Durp's Survival Hunters guide and welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my blog. I will try to update this weekly if not more often

My first blog will be the first draft of my survival hunters guide. This guide is available in DOC format here


Durp's Hunter Guide MS word format


and the current revision of it  is below!  Please comment  and keep in mind it is a "draft"!

DURP’s Survival Hunter Guide

Warcraft release .3.3.3

Draft #1

6/10/10

This Guide will be in 5 categories

1. Gear/gems
2. Spec/PET
3. Key binds and Macros
4. Rotation
5. DPS maximization via Math

Category 1:

The thing that makes survival DPS work is our crazy critical hit rating. This critical hit rating is achieved by the talents such as but not limited to Lightning reflexes and Expose weakness and stacking as much agility and possible. There are many more talents and procs but I won’t be able to cover them in 10 minutes. Check out my build on the armory if you have build questions.  

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Durp

Agility is the only stat you should care about it is always better than attack power or armor pen.  Gem for agility in every socket except for the one socket you will use for the green gem Jagged Eye of Zul this will give you the blue and yellow gem requirements for your meta gem and that meta gem will be Relentless Earthsiege Diamond since Crit is the CORE of our dps you want to increase crit damage where you can

Take the items that have the most AGI on them even if they are leather but never ever let your self get below the 8% hit rating.   Starting hunters my find hit to be a challenge. I recommend giving up a trinket slot for one of the huge hit rating trinkets until you get better gear and no longer need them.

Category 2:

Spec is easy because it is cookie cutter. You have two choices really AIMED shot (the right choice) and improved multi-shot.  Aimed shot is best for raiding but multi-shot is clearly better for doing 5 man stuff.  Check my build out on the armory if you like or lookup any other raiding survival hunter and you will see almost all of them are 0/15/56

Your pet is going to be a wolf. There is no other option the wolf offers the passive ability of two howls the first one is one you should have set to automatic and it is called Furious Howl This ability at 80 increases your attack power by 320 at rank 6.  The next howl is acquired from the pet talent tree. This ability is called Call of the wild. This ability increases your attack power and your pets attack power by 10%

No other pet offers you so much!

6. Category 3): Key binds and Macros

To summarize the importance of keybinds; if you have to look at your UI and mouse click anything you will be slow no matter how good you think you are and you will lose time and dps is all about reaction time.  Mouse clicking will cost you 10%-20% of your DPS 30-40% if you are really bad.

You need to have 100% of your combat abilities bound to keyboard and or mouse buttons. Many of my abilities are in macros that the same button does two different things depending if I hold alt while hitting the macro. 

You know you have your keybinding done right when you can turn off your UI and still dps a boss and be top of the meters. Here is me killing the first boss in ICC with my UI turned off.  Reguardless of class if you are a DPS spec  you should be able to do this

Abilities that do not activate the global cooldown should be stacked onto other abilities via macros. Example :   Kill command is not on the global cooldown. To make sure I never mis it I put it on my steady shot macro

/cast auto shot

/cast Kill Command

/cast steady shot

Note that I start with an auto shot. By putting this first I will shoot my first auto shot as I fire my first steady shot.  If you don’t have this in there and it is your first shot the auto shot rotation starts AFTER you finish casting stead shot. Now I never open up with auto shot but what I did was I added /cast auto shot to all of my macros J

Because you have like 20 abilities and you don’t have 20 keys within reach of the asdw keys, you will need to make multi function macros

For example I have a macro that casts flare or icy shot.  Here is how that macro looks

/cast [nomod] !flare

/cast [mod,alt] Icy shot

I leave the ICON for this macro the big “?” and by doing this when I hit alt the icon for the macro will change.   Being able to stack abilities will make your keybinding a lot easier.  I tend to group them by things that my brain can relate to

/cast [nomod] serpent sting

/cast [nomod] auto shot
/cast [mod,alt] black arrow

/cast [mod,alt] auto shot

Category 4): Rotation

Survival hunter rotation will change depending on the fight the most important part of our rotation is knowing how to maximize the dps from lock and load. Never fire exploding shot back to back. If you do the second explosion from the first exploding shot will never happen because you overwrite the debuff that causes the explosion.

Slow fight	Fast Fight	Lock and load proc
Black arrow Exploding shot Serpent sting Aimed shot Steady shot * black arrow is done first since this is a slow fight and you will have time for more than 1 lock and load you want to get as many in as you can	Serpent sting Exploding shot Black arrow Aimed shot Steady shot * even if you fired black arrow first because this is a fast fight such as a trash mob you may never even get lock and load off	Exploding shot Aimed shot Exploding shot Steady shot Exploding shot Steady shot * you can refresh a sting if needed in place of a steady shot but never in place of exploding or aimed shot

killing shot  ALWAYS takes priority to any other shot so I don’t list it in the rotations

always keep both stings and hunters mark up

A trick you can do to maximize your DPS on a raid is to trap mobs to force a 100% chance to get lock and load to proc.  I use the addon “Need to Know” to track my lock and load cooldowns and for fights such as Lady Deathwhisper if lock and load is not on cooldown when the adds spawn I will trap the one I am about to kill just to get it dead faster with lock and load. ( I break my own traps)

Category 5): DPS maximization

But Durp isn’t that what shot rotation is about??? NO shut up voice in Durps head! This is about the pro shit that really helps.

The best way to increase your dps is to stack procs and special abilities.

Example being your pet is a wolf.. Yes it is if its not you are doing it wrong

Lets assume for easy math that your default dps is 5000.   

We will now list the abilities that can improve that 5000 dps

• rapid fire
• racial abilities orc/troll
• trinkets if you have them
• pet ability #1 Furious howl +360 attack power
• Pet ability #2 Call of the wild +10% attack power
• ICC ring proc
• Blood lust
• Potion of haste or wild magic

Now I am not going to do the math for each of those and spend a week with examples I am going to use Two easy ones to make a point. Wolf pet ability 2 and bloodlust.

So say ability X is 10% more dps for you and your pet so it’s a raw 10% gain.  Bloodlust is a 30% dps increase.  So that is 40% more DPS right? WRONG!!!! If you do them separately within 1 minute you will get a 40% increase

5000 + 10% 5500 for 15 seconds

5000 + 30% 6500 for 30 seconds

Average that out for 45 seconds and its about 6000 dps

BUT if you stack them

It works like this

5000 + 30% = 6500 + 10% = 7150 dps

Now imagine adding 3 or four other abilities at the same time and you will see how it is that some hunters break 10k dps.  I use the addon “Need to Know” to track all of my procs that trigger automatically and I choose to wait until my ICC ring and my trinkets proc nearly at the same time before I stack on all my other abilities

 My personal best dps with no *SPECIAL* buffs is 13k on the blood queen and no I did not have her bite. If I had her bite it would have been over 20K dps.

If you have any comments, questions please leave a comment.