Haven't done Sunwell yet this week, but I took the 7/20/34 to BT and popped full consumables on Gorefiend to see how it stacked up. 2210 DPS without any heroisms.

Teron

Abron, the main purpose of Surv is the raid buff. Marks in it's current state is a mana hog that doesnt give back a whole lot at all.

Interesting you bring this up - I went to Hyjal last night with a 20BM/41MM build to see what could be done with it following a bit of discussion a few pages back. Took along my wind serpent, and managed over a hundred dps more on the fights than my previous best as surv. Of course, the loss in raid DPS makes it completely not worthwhile, but I found it interesting pushing 4k RAP whilst still maintaining a high pet dps as a plaything.

I've got 89 haste rating with items that I could push that up to around the 130 mark - did a 2:1 rotation that frequently dropped into 3:2 and 1:1 during RF/Heroism. Around 300 haste could make it a very intriguing proposition/possibility - but we're yet to see how gear itemisation will affect things, so I'll await with interest to see the drops from Mu'ru and Kil'jaeden, because there's not a lot in there that's hunter friendly from what I can see so far...

We do have an sv due to raidbuff. Mana is no issue either, i did around 1,7k dps on kaz with only 1 piece sr. Changing to steady as main attack makes marks more viable. I just wanted to thank you sv guys for testing out rotations etc. I don't know if it comes to a point to be subpar and if i get to know, i'll post it on the bm forums. *g

Abron, didnt mean to step on anyone's toes, but, imo, the raiding trend atm is all about synergy. If you get an extra lust & Goa you can push 100's of dps more, if healers get Sprist, they can sustain raid healing forever, if you have a ret paladin, you have constant judgements up etc. Marks as it stands, gives almost no synergy at all, while being a very mana demanding spec with 1:1.5 rotation producing medium to sub-par damage. I would even go as far as saying that BM doesnt give back a whole lot, but thankfully to it's cheap sustainable high dps, it is what it is.

I'm having some trouble figuring out how to plug in the 2:1 rotation into cheeky's spreadsheet to evaluate some gear changes. It's probably really obvious and i'm just overlooking it but any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

So I've been Toying around with a New Survival spec as of late. It's actually more of a hybrid, but I like to think of it as survival. The Main thing that I've been doing is Going all the way down MM until I get Combat Experience, and then Going down Survival to get EW, obviously getting Lighting Reflexes on the way.

But I noticed that In CE, it's worded differently than LR. I was wondering if depending on the order you specced, your stats would end up being different? This is something I havent' checked, and I'm not exactly the richest guy around, so constant respecces is not an option for me. But it's something I was just curious about.

I need some advice. After reading a crap ton of these pages, i'm having a lot of trouble understanding what kind of shot cycle i should be using as an SV hunter. I have some haste gear like fists of mukoa and valestalkers girdle, the neck from halazzi and the cloak. I guess what i need to understand is at what point do I go from pure agi to haste gear? Also, how many physical dpsers should be in raid before an SV hunter is actually helpful and what % do they contribute to the raid? I should be getting my 4piece T6 in the next couple weeks beacuse we've got up to illidan on farm. I've got 2 piece now. Should i be using my 4piece T5 until then beacuse of the crit bonus to SS, or the 2-t5 and 2-t6 (head and gloves) for the more agi and crit i can get now? I'm usually stuck in the tank group because our phys dps group is shaman, druid, 2-rougues, BM hunter. Why DW 2 daggers of bad mojo when you can have 2 breeching comets? If I were to stay BM, how do I maximize my own personal dps while still buffing the raid enough to make gimping myself worthwhile? Sorry for any typos, but I'm pretty tired.

Modeling 2:1 in the SS works by going to the Shot Rotation tab and manually entering Steady-Steady-Auto from top to bottom (i believe). Trying to get an accurate DPS readout from the SS on the new hasted SV outlook might be difficult though. From what I understand you spend (or certainly try to spend) as much time as possible in various hasted states to minimize the amount of 2:1 or even 3:2. I know you can take the off the "Averaging out" feature of procs but there is no accounting for Bloodlust and Drums in the SS. Cheeky SS is phenomenal but doesn't cover everything.

My guild loves me and typically gives us a great group for hunters. I've always happily been the survival bitch (knowing, bitterly, that I bring more dps to the raid than the BM hunters if only the meters took Expose Weakness into consideration). So anyway, sometime last week I made the switch to 7/20/34 and /cast /cast.

Here's brutallus, before I made the switch. I was hand-weaving 1:1.5 and switching to /cast /cast when hasted at least moderately (drums + something). I'm partied with 4 drums (including lazy drummers, so almost-permadrums but not quite), LotP, and GoA with an arms warrior and ret pally. I was specced 0/20/41: Wow Web Stats (1879 DPS)
The week I made the switch, I didn't have a felspine yet so I was DWing [Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality] with a [Dagger of Bad Mojo]. Our feral druid also transferred to fucking Premonition this week so I lost 5% crit, otherwise group/raid buffs were unchanged: Wow Web Stats (2106 DPS)
For the record, I'm spamming the /cast /cast macro with the /click line for kill command every .075 seconds using a G15 macro.

Now, just for kicks, here's 2633 survival DPS against gorefiend tonight using my current armory gear setup (exit dw, enter [Shivering Felspine]) and 7/20/34. We also got our LotP back. What's scary is that I could have done better; I forgot to switch back to bristleblitz after trash and one of my BM hunters/drummers was the first to get ghosts. There was also no ret pally: Wow Web Stats

Looking forward to brutallus tomorrow with LotP and my felspine.

Eureka!!! Okey time to perhaps make bold statements and try to get the Community to take notice of some of the numbers being punched out by SV hunters. Firstly, all credit must go to Kurkis for leading the way in pioneering the SV Hunter does BM shot counts approach. Now that we have some Hunters from very high rating Guilds following Kurkis's lead we are finally reaping the benefits of using a 2:1 Rotation and the /cast /cast macro, albeit the revised version which includes the click command for activating KC.

The 2633 DPS posted by Tsegoa below on Gorefiend is amazing by itself. However it doesn't start to tell the full story.

Using the tried and tested and now very conservative EW proc formula of 0.3 DPS per AP gain average we see the following mind boggling stats.

There were 7 physical DPS (excluding himself), 3 pets and 1 Tank in his raid, for the sake of argument we'll equate that to 8 physical DPS

8*300 Ap = 2400 Raid Ap /.3 conversion for DPS = 720 DPS

Raid DPS Contribution SV = 3353 DPS

Using the BM Hunters stats, Oaknar, of 2658 DPS and add 3% party contribution to 4 members @ 2400 DPS average we get

4*72 DPS = 288 DPS

Raid DPS Contribution BM = 2946 DPS

Now for the first time I think we can say that SV Hunters using end game gear can out DPS BM by a significant margin when considering Raid DPS as the ultimate stat.

Fascinating stuff all in all and 1 very poignant little snippet to close this is that [Shivering Felspine] coupled with [Cloak of Fiends] giving a toatl of 78 Haste seams to have hit the swwet spot when using a near full Drum rotation.

Awsome stuff, well done!!!

Well a couple of things here.

One is I just checked with one of our rogues who ran it through his spread sheet. 1 AP for him gives 0.344 DPS on his white damage and 0.29 DPS on his Sinister Strike. So 0.3 is a fair compromise.

Two is Battleshout gives 305 Ap so party buff for an end game rogue would be 91.5 DPS not 150.

Three is I think it was Lactose who came up with the 0.3 conversion factor who is usually a reliable source.

So no I am pretty confident the figures are not way off at all, however you must consider we are talking chars who have geared and killed 3 ish bosses in Sunwell here.

the 0.3 dps per ap only counts for classes who take the max benefit from AP, being rogues and fury warriors.
other classes gain less, alot less. like tanks and pets

when those calculations were made in this thread, it was said that its like 0.22-0.25 dps for enh shaman for ex.

The 0.3 works for rogues, dps warriors, and other hunters (with their pet dps rolled into their own it may be closer to .35, rogues were actually a bit more than .35, one of the warrior specs was as well while the other was a bit lower if I remember right). Tanks get around .2 or so (especially when you factor in their increased TPS allowing other threat capped raid members to do more dps). Feral druids get around .25 if I remember correctly. I did a survey of sorts asking members of the community to calculate out their own gain of dps from 1AP in their various spreadsheets and these were the results.

So, in general, .3 isn't that unrealistic, particularly with stacked groups.

Edit:
Found the old post, here's the list that I ended up with before moving on:
rogues - .3DPS
hunters - .3DPS
enh. shaman - .25DPS
fury warriors - .35DPS
arms warriors - .3DPS
feral druids - .2DPS
prot warriors - ? (.14TPS:1AP reported from one prot warrior)
ret paladins - ?
Also note, that these were for SSC/TK gear levels, nowadays it is probably a bit higher (if I remember pre-SSC/TK gear resulted in lower values while BT/MH gear resulted in higher values, an easy way to check would be to see what +1AP does to the DPS of a Sunwell hunter).

I must be missing something.

Granted, I'm at a much lower point in progression (3/4 TK, 5/6 SSC, 1/5 MH), but my stats aren't terribly lower than those that are having success with this hasted-ness. (Raid buffed I end up around 2700AP, 45%+ crit)

I see people sitting at about 2.45 shot speed with a 3.0 weapon, quiver and haste items. Shouldn't a 2.9 weapon shooting at 2.52 (just quiver) be similar?

So far my tests have been quite limited.. between regular raid support taking the past week off or so, raid make-up. I have seen that when I'm under HIGH haste (rapid fire/haste pot), my dps is quite improved. However, under drums only, I seem to be doing better with a 1:1.5. I tried 7/xx/xx, and hawk didn't seem to proc all that often, so I've been 0/20/41 for the past few days for the 2x rapid fire, spamming the BM macro while hasted with that, but otherwise 1:1.5.
All 3 specs (7/xx/xx, 0/20/41, and my old 0/24/37) are all within 50dps at Dr. Boom, depending on crit rate. (~900 +/- 50 dps)

I think that with a fairly regular raid scheduled for tonight (3x drums), I'll try the 7/xx/xx build again, but I'm just hoping someone can show me what I'm missing.

Rage Winterchill 7/XX/XX

I'll also take this space to state that the mana concerns I expressed earlier in this thread are quite manageable. 2 steady shots cost less mana than 1 arcane shot.

dont know if this was covered but is it true that you can use two of the5crit / 7stam gems and that will count as both your 2 yellow and 2 blue gems for your meta, to free up the rest of the gem slots for spinels

This is true. However, it is not always the best option. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not. From my experience, several factors go into choosing which of the following options is best for meeting meta gem requirements (note that other viable options may exist, but these are the ones that make the most sense to me):

Option 1: 2x[Jagged Seaspray Emerald] and 2x[Delicate Crimson Spinel]
= 10 crit + 14 sta + 20 agi with LR, Survivalist, and BoK gives
25.3 agi, 25.3 AP, 1.08% crit, 1.01% dodge, 50.6 armor, 169 health, 0.00% hit, 6.33 EW AP

Option 2: 2x[Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst] and 2x[Glinting Pyrestone]
= 20 agi + 10 hit + 14 sta with LR, Survivalist, and BoK gives
25.3 agi, 25.3 AP, 0.63% crit, 1.01% dodge, 50.6 armor, 169 health, 0.63% hit, 6.33 EW AP

Option 3: 2x[Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst] and 2x[Wicked Pyrestone]
= 10 agi + 14 sta + 20 AP + 10 crit with LR, Survivalist, and BoK gives
12.7 agi, 32.7 AP, 0.78% crit, 0.51% dodge, 25.3 armor, 169 health, 0.00% hit, 3.18 EW AP

Option 4: [Jagged Seaspray Emerald], [Delicate Crimson Spinel], [Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst], [Glinting Pyrestone]
= 20 agi + 14 sta + 5 hit + 5 crit with LR, Survivalist, and BoK gives
25.3 agi, 25.3 AP, 0.86% crit, 1.01% dodge, 50.6 armor, 169 health, 0.32% hit, 6.33 EW AP

Option 5: [Jagged Seaspray Emerald], [Delicate Crimson Spinel], [Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst], [Wicked Pyrestone]
= 15 agi + 14 sta + 10 AP + 10 crit with LR, Survivalist, and BoK gives
19.0 agi, 29.0 AP, 0.93% crit, 0.76% dodge, 38.0 armor, 169 health, 0.00% hit, 4.75 EW AP

My "favorite" (used most often) is Option 2. Here are the relative comparisons of the others options to Option 2 with not including health, armor, and dodge since they are not deciding factors for best DPS option and not including agility since it is already involved in the AP, crit%, and EW AP:

Option 1: +0.45% crit and -0.63% hit
Option 3: +7.4 AP, +0.15% crit and -0.63% hit, -3.18 EW AP
Option 4: +0.23% crit and -0.32% hit
Option 5: +3.7 AP, +0.30% crit and -0.63% hit, -1.58 EW AP

Some of the factors involved in determining which option is the best include:
1) Is hit rating benefitial? How far below or above the hit cap are you? Will getting a little extra hit help you make cap? Will a little extra hit allow you to switch out a hit rating item for a better DPS item?
2) Available socket bonuses that require blue and/or yellow sockets, especially those with agility as the socket bonus. The extra agility from the socket bonuses are valuable.

As a guideline, but not a hard and fast rule since there rarely are any clear cut decisions and since you do not want to always have to regem too much when get a new item:

- If you have two worthwhile socket bonuses that take both a blue and a yellow socket each, then Option 2 is probably the best, especially if the hit rating will be helpful. If you do not need the hit rating, then Option 3 works well.

- If you have 2 worthwhile socket bonuses that take a blue and a yellow in one and either a blue or a yellow in the other, then either Options 4 or 5 work well depending on whether you need a little hit rating ot not. May want to use Option 2 if need more hit rating.

- If you have 2 worthwhile socket bonuses that each take either a single blue or yellow, then Option 1 works the best, unless you need the hit rating, in which case options 2 and 4 should be considered.

- If you only have one worthwhile socket bonus, Options 4 or 5 still work well depending on whether you need the hit or not, but option 1 may be better.

If you have no worthwhile socket bonuses and do not need the hit rating then, option 1 often works best. If you need some hit rating, options 2 and 4 should be considered.

Hello,

I've been reading these forums for about 2 weeks now, and the more I read the more confused I get. Solutions seem to be derived on a case by case basis. I'm trying very hard not to be lazy and just cry out for help wkithout doing the research yet, but I have read all the threads here, and I have tried various shot rotations, and basically I have no method to measure whether or not I'm doing well. Additionally, some of the info here is several years old now. I'd personally prefer many smaller current threads than the way they do it here with just a few massive threads in which the info is ancient until the end few pages.

So here's the scoop.

I'm a Hunter in an end-game raiding guild, (if SSC and TK count as end game).

I was BM to 70, then have been MM from 70 to current raids, and then as of yesterday I respecced Survival to see if I could contribute more to my guild's raids.

So basically I've been survival for less than 24 hours, but I have been reading this thread for awhile to get ready for it.

As a survival hunter who desires one spec for soloing (dailies/farming/Arena), and for Raids, did I do well with my spec? Below is a link to my page in Wow's armory website.

The World of Warcraft Armory

its a (5/20/36)

You can see I went with IAotH and deep into Survival enough for Wyvern Sting, (I do PvP). I miss scatter shot though ;(.

I want to maximize my DPS, there are so many macros here, and I don't really understand them, if someone could just tell me which macro to use I would appreciate it. And with the macros I've used, I'm not quite sure how to use them, how often do I click the macro icon? Do I click it when its done with its CD? Sometimes when I click after CD it isn't ready yet and I have to wait a few more seconds. I've read the thread on shot rotation also, though i didn't gleam from it how to implement the necessary changes in my game.

I've been playing wow for 3 years now, and only this one toon, so you'd think I'd be better at it Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

While I'm not the most experienced hunter here, I've spent a long time in that area of content as a survival hunter (not there anymore but it's still fresh in the memory) so I feel I'm at least partially qualified to help. Please note that all this is my personal opinion.

Ok, first, spec.
Don't look at my spec at the moment, I'm experimenting ahead of my gear.
You'll almost certainly be better off with this.
It's the basic 0/20/41 more-or-less. I'm afraid it's not very PvP friendly so you'd have to respec for that I guess.
Once you get a bit more crit (about 33%) you could switch the points in TotH & EW the other way around without much EW loss and you'd gain a little mana regen.

The 5 points in IAotH is more of a hindrance for you at the moment.

As for macros and shot rotations, my personal preference was to not use macros. Instead, look for a wonderful addon called Quartz (get it even if you are using macros btw) and put the auto-attack swing timer next to the cast bar.

Now learn the 1:1.5 rotation off by heart.
That is Auto-Steady-Special-Auto-Steady repeat (where special is arcane or multishot).

The other nice thing about 0/20/41 is readiness, handy in a tight spot or useful for rapid fire, readiness, rapid fire (using auto-steady aka 1:1 while under RF effects).

Finally, gear.
With your current gear you have no meta gem thus the best way to enchant and gem is agi, agi and agi. in everything. Eventually you'll want a helm for the 12 agi +3% crit dmg meta in which case you'll also want to maintain 2yellow2blue gems.
You're over the hit cap so don't worry about sacrificing hit rating, 96 is the magic number for survival.

Edit: Forgot to mention, Expertise does nothing for a hunter (unless you're in melee), there are many better trinkets available.

Firstly, first time poster long time reader, i hope i can positively contribute to these intelligent discussions!

Now our surv hunter just quit WoW, so since i have alot of the required gear after farming BT for 6 months now and 3/6 sunwell atm, i was given the role of the surv hunter.

Now i know that BM > Surv, in terms of personal DPS, as i was previously BM and my personal record was 2.75k DPS on Teron, but im very impressed with the above poster getting 2.6k as survival!

With that aside i have a question for u, or any1 who would like to help out, is y u chose Berserker's Call and the BT exalted trinket. Is this because u havent got a Madness or DST? I know the rotation for Surv is spamming the 3:2 macro, but is it really worth sacrificing say the hit rating on madness for the exalted trinket (i notice u have a 10 hit rating in ur Felspine).

Also, ive done a fair bit of reading on EJ about survival raiding and was lead to believe Haste doesnt scale aswell as it does for BM. I go to ur armoury and u seem to "stack" haste. Is this intentional, or u havent got better in slot items? For example, the Kael cloak instead of the 1st chest ZA cloak.

The following is a link to my armory, (i just got the Brut neck and also have the ZA chest cloak, it might not be updated yet, and if it is, i also have the Kael neck and cloak. which were my previous items in those slots)

The World of Warcraft Armory

Any Critique's on my gear as it stands is also invited. Note: I havent finished re'gemming yet so judge the gem's leniently plz :P.

Ok, I was curious about how good this 7/20/34 would be for me (without 4pc t6 bonus at present, might be different case by this time next week given the amount of defenders that seem to drop for us and that I'm one of the few who actually needs said defender tokens).

Using (spamming) the following macro:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();


Hunter's Mark
Rapid Fire & Spam Macro
RF ends, Start Drums of Battle
continued to spam macro even though it might have been better to switch back to 1.5:1

Dr. Boom took some serious pounding and I came out with ~1k dps (AotH only). Quite respectable for pet-less non-raid-buffed personal dps.

I then switched out my twin Netherbanes for my Jin'rokh (45 haste) with 35 agi enchant and popped an Major Agi elixir to approximately make up for the loss of agi & crit.

Now I repeated the test as before. I gained about 130 dps. I ran the tests again a few times and the result was similar.

Just thought people might be interested in what I've found.
(p.s. This is better than my results with 0/20/41 though only slightly. The big differences are that Readiness spec = mana-heavy 1.5:1 except during hasted.)

Hello,

I have been a reader of EJ forums for about 8 months now, and it has really made me understand hunter mechanics and made me perform well in raids.

I am currently BM 41/20, However I am considering trying survival since my guild does not have any atm.

I do not have 4xT5 or 4xT6 bonus and are currently using macro for 1:1 rotation as BM. I know that with my gear, most would say that my survival spec should be 20/41. However I am very tempted to try the 7/20/34. My approach would then be to use WSR and 1:1 rotation instead of 2:3 due to lack of T5/T6 bonus. Then I would replace fel mana with haste pots. I also have DST and have several drummers in the group. I do not have any passive haste atm.

According to the spreadsheet I get the following results (Not considering haste pots/drums etc):
7/20/34 = 1068 dps - 1:1 rotation - WSR
0/20/41 = 1147 dps - 1:5 rotation - Sunfury
41/20/0 = 1259 dps - 1:1 rotation - WSR

the question is if the use of haste pots/drums will make up for the lack of dps compared to 20/41?

Is it even worth a try?

Your thoughts appreciated.