I spec’d Survival. For Replenishment. Because I was in a ten-man without any and it was making things annoying.
I liked it better this time than I did in the past (the fact that I remembered to train the higher ranks of Explosive Shot possibly had something to do with it. /nonchalant cough) My DPS was rather variable. For the most part I seemed to be floating a few hundred above what I do as BM, although sometimes I was higher, and sometimes the gap was much closer. (I somehow manage to pull off fairly equal DPS with all the hunter specs right now. I call shenanigans.) My mana issues, however, were nearly non-existent, especially because a ret pally decided to show up too (so much for me thinking we needed replenishment so badly!) and when I did go OOM a few times on Sapphiron tonight, I only had to be in Viper for about six seconds to fill up again.
I had a hard time getting used to the shot rotation because it didn’t really feel like there was any rhythm to it. I tried to set up my SCT-D to flash “ZOMG LOCK AND LOAD OHNOES” or something similar at me when L&L proc’d, and I got it about half working but then I couldn’t get a sound set to it. Still, I tried, though!
I am remaining Survival-spec’d tonight because the patch is tomorrow and we’ll all get a free respec anyway so don’t have a heart attack if you go to my Armory right now. >.> Honestly playing around with all the specs is something I would like to continue to do in the future– I sort of enjoy spec’ing for what the raid needs (I recently also spent a raid night as Marksman, for Trueshot Aura), and I’m making a mother-lode off of herbs lately so I can afford it. /nods
I actually felt like I had a really productive day in WoW today. I healed a Nexus on my druid. One of the group members was a hunter who intrigued me because his spec was almost the exact same as Lunapike’s— a very Pike-approved leveling spec. I complimented him on this. His response?
Well, that explains that!
Then the boyfriend got on his Baby Holy Paladin, I got on my Baby Prot Paladin, and our friend got on his Baby Priest, and we proceeded to take Deadmines. For the record, this is what happens when we do Deadmines:
Yes, and did you know that in our little world, VanCleef possesses the following: void zones, fire that you should not stand in, fire that you should stand in, a stun, Mutating Injection, infernals that can be avoided by being tanked along a certain side of the boat, and a tail swipe?
True story.
It’s better when you worry about the fire as 80s on VC. Though of course, we tend to do that instance naked save for weapons.
Good fun.
Also, I found the trick to survival is to just watch cooldowns for the proc, rather than your personal buffs. If you press ExShot and a CD doesn’t pop up, fire a steady and another explosive, then do that again. I found that a little easier to get the hang of… but I did also have two visual cues and a loud noise for when it happened, so. Your mileage may vary.
…and don’t forget about VC’s Garotte that you’re only immune to if you’re under the effect of a Savory Deviate Delight.
Check out Power Auras if you decide to stay SV. It is the bomb as they say.
Heroic VanCleef just has too many abilities, I’ve never managed to defeat him, the tail swipe keeps knocking me off the boat and into cookie!
Survival does take more getting used to than the other specs, but its worth it in my opinion. Of course I may be biased!
I heard If you kite him all the way to the other side of the boat that you can avoid the void zones entirely, however you have to kite him through cookie.
But really, Survival? tch tch
I’ve been specced Survival for a few weeks now. I wanted to give it a fair shake before the patch so I could compare (now old) Survival with the new Marksmanship tree for damage. Pre-3.1, I was doing an average of 300 more DPS as Survival than as Marks, which is pretty significant.
I use an add-on called Shot Proc that makes a little shotgun-cocking noise when LnL procs. The biggest irritation to the spec is that LnL seems to proc 80% of the time when both my Aimed and Explosive just got fired and are on full CD.
The replenishment does not do much for me, I find I burn through mana quite fast even with Replenishment up most of the time.
What I like most about Survival is Wyvern Sting and the undocumented stun effect of Explosive Shot (is that still in 3.1?). Having to continually refresh Serpent Sting is annoying (spoiled by Chimera Shot) but in 3.1 that’s a non-issue.
At first I really didn’t like the spec for it’s apparent lack of a shot rotation, being used to the arsenal available to Marksmen, but I’ve kind of grown to like it, particularly after seeing how amazingly well it scales with raid buffs, I’ve been hitting record DPS output (I was 4 lousy points behind being in first place on an OS raid recently, which was a huge increase from my usual 7th-10th placing as a Marksman).
At any rate, I expect to be spending a lot of gold on respecs and time at the training dummies trying to figure stuff out.
Sigh.
Try EventAlert! It’s pretty awesome imo.
VanCleef also has laser eyes similar to the Brann encounter in Halls of Stone. It’s what inspired an old guildmate of mine to rename his warlock to Lasercleef.
pew pew!
Gotta watch out for VC’s enrage timer, too. Nasty stuff. Heard Patchwerk was taking lessons from him.
“What I like most about Survival is Wyvern Sting and the undocumented stun effect of Explosive Shot (is that still in 3.1?). Having to continually refresh Serpent Sting is annoying (spoiled by Chimera Shot) but in 3.1 that’s a non-issue.”
The stun was a talent actually; TNT (pre 3.1) had the chance to stun as part of the talent. The stun has been removed in 3.1, I believe, mostly due to PVP balancing issues.
Also, I’m not sure if you’re referring to SV not having to keep up Serpent after 3.1 or not, but if it is in reference to SV that’s not really true. Noxious Stings is a talent that every SV hunter really should have as it’s 3% boost to all your damage when you have Serpent up. Even without serpent proccing LnL now it’s still worth keeping up, nevermind that serpent generally does more damage than a steady shot.
Theaah –
Thanks so much for the clarifications! You’re right of course, and I was overlooking things (I’m much more familiar with the Marks talents).
It will be interesting to compare the two specs in 3.1, but it’s an exercise my bank account is not going to enjoy.
Survival is so the Dark Side of Hunter specs. Who does shadow damage? Exactly. 😉
Agreed, Eidhalheg. I think it’s indicative of Blizzard not knowing what to do with the Hunter class (as has been evident for a while now). So they wonder what to do, and say “Hey, the Warlock is kind of like a Hunter!” and go on to further hammer the Hunter into the Warlock mould (mold?).
Shadow damage, DOTS, summoning pets…
It’s totally understandable, Noah. I’ve been keeping up with SV since I’m in love with the spec and I’ve kept generally up to date with BM but I really only know the general changes to Marks. (Like the bleed added to one of the shots)
And I tend to be a min/maxer for raiding so I follow the EJ forums pretty closely (at least for SV anyway). ^^;
Don’t forget the whelps!..
Many whelps! left side! Handle it!
I may jump Rain’ over to a survival spec *after* she finally gets enough money to buy her epic flyer…I figure 2nd Quarter 2010….
Until then – I still love running around with that spirit beasty too much to put him in the stable for very long.
Hello! I’m pretty new here and this is my first post. I am a Beast Master through-and-through. I’ve never really believed that min/maxing was really that important to raid success. It’s not as though I refuse to try other specs – tried out SV after the Great BM Hunter-Nerf of ’09, though I did not stick with it. There is just something about watching my Devilsaur become red and even more giant that puts a smile on my face that Explosive Shot numbers cannot match. And so, I stayed BM throughout the nerf.
I mention this all because I can now happily say that BM is now a legitimate contender with Survival in raid DPS. No longer am I stuck on the sidelines while SV’s dominate the meters. YAY!
I’ve actually written a full post about this exact topic on my blog at
http://bloggialwrath.blogspot.com/, come read it some time if you get the chance.
Also, I’m just like that hunter *cough* Goulet *cough* Can totally see through the blur *cough*. If BRK said it than it must be true, because he has Brain.
-Zolton
P.S. There really needs to be a Heroic Deadmines.
Theaah,
What are you using for a Survival spec now in 3.1? I’m likely going to dual spec MM/SV as I came to rather like SV in the few weeks leading up to the patch. I’ve been tinkering around with builds but I’m torn on a few things.
Mainly, whether to take Aimed Shot or use Multi in it’s stead. Aimed is a fire on the move shot so I like that and there’s no chance of screwing up any CC with it. But that leaves me a point shy on the SV side, as my crit isn’t high enough (32%) to maintain Hunting Party on 1 point alone, currently leaving the template with 4/5 in Master Tactician.
http://tinyurl.com/ca38ln is what I’m running now. (Have the Kill Shot glyph but still waiting on the ES glyph to be discovered by someone)
I took Aimed because I like the added flexibility/mobility. (And I’m finding that, at least for learning, having increased mobility in Ulduar is very nice.) I would advise against going 4/5 Master Tactician, though, or at least plug it into the spreadsheet to make sure; For me dropping a point from MT showed to be more of a DPS loss than dropping a point from Hunting Party, Sniper Training or Aimed Shot.
I see you’ve not taken IAotH at all, are you haste capped through gear? I don’t understand Haste very well, it seems to me one needs a huge amount of it to get the smallest benefit, and that stacking comes at the cost of other more useful bonuses.
I went with the theorycrafting on EJ as well as plugging different spec/glyph combos into the hunter DPS spreadsheet; 0/15/56 (with serpent or steady, explosive shot and kill shot glyphs) ended up giving the best DPS overall for my gear.
The soft haste cap (when Steady Shot gets to 1.5 seconds) is ~552 haste and that is pretty much completely unrealistic to get to. From what I’ve gathered you only really need to run with 200-300 haste because you’ll tend to reach the soft haste cap with raid buffs. (I’ve got 373 haste and that’s without gearing specifically for haste.)
That said, if I had stuck to my pre-3.1 glyphs (serpent, steady and imp. hawk) a spec that included IAotH would have been ahead of my current spec by a small margin.
I think the main reason for 0/15/56 or 0/14/57 specs to be ahead of something like, say, 3/15/53 is that the talents you have to skip at the bottom of SV to be able to do that are overall stronger talents than IAotH. (Like pulling points from Noxious Stings, Sniper Training, Hunting Party or-godforbid- Master Tactician)
The other thing (and this may just be anecdotal as it’s mostly just what it’s felt like to me raiding the past few days with the new rotation) is that with the addition of Black Arrow to our rotation as well as Kill Shot being back on the GCD we tend to be firing even less steadies than before. (This is part of why I’m a bit meh about the 4pc T8 bonus for SV but I’m reserving my judgement until we know the proc rate on it)
http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t38137-survival_hunter_wotlk/p88/#post1192617 is actually an interesting post in the SV thread on EJ where someone figured out about how much DPS each talent/point in that talent is worth. I could have sworn there was another post stating the DPS/point of IAotH but I can’t find it. :/