- Author: Jamielolx
- Date: July 12, 2022
- Updated: July 30, 2023
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Survival has two main choices when it comes to their talents. You can either maximize single-target DPS, or sacrifice some DPS in exchange for better mana sustainability and Replenishment.
Notable Talents
- Improved Tracking – 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 a Rank 4 explosive shot 3 times in a row, as the damage-over-time component does not stack. Instead, you should use Rank 4 Explosive Shot, followed by Rank 3, followed by another Rank 4. The different ranks do stack, allowing you to not waste any time. An exception to this is during Execute, where you will want to swap to Rank 4 > Kill Shot > Rank 4 > Rank 3 Explosive Shot. Frost Trap will not trigger Lock and Load 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 Agility increase. And while we do love Agility, these are very low numbers to work with — a different talent is often better, but not always. It remains one of the weaker talents for individual DPS.
- 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.
- Sniper Training – 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
This is what a single target build focused purely on DPS would look like.
If you are in need of 1% Hit, you can swap a point from Aimed Shot into Focused Aim.
This build focuses on sustainable damage as well as providing Replenishment for your raid through Hunting Party.
Glyphs
Major Glyphs
Most builds will opt to use Glyph of Explosive Trap , Glyph of Explosive Shot, and either Glyph of Serpent Sting or Glyph of Kill Shot.
- 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)
- Glyph of Steady Shot – Steady Shot will deal 10% more damage to targets with Serpent Sting up
- Glyph of Hunter’s Mark – Increases the ranged attack power from Hunter’s Mark. This is only worth it if you are running 3 or more Hunters.
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 pushback when you’re trying to revive your pet.
- Glyph of the Pack – More range on Aspect of the Pack makes the effect more reliable
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About the Author
Jamielolx
I played this expansion hardcore for 10 years
Where did the pet talents go?
Why do we spec in wyvern sting & noxious stings when it doesn’tgive any benifits and isn’t part of our rotation? Aren’t those 4 points better of spent somewhere else? If im missing something my bad :<
Noxious stings gives you a flat 3% damage bonus to the target that has your sting applied
In my mind there is no way that aimed shot in not worth taking, when I looked at this guide a few months ago it was different. What happened here?
I get it now, Multi-Shot is almost as strong and therefore it’s worth spending that point on another talent.
One thing that worries me is mana issues while doing 10man with this build though, I’ve found myself having to chug mana potion in multiple 10mans. I’ll give it a try!
Also multi shot and aimed shot are the exact same damage, Aimed shot is just a little bit cheaper, you’re not OOMing due to swapping these
A more mana-conservative build with the aimed shot will be added, the build currently shown is still the highest DPS one, however. but sometimes it is not worth chugging mana pots or going OOM over, you can sim what works better for your gear.
Meta evolved, numbers are different, they only thing you gain out of AiS over multishot is it being instant and not having that milli second wind up time, the damage of the two is the exact same allowing you to take an extra talent from the BM tree.
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
Even after tweaks it turns out explosive trap comes out on top a bit, be it a small margain
I agree, that’s why I added a seperate build for people that do want to trapweave
That being said explosive trap is currently possibly bugged (after testing) or there is a tooltip error for LNL backing it better than BA (damage wise exp trap is always gonna be better, it just depends if BA + 6% dmg > explosive trap damage, which can both be possible and not possible) – bug being the procrate on explove trap being too high than the tooltip shows (20-25% instead of 6% like black arrow, though it does tick faster than black arrow it doesn’t have the added damage bonus)
Can’t disagree on trapweaving currently being better than not doing so
Adding onto this for fellow glyph swappers per fight, if you’re not able to make use of explosive trap is makes little sense to glyph into it
not gonna lie this build is trash
Please elaborate because I picked the most cookiecutter builds possible on purpose.
dont mind the Elite wanna be