After returning from my unexpected break from WoW, I felt something was missing. I needed to shake things up. A few days later, I was having a discussion with a fellow guild-hunter about Survival Raiding. I plunged head-long into research and posted several times on my guild forums asking people what they thought.
The key insights that I will share with you here are as follows.
Survival raiding is all about support. If you have a regular raid group filled with warriors, rogues, feral druids & other hunters (but not other survival hunters,) then your Expose Weakness can be a major boost to the raid. If you are willing and able to take yet another dip in personal dps, you may have 3-4 spare points to add to Improved Hunter's Mark.
Before even considering Survival, you must be willing to sacrifice. Your personal dps will go down. You will spend a ton of gold & mats to maximize your agility. If you were a beastmaster, you will feel slow. If you were a marksman, prepare to learn "new" slick tricks. Scatter Shot & Silencing Shot are replaced by better trapping & Wyvern Sting.
The most painful thing for me was the math. To consider Survival, you've got to be able to boost your agility over 700 & your crit to 33% (before buffs.) Lightning Reflexes will only go so far, so do your math. Even then, SSC & TK gear may not be enough. Re-gem'ing to all +agility gems may not be enough. You may find yourself, like I did, scouring the server for enchanters who could do expensive +agility enchants.
There aren't a lot of great discussions or guides to Survival Raiding and there isn't a "cookie cutter" way to build one for Raiding. Some of it depends on what you are raiding. Do you need improved traps? Some of it depends if you plan to do other stuff and want Wyvern Sting. Still, if you look at the specs of enough survival hunters and talk to enough people, certain obvious trends come out. You must take Lightning Reflexes & Expose Weakness. You should try and get Mortal Shots from the Marksmanship tree. Much of the rest appears to be personal preference. You can boost your own DPS by taking 7 points in Beastmaster for Focused Fire. You can take the aforementioned Improved Hunter's Mark. OR, you can round out more points in Survival to improve your general PvE & PvP potential.
Last week, I went ahead and bought about 400 gold in new gems, raided my stash of crafting mats, paid for the re-spec and got myself into places like Kara & Heroics for practice. As I played with it, my base agility & crit hovered right around the minimum, which was fine for practice.
My Issues:
My first real issue was my Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle. At a base speed of 2.7 seconds, it's ideal for Beastmaster. (I run at a base 1.9 sec.) However, with my gear, I found myself at 2.3 seconds. You wouldn't think that being 0.4 seconds slower would be a problem, but it was. At 2.3 seconds, my shot macro timing was off. It was too slow to get into a rhythm. It was also too fast to weave other shots. I was still forced to stop casting Steady Shot in order to cast Arcane Shot or apply Scorpid Sting. This lowered my dps further and kept me from doing my most important job, keeping Expose Weakness up as much as possible.
My second problem was the amount of sacrifices I made (based on my gear) in the way of gems and other bonuses to get a barely good enough agility bonus. How could I justify swapping to Survival at just over 700 agility when other hunters in my guild could swap and be closer to 900?
But hey, there will be gear coming right? Yeah, I considered that. As I looked at the best upcoming hunter gear, I saw that most has haste boosts. How can I even consider Survival when I'm salivating over a potential base attack speed of 1.5 sec?
My final issue was and is personality. Even if I got a new, slower weapon & continued to get Agility gear, I have a rapid fire personality. I like the speed. I love BIG RED pet. I knew this going in. And, I probably would have learned to like survival if not for the gear obstacles.
It's not surprising that so few hunters like survival. I'm glad I tried it. I don't mind having wasted nearly 1,000 gold (not including enchanting mats) swapping to and then back again. The push was rewarding. I picked up some new gear. I learned some new tactics. I got a ton of badges. While my gem swaps had to be replaced, my attack power to agility enchantment conversions can stay right were they are.
Would I be willing to do it again? If my guild asked and if I could meet a number of basic criteria, yes. I would want to have a base (unbuffed) 800+ agility & 35% crit to consider it. I would want to have a slow-fire weapon like the Serpent Spine Longbow.
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2 comments:
Good to see you back Beroth. I hope you're doing well. I'm still recovering from nerve surgery myself, so my time online's been diminished. Miss running with QSS.
Take care, Jaynekobb
Hey there. This is Windarrow from Blackrock server on the US realms.
Despite having specced survival since more than 3 months ago, I still surf the net occasionally for more updates on survivalspec opinions and issues, since I was logged in on blogger a few minutes ago, I've decided to share my views on this, you can delete this comment if you wish to.
Assuming that one is switching from MM to Survival, there is a certain stage, assuming that the MM hunt does not operate under the benefits of EW, where the dps/damage from both the hunters equal out. We don't really need overly good gear for this, just above average, I'd say well-gemmed, half ZA gear and below, strictly no scrub greens :P, bad blues, or useless epics. This is easily attainable if you commit yourself to your character alot, which i'm sure you have :).
I like the fact that there is someone at least aiming for at least 800 agi after a respec. Some even go as low as 600 these days, which is pretty slack imo. Who'd want a measly 150AP buff in a 25 man raid from a low dpsing hunt?(Assumption that the person still need to learn a bit more if you don't see the fact that he/she needs 800 UB for efficient output+bonus AP)
I think you've put alot of effort into testing out the Survival spec, and I think you deserve alot of respect for that. Most people do it reluctantly, and diss about the class because they didn't try their best to test it, and hence failed horribly at it.
In regards to the attack speed issue, in my case I recently purchased, albeit reluctantly, the crossbow of relentless strikes, with a 2.80 base speed. With manual rotations without the help of a mod and 0 haste gear, I actually found that the speed is an accelerated one of the 3.00 speed bow, and with my old rotation still managable. Perhaps if you went back to survival, you could try out using manual rotations, as it is also more versatile in terms of coping with changing conditions in a raid. My rotation is a simple rotation of weaving steadies whenever my other abilities are on cooldown, primarily arcane and multi.
I also took the opportunity to do some regemming, as my hit rating was way over the top (123) from leaving gear in shambles to save up for my epic flyer. Before that, I was using a Wrathtide Longbow from H-SV, and my stats were 879agi 34.4% crit, 1.94k AP. After regemming it became 850+ agi, 37% crit, 1.95k AP, and my performances in subsequent raids increased dramatically, which was also largely down to the bow. Point made here is, if you've reached over 800 agi UB, do not be shy at all to sacrifice a little agility here and there to boost your own stats to achieve consistency, as being a good survival hunter is about having good balance as well.
With my method and style of gameplay. I have closed in onto the top dpsers in my guild, who are exceptional, I wonder why they aren't raiding in BT guilds lol.I used to be 10% off the top rogue, that was with buffing them when I had 780 UB, I'm roughly 3.5% off now, both in damage on bosses/overall, and less than 1% off the two other rogues who used to seem so invincible as well.
Ultimately still, it is down to personal preference as always. I see you like the BM spec nicely. Big red pet! :]. Just my two cents tips on raiding as a survival hunter.
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