Honestly, I'm pretty curious about this myself. I've got a DST in the bank for when I'm ready to try out 7/20/34 again, I was thinking my tsunami talisman would probably be a good idea for the second trinket, but haven't really worked out if it's better than the ashtongue trinket given the rotation.

DST + Madness/Swiftness afaik

Diasx,

Tokrah's recommendation of needing 700 agi unbuffed for Survival is a little harsh for someone just entering SSC. It is true that Survival hunting is much more gear dependent. However, I think you have plenty of agility with LR for being Survival in SSC if your guild currently does not have a Survival hunter.

Your 715 agility unbuffed combined with 20 agi buff food, a major agility elixer, and Blessing of Kings, gets you to 856 agility, which provides 214 AP boost to the physical DPS in your raid. Due to the better gear available via ZA, badges, arena, PvP, etc. than when I entered SSC, you have a lot more agility than what I had entering SSC, and I did fine.

Hence, if your guild doesn't have a Survival hunter and you want to be Survival hunter, I encourage you to remain so and to start to build better gear and learn the role better. Plus, it shouldn't take you too much to gain some better Survival gear with all the options out there.

If you want to be a more effective Survival hunter, I would like to make the following suggestions:

1) Stay away from the IAotH build for now as Tokrah suggested. That is not really only effective for end game Survival hunters with the 4 set T6 bonus that are using a steady-auto rotation, although others can get it to work out well too. With where you are in the game, you should be using either a full 0/20/41 Survival build, a hybrid MM/Surv build like 0/28/33, or somewhere in between depending on what works best for your guild and your situation. I personally suggest 0/20/41 with Readiness for its utility, but try some of them out for yourself.

2) To have effective DPS at your gear level, do not use the BM auto-steady rotations (2:1, 3:2, 1:1) since you do not have the attack speed to make it the best rotation for you. Instead, I suggest using a 1:1.5 rotation when you do not have to worry about CC and a 1:1.3 when you do. She the rotation thread or search this thread if you do not know what those rotations are.

3) Also to be effective at your gear level, I suggest avoiding haste gear for the most part. I little bit of passive haste can be good to tighten up your rotation depending on your weapon speed, but more than that will hurt your rotation until you get enough haste gear (well over 300 haste rating) to be able to effectively do an auto-steady rotation. Getting that much haste now will cost you a lot of valuable item level points in other stats. I suggest focusing on getting your agility and overall DPS up without worrying about haste for now.

4) Since you are an engineer, I suggest looking into making the Deathblow versions of your helm instead, although they are leather. Another option is the season 3 arena helm. I still wear that about half way into MH/BT. The rest of your gear is pretty good for entering SSC, with your belt and 2nd trinket being the only items lagging behind. Suggest running BM a lot if you can to get the Hourglass to replace the green trinket.

5) As Survival spec, you only need 95 hit rating. So feel free to drop about 50 HR in favor of items that may give you more agility and DPS.

Well, whatever you choose, I wish you the best of luck!

There are many macros out there that survival hunters use. If you search this thread and the hunter rotation thread, you can find many options.

If you are an end game survival hunter, then you can pretty much spam the same macro you did for BM. I had trouble viewing your character sheet on the armory, but it appeared that you are endgame. You can ignore the rest if you want, but I included it for other that may not be end game and who may have similar questions.

However, if you are not end game yet, you should probably be using a 1:1.5 rotation. Please be aware that I do not think that there is any perfect "spamming" 1 button for the 1:1.5. There are several reasons for this, with the main being that it is a rotation with a lot of complex factors affecting it, such as your weapon speed, your other gear, your latency, etc. In addition, unless you are doing a IAS 1:1.5, then you need a second macro to spam to avoid breaking CC.

In general, the 1:1.5 macros fall into 2 general categories from my observations:

1) The /castsequence macros. These macros have the benefit in that they generally do a good job at performing the true 1:1.5 rotation. One of the problems with these macros though is that they use /castsequence to inforce the specific order of shots, which requires more client and server communication, which will slow down you rotation and cost you DPS if you have more than a small amount of latency. Another problem with these macros is that they can be picky. One that works for one person well with their weapon speed and latency may not work well for you. In addition, if your macro uses multishot, you need a second version of the macro that is a 1:1.3 rotation to use when you don't want to break nearby CC effects. Finally, these macros do not scale well with large haste effects (small haste can tighten them up). Under large haste effects, you need to ideally switch to an auto-steady macro for maximum DPS. Thus, this situation could require 3 different macros that you have to switch between in various situations depending on CC and haste.

2) /castrandom macros. These usually have a /cast /cast or a castsequence for the auto-steady main part of the rotation with /castrandom to weave in the multishots and arcane shots. The good news of these macros is that they are a lot more flexible. They tend to still function well under various latency and scale well with haste (insert more auto-steadies between multishots and arcane shots). The bad news is that they do not enforce the true 1:1.5 rotation and can result in a loss of DPS due to inappropriate firings of the multis or arcanes. In addition, you still need a different version of this macro to use when CC effects are near (just drop multishot from the /castrandom line) and another macro for the large haste effects to just do steady-auto.

Now there are some very clever people out there that have come up with macros that try to reduce the need for more than one, but I find these macros too complex and more susceptible to the variants between different users.

I suggest trying some of these options out for yourself to see what works best for you and your situation.

After a lot of experimenting, I use a /cast/cast for the auto-steady rotation and hand-weave the arcanes and multishots in at the appropriate locations. That way I manually control whether to use the 1:1.3 or 1:1.5 rotation depending on CC and how often to fire specials during various haste effects. Now for survival fights in which I can't devote as much SA to monitoring my manual hand-weaving, I do have /castrandom macros I use. Of course, hand-weaving has its own set of problems, such as human error/timing and also distracting you.

I do not suggest over-stacking agility and/or ignoring DPS items or vice versa.

As stated in a post in the last few pages, my personal goal as a survival hunter is maximizing my overall raid DPS contribution. This requires me to raise both my agility in order to increase my EW AP to the raid and also my personal DPS so that I am still effective, especially when not on the same target as all the physical DPS. Fortunately with LR and BoK, those two goals often go hand in hand, but they can conflict too. That post a few pages ago provides my personal method for making gearing decisions. Others have similar methods.

1:1, 3:2, 1:2, and 2:1 are different versions of the auto-steady rotations with the first number being the number of steadys and the second being the number of autos.

Thus:

2:1 auto-steady-steady
3:2: auto-steady-steady-auto-steady
1:1 auto-steady
1:2 auto-auto-steady

If you use the BM macro and have enough haste to effectively do at least the 2:1 rotation, then additional haste can scale you up to 3:2, then 1:1.

Ah very effective post. Mostly contains what i need to know .

At the moment i have a macro with wich i can spam all i want. It weaves in arcane shot and multy shot pretty nice. Only downside at the moment is that i havent reallt tested it wel (or at least nobody logged a WWS of it) on a bos yet.

Currently i have two buttons. 1 containing multy shot and one without. Switching between teh two for CC fights and non CC fights.

It's became a rather complex and long macro though.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=5/target !Auto Shot, Steady Shot,!Auto shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot,!Auto shot, Multy shot, Steady shot,!Auto shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();


hmmm the above is probably not my compleet macro (i typed this out of my head) ill update it soon with the right one.

i also found this macro, could someone comment on it.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2.1/combat/target Steady Shot, !Auto Shot
/castrandom Arcane Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1

Wow Web Stats
7/20/34 w/ Dream Team Group

Also, dont ask what happened on Council...I dont wanna talk about it.

Oh how we wish we could. Sadly the Surestrike Goggles Pattern is the only one available to Hunters. :/

Grats on the bow man and some great numbers there. I am still trying to equalize my gear to where my current guild is proogression wise but missed out on random hyjal run that we did instead of felmist due to lack of healers. Turns out you get saved to Hyjal just farming trash. go figure.

After reading through most of this to increase my SV DPS for Brutallus I've decided to use the newest macro.

I have a few questions about it though (I have a 3.00 speed gun).

First of all how much better is a 3:2 with a DST proc than a 2:1?

With a DST proc I still end up doing a 2:1 instead of 3:2. How much passive haste would I need to make it into a 3:2 rotation. I am guessing you need to reach a certain attack speed but what is it?

Also same question applies for quickshots.

Finally, once I have got enough passive haste to make quickshots and DST start giving me a 3:2 would haste become pretty much useless and stacking agi/armor pen be the way forward?


As far as I understand that's the main information I would need to know to maximise my DPS.

I think I can count the number of times I have been placed in a group like that on one hand. It doesnt happen often, and I think its very situational on how good and effective it would be. I see stacking a Hunter group like that good for short term burst DPS. You have Rapid Fires, Haste Pots, Heroism's all going for a good short period of time...but once all those things are on cooldown, the value of having the group stacked like that goes down and down.

I could see us stacking the group like this again for a fight like Twins...where you want to try and get the first one down ASAP. But for a fight like Brut or Felmyst...I almost see it as a waste compared to the value Warlocks and Rogues would receive from a long term +DPS from a BM Hunter.

Those numbers I did on that BT run were the highest I have ever done as Survival, so it was a pretty fun night for me.

Sore82, I noticed that you maintained the Steady-Auto spam for the duration of the fights. Did you ever hit a time where all your cooldowns were up and your DPS started dropping? How significant was the difference? From what I see, you still did some pretty ridiculous damage with minimal haste from gear. It makes me want to give it a shot soon. I've been having difficulty weaving my shots for some reason, (I've been using macros and hand-weaving, but I always seem to end up in the middle of the pack regardless) but these numbers sure do seem rather nice.

Shouldnt it be between 350 and 380 depending on latency? No idea what it would be for 2.8 speed weapon.

Hi all (my first post on these forums); a couple questions for Xfer

1) The BT WWS you posted was done with just Clutch of Demise (and Drums of Battle) as "passive" haste (both Fury of the Crashing Waves and Berserker's Call buffs would at least indicate you didn't use a DST)?

2) What kind of macro setup were you running; the regular cast/cast with KC or a second macro for KC that I've seen mentioned a few times?

3) What's up with 121 hit rating? :> Though I see you only got one gem with any hit on it so I'm guessing it's just not bothering to do ZA for dual Mojos or Felspine not dropping yet?

Anyway, very encouraging results and lots of kudos for that.

I'm a long-time manual 1.5:1 man myself (currently trying out BM for fun with Crossbow of Relentless Badges) but my doubts of trying out the 7/20/34 with macro is eroding as I type this seeing as haste gear is not a requirement for good results (I currently only got a Felspine and sort of agreed to pass Clutch of Demise for rogues now that I finally got Telonicus').

We actually kill Gruul fairly often on off-raid days so I might be able to get my hands on a DST too, what I'm really concerned about is my latency and how it would affect adopting macros. And we're not talking about 150 or 200 here, it's usually closer to 300 than 250 during evenings :/. Does that mean I can forget macros (I know from experience the castsequence ones were crap with my latency) and 7/20/34 altogether or how sensitive are the /cast/cast macros to latency these days (with all the serverside black magic going on)?

On longer fights, I of course noticed a drop in my DPS. The manual Burst Hast effects we have (Rapid Fire/Haste Pot) increase our DPS my a good amount for a short period of time. If you are able to have Drums up at all times, then your DPS will only dip down so far. Teron was what I would consider a medium fight...it was short enough that I could remain hasted for a good majority of it, but there was still a period of time where I was doing less damage, that overall lowered my DPS by some amount. To tell you the truth, I wasent really paying attention to my exact DPS at all times.



1 - Right, just the neck for Haste and I think 1-2 of the others in the group were leatherworkers...it was not up all the time. I have no DST either...if I did, I would have used it. I have had awful luck on getting that thing, but im still trying every week.

2 - I use:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto Shot
/click [target=pettarget,exists] MultiBarBottomLeftButton12
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Lightning Breath
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

and

/castsequence reset=4 Kill Command, !Auto Shot, !Auto Shot, !Auto Shot

The way to set up this macro has been explained on this forum a couple of times.

3 - Well, I just recently was able to put on my Cursed Vision from getting the Gronnstalker Belt (both of which have a good amount of +hit). My hit is over the cap right now cus I dont really have much I can replace it with (and my guild is also lacking Red BT/MH gems). But I do realize im over, and am planning on getting some boots or something to replace some of the +Hit with better stats. My choices right now are [Shadowmaster's Boots] or [Star-Strider Boots].

Sore82, I'd love to run some questions by you concerning all this if you don't mind...

Firstly am I right in thinking your group composition was resto shaman, feral druid and you 3 hunters (yourself and 2x BM)?

Secondly, is the "haste" buff from a haste potion? I've not used them myself as I (currently) run a manual 1.5:1

Also, what order did they haste buffs come in and did any overlap? I only see 1 Drums buff which is approx 5% by itself, did you pair the drums with heroism or was that after the other buffs?

Also, what macro do you use for this and what's your MS like?

Sorry for the barrage of questions but this looks like something I might be able to replicate in my guild and I'd really love to try... might need to convince a paladin to keep up JoW though. Alternatively use a fel mana potion at the start and a haste potion when it's off cooldown, that would keep you at full mana for a while early on.

Edit: I see you've just answered most of my questions, many thanks. I'd still like to know the order you used them in and if that really matters.

I didnt really use a specific order...we were doing BT so the drum rotation was not really a priority. Sometimes they were dropped, sometimes they wernt. Im not a leatherworker, so I didnt have my own drums to drop. I didnt really pay attention to drum up-time.

As for the other Haste, I usually started off with using my Rapid Fire + Berserker's Call, and then once Rapid Fire ended I drank a Haste pot. Then around 25% the shaman would pop a Heroism. If Rapid Fire or Haste pot were up at that point I would stack them, since in BT, once something is sub 20% it usually dies very fast.

I dont know the numbers, but I would assume that having the 4piece T6 makes a substantial difference since you are using a 2:1/3:2/1:1 rotation.

As for running a 3:2 rotation with just Regular Haste buffs...im not sure. I know that my goal is to get around 80passive haste (haste on gear) which I think will help make my IAotH get to a 3:2 when it procs.

I really havent had that much experience with using this build or haste gear. I kinda just have to wait for stuff to drop to test it out to see how well it works.

would it be interesting for us to stac such an amount of haste to get a 1:1 shot rotation without having to weave in extra shots (making us most mana efficient build there is)

i was wondering this cuss with sunwell a lot of new haste items are opening up for us.

Hi, im kinda new to survival, have tried some diffrent rotations etc. but i cant seem to find the right rotations. I have tried that "2part marco" but that one starts to clip the autoshots almost instantly, i've tried a normal auru/steady macro and put in arcane/multi manually, and i've also tried this macro:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom Multi-Shot, Arcane Shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Right now that macro is the one that works be the one that gives me the most, im useing that one but without the multishot if there is CC around. What should i aim for? Get much haste gear and only use that steady/auto macro?

Thanks! // Confused hunter!

(If armory doesnt link from sig: Runqen @ Argent Dawn)

As a newly converted survival hunter, I have been keeping up with this thread on current strategies to make this spec work most efficiently. And so far, it has been great. I have been playing around with both spec, 0/20/41, 7/20/34. The latter being my most recent and current spec. With no haste buff up (IAotH, Rapid Fire, etc.) I have been trying to stay close to a 1:1.5 shot rotation.

I have been observing several WWS reports recently of people with the same spec. Looking at their specific damaging shots, mine do not seem to match up percentage-wise. It may be my lack of the 4 piece t6 set bonus, but my auto-shots always seems to be my top damaging shot, as opposed to steady shot being the most damaging shot by percentage (from what I have seen from WWS). Does this statistic alone throw up a flag that there is something wrong with my shot rotation? I normally use a standard BM macro while weaving in specials.

If you dont have 4 pieces of T6 your autos will generally hit for more than your steadies. Your 1:1.5 roation unhasted then becomes the right choice. When you go with the other rotaion in an unhasted situation you are trading out auto shots for steady shots. This costs mana and drops dps. Even if you did have 4 piece T6 and your steadies did a little more than your autos if you couldnt maintain some level of haste most of the time then you still dont want to trade steadies for autos. What you are after with the other rotation is increasing your overall shot count. IAotH / leatherowrking / Bloodlust / DST / passive haste / haste pots (usable because of increased mana efficiency and things loke JoW or shadow priests) all start to increase your ratio of time you spend hasted vs non-hasted. Your 1:1.5 rotation does not benefit from haste but the other rotation does. Increased haste levels also greatly reduces your chances of chaining steadies which kills your real dps.

All that means that your personal gear / haste / latency / weapon speed / group composition all play into what the right choice for you is. You really need to go out to Dr Boom or blasted lands or (my favorite) ghosts at the top of DM North and use recount to record the shot counts you can achieve wiith various setups. Then use WWS numbers from actual raids to compute the dps each setup gives you. You should also compare mana efficiency. i.e. a 30dps upgrade for a 40% mana efficiency loss may not be worth it.

From my understanding of whats been thrown around in this thread, the idea of the 7/20/34 build is to provide as much extra haste benefit to keep you as close to the 1:1 rotation as possible for as long as possible. On a short fight readiness is nice for the extra RF because the ratio of hasted to unhasted time isn't as small as it is in longer fights. Once you start approaching 6-10 minute fights the amount of uptime on quick shots seems to be out pacing the amount of uptime you have with RF readiness RF, not to mention alot of the haste is actually wasted on RF because you only need to get to about 20% before you drop into a 1:1 just like the BM hunters. Basically it seems like the holy grail for survival, and by extension marksmanship, is to get to enough passive or semi passive haste to keep you at a 1:1 steady rotation for as long as possible.