Let me preface this post with this comment: Both specs are putting up great numbers and there isn’t a dire need to be able to switch specs during Ulduar. Since I have not partaken in Arena lately both my specs are designed around raiding.
My first spec is a Survival spec is a 0/15/56 build. This build was chosen after tinkering around with the spreadsheet for a little while. I went to Wowhead and clicked in a basic Survival spec, imported it to the spreadsheet and then modified talents until I found what was going to provide the highest DPS for my gear.
My second spec is straight from the Elitist Jerk’s top theoretical DPS thread for Hunters, and it is a 7/57/7 build.
Most of the time I choose to stick with my Survival spec. It’s a little less mana intensive compared to the MM spec most of the time since our group composition varies a lot and we don’t always have as much mana regeneration as I would like.
But that being said, I do find myself switching specs frequently depending on certain fights for a couple reasons, most of which are not game-breaking as I said.
For example, Auriaya I prefer to be Marksmanship. The reason is I like to be able to drop Explosive Trap during the little cat spawns to speed up their demise. Since Black Arrow shares a cooldown with my traps and provides a significant increase in Survival DPS, I prefer to use the the DPS build that is not reliant on a trap cooldown.
Moving down that hallway we come across Hodir, a fight where I choose Survival over Marksmanship. I have designated myself as the person who is going to be primarily focused on stacking the Singed debuff to help our casters. Explosive Shot goes a long way in keeping that stack as high as possible.
I also opt to use Marksmanship for Yogg-Saron since Silencing Shot can help silence adds during phase 1 in case your raid composition needs it.
Now as I mentioned, not everyone is going to want to keep both specs are raid DPS specs. Some people want Beast Mastery so that they can keep those fun exotic pets around or use it for your 3v3 team or what not. For a while I had my second spec as a janky BM/MM spec designed just to solo Zul’Gurub bosses and other old content.
Provided that you are not completely stuck on one spec and are willing to adjust the best question to ask yourself is what kind of raid composition can you expect in your raid? Do you need to have a silencing effect? Does your raid need Trueshot Aura in lieu of another 10% AP buff effect? Perhaps you need replenishment.
A lot of this will depend if you are focusing on 10 or 25 man content. Perhaps a spec for both? If you are looking at a focused 10-man raid group it will be easy to determine what role you need to fill. I know our other Hunters have picked up Trueshot Aura and are primarily raiding as MM so it’s a talent I don’t need.
So here is the list of my spec of choice for each fight:
- Flame Leviathan: Ummm . . . . yeah. :)
- Ignis: Survival
- Razorscale: Ehh, no preference.
- XT Deconstructor: Marksmanship (since we’re working on hard mode I can back-to-back Rapid Fire so its up the entire heart phase)
- Kologarn: No preference
- Iron Council: MM since we are only doing medium mode and there is the Black Arrow/Trap cooldown conflict
- Auriaya: MM
- Hodir: Survival
- Thorim: MM while working on hard mode and I am in the hallway and I use Rapid Fire on the minibosses
- Freya: No preference but I am usually Survival. Remember to mil Freya by keeping Viper Sting on her during the add phases :)
- Mimiron: Survival, but I haven’t tried it as MM yet and imagine the spec would work just as well
- General Vezax: Survival
- Yogg-Saron: MM
Do you run with two DPS specs? Or have you chosen just one build and stuck with it? Share your thoughts, your reasoning behind the different specs you might be running, or share your thoughts on mine. As always post ‘em in the comment or stop by the forums!
Do you have different equip-sets for each spec or one for both?
I use the same one for both. I still find Agility to be my best choice for sockets at the moment. If it was BM, THAT might pose some gear problems. :)
Funny to read your thoughts about this as I just respecced MM not too long ago and was actually thinking about switching for different encounters in Uld. MM has proved to be a fun spec actually and as for now I am enjoying a little change from Survival and dps wise it certainly holds ground or even tops Surv.
I’ll take your experience and try to switch for different encounters.
I agree, it is fun to have a change of pace every now and then as well.
where do u end up on the dps charts for each of these fights? esp the 25 mans
Last week I edged out our Rogues for #1 on our Ignis kill. But in general I am in the top 5 for fights that aren’t Vezax or Hodir.
I haven’t picked up Dual Specs on my Hunter, but if I did I’d be doing the same, two raiding specs.
However I enjoy MM a lot more than I enjoy Survival, so I’d probably use MM whenever possible, like whenever there are adds/bosses with mana bars for sure :)
The one point I would really choose a different spec would be for Ignis – I’d go MM there. As MM, it’s easy to be the “Construct Breaker”, because my crits easily hit for over 5k. Survival, at least the SV hunters I know don’t get that number nearly as often. And my abilities are instant cast, unlike a mage or something.
We usually have a Shaman or Mage as the Construct-breaker, although during our 10-man I went MM so I could fulfill that role as well.
Well what you listed drotara is what is ussaly what I do. By the way I like how when a fellow hutner in-game asks you a question form another server you think about it then post that rocks bro thanks.
I’m surprised by Survival on Vezax. I’ve found MM to be more effective, with Chimaera, Wild Quiver, and Arcane. I’m sure you have hard math to show that over time, LnL + ExS means more damage in Crashes. My anecdotal evidence tells has me a good clip higher as MM.
I’m wondering if it’s due to Sniper Training being down to much when retarded monkeys run at me with Leech…
I dont know about Drotara, but I have a specific reason I use survival during Vazax. Mana consumption. Survival is alot easier on the mana bar and overall that can have an impact on that particular fight. Yes there are shadow crashes around and areas to get your mana back. Ultimately less time you have to worry about looking for those areas you can dps harder.
There may not be a shadow crash nearby or a saronite vapor near by one time, but as survival you can just hop on the shadow crashes as you please and move to the saronite spots less often and find the ones closest to you.
Like Drotara and others have stated though, it is not set in stone which spec you choose for which boss, but for me, survival is the most effective.
Understandable.
MM you almost need to treat yourself as a Caster, rather than Physical DPS, for that fight. I made the same point in the Vezax threads, maximizing hunter dps for this fight is about using the crashes.
Hell, I’ll jump in the green goo too if it’s close. MM Mana for that fight is horrid w/o a crash, solid with it. Flipping Viper when lowish and not in a crash helps tons, a point I picked up here. But inside a crash, with CS, WQ, and AS, and 30s of RF? It’s tasty.
Myself and the other main hunter in the guild have both tried it as both specs. We’ve seen MM outperform Surv by a substantial amount. This very well may be a play-style issue, where the way we play lends itself to MM over Surv for this fight.
I don’t want to get into the actual numbers, as they are arbitrary and show that our casters suck at this fight. Really. They do. No clue how their DPS is staying the same. None.
Aside from an inability to see big black arcing death, that is.
Where do you take one point from in the MM build when you need to pick up TSA? I hope its not Silencing shot, too much fun to pass up :)
You know, I am not sure what point I would move around for TSA. I would have to play around with my build a bit.
Ensidias guide for MM and elitist jerk both recommend removing one talent point in improved barrage, you loose about 20 dps all in all but the raid gain should be bigger if you have no other source of 10% ap…
Thanks for the responses!
Just switched from MM to surv. whats a good shot rotation.
Well it’s not so much a rotation anymore as prioritizing shots. With MM you have the bonus of only having to cast Serpent Sting once and maintain it with Chimera Shot. Depending on your spec, the general idea is to just keep your important shots on cooldown while still taking care of your pet and other raid responsibilities.
I currently have a MM spec and a SV spec (imagine that huh? :)
I do however collect gear to be able to go for a MM Arpen setup. Lost the roll on the trinket last time it dropped sadly but perhaps this reset it will drop again, I’m usually not halfbad with getting lucky on rolls either.
Anyways.. If i get it to work and it shows up the numbers that it “should”, I cant see a point sticking with SV as the other spec. I imagine Arpen gems instead of agi gems wont boost my damage enough to keep SV as a viable build with the gear.
I will probably have two MM builds; one with TSA and one without (for the times we got blood dk or Enh. shaman with us).
If the future changes to pets and how they scale means partly arpen from hunter to pet and BM gets the boost Blizzard agrees is needed, I might keep a BM build as second if its good enough. Given that Arpen excludes Arcane shot from the templates of the “new nifty MM setups” – BM would probably be a tad boring with just multishot and serpent sting to break the steadyshot spam.
Either way I can see myself drifting away from SV if I get the gear to make the jump to armorpenetration fully.
Well I’m MM all the way, I tested SV MM and BM and i do it every major Talent change patch, but i started MM 4y ago, and i’m staying with it, still the highest DPS i can get with my spec (7/58/6)
I am also spec’ed MM/SV. How I choose which to role with is easy–if there is another MM hunter in the raid, I roll SV. If not, I roll MM. TSA is just too great of a raid buff to pass up.
I agree completely. The absence of the the 10% AP buff from any class definitely out-weighs minor things being able to trap in place of Black Arrow, etc etc.
I recently switched to MM from Surv (dual spec) for raiding … my dps is about 4100 now .. on survival i was doing like 3900 … so MM is definitly my choice of raiding now
I to am Surv and dual is MM. I have been testing in no raid and found SV to perform better.
My MM spec is the same taken from EJ, I have played with the rotation and can’t seem to close on my SV dps against target dummy. I know this is not the best for testing, but I am scared to go MM in Uldar and not perform up to my expected level. I am typically one of our highest Hunters and don’t want to end going wtf?
FYI I have played my hunter for a long time and understand priority shots. Just wondering if it is dummy or do 25 man buffs make up for it there against SV?
You definitely cannot compare your raid DPS to target dummy DPS. Buffs and debuffs make a HUGE difference in your DPS. If you are eager to try it MM in your raid, do it on a easier fight like Ignis or something and see if you can get the numbers you are hoping for.
I understand dps between the raid and dummy. I have been testing on dummy in both specs and MM is showing up consistently lower. I understand procs and crits and ran somewhere around 5 trials each spec.
I am trying to find the wording for this question does MM scale better with 25 man buffs then SV?
I haven’t seen any numbers that indicate scaling discrepancies between MM and Survival. It’s just a playstyle difference in my opinion. Give it a shot, I am sure you’ll be able to bring both specs really close to each other. :)
Target Dummys are not optimal to meassure DPS on. While possible to do just that to some extent they have a far more valuable excistence; to provide you with the enviroment where you can test out rotations.
Surely the end result is the same thing to some extent – you get to try different rotations etc vs one another to see which one peforms the best – its all about the reading of the results. In example Explosive shot scale purely on RAP while Chimera Shot is linked to (125% of) weapondamageand thus your actual weapon is in the calculation aswell.
In a further example of comparing SV vs MM at a dummy you tend to miss out on some crucial buffs. MM brings TSA to the dummy, SV dont and a larger part of SV’s damage isnt reliant on sunderarmor on the dummy vs MM and so forth with many other things that will render a pure DPS test at a dummy worthless.
I would suggest to start with downloading a spreadsheet for hunter dps, then go to a dummy to test out the rotation and get the hang of it, then go to a raid as its the only place where you can get anything confirmed.
Lots of good info here. I think the hunter community as a whole is finally starting to see the impact of spec’ing for the content you’re working on or specing to fill gaps that your raid lacks.
Some food for thought. Uhuhfaster, as has been doing some serious ArP testing with Marks. Much of the EJ community is finally accepting a suggestion we made months ago regarding ArP and its impact on the insane scaling potential of Marks as a whole.
http://www.bigredkitty.net/forums/index.php?topic=4094.0
http://www.bigredkitty.net/forums/index.php?topic=3875.msg48296#new
Above are a couple of threads where I have been updating Uhuhfasters success with this spec. We ran his ArP heavy build versus my Agiliy build nearly identical talent choices and the ArP build competely shits on the Agility setup and is a MUCH more managable rotation as well as more mana friendly. There are lots of benefits many of which I have discussed in the previously linked threads.
Prior to this, my DPS was very competative regardless of which spec I played by my preference was as follows.
Razor – Marks, I don’t do much this fight really its just social time for the guild but if you’re learning it the additional cooldowns really help for the burn.
Ignis – Indifferent but I lean toward marks, simply because of the amount of instants you can fire, chim/aimed/arcane while flying in the air. I had the number one parse on Ignis for nearly a month until people started tanking adds under the boss and padding with multishot lol.
XT – If you’re working on hard mode it really depends on your job. If you’re responsible for killing sparks you’re going to want to be Survival. If you’re not, you can really play either spec on this fight. Due to the recent HP nerf’s on the heart its much more spec forgiving.
IC – Both spec’s have some clear advantages on this fight. If you’re working on hard mode(Breaker Last) Marks provides MASSIVE amounts of “phase three” burst via instants + RF + rediness. SV will be a much more static output on this fight tride and true reliable regardless of its reliance on RNG. If you’re doing Runemaster last, it really doesnt matter. The trap isnt completely necessary as long as you’re putting enough AoE on the portal fast enough.
Kolo – Fight is a wash, enjoy any spec. Marks might have some advantage here simply from mulishot output.
Auraiyeayyeayaiay – Drot has some great points but I just suggest playing what you feel like. No reason to overthink this fight.
Hodir – At first we thought Marks would be at a serious disadvantage. We’ve had mixed results both with an Agi build and an ArP build. The median damage seems to be more reliable as Marks but the top end potency of SV seems to reign here. Play what you’re comfortable with.
Thorim – Both spec’s can enjoy success on this, I would sugges marks in the arena simply due to mana management off of stings on Thorim as well as more AoE output. I am pretty sure I still have a top 10 WMO parse on this, using SV. Probably would have put out similar numbers with Marks tbh.
Freya – What you spec for this fight really depends on your job and if and how many keepers you leave up. An entire new post could be dedecated to this fight, So i’ll leave that for a later date. Both specs are very viable on this encounter.
Mimiron – Either spec is fine but I feel like SV shines on this fight due to it’s lack of pet dependency and IaoTH dependency. Especially if you’re working on Firefighter.
General – Faster put up decent numbers last week for us on this as Marks but he spent a serious amount of time in Viper. SV clearly has an advantage on this fight, not only from ES being worth 30k damage per gcd but from the passive mana returns.
Yogg – Marks enjoys a good amount of scaling benefit on this fight with watchers left up. But when you start working on hard modes the mana ineffiencey as the scaling benefits dwindle. SV enjoys neither of these drawbacks and is far less stressed.
I guess I could have posted my own blog regarding this and just linked it over, didn’t realize I’d have so much to say. I may just copy paste this over to my own blog since I haven’t posted in like a month haha….
Glad to see you’re finally getting busy on hard mode’s Drot.
Dont over look Orbit-uary, it is a complete joke after the nerfs.
I have a question that is irrelevant to your post (somewhat). In your opinion, how important is haste rating (for SV hunters)? Is it crucial to reach the soft haste cap? I’m always trying to gem up to be close to 522 haste rating but I’m wondering if I should be investing in crit rate or something else. Please share your wisdom.
SV stat priority:
Hit until capped > Agi > AP > Crit > ArP > Haste
Thus, don’t gem for haste.
Haste only affects auto shot and steady shot. Plus, any latency decreases the effectiveness of haste. And since being over the cap provides no benefit, if you’re capped, haste buffs (Hero/BL, RF, pots, the beams of light on Hodir, etc) are wasted. Just go with whatever haste is on your gear and you’ll be fine.
thanks
except for general mm beats sv for me – most love for mm at council hardmode thou ;)
I run raids with Survival and when i get back to town i switch to my BM and call on Loque’nahak.
Do any of you use Power aura as MM? If so can you c/p the configuration code for Chimera shot, Arcane shot and the proc you get of steady shot.
Thanks
I actually started a thread on the QQ forums with my Power Auras text as well as a screenshot of how I have it set-up.