Dear Jerks,

I've been a long-standing theorycrafting poster on the Blizzard Hunter Forums...not sure why, more of an ego crowd than a numbers crowd...so maybe I'll hang out here for a while.

I've taken a look at some of the discussion with Survival and thought I'd throw out some of my own. FYI, other than Gruul Gloves and Kazzak Pants, I have no 25-man loot. MOST kara drops...but still 3 more that are upgrades for me.

I currently run at 720 agi, 1900 ap, 33% self-buffed (no TSA, I'm 0/20/41). Fully raid buffed (with grace of air, 4 pally buffs, feral druid in my party, and full host of pots) 1008 agi, 3023 ap, and 45.8% crit (jumps to 55.8% during master tac proc). Gotta love being fully buffed.

The way I go about my approach to survival is...a little different than the discussions I typically hear. A lot is made about what is lost from marksman in the conversion...and too little is made of what is gained. Someone in another post labelled the talents in the tree as "mediocre".

i'd throw out another point of view.

With surefoot, I require far less hit rating than a Marksman. 89, to be exact (well, 85 with troll bowskill and kazzak pants). This means I can spend a lot more of my precious itemization dollars on dps stats.

With Thrill of the Hunt, and 40% or more buffed crit...(more when they really care) i get 40% * 40% = 16% of my mana back. With mana efficiency as well...that's some pretty good mana return. In other words...I need less mana than a marksman.

After a while of living with the spec...I really started living with the idea that "survival" meant I needed less of these expensive itemization resources to survive...and I started cutting them back. Until I found myself geared in a great deal of rogue gear, stacking agi gems, and sending my "short term" dps through the roof.

On trash pulls...i did tremendous damage. Which makes sense. Many hunters now have a 'dps' set when sustainability isn't really an issue.

And for bossfights I'd dutifully put back on mail gear and say goodbye to the damage meters.

And then one day I forgot to switch. And I realized it as the fight started. So...I blew a mana pot early. And another when it came up. I FD'd and drank after 5 minutes, for 20 seconds (restoring 4800 mana + a little more from regen) and burned hard for another 5 minutes, popping pots.

After the fight, my text box turns pink with whispers...I'd just beat the best geared warlock on the server in dps on a 10 minute fight. Perhaps he was having a bad day.

It was a happy accident...and one that has spurred a whole new line of thought about itemization.

What's great about the survival tree is it doesn't NEED to accept hunter itemization costs. Why wear a Beastlord shoulders and Tunic when Assassination does so much more dps? Such choices throughout your gearset (morose boots over chess boots, etc etc) really do add up to some big numbers.

Though I see it built into many spreadsheets on this site and others, I'd suggest that our sustainability is a bit more flexible than a lab situation. There are plenty of bossfights where a 'stop dps' call goes out...there are plenty of moments where you can grab a drink. And even if there isn't...one could easily see that a loss of 1000 mana for a gain of...20% (?) dps is well worth it in a 10 minute fight where you need to give up 20 seconds (3% of the fight) to drink.

Though I certainly could throw out a lot of math here, after reading a few survival posts on this forum (raid viability) I realized that my approach maybe hadn't fully crossed the ocean between the offical forums and EJ.

So...I thought I'd start w/ the philosophy and see if we can break into the hard math as we go. Feel free to armory me, Elakuan on Mug'thul.

As for my dps...though I'm far undergeared compared to my raid-mates (including a hunter w/ t5 shoulders) my dps is...more than viable.

In other words, the "mediocre" talents in the survival tree, for me at least, have become the solution to medicore itemization...the rejection of which has put my dps through the roof.

Yes, Survival Hunters require less hit, due to Surefooted*.
Yes, Survival Hunters tend to need less mana, due to Thrill of the Hunt (and also for not having (Improved) Barrage) - although a lot of Hunters use abilities which cannot crit, making your number a bit high.
Yes, there are often times in an encounter with no or little DPS, which could be converted into drinking time with minimal loss.

Nothing of the above amazes me the slightest, and you're not the first by far to mention Rogue loot and Agility gems. Stuff like this has become more and more common-place, at least on these boards.

What does surprise me slightly, though, is your group composition, which seems to be more Hunter-friendly than a lot of other guilds use (Shaman and Feral Druid?). You also mention Grace of Air, I can only imagine you get Mana Spring as well?

Other than that, to end my reply on your essay: One of the only things that's really up for discussion here is whether or not to Feign Death and drink combined with Rogue gear is better than "standard" gear and not Feign Death. The cut-even point can easily be provided with some math. The numbers you have on this topic are very vague, and you don't seem certain of them either :P

Here's an idea for you: Since you say, with your Rogue gear and Survival spec, you can do so high amounts of damage, with the caveat that you have to drink and chug pots - ask for a Shadow Priest. They're the biggest boon to Hunter mana available (other than Judgement of Wisdom, which rarely, if ever, happens). I utterly hate this fact.

*You might actually be able to cut back your Hit Rating even further; Weapon Skill and its effect on Hit% hasn't been tested in any decent shape post-TBC.

Just as an aside. This guy refuses to post logs.

We tried for a good few days on the WoW forums.

He talks a lot but never really backs any of it up.

I'm not saying he's wrong, but don't expect logs.

I'm basically using the same gear I had when I was survival. ( http://surl.se/pictures/20075/46031.jpg )

Got new shoulders, but thats about it.

What bothers me is how you get 3023 ap when I ge 2902 if I add flask to that picture I posted?

You can do good dps with survival, I topped the charts even with survival spec in my guild in most of the fights. I wouldnt mind some logs though. :p

You can dps for 10 mins without fd and drink btw, just takes fel mana pots and mageblood. :<

I still think 5/20/36 currently is better dps than 0/20/41. In the next patch 7/20/34 beats all survival specs though.

Actually, I dont really get the point of this post.
You are mentioning that its a good thing to use leather gear, agi gems and so on, and thats all true. Its also true, if you are wearing leather gear, you'll have a lot less mana, which has to be compensated.

But I fail at getting the point what all of this has to do with the survival spec?
You make it sound as if choosing rogue gear, agi gems and finding ways to compensate the mana loss makes less sense for the other specs, but it doesnt.
On the contrary, BM has the exact same approach but gets more out of it for personal hunter dps because of the spec.
MM is a tad bit different, they are more likely to choose all the epic mail gear, because they also benefit from the masses of INT on them.
And after the 2.01 item changes blue items lose a lot of value and even the T4 set gets interesting.

Sad thing is felstalker bracers still beat the ones from Attumen. :|

All I'd say is that whether it's viable or not, having to stack another class's gear to make a spec work doesn't really shout in its favour. The fact remains that 4-5 tiers of the Survival tree ARE lackluster & could do with some juice, as people have been saying for quite some time.

Sure, guys...I didn't feel like this was anything new...which is why I'm shocked to see there being a question of survival's "viability". To me this is a moot conversation, and has been for some time. If what I'm doing is old news, fantastic. I'll shut up and stick to the math.

As for damage meters...I've always found them far less reliable than math in predicting damage. Meters can be tweaked in any number of ways. Armories cannot. I would think that here, at EJ we could stick to the math. Cries for 'SS or it didn't happen' are the kind of response I'd expect back on wow forums...followed by responses of 'well, your clothies must suck'.

As for the group composition...I've always found that when you are a 'top 5' dps'r REGARDLESS of your class, intelligent raid leaders will work to maximize your output. In the last week I moved to a guild killing bosses in TK and SSC, and without a single drop to improve my current situation, have been treated well for what I'm bringing to the raid. It certainly didn't start that way, my performance on the meters adjusted their group choices.

Anyway...all of this seems absent from (at least) recent conversations regarding survival on this board. High dps through different itemization choices. Sorry if i'm repeating old info. I'll read more and talk less.

But you're not presenting any math. I think that's the point. In the absence of math, and with a lot of grand claims, people would like to see some damage meters.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't really count for much here, I'm afraid.

I've been reading the US hunter forum a few times per week for over a year now so I've seen your threads. There's one thing though.

Playing with numbers is always playing with numbers.

When you step outside the theorycraft box it's always a bit different and in the end its only the meters and logs that matter. :|

Damage meters can, along with math, explain a great deal. Especially the ones that give extremely detailed information, both in terms of abilities used, but also stuff like mana gained, etc.
Of course, logs aren't always relevant, depending on the nature of the post.
Dismissing them completely, though, is, in my opinion, foolish. To get accurate predictions, you need to base them on real data somewhere along the line. A good combat log parse is a highly valuable tool.

This is not optimal.
What's optimal is seeing which people (not necessarily by class, due to varying skills) gain the most.
Arbitrary values ahead: Let's say you're in the top 5 DPS. As a result, you get put into 'uber group 1'. This boosts you with a 100 DPS.
Mr. X is ~10th in damage. Boosting him through optimal grouping might boost his DPS by 150.
If everything else is identical, the optimal choice of an intelligent raid leader is not to maximize your damage, even though you might be consistantly higher.

This isn't to say that you should get the aforementioned buffs, I'm just going against the blanket statement "If I'm in top 5 DPS, the best thing to do is to boost me higher".

While, yes, opting for slightly non-intuitive gear choices might be the optimal for certain specs (at least more so than for others), this is, as mentioned, not groundbreaking research.
As you said in your opening post, these forums cater much more to the math and theorycrafting people than your average WoW forum, hence we're much more likely to try and optimize (and thus discuss) things that aren't as obvious to average Hunters.

It's a form of comparative advantage I guess, what composition to go with.

As an example:
Give Hunter Grace of Air, Leader of the Pack, Strength of Earth (pet only)
Give Warrior Windfury, Leader of the Pack, Strength of Earth, Unleashed Fury (is that the melee based one? Can't remember right now).

This would most likely yield different DPS increases, correct?

In other words, group composition is a bit trickier than "buff the best damage dealer regardless of what it takes".

Unleashed fury is melee only, curse Blizzard.

I thought you ment hunters only, but alright.

How about a group setup like this:

Cat, BM, BM, Fury warrior, enchancement shammy.

Shammy gains nothing from the WF totem so that 97.4 agility from GoA is nice. You could make the group better by switching the fury warrior for another bm hunter but thats a bit rare.

If there's more than two rogues and if there's two fury warriors in your raid it's very rare thise days as well.

Compare different classes, not the same class. If rogues/warriors gain more from a shaman, they'll get him. If mages gain more from a shadow priest, they'll get him.

What I'm suggesting here isn't something that equations and charts would help explain.

If one could replace hit rating, int, and/or mana/5 through talents...and replace those needs with dps-laden gear...then those talents in themselves have a dps value.

Which to me, makes these 'mediocre' survival talents worth talking about.

The math for such a thing, unfortunately, goes hand-in-hand with an itemization discussion, making it extremely tricky...and easily overlooked as viable.

But if for the same sustainability and hit rating a survival hunter can wear more dps gear...doesn't that gain some valuation in the analysis of the tree?

If you can show me how to quantify that, I'd happily jump in and do a study. But my inability to post an equation on the subject at this date does not lessen the viability of the approach. It simply means that we haven't found an adequate model for it yet.

But to ignore these issues when discussing raid viability for survivalists is in my mind a big mistake...they can bring a great deal of dps to the table. Again, to me this seems self-evident, if not easily quantifiable.

Not groundbreaking at all...but why isn't it part of the conversation? In application it suggests builds of survival hunters that can do tremendous damage.

Its not always only "who gets it".
As of TBC, the hunter also gives back.

Have dps group1 consist of:
1x feral for 5% crit
1x warrior for battle shout
1x melee shammy for agi, earth, 10% AP and bloodlust
1x maybe a rogue, who gives nothing but gets a lot

Would you want to give the 5th spot to a rogue who gets (theoretically, never did the math) more out of a shammy totem then a hunter, or would you give it to a hunter, who gives 3% damage and 110 melee AP to a total of 6 members for optimal synergy?

Second part of that question is, did you check the skill level of the players and do you know the full potential of both classes and how close they are on reaching it?

Does it help to put bad player A in the group, who gets more out of the buffs in theory then player B, who profits a bit less, but plays twice as good?

I'd say perfect group composition cant be done by simple numbers and should be examined on a case by case basis for perfection.

Well I'm not sure what there is to discuss here. "I can't empirically prove it, but I feel in my heart this is true" may be a valid statement to make in discussing topics like religious faith or metaphysics, but this is a game forum that generally focuses on theorycraft (math and game mechanics). In other words, if you do well as a survival speced hunter but can't really explain why, that's great, but then what is there to discuss?

Just saw that fenrus beat me to the statement, that the answers are less of an attack against you, they seem to result out of the fact that you dont offer anything to discuss.

This board is focused on extremely deep mathcraft and there are 2 very long hunter threads which include lots of math and numbers not only on MM and BM, but also on SV and all of its complicated calculations.
SV was not dismissed as a crappy build as its being done on official forums but in the end the done math shows that its...well...lacking, compared to MM and BM.

So, if after all the talk, which you obviously missed and didnt care to read, you make a thread and say: "I feel SV is the best", this cant lead to anything else but people asking you for some deeper insight in form of calculations/WWS logs, which might have been missed all along.

In other words, the discussion you hope for has been held a long time ago.

Actually in one respect, hit rating, Survival's talents become less than mediocre. If you move to Rogue leather you're going to be dripping with so much +hit that you'll be well over the cap. Getting 3% more from Surefooted makes the talent completely useless (for PvE).

Also, it really shouldn't be hard to come up with mana usage/regen equations so that you can figure out what % of time you need to spend drinking. But, as a Survival Hunter if you start drinking Expose Weakness falls off the mob, and the raid looses not just your DPS, but a good chunk from the Warriors, Rogues, Enhancement Shaman and Kitty Cats. Of all the specs, Survival is the one that absolutely should not be drinking whenever they run out of mana.

I followed your threads the last week or two on the general forums, Elakuan. They are some of the only thought-provoking work posted anymore. But you're in a different playground here. Facts and figures mean more than generalizations and unsupported anecdotes. Don't get discouraged, just learn to converse with the big boys. You'll find you learn a hell of a lot more here than you educate.

I agree...I suffer from an inability to model my own performance. Which, believe me, is a frustration to me.

At most, yes, I was hoping we could find a way to quantify these things and include them into the discussion.

At least, I felt obligated to throw out that it SHOULD be a part of the discussion. As a physicist I know explained to me recently regarding an observation, "The fact that I can't yet explain it doesn't mean it isn't a remarkable thing."

Has this already been modelled, and the recent threads here regarding the tree are not up to date? Had I seen discussion of itemization in the survival threads here, I wouldn't have posted. But I feel as though some, at least, are missing one of the best features of the tree.

Anyhoo. If this isn't a conversation worth having, absolutely. Lock down the topic...and thanks for your time.

Well, and that's why I'm here, Cheeky...I'd love to learn more. Unfortunately, Lactose made this a very personal thing from the start, which I don't understand a bit.

You're right of course, that EW falls off...but at my level (1000 buffed agi) its power (250 ap) and its reach (raid-wide) more than make up for a 3% absence in the fight.

As has been discussed ad nauseum, the weakness of TSA is that it has no scalability...in my mind a mistake. It should simply be a percent of Ap transferrable to the party, as it transferrs to our pets. But as it stands it lessens the usefulness of the marksman tree, particularly if one can do higher dps in Bm and Survival.

As for hit rating, the fact is I still need to switch into higher hit rating gear to face a boss...just not as much as a marksman does. I would LOVE to hit the cap you mentioned, where my max dps gearset got me to my 89 (85 for me) hit threshold. I haven't yet found that gear.

Perhaps your point is well taken though, when you have access to Tier 6-level gear...I haven't seen enough drops at that level to know that they are increasing it in itemizaiton. But for now...even 89 seems like a lot.

Cheeky, I think the challenge I would throw out to the amazing minds here at EJ is...if my math doesn't satisfy, let's find a way to model it. Let's look at the itemization for a particular level and assign points to hit and mana that can be spent on other things...and valuate the other things.

I'm happy to help develop the math...but I hear people saying this is old news. If this is a redundant conversation...well, I'm confused. Do we want math, or do we not care.