt (WH). The column and row-spanning cells in italics indicate how to read the talent distributions in bold. For example, 3/0/2 means three talents in OWN, none in SE and two in CA. I also look at Frenzy builds (as per Harvoc’s suggestion in the comments below), which take three points in Frenzy in the BM tree but take no points in Efficiency in the MM tree.
| SA/WH Dist. | ||||
| 2/0 | 1/1 | 0/2 | ||
| OWN/SE/CA Dist. | 3/2/0 | 37,935 | 38,695 | 39,068 |
| 3/1/1 | 38,142 | 38,882 | 38,752 | |
| 3/0/2 | 38,389 | 38,649 | 38,552 | |
| 2/2/1 | 37,809 | 38,561 | 38,893 | |
| 2/1/2 | 38,055 | 38,787 | 38,827 | |
| 1/2/2 | 37,720 | 38,465 | 38,794 | |
| Frenzy | build | 38,556 | 39,095 | 38,995 |
This table shows that it really does matter how we distribute our pet talents, and that we really should not talk about player talents without at least mentioning pet talents. The top two builds are the Sic ‘Em! and Frenzy builds with 2 and 1 points in Wild Hunt, respectively. Before we make a final conclusion, though, let’s also look at cunning pets.
The table below reflects distributions of the discretionary player talents with a Cunning pet. Since there is only one Cunning build for PVE, we only have six cells of results.
| OWN/SE/CA Dist. | 3/2/0 | 39,145 |
| 3/1/1 | 38,924 | |
| 3/0/2 | 38,597 | |
| 2/2/1 | 38,916 | |
| 2/1/2 | 38,692 | |
| 1/2/2 | 38,680 | |
| Frenzy | build | 39,003 |
The DPS from the top 3/2/0 builds very slightly edges out the Frenzy builds on average across pets. My final recommendation, then, is for raiding hunters to take a 3/2/0 + 2/2 WH build.
It is worth noting that both the 3/2/0 and Frenzy builds assume high Hawk and pet uptime. The key difference amounts to the Efficiency talent. By not taking it, Frenzy builds increase the typical cost of Arcane Shots and Explosive Shots, slightly altering the SV rotation. I suspect that the only reason that a Frenzy build is this good is the current Focus surplus. Not taking Efficiency also means that Frenzy builds should avoid interleaving shots into a LnL sequence.
Thanks for another excellent article. A couple of thoughts.
- While overall average DPS is clearly one feature of recent raids has been the need to produce high burst DPS when situations demand. (You alluded to this in a recent post on trinkets) I wonder if it would be helpful to also rate build/gear in terms of burst DPS, say by measuring DPS during rapid fire? It may be that the “best” option for total DPS is not the best for burst. This may be relevant to this discussion, while you may gain DPS by using sic em you will lose it if the pet is moving to the target. But you may also get no benefit from CA if the swap target is nuked so quickly you will never be using cobra when its above 90%.
- For this reason and also because of the haste buff in Madness I would have thought that mastery would now be preferable to haste?
I was going to suggest trying out builds that included Frenzy and Bestial Discipline with One with Nature because that was what had yielded the highest DPS on my Survival hunter on Female Dwarf until I remembered that I hadn’t switched my Serpent Sting glyph over to Arcane Shot once I had received my 2-piece T13. Previously, I had been running with a Frenzy/Bestial Discipline build with Go for the Throat and my pet had been specced 1/2 in Shark Attack and 1/2 in Wild Hunt. After doing some testing with the Arcane Shot glyph, Sic ‘Em with One With Nature and my pet being specced 2/2 in Wild Hunt yielded the about 90 higher DPS than my previous settings. This is of course anecdotal data but I was wondering if the opposite might be true at different gear levels, putting Frenzy ahead of Sic ‘Em. Do you mind doing some testing?
A Frenzy build actually produces competitive numbers. This updated profile shows the best talent selection I could come up with quickly: http://www.femaledwarf.com/?setting_id=69232
A 2/2 GFtT, 2/2 BD, 3/3 Frenzy, 1/2 WH build yields 39,095 dps, putting it on par with the best specs tested in the post.
I have update the post to include Frenzy builds. Thanks for the suggestion!
Oddly enough, switching my pet over to Cunning actually lowered my DPS by about 130. This is my current profile: http://www.femaledwarf.com/?setting_id=5119. I don’t have any reforges because I replace my gear fast, meaning that I’d just have to redo all my reforges for each new piece of gear, something I can’t justify with the low (and I mean low) amount of money I have right now.
Also, on the profile you linked in the article, checking “Interleave alternate shot instead of delaying 2nd Lock and Load Explosive Shot for 1 sec.” was about an 80 DPS increase but in the profile you linked in your comment, it was about a 290 DPS decrease to check it and was about a 470 DPS decrease on my profile. Any ideas why this is?
Interwoven shots cost Focus, and so the benefits of interleaving decrease as you taken points out of Efficiency.
But all three of the profiles: your article one, your comment one, and my own have Efficiency in them.
My comment profile does not, and, unless I’m missing something, taking GftT is better than Efficiency for a Frenzy build.
Oops… Yeah, your comment one doesn’t include it but mine does and mine includes Efficiency. Also, Go for the Throat is better than Efficiency with Frenzy.
Another thing I forgot to mention is the fact that the Frenzy build is much better for AoE because Efficiency and Sic ‘Em do nothing to increase your DPS while AoEing as you don’t fire any Arcane Shots whatsoever and the only Explosive Shots are during Lock and Load, when they’re focus free. This is especially potent when paired with the Serpent Sting glyph (only slightly behind the Arcane Shot glyph), 1/2 in Shark Attack (Wild Hunt is much less potent without Sic ‘Em thus I/2 points is optimal for AoE), and Point of No Escape (a talent that you don’t take in either of your profiles but one that I always do for the increased AoE damage in dungeons). These settings are about 310 DPS behind the single-target ones in a single-target fight for me but I’d assume the gap in DPS for single-target fights will decrease as my gear improves and the AoE damage is markedly better, I’d assume.
I’ve been having trouble reforging out of haste on my gear so i thought maybe dropping a point out of Pathing and moving it over to Hunter vs. Wild might be nice giving that our group has been having survivability issues with certain heroic encounters. Anyhow, after loading up everything in femaledwarf, I noticed that removing the point from pathing was actually giving me a ~200 dps gain. Does that make any sense at all? I can’t really wrap my head around it so any insight would be great! Thanks, and good article!
Are you sure that’s all you changed between calculations? I don’t see the same result for myself, and can’t explain your finding since adding Haste always increases dps when it does not come at a cost to other dps stats.
Yeah I thought the same thing, maybe I had changed something, but no. I’ve run it multiple times with the same outcome. Well now I ran it again today and I’m getting a 158 dps loss. However I disabled Heroism in the buffs section. I just retried it with Heroism enabled and it’s showing a 9 dps gain with 2/3 pathing. Lol, I don’t know what is going on. The setting should all stay the same after hitting update dps yes?
Everything that you don’t change should be staying the same, yes.
On some practical runs with this spec I’m seeing a big dps loss myself, back to normal spec and talents and doing just fine on dps.
I was at 2.5k crit, 1.7k mastery, 1.1k haste until i switched out hit/mastery staff (name escapes me atm) for the dw polearm. so im down to around 2.3crit/ 1.1 mastery/ 1.2 haste.
I still think mastery > haste and have been reforging to it for a while now since mid fl progress. Seems to yield better results.
/2centz
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3/2/0 + 0/2 is optimal! 4 ferocity + > haste
wtf…
3/2/0 + 0/2 is optimal! 4 ferocity + > Haste