Survival is changing for the better in 4.3. Its DPS is going up both in relative and absolute terms, leaving it more appealing than it has been since its nerf after Cataclysm launched. What is there to know about SV gameplay that might be different for returning hunters?
edit: The post now includes updates resulting from conversations held in the comment section.
The baseline SV shot priority is and will be the same as it has been this whole expansion. You want to use Explosive Shot and Black Arrow on cooldown, keep Serpent Sting up on the target with Cobra Shot, and dump any extra Focus during free globals using Arcane Shot.
There are a few differences from patch 4.0 that returning hunters may wish to note:
- Black Arrow does enough damage that it is the Lock and Load proc source of choice for single targets. Zeherah notes, though, that changes to the internal cooldown of Lock and Load on the PTR may make Explosive Trap again a reasonable if not preferred way to proc Lock and Load.
- The Glyph of Arcane Shot is better than the Glyph of Serpent Sting even without the new two piece tier bonus. The other two glyphs of choice are still Kill Shot and Explosive Shot. Keep in mind that on AoE fights or in fights where AoE damage is simply more important than single target damage that you may wish to glyph into SrS rather than AS (thanks Zeherah!).
- A OwN/SE build is now the way to go, meaning that SV no longer takes Careful Aim (and hasn’t since the CA nerf). This in turn means that the SV rotation no longer varies with the CA phase, making things even simpler than before.
- The proper Lock and Load sequence no longer interposes a shot between the first two Explosive Shots.
This last point merits some elaboration. Hunters over at Elitist Jerks have come across a new LnL sequence that squeezes the Explosive Shots in a LnL closer together without clipping (and that’s a good thing). Clipping results from an Explosive Shot following too quickly on the tail of a preceding Explosive Shot, overwriting or “clipping” the last tic of that ES. This causes you to get eight Explosive Shot tics from a LnL sequence rather than nine.
An easy way to avoid clipping would be to just fire Cobra Shots between all ESs during LnL. The thing is, though, that we want to cram as many Explosive Shots into a fight duration as possible, and that means getting Explosive Shots in our LnL sequences as close together as we can without clipping. I tested the new method from EJ a bit myself and think that it offers a nice way of tightening things up. Under most conditions you can simply go through your LnL sequence as before except excluding the shot that was previously interwoven between the first two ESs in the sequence.
Unfortunately, “most conditions” are not “all conditions.” There are some situations (as commenters below point out) where having no delay between the first and second ESs results in clipping. One such situation is when you are moving toward the target. This causes the ESs to arrive too close together and clip. Because of this it helps to make sure that you are not firing the second ES in a LnL sequence before there is one second left on the first ES. Zeherah cautiously recommends using an addon to watch fractional seconds. I personally recommend NeedtoKnow for this but other addons may work too. Regardless, to be on the safe side, I recommend putting a slight delay (but, again, not a shot) between the first two ESs in a Lock and Load sequence. This delay should be very small, substantially shorter than a global, and I recommend testing it out yourself on training dummies to get a feel for what works for you.
If you have 66 Focus (including regen) and do not need to save for BA, you want a LnL to go like this:
ES > slight delay > ES > AS > ES
If you cannot pay for an AS plus an ES or need to save up for BA, you want a LnL to go like this:
ES > slight delay > ES > CoS > ES
Some contend that you need an additional delay beyond an AS between the second and third ESs, but I can’t substantiate this with my own testing.
Why am I skeptical. I am always skeptical I guess.
I’ve never been too sure about the benefits of CA unless its a long term boss fight where I can pre-pot and blow my CDs right off the bat for a high burst of dps. Beyond that type of fight (which is not all of them), CA becomes a waste of 2 points for us and really should be moved elsewhere. I admit to running with CA instead of BD or SE…feel like I’m wasting points no matter which I choose :)
I still feel like there is something missing in regards to our Mastery and its benefits to our overall damage as SV. Why do I feel like there’s something there….
CA has been suboptimal for SV ever since the 10% nerf in 4.2.
As for mastery, well, yes, it sounds good, but what ultimately matters is its magnitude of effect.
Skeptics keep everyone else on their toes!
Re:
>> If you have 66 Focus (including regen) and do not need to
>> save for BA, you want a LnL to go like this:
>>
>> ES > ES > AS > ES
Does Arcane Shot no longer consume part of the LnL?
sure it does, but you use the AS after both charges of LnL are used by ES.
Lock & Load only gives us 2 free shots, not 3.
It seems to me that the theoretical benefit of Mastery for SV has always been there, and always been higher for us than for MM or BM BUT, in practice it’s never really played out as (higher Mastery=higher DPS.)
I’m actually glad to see the whole CA thing sort of “going away” as it seems like something I’m prone to kind of forget about ayway >.< No, I'm not really that bad, srsly, I'm not! lol
I have to admit, I’m not clear on your explanation of the LnL sequence change.
Are you supposed to pause between those first two ES and watch the target debuff wear off (like we used to back in Wrath)?
Or do you just fire the first two off as fast as the GCD allows and somehow the ES tick clipping doesn’t happen anymore? (Or does it clip, but it’s a net dps gain anyway?)
It’s the `somehow the ES clipping doesn’t happen’ option. You can fire ES-ES-AS-ES on the global with no delays and you will get nine ES tics. You can test this yourself on a target dummy, and you can see the dps gain over at femaledwarf by using the new shot interleaving option that Zeherah implemented.
Great. thanks for the clarification.
To clarify further- the way dot refreshes work is that when you refresh a dot, whatever is left on the current tick is kept in addition to whatever ticks are applied. So if there is less than one tick left on your explosive shot, you can refresh the dot without losing any ticks. Because explosive shot has 3 ticks in 2 seconds, spaced 1 per second (initial tick, tick 1s later, tick 2 sec later), if you fire another explosive shot after your 1 sec GCD has expired, you have a good likelihood of only having that last tick still available on your explosive shot, thus allowing you to refresh and not lose any ticks.
You should note however though, that in some cases it is possible to fire fast enough that you can clip that tick, which is why it’s recommended to include a very slight delay. I tested pretty extensively on dummies and was able to clip the tick quite a bit when I tried to minimize the time, but by making sure the debuff was at 1sec when I fired it did not lose ticks.
The reason why you can’t apply the same approach to that last explosive shot (i.e. ES ES ES) is that by refreshing that first explosive shot before it expires, you’ll end up with close to 3 ticks instead of 2 up after your 2nd explosive shot, which means by the time your GCD expires you will definitely still have more than a partial tick left on your target, which will cause you to lose a tick.
Also, BA has been higher damage than explosive trap on single targets for quite some time. That being said, it looks like the LnL ICD may have been shortened on PTR, and with the increased damage on explosive shot and proc rate on LnL it’s possible that factoring in increased LnL proc rate that explosive trap has (since it has 2x as many ticks) could tip the scales (the ICD historically has kept this from being a huge factor).
With regards to serpent sting glyph versus arcane shot glyph- on heavy AoE fights you’d still probably lean towards the sting glyph since the value is multiplied pretty heavily by serpent spread (and you also probably fire less arcane shots on those fights). On single target fights arcane glyph will definitely be magnified with the new T13 2pc bonus allowing us to fit a lot more arcanes in.
I also tested a lot on dummies and could never get the second ES to clip the first, and so concluded that the slight delay was unnecessary. Did you figure out what was specific to the cases of clipping so that I can verify it?
As for BA, yes, my wording was poor. That list was basically covering changes since 4.0 rather than changes from 4.2 to 4.3.
I’ll update the post to reflect your comments on glyphs, the LnL cooldown and explosive trap.
I suspect the issue with clipping is related to latency and possibly the way the spell queue works. It may also be a factor of travel time changes (although when I was testing I was standing still at a dummy so it wasn’t a factor in that particular case). Given the GCD is 1 sec and the amount of time you should have to wait to not clip is just slightly over 1 sec (since if you fired exactly at the 1 sec mark the tick may be just occurring when the refresh occurs), it’s not surprising that the results might differ slightly based on factors that vary- the window is just extremely small between clip and don’t clip. If you look in logs of spammed instants, you’ll find that sometimes they’ll actually come less than 1 second apart- which is probably related to the changes they put in to let you get around the effect of latency on your GCD.
I’ll doublecheck when I have some time and see if I can reproduce my results- the last time I checked was awhile ago, but at the time I was definitely able to clip the 2nd ES sometimes with heavy spamming.
But it’s definitely a net dps loss (over the course of the fight) to interleave a shot between the two LnL explosive shots because you’ll get less LnL procs over the course of the fight, right?
That seems to be the big take-away point.
Is this new LnL sequence/rotation only effective on the PTR or is this something they’ve found that is working on live servers?
I did a crap job on that question with this post. It started off as a guide to SV in 4.3, but everything actually applies just as well to live now. I should have to just rewritten the post as a simple guide to SV rather than something worded toward 4.3.
So, yes, everything mentioned in the post aside from the dps buffs applies to both live and 4.3.
I also was able to clip the first Explosive shot (by spamming ES at the right time). Three examples of how the first shot gets clipped:
– dots do not necessarily tick when the shot first arrives. Instead, there’s a slight delay (call it e1 for the tick delays of the first explosive shot). If the second shot is queued, it can get applied exactly a second after the first shot arrives. It’s tick is then applied at a different delay time (e2). If e1 < e2, then the second tick of the first shot applies, and the second ES extends the dot to 4 ticks. If e2 < e1, then the second ES applies, and extends the dot to only 3 ticks.
– the character is moving towards the target, so the second ES has a shorter travel time. That allows it to get applied before the second tick of the first ES.
– there was a normal ES *before* the LNL proc, so there's already an ES ticking when you fire the first ES of the LNL. In that case, you must delay by a CS or more before applying the second LnL charge (and if you do this right, you get 12 ticks in a row).
NOTE that ES ES AS ES is *not* the usually the right sequence, since after the second ES, the dot has *four* ticks remaining and thus you will likely clip unless you delays for TWO full seconds (see http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t110723-cataclysm_survival_hunter/p20/#post1975867). In later posts I found (via sims) the highest DPS to be ES ES AS AS ES (subbing CS for AS when you don't have enough focus) to be 400dps higher (in my gear) than the alternatives. Also note that CA with the right pet was higher dps than SE.
Once the new gear settles, I'll rerun those simulations, but there's definitely a non-trivial amount of dps that can be squeezed out of a good sequence here.
I’m not sure of the accuracy of the mods tracking timing to the fractional second, but in my case I find it’s best to just watch that there’s only 1 sec left on the explosive shot debuff before firing my next shot. This also allows me to determine if it makes sense to fire another intervening shot or to pause briefly.
In my case I’ve configured Serenity to show the explosive shot debuff moving across the focus bar, which makes it pretty easy to spot when it’s safe to fire again.
I’ll check Lokrick’s conditions for possible clipping and update the post accordingly. I have yet to see any evidence that two full globals are needed after the second ES after a lot of previous testing, and so I’m highly suspicious of that claim.
The differences over the optimal dps build may result from differences between sims and FD. My conclusion was drawn from FD and I was very careful about it, testing across hunter/pet talent combinations and levels of haste and mastery. The difference of an OwN/SE + 2/2 WH build over the CA builds was small enough that I could easily see different approximations of DPS putting things differently. However, FD (for me) consistently put OwN/SE ahead.
As for mods, I think NeedtoKnow is nice enough, offering maleable bars that track down to the fractional second.
I’d be interested in seeing some of those builds. I verified the results with femaledwarf (though I admit a preference for the control and precision of SimulationCraft). The key thing is that WH and SE rely on each other. When using CA instead of SE, the pet’s last two points must in Shark Attack. I couldn’t find your toon, but I did model Euripides:
29332.10 euridedes from Armory plus default wolf pet
29442.97 euridedes with CA and 2xSA rather than SE and SA/WH
On FD, it’s +400dps for me, +110 for Euripedes, and a whopping +30 dps for 4.2 BiS, so it’s value clealry varies based on equipment, fights, etc. (e.g., if you bring a cunning pet that doesn’t have SA, you will want SE to power it’s WH).
As for the clipping, I was originally inspired to analyze the LnL because of the clipping I saw in my WoL parse, but I don’t know whether it was frequent. The post I mentioned earlier walks through the timing of clipping. If indeed clipping isn’t an issue, then there’s some flaw in my timing analysis. I’d be delighted if you’d take a look and see if you spot anything.
I was able to get 29,606 with Euripides using a SE-WH build, but could only get 29, 298 with a CA-SA build.
You can find my settings here:
SE-WH: http://www.femaledwarf.com/?setting_id=59526
CA-SA: http://www.femaledwarf.com/?setting_id=59527
Thanks, that helped. I compared settings to figure out where the discrepancy was. For my FD sims, my settings were old, and had the incorrect CA time (20% instead of 10%). When I fixed that, I get the same numbers. Also, Lokrick’s FD numbers come out consistent with your current results:
29002.68 ca/sa2
29270.51 se/wh1sa1 +267.83
29206.01 se/wh2 -64.5
One thing I noticed with Euripides numbers: the computed stat priority between crit and mastery changed between the two profiles. It would be interesting to see whether optimizing one case made a difference. (BTW reforging his boots to haste helped both cases. :) I’ll look at the simc numbers this weekend (which did not have a CA uptime error), but note that I’m perfectly happy to have WH be the winner, since it’s available on more pets.
One unrelated thought when looking at FD settings: the Termination phase is listed as 20% of the time. But since a few classes have increased damage during termination, it would typically be less than 20% of the time on the boss, reducing the value of Kill Shot (and it’s glyph).
Great.
I have a question about an AoE spec for Surival. Since, my new guild hasn’t started seriously raiding yet (the guild leader and her boyfriend who started the guild just made it a couple days ago after they transferred to Fizzcrank, so we’re going to start in 4.3 most likely), I’m still running dungeons to stockpile Justice Points for 4.3 and to give some XP to the guild. I was wondering if this would be a good spec for just AoE because that’s mostly what a dungeon is (recount shows that I spend less of my time damaging bosses than I do trash mobs): http://www.wowhead.com/talent#ccbcZbZcbhfMhrRsk:RsmV0b0Mc. My AoE rotation is trap launching an Ice Trap for Point of No Escape and Lock and Load, trap launching an Explosive Trap if there’s more than 3 mobs for the damage and for T.N.T. (only after I’ve used the Lock and Load proc from Ice Trap so as not to have them overwrite each other and waste the first one), Explosive Shot if Lock and Load has procced, Kill Shot, Multi-Shot if there are more than 3 targets, and Cobra Shot. I was debating about taking away a point from Go for the Throat to put into Serpent Spread but since the only time that second point would come in handy is when I Multi-Shot on two targets only once at the start to get Serpent Sting up on both of them, I decided against it (plus, if I really wanted to, I could just keep Serpent Sting up on them both by alternating my targets for Cobra Shot). I didn’t take Efficiency or Sic ‘Em because Explosive Shot is only used during Lock and Load because it’s focus free and because Multi-Shot replaces Arcane Shot as a focus dump. I didn’t take Careful Aim either because as I said before, most of my damage is done to trash mobs, which have an almost non-existent Careful Aim phase. Any thoughts?
Honestly, there’s no reason to deviate from a standard SV raiding build since it takes all the important AoE talents and will get the bosses down faster to boot.
As for your rotation, well, I’m not sure that getting the Point of No Escape buff is worth more than firing another Multishot or two instead.
Well, if I never use Explosive Shot and Arcane Shot except for bosses (which is like 20% of the targets that I damage) and the Careful Aim phase on trash is so short as to be seconds, what’s the points of taking Efficiency, Sic ‘Em, and Careful Aim, respectively?
Well, I don’t recommend taking Careful Aim (see the post). I also only recommend Efficiency and Sic’Em! because they’re better single-target dps talents than the other single-target dps talents that you’ve taken instead. Taking Efficiency will also leave you in practice for shot budgeting when you do start raiding.
But, if you’ve got your heart set on this build, just use it. You don’t need validation or permission from the blogosphere. Just have fun with it.
Oh the other single-target talents are worse than Efficiency and Sic ‘Em, but since those two serve no purpose when AoEing while Bestial Discipline and Frenzy do because my pet is still attacking one target, they’re better DPS.