Welcome to the wonderful world of ninjaing loot from feral druids. Raiding as a hunter has gotten much easier with WOTLK now that crowd control is a thing of the past. Trap-dancing kept landmines relevant for a brief moment, but with the addition of Black Arrow we can finally take advantage of Sniper Training and pewpew from a safe distance like we were meant to do. Oh wait, this is supposed to be a guide for new Gypsy huntards aspiring to Raid Rank One, and you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
OK, let’s start with a brief comparison of the trees. Hunters have some of the narrowest selection between talent trees in terms of functionality, but play style can vary significantly which I will get to later. I started as a Marksman when I knew nothing because it seemed like the big damage tree. It’s true that Marksman talents will give you the biggest hits, but hunter damage, counter-intuitively, isn’t maximized that way. If you like big hits this is still the tree for you, but you should probably reroll as a caster. In BC I thought “nuhb” whenever I saw I had gained the Trueshot buff. Now I’m more respectful of the preferences of others, and I’m grateful for the 10% AP buff. I spent BC as a Beast Master which for a while was not only the best leveling/grinding build but also far and away the best DPS build. The survivability of the BM build was and still is supreme because of our uber pets and the buffs they provide. The huge DPS came not from big hits, but from lots of hits. Serpent’s Swiftness turned us into machine guns, and still makes a BM hunter haste-capped. Swiftness combined with the now-integrated quiver bonus reduces the cast time of autoshot to below the global cooldown. This means you can’t shoot any faster by adding haste. It’s important to explain at this point that in WoW hunter ranged weapons do something impossible: they fire two shots at once. Autoshot fires continuously on its cycle while you work your rotation. Autoshot is unlimited in speed, so haste will continuously improve your autoshot, but once your steady shot is below the GCD it can’t be fired any more frequently. This is particularly important for BM hunters who should only be firing serpent sting-steady shot (with autoshot pewing away in the background. For survival hunters things get much more complicated, but I will get to that later.
Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how much you like theory crafting and spreadsheets) there is no longer an absolute cookie-cutter build for maximum dps. At least I haven’t found one and I’m still finessing that 71st talent point and that last glyph. There are however certain things you absolutely must have and I’ll go down the list here:
SURVIVAL TALENTS
IMPROVED TRACKING 5/5
Must have. This is a constant 5% bonus to all damage on any of the trackable mobs while any of their tracking types is active. In other words, while Track Humanoids is on you will get a 5% damage bonus against humanoids, undead, demons, etc. It’s worth noting that mechanicals can’t be tracked (which is ridiculous given the kind of tracks Flame Leviathan must leave) so it’s not as useful in Ulduar, and also won’t be reflected on practice dummies, but you should still always have tracking on by default.
TRAP MASTERY 3/3
Primarily for the 30% damage bonus to Black Arrow, but the 30% duration bonus helps with Zombie Chow in Naxx and in PVP I suppose.
SURVIVAL INSTINCTS 2/2
The damage mitigation doesn’t hurt [insert groan] but this is really for the 4% crit buff to Explosive Shot and Steady Shot.
SURVIVALIST 5/5
The 10% stamina buff synergizes with Hunter Vs. Wild for an additional attack power buff of 3% of your stamina.
TNT 3/3
6% damage buff to Explosive Shot (and fire traps).
LOCK & LOAD 3/3
Oh yeah. 6% chance when Black Arrow or Immolation Trap tick (and less importantly a 100% chance from Freezing Trap, Freezing Arrow and Frost Trap) to give you two mana-free & ammo-free Explosive Shots with no cooldown! Be careful though. You don’t want to spam Explosive Shot. It’s a 2-second DoT, so you want to allow each Shot to tick through before firing the next one or else you are clipping your damage output. The base cooldown for Explosive Shot is 6 seconds, so this means you can get three Explosive Shots in where before you could only get one. When L&L procs, before firing your second XS refresh BA if it’s ready, or else Serpent Sting if it’s below two seconds. If both of these are fresh, fire a Multi-shot because it’s instant cast and the GCD will be up before XS stops ticking. If none of these are available I fire a Steady Shot.
HUNTER VS. WILD 3/3
Converts 30% of your stamina into AP for you and your pet. Very nice, and also makes PVP gear slightly less craptastic.
KILLER INSTINCT 3/3
3% crit buff.
LIGHTNING REFLEXES 5/5
15% agility buff.
RESOURCEFULNESS 3/3
Reduces the mana cost of traps and BA, which means more pewpew before dropping into Viper, but more importantly it reduces the cooldown of BA by 20%.
EXPOSE WEAKNESS 3/3
100% chance on ranged crits to grant you an AP bonus of 25% of your agility for 7 seconds. This used to be the centerpiece of the raiding SV build when the buff was raid-wide, giving the hunter reason to stack agi above all else. Now that it buffs the hunter only I think agi is much less important. I favor AP gems and enchants above agi and crit, but I go for more balance with my SV build than with my BM because crit is much more important. My thinking is this: generally when given a choice between agi and AP gems and enchants the AP is twice has high. This means a constant 100% AP bonus on the base agi, as opposed to a proc that gives a 25% bonus (plus a little crit). I am still investigating whether 3/3 is necessary or if 2/3 with a decent crit percentage provides comparable uptime.
WYVERN STING 1/1
As a prerequisite for Noxious Stings, but it’s also useful in PVP.
NOXIOUS STINGS 3/3
3% damage bonus to all attacks when Serpent Sting is active, stacks with the must-have Glyph of Steady Shot. You always want to refresh Serpent Sting, even before it expires. I try to fire it when there are 1-2 seconds left on it, to account for latency and travel time.
MASTER TACTICIAN 4/5
Ranged hits have 100% chance to increase crit by 8% for eight seconds. 5/5 grants 10% crit bonus. I’d like to find that extra point somewhere.
BLACK ARROW 1/1
I <3 Black Arrow. 788 (base) shadow damage over 15 secs (24 sec cooldown with Resourcefulness), but more importantly it grants a 6% damage buff to all attacks. You must keep BA up whenever it is off cooldown.
SNIPER TRAINING 3/3
The addition of BA allows us to stop running up and dropping traps, and that means Sniper can proc. This sweet talent procs whenever you stand still for six seconds. It increases your Kill Shot crit by 15% (yay Kill Shot glyph), and more importantly it increases the damage of Black Arrow, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, and Explosive Shot by 6%.
HUNTING PARTY 3/3
This is a crucial raiding talent now. In addition to the nice 3% bonus to agility, it has a 100% chance on Arcane, Explosive, or Steady crits to grant up to 10 raid or party members mana regen equal to 0.25% of “the maximum mana per second.” I’m not really sure what this means, but I do know that Blizzard has put new emphasis on mana regen in raids and this is now the utility that SV hunters bring in addition to uber deeps.
EXPLOSIVE SHOT 1/1
/drool. This is what SV hunting is all about. This is a three-tick fire DoT with a base damage of 149-177, but when it crits for me (which it often does thanks to Sniper Training) it can top 10K damage in total. As I said above, the most important part to remember with this shot is not to clip the DoT when Lock & Load procs. This can take up to 2/3 of the damage away and you might as well respec. Also, you want Black Arrow up before you fire this, unless it has more than 5 secs left on cooldown. Be aware that Arcane Shot shares a cooldown with Explosive Shot, so you will never be using it again. Take it off your action bar.
MARKSMAN TALENTS
Whether you are BM or SV, MM provides crucial utility talents.
LETHAL SHOTS 5/5
5% ranged crit bonus. ‘Nuf said.
CAREFUL AIM 3/3
Increases your AP by 100% of your intellect. Not only is this a huge AP bonus, but it also encourages you to stack int, which means more mana which means more pewpew. This makes it much easier to take advantage of socket bonuses too. I often gem for int.
MORTAL SHOTS 5/5
30% damage bonus to ranged crits. Where do you think those 10K explosive shots come from?
GO FOR THE THROAT 1 /2
Ranged crits generate 25 focus for your pet. As a BM I had 2/2, but the SV crit rate generates more than enough focus with just one point. The SV pet may not be anywhere as powerful as the BM pet, but it’s still a good portion of your dps and Furious Howl can’t proc without focus (more on that below).
BEAST MASTER TALENTS
IMPROVED ASPECT OF THE HAWK 0/5
Putting a point in here is popular for the 3% haste proc, but I think the point is better spent elsewhere. If you do use this you will want the Glyph of the Hawk for an additional 6% haste.
GLYPHS
Explosive Shot
Increases XS crit chance by 4%. Must have.
Steady Shot
Increases Steady damage by 10% when Serpent Sting is active on the target. Also must have, and must keep Serpent Sting up.
Kill Shot
Reduces cooldown of Kill Shot by six seconds, down to nine. The third major glyph is flexible. As I said above, if you use Improved Aspect you will want to glyph for it. I’m experimenting with Kill Shot because the massive health on raid bosses. For example, Patchwerk has a 6 minute enrage. That means approximately 72 seconds spent at 20% health or below, the upward limit for Kill Shot to activate, which allows four Kill Shots to be fired. Glyphed I can fire eight kill shots, for over 80K damage output. Maybe 9% haste will equal 40K from autoshot over six minutes. More math needs to be done.
Most of the minor glyphs are useless, but I’ve settled on:
Feign Death
Reduces cooldown by five secs. Nice to have when you need it, especially with the massive threat you will be pumping out from all those crits.
Mend Pet
Mend pet increases pet happiness, eliminating the need to feed.
Revive Pet
Eliminates pushback when casting revive. Again, nice when you need it.
Those are the talents and glyphs that I use. There is some wiggle room, but this build is guaranteed to move you up the meters. Of course build alone can’t do it. Rotation is crucial. SV doesn’t have a locked rotation the way BM does in Serpent-Steady. Survival hunting depends on shot priority which requires close attention. By shot priority I mean that when a cooldown is up, you fire the shot of the highest priority. I’ve run the math and this is the most effective order:
1) Kill Shot
2) Black Arrow
3) Serpent Sting
4) Explosive Shot
5) Multi-Shot
6) Steady Shot
As I have said, this is all a work in progress, which is part of the fun. If you have other ideas I’d love to hear them and try them. Happy killing.