- Author: Jamielolx
- Date: July 12, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
There are generally two talent builds that Survival will use throughout the whole expansion, the ”single target build” and the ”AoE build”
Notable Talents
- https://www.wotlkdb.com/?spell=52788 – Increases damage done to beasts, humanoids, elementals, and more, while tracking them by 5%. However, you do not have to track every individual type to gain the 5% damage increase from it. If you track humanoids you gain 5% damage from all the types of mobs listed, same goes for tracking any of the types of mobs listed, so you do not have to ‘’track dance’’ as some hunters may think!
- Trap Mastery – Increases the duration of all your traps by up to 30% when maxed out — this is a Survival Hunter’s bread and butter when it comes to explosive trap damage.
- Lock and Load – Speaking of bread and butter, this is probably THE talent that makes people want to play Survival. When it procs you get three explosive shots in a row, without a cooldown. Do not spam an explosive shot 3 times in a row, however — either weave in a different shot or wait until the last tick of the previous explosive shot is about to expire, before firing a new one. Frost Trap will not trigger this effect on a boss, but it will guarantee a proc on slowable targets as long as the internal cooldown is up.
- Hunting Party – This is a deceptively bad talent. You probably still want to spec 1 out of 3 just for the replenishment, but the 1% Agility gain is very neglectable — even if you had 1,000 Agility, this talent would only give you a 10 AGI increase. And while we do love AGI, these are very low numbers to work with — a different talent is often better.
- Hunter vs Wild – This increases your attack power based on 30% of your stamina, a cool little talent. Although this is only a small amount, it’s still something to be aware of when you are playing survival.
- https://www.wotlkdb.com/?spell=53304 In my opinion a clunky talent for a very mobile class and spec – rewarding you for not moving, and making it increase your damage It’s very easy to keep up for your single target build since you aren’t moving around to trap too often but you are going to want to pay good attention in your AoE trap spec.
- Focused aim – Preferably, you want this maxed out, however, due to gear issues this may not always be optimal. When you have too much hit (how much is too much?) to go for this talent you may want to consider Improved aspect of the hawk, especially once you gain more gear.
Talent Builds
Glyphs
Major Glyphs
- Glyph of Serpent Sting – Increases the duration of your serpent sting giving you more time to fill in other shots.
- Glyph of Explosive Trap – Makes it so your explosive trap DoTs can crit.
- Glyph of Explosive Shot– Gives your highest damage ability more crit.
- Glyph of Kill Shot – Reduces the cooldown of your 2nd highest damage shot (during execute)
Minor Glyphs
some of these glyphs may prove useful in combat as well – so those will be the ones listed.
Glyph of Feign Death – Reduces the cooldown of feign death
Glyph of Revive Pet – Reduces knockback when you’re trying to revive your pet.
I don’t agree with not using explosive trap glyph in your single target spec. Even on single target, the glyphed explosive trap will do FAR more damage than black arrow, even with the 6% damage modifier to all your other abilities. On static boss fights, you don’t even need to move for explosive traps – You just stand at minimum ranged attack range and due to how traps are being placed slightly in front of you, the trap will proc instantly. Another way to properly gauge the range is to stand slightly behind your pet.
There are maybe like 2-3 fights in entire WoTLK expansion where you are strictly forced to use black arrow.
To add onto to this, if you check beta logs you can see that glyphed expl trap does 2-2.5x damage over a fight and this is with template gear. At P1 BiS you would be looking probably at 3x-3.5x damage diff between abilities. It’s probably only not worth it, if you’re a horrible hunter player and you’re losing 3-4 auto shots everytime you’re going to place a trap
The guide was written taken into account newer players(That would obviously favor BA this is not the reason I mentioned it though), I have done some extensive testing of my own on the beta for the past couple of months and have found explosive trap errors that should soon be fixed. (most but not all in regards to the glyph)
Sadly even though I love survival it won’t be in their favor. I am not sure if this would put it ahead or below BA but whatever comes out I will adjust before classic releases.
For now, It’s a bit too much of a grey area so I included both playstyles.
That being said regardless of how explosive trap gets tweaked it will still remain superior on AoE fights, that is a given
Where did the pet talents go?