Alidien

It's still widely discussed if MT, IAotH or Barrage are the better options for a Survival build.

Myself being 5/20/36 I still get a bit annoyed over AotH procs as it changes my rotation and thus need even more focus than before. In addition to leading raids this can be a pain to get right, and already having around 43% crit in raids I don't really think MT is worth 5 points.

Something like 0/27/34 (2 points RWS, 2 in both TotH and EW) might also be a good option but theorycrafting the differences is way out of my league.

Looking at Zek and his 0/20/41 build it's no question that build can dish out some serious damage too.

 

Sapa

I can't say for sure. I topped Lurker last night (easier than being second last time) with less support. (had only lotp vs lotp+totem). Only have partial WWS from priest on other side but synced SWS/recap showed this much.

I love Readiness thats for sure. Was tanking some stray trash / bosses / triple trapping mobs... fun stuff, helps sometimes to. 2x Misdirection really kicks, as only hunter in yesterday raid it was quite simple to pull for 2 tanks. (not really required, but possible to do)
(came in handy on mag)

And i don't miss Iaoth. With 7/21/33 I had to adjust rotation to Quick Shots procs but damage seems to be same with just max special rotation and no hastes for me.
Got some crazy crit numbers like ~50% on auto/multi and such while on paperdoll was clearly 38-40%.
I stopped using KC also and it looks like it helps to.

Overall I'm happy with build, lots of "massive" crits and lots of focus for pet.
For DPS alone I don't know for sure, seems same/better with 0/20/41. Maybe i had more clipping issues when i was using Imp.Hawk+KC. :/ (200-300ms last night)

I guess ill need to log some more raids and analyze data. Or go on few hour Dr.Boom rampage.

Will be posting WWS logs here. This one is from last night, they are quite off on lurker (im missing 330k damage...), precise on Hydross, and bit off for me and Zaborg on Mag (we clicked cube at the entrance)
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=fsr1u6fq2f5w1

I recommend to everyone tinkering with SV spec to try Readiness, even if in theory you only gain 15sec of rapid and 1 multi-shot more ever 5 minutes .

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/511456SFyyX.png

 

• Ryas

I just recently respec'd survival for more utility. As the Class Leader of my guild, I got a spot in raids more often then the other hunters, so I felt I would be the best candidate for it. I'm not 100% of the way there gear wise (using T4 shoulders which have no agility what-so-ever), but I am getting there. With Leader of the Pack/Grace of Air/Kings I had about 850 agility and about 41.5% chance to crit. I am currently 0/25/36 spec. On Tidewalker last night, I was doing about 900 DPS (I was also dropping frost trap for entrapment, so that hurt my DPS a little), give or take (don't have WWS for last night, got screwed up). Not to mention, I have Improved Hunter's Mark and Expose weakness, so i was giving the raid around 325 melee Attack power, which isn't too shabby.

Beast Mastery is definitely the king of DPS for raiding, but I do like having a bit more utility, and seeing crit after crit is fun. And a well played Survival hunter can still do a good amount of DPS on any given fight, not to mention the added damage they are giving to all melee, even the MT. Granted, it is a much more gear dependent spec then BM by far, I think having a survival hunter in a raid isn't a bad idea, which is why I decided to spec into it after much debate. I know the melee appreciated it.

 

Alder

My main is Cloudhoof on the Arygos server, not this Paladin anymore.

Anyhow I just switched from a 0/24/37 to a 6/21/34 build (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cxoZVVbRVzZchhGzfMhVzh) for max DPS i would have gotten the 2nd point in focused fire instead of scatter but I PvP some too.

I did a few tests over the past few days asking myself the same sort of questions this thread does. Although I have never had MT, I feel pretty sure now IAoTH and FF is better than Thrill and Barrage.

This was after thinking about how I can overcome the mana problems losing thrill brings but its harder to replace IAoTH.

So I tested out on Dr. Boom, haven't gotten to raid since making the switch:

I did 2 mana bars worth for the tests basically, no buffs to myself and no HM

1. With Dragonspine : 697 personal DPS 1:50 avg. until OOM

2. With Blackhands: 617 personal DPS 2:00 avg. until OOM

I was using a full Multi/Arcane rotation with Blackhands and using a full rotation on the other until dragonspine proc'd and then I'd go Steady/Auto.

So once I saw I could handle the rotation switching and saw how much the haste seemed to help I went for IAotH to see if I could increase the damage more.

3. With Dspine and IAotH: 769 personal DPS 1:30 avg. until OOM

Granted more tests need to be run, but after seeing this I wanted to try out in the real world and I'll try to get some of those kind of results soon. I should also end up in some groups with or without shadow priest and can relay what sort of difference that makes.

 

Ladwenae

If used right I think readiness is worth having, at least im getting envious when I read posts where Zek is talking about his readiness use.

When I was MM and had IAotH I more or less always switched to my steady macro and when the proc was down used max specials and that gave me satisfying results.

Im currently 41/20/0 but with emphasis on PvP and its quite a significant drop in DPS without IAotH, but thats not really a surprise.

 

Jamuka

Assuming 55 shots in 60 seconds MT will proc 3.3 times in a minute. As each shot is space out approximately 1.09s appart, this means that after a proc the next 7 shots fired have a chance of causing overlapping MT procs. So there is a 42% chance each time MT procs that an average of 3.81 seconds of the procis wasted. Thus, on average 1.6 seconds of each MT is wasted, meaning that the 3.3 procs every minute average an uptime of 21.11 seconds in that minute. This averages out to 3.52% crit (just to be sure I checked and increasing your crit by 10% for 21.11 seconds every minute is an equivalent DPS increase to 3.52% crit all the time). Assuming you have a crit rate of 40% and using a 130% damage increase (for a total of 230% damage on a crit) this increases your DPS by 3%.

Was gonna work on IAotH next, but ran out of time. Will come back late tonight and try it out if no one else has posted anything on it.

 

Cheeky

All the math for both abilities (and automatic updates based on gear/rotation changes) can be found here.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

Sympa

Debating the following spec for raiding
Build 1 The Spec

Build 2 The Spec

Build 1
With this spec i would have Imp AOTH aswell as most of the benefits from Surv and Most of the benefits from Marks. Also have some mana regen from the crit talents.

Build 2
With the second spec (also surv) i traded the mana regen talents in surv out to extra damage from multi shot in MM. Honestly.. if hunters keep getting wisdom + judged mob/spriest... mana isnt an issue with minimum consumable usage

 

zork

So many specs in here but what would be really interesting is the rotation used as survival hunter to get high dps, if any.

A rotation depends on many facts and I would appreciate if we could gather them to get some rotation to work for any bow-speed.

- Haste buffs can be bad for rotations because cooldowns are not affected.
- Latency is a very big issue. Does latency affect the auto shot aswell while only shooting auto shots?
- You cannot fire specials faster than 1.5 seconds cause of the global cooldown, is this true or not?
- Specials delay the next auto shot by 0.5 seconds, is this true?
- Is it a good decision to use multishot against single targets as a survival hunter?

Lets take a 3.0spd bow for example. With only a 15% quiver its speed goes down to 2.6.
As said in the rotation thread the auto shot is your best shot and should never be delayed.

Steady shot is affected by the quiver and will be fired in 1.3 seconds. Its questionable if the casting speed of multi shot is affected by the quiver aswell.

To sum this up: Is it possible to find a rotation that will allow us to fire multi, arcane, steady and auto shots without delaying anything?

If find it hard to fit in multi shot cause of its cooldown and long castime. But I give it a try. Here is my sequence for a 3.0 speed bow with 15% quiver. I do not know how to handle latency in this sequence and haste buffs will mostly ruin the sequence cause of cooldown usage.

RothUI Download - Tank Guide - Avoidance Calc - Threat Calc - Rothar - darkmasters.de

 

◊ Lactose

Numbered for ease of answering.

1. Disregarding how it is to shift into the newly hasted rotation (i.e. user error), I don't think haste can ever make you fire less shots. Proccing hastes are very prone of disrupting your rhythm, though, which might be somewhat bad for your overall DPS.
2. Nope, not as far as I've seen.
3. True, excepting while under the influence of Bloodlust / Heroism.
4. Specials can delay your next Auto Shot by 0.5 seconds. Auto Shot basically has a 0.5 cast time.
5. If your average Multi-Shot damage is higher than your average [other special you'd fire], and using Multi-Shot won't leave you mana starved, yes.

SNAKEBALL™

 

Maghun

I'm currently BM spec for arena, however I have come to enjoy 0/28/33 aka http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=VZqVbRVzhhZIhb0tcMhV0h while thrill of the hunt is an excellent talnet I believe it needs to be similar to the t3 6piece bonus so that it gives mana back from autoshots, I also have no mana problems so I decided against using it.

I have read that MT is ~3.9% crit on these forums, however I don't find it's worth it since raid buffed i push 42% crit (with druid) without MT.

90% of the time I will be grouped with a feral druid and shaman for goa hitting 106X agil and giving a nice ap buff to the target. with this setup im pushing almost 1200dps with scorpid on fights like mag, and around 900dps on gruul.

I have trialed 5/20/36 and found the haste procs required more effort to keep up the same dps as 0/25/36 or 0/28/33, however I do play with a 400ms ping.

saying this I do around 100 more dps with bm spec but its much more effort to keep up the dps and I rather just be survival and be able to pay extra attention to the fight.

 

shinobi

I keep seeing variations on Marksman/Survival specs with very few points in BM for iAotH. I'm curious to know what I might be missing out on specced as 7/20/34. Granted, I dropped iAotH due to not being able to keep up with the haste buff, but I have to wonder if I'm trading away some DPS by taking up FF instead of going deeper into MM/SV.

I've also played around with the Hunter spreadsheets, which show I should be reaching and/or breaking 1300 DPS, I'm nowhere near that; more along the lines of 6-700 DPS. I'm wondering if maybe my rotations are off, or if there's something else I'm missing.

Here's my WWS log from my guild's run at Voidreaver last night (copy/pasted, as I haven't been able to talk to the guy running the logs to see if he wants it semi-public). Granted, I know I'm losing some DPS due to moving around, but it still seems rather low.

Another from Lurker Below; while I did improve my rotation from our first kill, I still did not post any memorable damage:

Any ideas as to why I'm not performing anywhere near the DPS mark listed in either spreadsheet, and what I could possibly do better to start pushing more damage?

 

Cheeky

Where is your pet? Even as a Survival spec your pet should be doing 100+ DPS. Also, most spreadsheets (I know mine does) provide numbers against a 0 armor target. You can fiddle with armor values to see how that effects the damage outputs. Once you get an armor value that matches your average shot damage you'll have a better idea what your personal DPS is.

Also, is Hunter's Mark up and refreshed? My spreadsheet assumes it is kept at +440 RAP.

Your shots aren't hitting for any less than mine, but I have 300+ DPS coming from my pet, which makes up the difference in our numbers.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

shinobi

Aye; I keep a close eye on Hunter's Mark to make sure it stays up at all times. You do bring up a good point though; I do underutilize my pet, and it sounds like I might be able to push a bit more out with him on the target instead of by my side.

 

Arcazua

MT vs Imp AotH:


For purposes of this discussion, R = average shot rate. (So 1.25 if you tend to shoot twice every 2.5 seconds. OK, so technically this is average time per shot rather than shots per time. Sue me. It'll work.)



MASTER TACTICIAN

This is the easier of the two. In a given period of 8 seconds prior to the shot you are taking, there is a 1 - (.94)^(8/R) chance of MT being up. Other than the "1-" part, that is the chance to not activate in any of those shots. So if you can pull off one shot every second, Master Tactician will be up about 39% of the time, for an average contribution of 3.9%.

Of course, that's best case scenario. In intermittent or short fights, the advantage is much less, but since we're comparing it to Improved Hawk, we'll disregard this.

A 3.9% increase is +3.9% of your non-crit DPS added overall, or 5.1% with Mortal Shots. If you've got 30% crit and Mortal Shots, you're already doing ~139% of non-crit, so jumping to 144% is an actual increase of about 3.6% total damage.

By contrast, if you're shooting every 1.25 seconds, you'll get an uptime of about 32.6%, an effective crit rate of 3.3%. If you're somehow shooting every 0.75 seconds, you'd get an uptime around 48%, or a boon of 4.8%. As you can infer from the previous example, whatever percentage you DO have, is probably slightly less of a percent of your total damage with Mortal Shots.



IMPROVED ASPECT OF THE HAWK

Because the probability is dependent on if we are hasted or not, we have to break this in half.

If hawk is not active, it will take 10 shots to retrigger on average. This takes 10R seconds.

Once it is active, it will last 12 seconds if it is not retriggered. You will fire 12/R shots in that time, each with a 10% chance of reinitiating Hawk. The chance of none of those succeeding is 0.9^(12 / R/1.15) = 0.9^(13.8/R)...so one minus that is the chance of retriggering.

However, we could retrigger off the retrigger, and retrigger off of that...we end up with the sum of a geometric series. So the average number of retriggers is going to be 0.9^(-13.8/R). (Sum of a geometric series is 1 / 1-P.) This number includes the original trigger.

Time to make a few assumptions so the math is relatively simple:
1) Assume that on average a reproc will add 6 seconds (half the duration) to the active period. This is slightly faulty, since the shot it activates on will be front-heavy, but it can't activate for at least R/1.15 time, so we'll pretend that balances out.
2) Assume that a 15% haste will increase your damage by 15%. Theoretically, it should. Work = Rate * Time, so +15% rate in the same time should be +15% work. In practice, it might not.

Then we have an uptime of...6+6*[0.9^(-13.8/R)]...31.7 seconds if you were attacking once per second without Quick Shots. The downtime was 10R, or 10 seconds. So the effect will be active 31.7 out of 41.7 seconds, or 76% of the time. That's an effective 11.4% haste increase, for 11.4% damage!

If we assume a slower attack rate, say 1.25, then the result is 25.2 up, 12.5 down, active on average 67%, for a 10% increase.



There's really no question which one is better, until the haste starts screwing with your shot cycles. If maintaining a 1 second shot speed as a non-BM hunter requires a slow weapon with a tight specials cycle, 15% haste very well might F you up. However, even for straight auto-steady, it's still a very good increase. We're talking a magnitude of about 3:1 in value, unless you start putting in contingencies like "but I like to use Aspect of the Viper," "I mostly PvP and so I never use autoshot," or "but the extra crit adds more than just raw damage for a survival hunter."

In fact, if I did the math right...and I've done it before and don't remember it being THIS good, so maybe I haven't...this is better damage than all other talents except SS or maybe MS.

 

• Glaurong

Couple things:

1) Auto shot is the only thing that triggers hawk. You will never be firing one every 1.0 seconds, especially as a survival hunter.

2) Since this is the case it's value varies greatly based on weapon speed. I did some simulations and pulled some trend lines out of the numbers in the spreadsheet thread if you want to see the exact numbers. I believe Cheeky ended up using it.

Edit:

3) As you alluded to, 15% != 15% increase in damage. You can only cast one steady every 1.5 seconds. This rate is fixed and should be accounting for at least 30% of your damage. Same with the rate of fire for multi and arcane. Really the only value hawk has is if you have dead time to trim out of whatever rotation you use.

So in practice a 15% haste could add up to ~5% increase in dps if you are using a non-optimal rotation or a non-optimal weapon speed.

Log Parser for BM Hunters (Right click, save as) - Updated 10/11/2007

 

Zure

IAotH can only proc off "normal ranged attacks" which seems to just include auto-attacks. I just hopped on my hunter and cast about 100 R1 arcane shots on a mob while running (so no autoshots), with zero procs. Then I stopped moving, autoshot 3 times and experienced a proc, then I cast 50 more arcane shots while running, no procs. This pushes the uptime down significantly.

 

Sapa

Where is your Multi Shot also?

Yes i know you will very likely clip rotation when doing "Auto, Steady+Multi, Auto" part of it. But will increase your damage (and mana usage), and sometimes when you get used to it you might execute it perfectly.

I don't use Iaoth and other hastes under 30% since they screw me over two times.
First it's demanding on focus and adaptation to proc. (going from max special rotation to one special per auto in any given combat situation ).
Second my max rotation has bigger dps as one special per auto.

I do use rapid fire tho. Its more mana conserve move than dps and fitting MS+Arcane in rotation all the time is costly.

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/511456SFyyX.png

 

◊ Lactose

Regarding the MT vs IAotH stuff:
There's some interesting posts on the matter here, ~page 7 / post 151 and onwards.

SNAKEBALL™

 

Cheeky

I used it for a while, but I switched to Norwest's calculations in a later version. I found I preferred the mathematical approach to the numbers you derived from the simulations. They came out to be very, very close, but the simulation doesn't exhibit the stair-step function that you really get based on weapon speeds. I believe this is because the derived equation smooths out the curve.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

Arcazua

Blah, I knew there was something that was only on standard attacks. I had forgotten which ability it was. That accounts for the overshoot.

Alright, so if I fire auto at a rate of once per 2.5 (outside Quick Shots), that's 16.7 up and 25 down for an average of 40%. That works out to a 6% increase, which is more in-line with what I was expecting.

This is true, but all epic weapons in the game are funneled into a fairly small space, (essentially 2.7-3.0,) and this thread is specifically about survival hunters, so Serpent's Swiftness is not under consideration. The domain for shot speed is 2.35 to 2.61. This makes the range vary from 42.7% up to 38.6%. Not that great a variance. I think it's safe to simply call it 40.

Faster auto = faster steady, if you're using a steady-auto rotation. With a shot speed of, say, 2.4 you will wait the extra 0.9 seconds past the GCD before firing the steady. Decreasing that to 2.1 means only waiting for 0.6 seconds, so yes it does actually