It’s a dreary day here, as it has gone from a beautiful, sunny weekend to a very rainy Monday. But that’s OK. The rain makes it smell nice outside. Hopefully all of you wished your mother a happy Mother’s Day.
I think over the course of the weekend I re-specced 6 times. I decided to go Beast Mastery for some 3v3 Arena games, where we managed to pull out a 6-4 Win/Loss ratio. Instead of going with a cookie-cutter Marksmanship build, we decided to go for burst and see how that worked out for us. In most situations we found it was great, as I would be the first target, Bestial Wrath and the Beast Within would allow me to break free and start kiting. If the opposing team switched targets I could then hunker into a BM shot rotation and royally unload on someone. I actually think our 4 losses came from Ret Pally/Warrior teams with a Druid or Shaman healer.
One of the specs I tried this weekend was a 7/20/34 build. Interestingly enough, a comment was left asking me to write about this spec and break down what it does. And I am only happy to oblige.
First of all, take a look at the spec here. What you are looking at is a build attempting to squeeze as much damage out with a Survival spec as possible. The concept is similar to that of a Barrage build but with a few noticeable differences. Most notably, 7 points in Beast Mastery and the sacrifice of any mana efficiency talents.
Improved Aspect of the Hawk is an incredibly great talent for PvE purposes. Having another haste proc can do wonders for your DPS or for your mana pool. And even as Survival, a pet can bring a significant chunk of DPS. So taking two points in Focus Fire not only offer a 2% flat increase in damage, the increased critical strike chance of Kill Command is just icing on the cake.
Make note that in the build I linked I have 5 points in Efficiency, lowering the cost of our abilities by 10%. If you are your guild’s designated Improved Hunter’s Mark person, the ability to sustain this build is diminished somewhat.
The Survival tree is a little different than other builds, mainly because we have far fewer points to fudge with when designing the spec. We are essentially making a beeline for Expose Weakness. In fact once we get to Expose Weakness we only have a single point left to do anything with, which is why you find that single point in Thrill of the Hunt.
This tree can be changed around a bit however, depending on your personal level of progression. For example, looking at the list Alumatine has compiled here, if you view under Monster Slaying you can see if the talent would be beneficial to you at all. Also, the single point in Entrapment is mainly to meet the talent level requirement so we can move down to the next tier.
If you are interested in this spec, you should note a few things. One, it can be very mana intensive. During a heroic Mechanar run I was noticing how much I was tearing away my mana pool. If you are going this spec for raiding, I would make sure that you are going to have access to support classes to help you sustain your pool. Because you are going to need mana as much as a Blood Elf junkie needs mana pots in the back alleys of Silvermoon City. Friggin’ addicts.
You will also notice that I have Improved Feign Death in the build I linked, as well as the spec I am currently using. I did this for a couple reasons. One, I have a lack of alternative talents to place the points in that would even be marginally useful for raiding. And two, Improved Feign Death can be marginally useful for raiding. :) I figured I have seen a few resisted Feign Deaths lately, and while it hasn’t caused any issues, early on I do have to throttle my damage and I don’t want to be threat capped for 30 seconds.
According to Alumatine and his testing this spec would actually provide more DPS than a Barrage spec, but I decided to take the middle ground and go with Barrage and take all three points in Thrill of the Hunt.
I really should get some pretty pictures to sprinkle in this post. It seems kind of long. Let’s see . . . there we go. I think the picture up there illustrates how I feel today. Although typing something and adding something earlier in the post doesn’t really make sense. Oh well. :)
fine post but i have one question, what kind of rotation is one to use with that spec? also what will the optimal speed be? i have been hearing ppl saying DST is a must for it to work. also do you feel your barrage spec is better then imp arcane shot, i can see the use of multi shot can become a problem in some pulls?
A general Survival rotation is something alone the lines of Auto > Steady > Arcane > Auto > Steady > Auto > Steady > Arcane if you are taking a Improved Arcane Shot spec. If you spec into Barrage you replace every other Arcane Shot with Multi Shot. Obviously you don’t want to do that during regular pulls, but as a rule of thumb you spec for bosses, not for trash. You just have to make a judgment call if it is safe to use Multi Shot.
DST isn’t necessary for it to work, but if you have one than that is excellent. Similar to how you treat IAotH, you manually adjust your rotation to handle your hasted weapon speed. This may be switching to a 1:1 rotation with Steady or a 1:1 Priority rotation with Arcane Shot or Multi for the duration of the buff.
Barrage will provide higher DPS than Arcane Shot just by crunching the numbers, but requires a lot more mana. Therefore if you feel that you might have problems sustaining it, try Arcane Shot. Remember, your DPS is almost nothing if you are dead or out of mana. :)
As far as speed goes, it’s hard to tell an exact optimal speed. This can change depending on lag and other factors. I am sitting at 2.4 speed and sometimes I feel I am really pushing my luck squeezing in those Multi and Arcane shots.
That answered one of the questions I was going to ask, still have a couple/few more I believe.
First, I recently switched to survival just for a change of pace, figured being in T5 content with some decent gear and a lot of sockets I could probably handle it, and I loved it and probably won’t be switching back to BM for a while. I don’t know if you’ve ever done the Leotheras fight as surv but it seemed last night that I dodged a few ticks of the whirlwind dot, and I was just wondering if you’d had a similar experience or if I’d just dodged more than one attack…
Second, I was just wondering what sort of DPS you’re able to put out on a nice stand and shoot fight like Tidewalker. I had close to an optimal group makeup (feral druid with the extra crit idol and an enhance shaman that I hijacked for GoA), and by the end of the fight I was at nearly 1500 dps, even being graved 3 times. I was just wondering if that’s typical for survival or if I just got a ridiculously lucky crit streak.
And finally, I was just wondering your thoughts on putting 2 points into Combat Experience rather than a full 3 in Thrill of the Hunt.