Survival Hunter Guide (5.0.5)

[kalo]

ye, but if you got a debuff, pre cotw would also be affected.

[belgicanofl]

Not that hunters can't be used for those things, but I'm pretty sure another class can do almost all of those jobs better.

* Face Rage on Shannox - Arcane Mage
* Spider caves on Beth'tilac - Balance Druid
* Meteor DPS on Alysrazor - Anyone can do that
* 'Tanking' 5 burning orbs at once with double Deterrence as part of a cooldown chain - Good call on this one
* Blowing up traps on Ragnaros - Priest or Mage with Slow Fall or Levitate

* Arcane mage was best for sure.
* SV hunter beats any boomkin on that fight, hunters ramp up way better, aka we're at full potential as soon as we target them.
* Hunters handled meteor the best, most instants out of all ranged classes.

[zakaluka]

Lots of talk of haste plateaus in this guide.

It feels very much to me as if both the 2-set and the 4-set are designed to:
1) Completely devalue haste
2) Eliminate the concept of haste plateaus entirely.

Simcraft and FD will still often show me haste valued above mastery, but I don't feel that these sims really show the whole picture. With the obscene amount of focus regen we have now, I feel that adding haste to my gear will just make me focus cap more often. And with our 4-set mini-bloodlust proc I feel that it's impossible to talk about a tight ES cycle anymore. That throws us back into the realm of priority casting, the same as every other RDPS.

How far off does that sound? I just want to get my haste as low as possible, be hit capped, then stack crit>mst. Am I wrong?

Seems like the whole section on haste thresholds is obsolete with t13.

[Illana]

it's not obsolete, just that reaching the next haste threshold (2264 rating) with BiS gear is not really possible without losing crit. If I had better gear I would be inclined to test the 1.5 second plateau but I would be losing too much crit for it to be viable.

Zeherah did make a post about why haste is so iffy with his FD spreadsheet and it seems to be a inherent problem with the way our resource regeneration works.

In actual play there is no difference really betweeen 1.66 second cobra shots and 1.6seconds, all you are doing is getting a few more autoshots in per fight and some deadtime between explosive shots but you DO gain some arcane shots when you get some thrill procs since you only use a GCD (1 second) to fire them instead of 1.6 seconds+

if anyone is rocking heroic gear and heroic crossbow+spire would be helpful if you could test the 2264 plateau, alas my own guild limitations makes it seem this might be a long way off for me yet (especially as our guild is cursed to drop conquerer tokens every week since FL came out)

[Jigsawe]

it's not obsolete, just that reaching the next haste threshold (2264 rating) with BiS gear is not really possible without losing crit. If I had better gear I would be inclined to test the 1.5 second plateau but I would be losing too much crit for it to be viable.

Zeherah did make a post about why haste is so iffy with his FD spreadsheet and it seems to be a inherent problem with the way our resource regeneration works.

In actual play there is no difference really betweeen 1.66 second cobra shots and 1.6seconds, all you are doing is getting a few more autoshots in per fight and some deadtime between explosive shots but you DO gain some arcane shots when you get some thrill procs since you only use a GCD (1 second) to fire them instead of 1.6 seconds+

if anyone is rocking heroic gear and heroic crossbow+spire would be helpful if you could test the 2264 plateau, alas my own guild limitations makes it seem this might be a long way off for me yet (especially as our guild is cursed to drop conquerer tokens every week since FL came out)

Getting to the next haste plateau is irrelevant at this point. It was viable before since we didn't have double focus regen on Cobra/Steady; now, with 2264 haste, 4 CS' guarantee a focus cap regardless of what you start at and the 2 CS and 3 AS rotation will delay ES by draining focus , both of which are something you should be avoiding. At most you should reforge to haste from mastery when you have an exact, consistent fight length and can extrapolate to what haste break-point you should get to, to reduce losing an ES (since each one is delayed somewhere beteween .12-.18 seconds with good gear).

I.e. Say you average 0.15 seconds of delay per ES sequence, if your Ultraxion kill is above 4 minutes, you're losing out on an ES and can adjust your haste accordingly. The Auto Shot gains in itself isn't enough to warrant reforging mastery to haste as SV mastery doesnt' effect Auto Shot.

[Illana]

actually no: it's even more viable with the double focus because the goal is to hit 2 CS and 2 AS between each ES

this isn't focus positive however (unless RNG blesses you with procs constantly) but you will still gain more ASes during the fight overall compared to a mastery build.

Will it out damage mastery and make up for the sacrifice in crit is what I don't know but I think it will be very close.

[Arakjin]

I used to play hunter and after I took a long break from wow I'm completely confused, last time I played hunter we still used mana

[Absolutely Fabulous]

This haste thing is absolutely killing my spirit Is it possible to get to 2264 with mostly normal pieces + some LFR ones? Ilevel 394..
Should I reforge out of crit in order to reach it? Aaaand, would 758 haste be possible if skipping Pathing?
*So confused* Seems I just cannot get a flow on my rotation at all..

[Illana]

definitely not at ilevel 394, you will lose like 5%+ crit and that's not even close to worth it.

currently SV has a lot of small "wait" times before explosive shots

dont be afraid to wait 0.5 seconds at 40 focus to get an ES off instead of casting another cobra especially under haste effects

[Joyful]

This haste thing is absolutely killing my spirit Is it possible to get to 2264 with mostly normal pieces + some LFR ones? Ilevel 394..
Should I reforge out of crit in order to reach it? Aaaand, would 758 haste be possible if skipping Pathing?
*So confused* Seems I just cannot get a flow on my rotation at all..

Don't go for haste platoues as SV with the 2p, 4p, RF, BL/hero, thrill of the hunt and LNL....

[Illana]

well thats the idea

non-focus positive rotation supplemented by procs and haste effects

[Slothswag]

nice guide :3

[Jigsawe]

well thats the idea

non-focus positive rotation supplemented by procs and haste effects

Yea you're correct I'm not sure where I was getting the 3 as' from. I'd still imagine it would only be worth reforging to haste if you have a guaranteed di every fight to limit the amount of reforging.

[Illana]

Yea you're correct I'm not sure where I was getting the 3 as' from. I'd still imagine it would only be worth reforging to haste if you have a guaranteed di every fight to limit the amount of reforging.

oh i totally forgot DI as well, would be likely you would not even need to sacrifice any crit at all for the the 1.5sec plateau if you got that.

indeed I just checked:

Using BiS gear (hc vishanka and kirils) you will get 1.493 second cobras with DI.

So actually SV hunters being a viable target for DI and this new plateau........ hhmmmmmmmmmmmm if only we raided with a lock :<

[Dracodraco]

Mind you Ilana, I am missing three pieces of gear before I am BiS -
Protecter heroic Chest.
Vial of shadows (no effect on haste).
Ring (Primordial shadow).

As primordial shadow has expertise/mastery, and the 397 vp one has mastery/haste, getting the 397->410 upgrade would give me even less potential haste. The trinket won't affect my potential haste.
Now, I went to wowreforge with this and put in my current gear, and upgraded to the 410 tier chest. The result was this:
If I wanted 961 hit, I would end up at 2141 haste, and 2011 crit - note that this is down from my current crit rating of almost 2700. Which means that I would lose about 4% crit, and still not be able to obtain your "elusive" haste softcap. I am also losing approx 300 mastery rating.
All in all, considering this, we can obviously go ahead and just forget about reaching it without help of DI (which is still a significantly stronger buff on moonkins and shadow priests), and even in case we can reach it, the potential dps gain would probably not be worth it due to the massive loss of crit and mastery.

This is because "BiS" consists of the heroic vishjanka and Kiril, giving us much less secondary stats to play around with - it's basicly only possible to take advantage of this "plateu" in the very brief period where your guild is farming 6/8 heroic, but are stuck on spine/madness, thus meaning the 410 spire is the best they can do in terms of weapon (390 kirl>403 kiril>397 spire>410 spire>416 kiril). Vishjanka normal will be BiS untill vishjanka heroic, so can't calculate with the zon'ozz HC bow either.

Even then, if I change my gear to have the Spire, I get these ratings:
2274 (vs 2679) crit.
2304 (vs 1055) haste.
994 (vs 1083) mastery.
Still losing us a few percentages of crit, and most of a percentage of mastery. But mind you, this is assuming that every single other piece you have is BiS excluding the seal - which is probably unlikely.

All in all? I don't think it's feasible to go for the 2264 plateu, especially when we don't even know if it'll be an increase worth noticing.

[Joyful]

There is way to much stuff going on for haste platoues to work for SV with only thrill of the hunt and LnL fucking up focus regen and the need to cast, and then add in BL/hero, rapid fire, 4p and you will have a very very limited amount of time where your haste platoue will actually work, even as MM before that's slightly less rng with its focus regen and haste it were never really something you noticed.

And normal Vish is only 2nd bis for trolls, isn't?

[Dracodraco]

There is way to much stuff going on for haste platoues to work for SV with only thrill of the hunt and LnL fucking up focus regen and the need to cast, and then add in BL/hero, rapid fire, 4p and you will have a very very limited amount of time where your haste platoue will actually work, even as MM before that's slightly less rng with its focus regen and haste it were never really something you noticed.

And normal Vish is only 2nd bis for trolls, isn't?

Nope. It's about 300-400 dps over 410 zon'ozz crossbow for orcs, too (and by proxy, any other hunter race).

[Joyful]

Nope. It's about 300-400 dps over 410 zon'ozz crossbow for orcs, too (and by proxy, any other hunter race).

Guess ill have to tell that our nab hunter.

[Illana]

still! please test it if you can spare the gold for reforges

[xodium]

Great info!