Survival hunters?Follow

Just asking.. is survival hunter recommended? Because i saw quite a few survival hunter in Warsong at low lvl.. Please do not flame at me.. i am just asking a question here

Cant we just look at the tree ourselves, and decide weather its good or not?

Only reasons i see it being good to start out with is Hawk Eye, Savage Strikes, entrapment, and maybe deterence.

I actually think it is a decent tree till you get lightning reflexes.

Edited, Jul 24th 2007 1:36pm by Petewind

Survival if built right is better DPS than marks, has much better traps (with 2 pieces of beastlord you have a traps that last 26 seconds and cooldown of 20), and give by far the best raid buff going.

A readiness build is excellent DPS in boss fights and as you can get 3 or 4 rapidfires in per boss fight, as well as have an easy way out of a resisted trap or FD ( which happens rarely as survival).

Survival is by far in my opinion the hunter of choice for instances, in 5 mans control is more important than DPS, the added effectiveness of your traps and still really good DPS make you worth taking.

As a SV hunter you want to stack Agi, i myself have 800 after LR, and i have no complaints with the build. The Agi makes you hard to kill as you will have more armor and dodge due to it. in a raid with the perfect group set up you can sit at 1000+ Agi giving you a huge boost and a 250+ AP raid buff.

One more thing i thought of after i posted is SV has great Mana efficiency as they can grab the lower SV tree TotH nad the upper Marks tree Efficiency, so the higher you get your crit the less your shots cost overall. 25% crit gives you 20% mana reduction on average.

All Builds have their strong points, i happen to love Survival.

Edited, Jul 25th 2007 1:53am by Sturrg

Its not real hard to gear yourself for Survival, and you never have to raid to get a gear set that will get you 700+ Agi. There are little pieces in almost every instance, and when ever possible put +8 Agi gems in all slots, regardless of the gem slot color.

The thing you want to concentrate most on is your ability to CC as a SV hunter, if you do it well you will be invited back time and time again. The other night since we were short priests for Moroes i chained trapped a mob in place of the priest shackle, in the opinion of everybody in the group it was more effective than a priest shackle as the mob never once moved in the 4 or 5 minutes the fight lasted.

Your DPS might be a little low untill you finish gearing yourself, but once you hit 700+ agi, roughly 28+ crit and 1600+ AP your DPS will be worth having along for any situation

Expose Weakness > Ferocious Inspiration

The reason for this is mainly that EW is a raid wide buff whilst Ferocious inspiration will only affect a group.
But lets fill this a little with math.

Lets assume:
- A raid buffed survival hunter has > 800 agi, so EW gives a raid wide 200 AP debuff on the current mob. As a SV hunter has raid buffed >= 35% crit easily the debuff should be up >= 90% of the time.

- Ferocious inspiration gives a flat 3% of damage increase to the whole group and it is up > 80% of the time.

So how much does FI add to the raid DPS?
Lets say the typical raid caster can dish out 800DPS (sustained). So FI would give the raid 800 * 5 * 0.03 * 0.8 = 96 DPS.

How much does EW add to the raid?
Thats a little more tricky to answer since you have to calculate the dps increase of different classes (and I'm not sure how well everyone scales with AP).

So lets further assume a typical 25man raid. So 2 hunters (incl 2 pets), 2 rogues, 4 warriors.
So that is 8 players and 2 pets who benefit from 200 extra RAP.
But lets calculate it the very safe way. 1AP/14 = 1 DPS (before crit and special abilities.
So from white damage (without calculating crit and special attacks) EW gives the raid 2000/14 * 0.9 ~= 129 DPS.
A tank will not benefit by much more than that and pets will not benefit much more either. Rogues, hunters as well as arms/fury warriors will get a ton more out of 200 AP. Additionally those classes usually have > 25% crit which also adds to DPS.
I assume EW will add > 200 DPS to a raid group (when including crit chance, specials, armor and things like that).
I'll not go deeper into calculating the benefits, but to me it is obvious that EW is a lot stronger than FI for a raid group.
However a good raid group will have both. Since EW does not stack, it does not make sense to have more than one survival hunter in your raid.

Oh im sorry forgot, the survial instincts isnt good at all... i meant survivalist
BTW heres my specc atm. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/hunter/talents.html?0000000000000000000000505021205010000000003320031510300313501000

Survival is not a good leveling tree compared to the other two. It is only at later levels with very good gear that it comes into its own.

I'm not going to argue the particulars, you're quite right in the range of effect of EW vs. FI.
But you're comparing two talents against each other in a vacuum, and this theory doesn't convey to practice.
If you've got FI, you're very likely to have 5/5 SS. And thus you'll be doing more damage overall than the SV spec Hunter, regardless of his other talent selections and despite any damage contributions from the group or raid members from both EW and FI.

So in a vacuum EW may be better than FI, but that ignores the larger picture: Currently BM is the best damage dealing tree. Picking a Talent from SV that is 'better' than a Talent from BM is a bit too narrowly focused to be a fair assessment.

To try to put it in perspective, I could say that Master Marksman (MM) is better than Master Tactician (SV), and back that up with facts and figures. But it wouldn't make a MM build better than a SV build, on that comparison alone.

[offtopic]Unless they died really early, your shadow priests fail. FAIL. :P[/offtopic]

The main raiding hunter in my guild decided to completely respec and partially regear from deep MM to Surv/MM in order to help out the raid more. Fully buffed he's sitting at a little over 2k AP, 36% crit, and just over 930 agility. Unfortunately, we've only had one or two melee DPS that were actually specced for melee those fights, so the returns aren't as much as they could have been.

The AP bonus helps out the whole raid in another way as well: since so much of a warrior's and druid's threat comes from damage, it gives a higher aggro ceiling and (if your DPS is up to it) that means the boss can be downed faster.

BM is for leveling, MM is for PvP and Surv is for PvE.

This may sound weird, but in MM you have scatter/silencing shoot wich is imba in PvP.

Surv benefits the whole raid.

In out guild we have mostly MM, 2 BM and me as Surv, all with the same gear(Tier4 and some Kara gear), and latly I find my self over the other hunters in the damagemeter!

If your talking about personal DPS excluding pets, i would have to say that SV may have a slight edge over MM and decent edge over BM. But over all DPS BM wins and SV and MM are about the same, I have played a hunter for 3 years and have been every spec under the sun. I myself currently prefer SV it doesnt give you the huge crit numbers that MM does but it gives you allot more smaller ones and the utility makes it worth taking.

IMO your spec is the least of your troubles anymore for DPS(Blizzard has come along way with the hunter trees balance issues), first learn how to use a proper shot rotation and how to change it for certain situations, then work on gear, and last is your spec. Your spec is just tweaking and it wont make or break your character.

Edited, Jul 31st 2007 6:06pm by Sturrg

The point being that it only takes a single, low DPS SV spec Hunter to provide the EW buff to the melee only, while a BM Hunter in a group of DPS casters will give pretty much the same benefit and also provides what is in today's game the best DPS of the Hunter specs.

If your raid is melee heavy, that single SV Hunter can provide a decent DPS boost to the raid proper, but any BM Hunter provides superior DPS as well as the FI buff to all of the members of her group.

Me, I'll vote for +3% damage to the ranged DPS who typically lead the boards, rather than less target mitigation for the melee DPS who typically trail the boards.

And in my Guilds raids we have a Rogue who consistently tops the WWS charts. But he's only one contributor.

YMMV

Edited, Jul 31st 2007 11:02pm by Kompera

Edited, Jul 31st 2007 11:12pm by Kompera

You can assert whatever you chose to assert. But the facts will remain: SV builds are low DPS compared to BM builds. Period, end of sentence, please play again. No amount of ranting and railing will change this, if you are comparing two Hunters in eqivalent (not necessarily exactly equal) gear against the same opponents.

That's what I'm smoking.