3.1 Survival Build

Survival was always one of my favourite builds in The Burning Crusade when it was an underpowered build to be and only a few hunters could pull it off with any decent dps.
In Wrath, after the major buffs this build received many hunters turned to this spec with a huge amount of DPS output. It was sad to say many of these hunters could not do this build justice and with some lower geared hunters just didn’t have the stats to back up the build.

Survival is a very stat dependant build with Agility at its core. Many of these hunters had come from the Beast Mastery tree where Attack Power was the core of that spec and it just didn’t transfer over. Survival is all about PROCS that come from having massive amounts of Agility.
Before the change to Survival, your main PROC was Lock ‘n’ Load from either traps or Serpent Sting DOT tick, now after 3.1 it’s from again Traps and now the new Black Arrow shot DOT tick. The other proc was Expose Weakness a buff that increased your Attack Power by 25% of your AGI for 7 seconds. Also, Thrill of the Hunt, which regenerates mana each time you critically hit, so again the more Agi you have the higher your crit chance. Therefore, you can see AGI means a lot to this build and this is why the abilities like lightning reflexes are build into the tree. This is why a lot of the hunters that went from Beast Mastery to Survival found that although the spec was so over powered and they could do massive dps with it; once Blizzard resorted the tree with the new redesigned Lock ‘n’ Load at its heart it just didn’t work as well as it should. Again, they lamented on the World of Warcraft hunter forums.

I personally no longer like the Survival build much to my despair, as I loved it so much in TBC. The new redesigned L’n’L proc just isn’t for me, and to be honest I don’t like a build designed around a random proc that as of 3.1 very rarely happens.

Some talents to think about

Lock and Load -
You have a 100% chance when you trap a target with Freezing Trap, Freezing Arrow or Frost Trap and a 6% chance when you deal periodic damage with your Immolation Trap or Black Arrow to cause your next 2 Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot spells to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo.
The main talent at the Survival heart. However most hunters get this wrong and spam two explosive shots one after another. This unfortunately over rights the Explosive Shot DOT tick, which as of 3.1 can now critically hit, so ensuring the tick happens is necessary. To do so power Auras addons help, some macros can also help with this two with I will highlight later on. For now let’s think about the L’n’L proc rotation. When you hear that magic sound happen:
Explosive Shot -> Aimed Shot (if you have it in your build) -> Explosive Shot if not use Explosive -> Multi -> Explosive. By doing this instant shot in the middle you ensure the Explosive shot DOT tick happens and you don’t over write it.

Expose Weakness -
Your ranged criticals have a 33% 66% 100% chance to grant you Expose Weakness. Expose Weakness increases your attack power by 25% of your Agility for 7 sec.
OK sounds good right? 3/3 all the way. Whey hay 100% woot! NO! Think about this for a second. How much Crit do you have? 30% crit and above? Raid buffed you are talking almost what 40% and that’s with medium gear. High End gear it will get even higher So you are critically hitting most of the time with one shot or another, with 100%, every time you crit you are over writing the buff over and over and over and not letting it run to its 7 second duration. Is this making sense now? Therefore, this 100% 3/3 talent point is a bit of a waste of 3 points. With high end gear you probably only need 1 point in Expose Weakness as your Crit will be high enough that more often than not you are under the influence of the buff, more than 1 point would be a waste and these points could be put elsewhere in other damaging talents. Again, this shows that AGI is at the core of this build, as AGI will determine how much this buff will be and increase your crit freeing up 2 points to use elsewhere.

Go For the Throat (Marksmanship Tree) -
Your ranged critical hits cause your pet to generate 25 Focus.
I will bang on about this repeatedly. Your pet is your friend; it’s why you rolled a hunter. Give it some love. Remember those points you freed up from Expose Weakness? Show your pet some love and give it 1 point in this talent. Only the 1 mind you don’t need any more than that, and I’ll tell you why. You either have a wolf for the Furious Howl talent, which gives you a nice amount of Attack Power buff, or say a cat or raptor something decent for damage or just for the buff it gives you. You are not Beast Mastery so you pet won’t have talents like Bestial Discipline so its threat generation will be extremely low, so low in fact that after the initial Dash ,Charge, Rend/ Furious Howl, Claw/Bite it won’t regenerate Focus to do much more that Claw or Bite or say Rend. Rendering the other damage talents or buffs useless as it will use the Focus Dump first using up whatever Focus it had leaving the other talents to sit their languishing not used. This is called Focus Starvation. With 1 point in GFTT, your crit is so high, so much so that each time you crit your pet generates 25 focus to use for whatever is ready to use. Meaning that it can focus dump more, which means more damage from your pet and overall more dps from you, and if that all-important Howl is ready, you get it every 40 seconds without fail. So why not 2 points? 2 points would give your pet 50 focus every time you crit this sounds better, but in fact your crit is so high that you pet would end up over gorged with focus and not able to use it all so again this would be a waste of a point that could be used to better effect elsewhere.

So know you know a bit more about the Survival tree, and why some talents are just not worth maxing. I must bang on again about IF you don’t have the hit cap of 264 or 164 with 3/3 in Focused Aim, you might as well throw your DPS in the bin. It won’t matter how much AGI and crit you have if you don’t have the hit cap you’re not going to hit anything and your DPS will fail! So get to that all-important hit cap first with 3/3 in the Focused Aim talent (found in the Marksmanship tree) and then get more Hit on gear so you can reduce the amount of points in this talent to put elsewhere. Here is a build to use IF and I say IF you are already at 264 HIT. If you aren’t you will have to take points from this build to put in Focused Aim. Ideas like taking out Aimed Shot and use Multi-Shot, take out Nox Stings until you have the required hit and then put these talent points back and use Aimed Shot and Nox Stings.


Macros
1st macro is my Black Arrow/ Pet abilities macro
#showtooltip Black Arrow
/cast Black Arrow
/cast Call of the wild
/cast Rabid
I tried with Black Arrow off this macro and to be honest, it’s just too many things to keep track of. Black Arrow works well on the macro as you hit serpent sting just before your first opener of Black Arrow this means your pet is already in combat so you don’t waste any uptime of call of the wild and rabid in the time your pet gets to your mob. You can add /Cast Furious Howl as an extra line if you want, if you are not happy to leave it on auto cast.

2nd macro is my main/spammy macro. Not used to extent, it used to be and now Kill Shot is on the GCD (Global Cool Down) it has to be removed from the original macro. However, this has made things somewhat better. The macro I use for all builds as it is generic.

#showtooltip
/console sound_enablesfx0
/cat Steady Shot
/cast Kill Command
/console sound_enablesfx1
Use this when all other shots are on CD and mash it so kill command is used when it’s available. You will still hear the roar when it’s used.

3rd macro
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=2 Explosive shot, Aimed shot

Now I tweaked this about according to how much haste to few seconds before it reverts to Explosive shot and you miss the Aimed shot timer and too long before it resets and you waste time before it swaps back to Explosive. I tried 6 secs and that was far too long Explosive shot was coming back faster and I was waiting for it to swap back to Explosive for me to hit it. In addition, this meant I couldn’t use this macro when Lock ‘n’ Load PROC’D. So try reset=2 and see how it goes I found this to be the optimal time between shots rotation. This also means that when Lock ‘n’ Load PROCS you can hit Explosive shot -> Aimed Shot -> Explosive shot one after another without any worry the DOT tick from Explosive Shot will be over written.

Kill Shot
Now kill shot is on the GCD we can no longer add this too macros (tis a pain but simple enough to remedy. Either put it on its own or you can make another macro easy enough to use.

/stopcasting
/cast Kill Shot

This simple macro should stop whatever you are doing (usually Steady Shot) to fire Kill Shot meaning you don’t miss any time waiting for the cast time of Steady Shot to end.

Shot Rotation
Well you now have three DOT timers to watch as well as a PROC and a PROC rotation to remember. So what to use first? I didn’t stay Survival long but the shot rotation I used is as follows:

Hunter’s Mark/ PetAttack -> Serpent Sting -> Black Arrow (Macro) -> Explosive shot -> Aimed Shot-> Steady Shot x 2/3 depending on haste and then watching cooldowns depending what is ready to use.
Whether you use Black Arrow then Serpent Sting first is up to you. With the Serpent sting buff being slightly longer (with Glyph and Resourcefulness) I use the longer DOT timer first.
Lock ‘n’ Load rotation
As explained above Explosive Shot -> Aimed/ Multi Shot (depending what you have in your build) -> Explosive Shot

Glyphs
Explosive Shot
Serpent Sting (with noxious stings this glyph helps you to have serpent sting DOT up longer)
And either Kill Shot or Aimed Shot
I prefer the Kill Shot as with Survival your Kill Shot hits so massively when it crits its well worth the reduction of 6 seconds on the cooldown. It’s up to you though.

Pets


Again, it’s up to you. Your pet is secondary to your dps so think of pets that will either be happy if left to itself or will add a buff to you like the wolf. Pets like Cat, Raptor will happily do decent dps on its own doing Claw and Rend/ Savage Rend and with 1 point in Go For The Throat will have more than enough Focus to do these over and over without much interference from you. Alternatively, the new Wolf with Furious Howl that won’t do great damage but will give you a nice buff every 40 seconds again if given focus to use.