Looking at your longest Patchwerk attempt, there are some clear issues. You fired 10 arcane shots (not currently optimal for BM) and 9 multi-shots (disfavored on single target). Your Serpent Sting had poor uptime (note your 32 Serpent ticks compared to Sanasala's 43). I'm not exactly sure what type of pet you were using (wolf?), but it isn't one of the high dps nonexotics (scorpion, cat, or even wasp).

SV is completely capable of putting out 3k parses. I put out 2800-3000 on favorable bosses in my 10 man raids, which are missing a host of critical hunter support buffs: no sunder, no +10% AP, no +5% crit, and only one paladin. Feel free to examine my Armory; I am by no means at maximum gear (and some of my talent decisions will be deemed dubious, I expect). I see no reason why an SV hunter in closer to maximal available equipment, on a 25 man raid with full buff support, couldn't parse ~4k on appropriate parse-test encounters.

But lots of people can parse 4k. It isn't special. The problem is that we are comparing to other specs and classes that can do 4500, 5k, 6k or more. The boom is being lowered on the highest of the dps hunters, but SV is caught in the crossfire, and I am somewhat doubtful that a point-target buff to ES will do more than tread water absent degenerate strategies. Trapdancing appears to be a great dps strategy on paper, but might be the canonical example of why papercrafting can only go so far in modeling real-world encounters.

Also do we still have NO information about Explosive Shot's increased scaling?

So then your advice, Serpent, is that I should stick solely to alternating between SS and ES for shots in a boss fight, and then alternate between Wyvern Sting and Serpent Sting as the effects of each wear off? It hadn't occurred to me that firing Arcane/Multi-Shots between Steady Shots could possibly damage my overall DPS (although could very well open up a lot of mana if true).

At the moment, no.

The short version: For SV right now, your optimal order of operations is to maintain Serpent Sting, fire Explosive Shot any time that it is up (except following LNL procs, where you must weave it with Steadies / Serpent refreshes to avoid overwriting your own ES ticks), and filling the remainder of your GCDs with Steadies. In contrast, the BM rotation is just Serpent / Steady spam. Neither, right now, wants anything to do with Arcane or Aimed/Multi, because they are at best a very small gain in dps in exchange for a nontrivial loss of mana efficiency. I do not think that the math in any way supports use of Wyvern Sting as part of a dps rotation, although it seems to have some following in this capacity from comments upthread (keep in mind, also, that if the mob is immune to its cc component, it will not receive the dot).

Of course, managing -- or forcing -- LNL procs is rarely as simple as my quicky explanation makes it sound. Refreshing Serpent Sting at moments of locally maximized attack power can be an improvement to net dps, but on-the-fly is generally more art than science. Viper management is a topic all to itself.

And it's all going to change at 3.0.8. BM is likely to move to a Serpent/Arcane/Steady rotation. MM has a pretty crazy 20-second-long repeating pattern as the papercraft ideal. And SV may wind up doing some very dumb things in an effort to be competitive.

My most recent Patchwerk results: (Srry, don't have WWS)

Came in 3rd behind 2 rogues (5900 and 5400 dps) at 4500.2 dps doing 7.3% of the total dmg


http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/6858/survdpsmm5.jpg

Basically laid an immo trap before pull and put one down on CD

Messed up a couple of trap dances and may have clipped a few autoshots.

Used a 1/16/54 build that included 3/3 resourcefulness

I think Survival dps is already pretty competitive with trap weaving and I feel like it will definitely be a lot more viable after the patch. I also think macroing in a raptor strike with immolation trap and disengage would increase dps as well.

On training dummies I've also consistently found my dmg breakdown as 30%/30%/30% steady/auto/explosive. This may be enough to pull survival over marks after the steady shot nerf as marks steady shot dmg % is a lot higher than 30% of total hunter dmg.

I plan on testing my DPS with both Survival and BM specs after the patch.

I did two tests before the patch, yesterday and the results I found were actually quite surprising.

I opted for a 7/13/51 build with no explosive shot. World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

I usually use 50/21 as a BM hunter and have enjoyed success with it so far, but am considering Survival due to some of the BM nerfs incoming.

I get around 2.2k dps unbuffed on the dummy as 51/20 BM.
I got around 2k dps unbuffed with my Survival spec.

I'm wondering how well Survival scales in a raid environment?

I know with BM my pet dps goes up by a huge amount and i'm wondering if perhaps that is where Survival will fail.

Just wanting some more experienced Survival Hunters opinions.

Korvek, just looking at the damage breakdown, the talent point in trap mastery looks like it's giving you less than .8% extra damage for the investment. This of course is only on a fight where you can use trap dancing in the first place (although I suppose it provides other utility as well). Will that really give a better benefit than investing it elsewhere? I guess the most logical alternative is imp hawk, not sure how much dmg that provides per talent point.

Also wondering why you have 3 pts in EW, wouldn't 2 give you relatively the same uptime?

Don't forget that a large percentage of BM damage comes from pets so although a greater percentage of their personal damage is steady, they actually get a pretty similar amount of total damage from steady. Just a rough example:
- BM hunter is 50% hunter/50% pet * steady is 50% of hunter damage = 25% of total damage is steady
- Survival hunter is 85% hunter/15% pet * steady is 30% of hunter damage = 25.5% of total damage is steady

I'm not familiar enough with marks damage splits to do the breakdown there- I think their steady is higher than ours but I don't know how much higher.

I also wanted to know what Damage 3/3 Improved Stings would add for me. Well it's quite disapointing and far away from 2% DPS per talentpoint, which Blizzard once said is their goal for a damagetalent. Let's assume Serpent Sting is about 4,5 % of your personal DPS. So for your 3 points in Improved Stings you get 1,35 % DPS, or 0,45 % DPS per talentpoint.

To compare this to other Talents: Let's say Autoshot is about 25 % of your personal damage and iaoth uptime is about 50 %. If you have enough haste for the GCD-steady-cap and iaoth only improves your autoshot-damage you'll get 1,88 % DPS or 0,375 % DPS.

As you can see Improved Stings is not much better than iaoth in the case you got the gcd-cap for steady.

I don't know which glyphs you use, but most likely you'll use steady, serpent and a random one. So if you use this glyph-slot for the iaoth-glyph, put one point into iaoth: Assuming about 30 % of your damage is done by steadyshot and taking your 242 haste rating:

For this point you get the full amount of additional damage for autoshot: 1,125 % DPS
You'll get about 7,97 % haste for steadyshot: 1,196 % DPS

So this single point (together with the glyph) let you do 2,321 % more DPS which is more Imp. Stings can give you.

My advice is: Drop imp. stings unless you really want it for pvp and move one point into iaoth, one into gftt and the last one into aimed which is useful for movement-fights.

I hope it sounds useful for you.

I know some people have played around with ES-less SV builds. While there's an outside chance that those could be viable at the moment, their day, unquestionably, is ending. The Steady Shot nerf punishes this sort of thing, and the only correction for SV is being bundled into ES. Even with what we know now, if you want a non-BM spec post-3.0.8, you must get the 51 point shot in one of the other two trees.

Sadly, I think trapdancing looks to be the future of SV. I think it is a profoundly wrong approach for Blizzard to take, but we work with what we've got. I believe I would recommend this 0/18/52 +1build. 3/3 Resourcefulness is simply going to be required to offset the substantial mana load of trapdancing and to push to a 24 second rotation over a 30 second one. The two points in Savage Strikes are deeply suboptimal, but they are competing with 2 more points in Hawk Eye ... on a build that is intended to spend as close to 100% of the time at minimum range as possible. Bad talents with synergy outweigh good talents that never get used, I guess.

This build has an unspent discretionary point. Improved Aspect of the Hawk is probably the best place for it, especially if you dedicate the third glyph slot to Glyph of iAotH and are under the haste cap. Other options are Trap Mastery (less than 1% dps gain, but the +30% Frost Trap duration is useful in some circumstances), GFTT 2/2 (if you are still having focus problems), or Rapid Killing 1/2 (to bring Rapid Fire into resonance with activated trinkets). At hit cap, the 3 points can come out of FA, also, and be spent more or less as desired in the above marginal talents.

Because this build will, at times, step forward into melee, it slightly prefers a 2h weapon to dual wielding on face value, although this may be mitigated somewhat by the insanity that is 2x [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Accuracy]. Conceivably, something like [Black Ice] could be used, but better 2h choices are probably [Betrayer of Humanity] and the post-3.0.8 revision of [Journey's End]. Does a 2h weapon's better Raptor Strike (and better hit %) on trapdance cycles win out over, say [Calamity's Grasp] / [Sinister Revenge] with dual Accuracy? Too early to tell and simple mathematical modeling is not going to give us a good picture of how this trapdance silliness performs.

Personally, I hope they realize that they are forcing SV down this path and provide a more sensible alternative. As it stands, I think trapdance SV dps will be competitive on those fights which allow it and quite a bit further back elsewhere.

Have you thought about taking the iaoth-glyph and put only one point into iaoth ? Glyph of Steadyshot and Glyph of Serpent Sting seem to be no-brainers but for the last slot Glyph of iaoth is a real option i think. The Glyph-designers don't seem do like SV-Hunters i think. Or can you think about better options for the 3rd Glyph-Slot ?