Gradual reconstruction of the site

Have spent most of the night working on some new posts which will be permanently linked from the front page. These are my own attempt at providing basic info about Survival in a post-3.0 sense, and hopefully answering at least a few of the questions I've been seeing on the forum.

I also need to do a more extensive Scholomance guide, since incoming links to the Lair from Google searches with "solo Scholomance," as the keywords average between one and five a day. It's fairly obvious from that, that soloing Scholo is something quite a lot of you still want information about.

Scholo won't be any challenge at all at 80; it isn't a real challenge now to anyone with above T5. Of course, even at 80, however, there will still be people levelling up, so for them a guide on it could still be worth something.

Anywayz, there will still be lots of changes for the next few days or so, I expect.

Survival specs for 3.0.

I'm going to list some specs which I'm either commonly using, or are in testing, for the three purposes of farming, five man instances, and battleground PvP, respectively. Although I do raid occasionally, it is infrequent, and I also do not generally play in the Arena at all. Hence, any advice on raiding specs will be tentative, and based on what I have found to generate the highest DPS in Heroics, primarily.

These specs are also subject to change as I do more testing of various things...so stay tuned. ;-)

The New TSA vs. EW
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Assuming people want to put points in Survival at all, said people are possibly going to be wondering whether or not to get Expose Weakness, or to only go as far into Survival as 3/3 Killer Instinct, (or 3/5 Lightning Reflexes, rather than Imp. Barrage) and put the rest of their points in Marks, in order to get Trueshot Aura.

As far as a group damage buff is concerned, the answer is fairly clear; TSA, since EW no longer buffs group damage at all, and TSA is now potentially raid wide. However, for personal DPS, it gets a little more murky.

At 1500 base RAP, TSA generates the same amount of bonus RAP as EW at 600 Agility; 150. However, TSA also needs another 500 RAP, (2000) to generate a 200 RAP bonus, whereas Expose Weakness only needs another 200 Agility for the same bonus, which is a difference that is well within the reach of consumables and raid buffs. (800 Agility total) This gap will also, of course, continue to scale up with higher numbers.

Pets are also an issue. The pet of a Hunter with TSA up will receive the +10% AP bonus directly, whereas a pet whose owner has Expose Weakness, will only receive 15% (Hunter to pet AP scaling) of what the Hunter gets. So for a Hunter with 600 Agility, that means 15% of 150 = 22.5 AP, which is pretty dismal, at just over 1.5 DPS. (14 AP = 1 DPS)

My conclusion is, thus, that Expose Weakness is better used in a group scenario (rather than soloing) where it has been taken anyway, as a prerequisite for Hunting Party. The good news here is that as demonstrated above, EW scales more efficiently than TSA for personal damage output. For solo farming, however, Trueshot Aura would be better, since it can add to pet threat generation, however since I also tend to want Noxious Stings, Resourcefulness and Trap Mastery for farming, I would probably end up having Expose Weakness in that scenario as well.

For battleground PvP, I will want TSA, since testing suggests that TSA with 5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization is a better way to go, unless your Agility is greater than 800-850.

Farming spec. Get a Tenacity pet for this as well ideally, if you don't already have one. The Gorilla is what all the cool kids are doing, but I still love my Boar. ;-)

As I've said before, my own farming specs are usually based around Trap Mastery, and Imp/Noxious Stings. Blizzard have forced us to choose between Trap Mastery and Readiness at the moment; a scenario which I consider highly unsatisfactory, especially for instance farming. However, as long as you chain trap, that probably won't be too much of a problem, depending of course on what you're doing.

Five man/Heroic utility spec. The point of this spec is both crowd control, (Scatter Shot, Wyvern Sting, Clever Traps, and Resourcefulness for chain trapping) and Hunting Party.

Although its' raw damage output is substantially lower than the hybrid spec below, its' personal and group mana efficiency is exceptional, and 5/5 Improved Tracking, 2/3 Noxious Stings, 3/3 Hunter Vs Wild, and 3/3 Expose Weakness all mean that, providing that the base levels of Agility and Stamina are reasonable, personal damage output won't be truly attrocious, either.

Five man DPS spec. This spec is based on Alumatine's hybrid raid spec from TBC, and includes talents from both Marksmanship and Survival that add to your AP and crit chance, for high per-hit burst damage.


Battleground spec. Very similar, but with some PvP-specific adjustments; primarily Surefooted and Scatter Shot.

My second 70

Just a moment ago, I was reading a post from Pike about how she'd managed to get her alt Druid to level 60.

Given the second alt which I just started with a friend of mine yesterday, and especially the nature of some of my more recent posts, I've realised that my second (and most likely only other) 70 is going to be a Paladin. Granted, I'm not yet level 10 with the alt yet, but I was commenting to the RL friend that I WoW with just last night, that aside from range and healing, the playstyle of the Paladin is extremely similar to the way I play a Hunter as Survival.

I have another alt Paladin who is level 30, and I've done some low level tanking with him, in the Wailing Caverns, SFK, and Blackfathom Deeps. I also have a pure Prot/Shield Spec Warrior on Jubei'Thos who is around level 32 now, and I've tanked the SM Graveyard with him as well.

I love tanking; I absolutely love it. (Big surprise there for anyone who's read a lot of my writing, eh? ;-)) Of the dedicated tanking classes that I've tried, the Warrior is probably the most difficult and seems to require the most energy, especially for multi-mob stuff. Then again, the first few times I tried it, the Paladin probably had me tripping over my feet more; after I'd played a Warrior for a bit, the Paladin's tanking mechanics seemed very strange.

I also know that I probably should have just rolled a Paladin or Warrior early on, rather than a Hunter; however I think the biggest appeal was (aside from the added versatility of range) the additional challenge of being strongly defensive with Surv. We're actually given a lot more towards it in the tree than most people think, but there is still a bit of a need to be creative after that as well.

I might write about the new alt Paladin a bit here at times. I am going to spec either Prot for instances or farming I think, and Holy for battlegrounds at times. My focus, even with this Hunter, has never really been primarily on DPS, I will admit. Rather than doing damage, the thing I love in this game is the opposite; being a close to totally impenetrable brick wall that nothing else can get past.

With a Paladin, that's a lot easier than it is with a Hunter; but there have been a lot of times with Survival where I've been able to pull it off for just long enough as well. As I've written before, my favourite aspect of this game used to be Warsong Gulch, and that battleground wasn't about damage either. It was about either flagrunning, or holding the line.

Introduction

I'm re-editing this post, as it is going to be one of my new series that are permanently linked from the front page. Nearly all of these will have the "basics," tag; think of them as a summary of minimal info where Survival is concerned. The other material in this post can be considered an introduction to those.

I didn't end up writing the Project Lore Hunter class guide, even though Brandon Sato wrote to me as well as Pike and asked that I do so; at the time, Pike was apparently initially asked to do a spec guide specifically for Beast Mastery, whereas I was asked for something much more generalised, which Pike ended up writing.

Although part of the reason at the time was severe, genuine illness, the other reason why I didn't end up finishing it is because I didn't (and still don't) believe that I was even remotely qualified to write a guide for the class in every area, and thus also greatly feared the amount of criticism that I would likely receive for attempting to do so. The beginning of my attempt at that guide is still on my hard drive, and there may come a time when I finish it and release it, however the odds of that occurring are extremely low. If you visit my Armory profile, you will discover that my Arena rating in particular is utterly attrocious, which is a testimony to my utter lack of skill where that area of the game is concerned.

There are four areas of this game where I feel that I am sufficiently qualified to offer instruction; those are levelling, five man instances, battleground PvP, and the soloing of five man instances. There are another two areas, however, where I have virtually no ability whatsoever, and they are the Arena and high end (post-Karazhan) raiding. As far as the Arena is concerned, I highly recommend Bandet as a source of information.

On the raid front, Alumatine has apparently left the game, at least temporarily; I will thus offer what advice I can in that area, (which is largely based on my own, very limited testing of recommendations he made that were current during TBC) but please bear in mind that as noted, raiding is not my primary focus.

Another BM respec

So, on logging into WoW yesterday, I felt I wanted to do something a bit different. I not only wanted to set up my talent points on a couple of pets, but since I've already used Marks (to a degree anyway) and Survival since the patch, I thought I'd try out Beast Mastery.

I didn't actually go the 51/10/0 path, since the word on the forum was that having so few points to spend in Marks, (particularly in terms of missing Go for the Throat) caused a nasty lack of damage.

This was the spec I used, and I haven't changed back from it yet, either. You will notice that I've taken Hawk Eye as the only talent from Survival. The comparitive lack of range was one of the main things that I used to miss during temporary BM respecs in the past, and the fact that I can now get Hawk Eye without sacrificing (and indeed, marginally improving with 2/3 CA) damage, was a welcome change.

I also got a Ferocity pet for the occasion; a white Ghost Saber from the cat statues in the ruins of northern Darkshore. This pet is, as has been said elsewhere, beautiful and very unique, and I will be keeping it after respeccing back.

To really try this out, I tried two different activities with it; a solo Scholo run, up to and including Rattlegore, and around half a dozen matches in Arathi Basin.

In Scholo, although my damage output seemed decent, the single main thing that stood out was the comparitive lack of mana efficiency. Although despite the patch's changes, I was sticking to the 1:1 rotation to attempt to conserve mana, I have, through long practice, learned to instinctively lean very heavily on trapping. I did here as well, even with this spec, and I definitely noticed the lack of Resourcefulness. For three mob pulls, I was generally having to drink every other pull or so, especially if I was trapping.

Bestial Wrath, however, was also wasted in Scholo; I only used it once, on Rattlegore himself, and that when he was 75% dead anyway. My usual strategy with him has been chain Snake and Immolation trapping.

I am, I will confess, exceptionally slow and methodical when farming, and I think that more than anything else is what has discouraged me from putting up any video footage of me doing so. Aside from the filesize being prohibitively large, even with editing, it would, I fear, be in danger of putting you all to sleep. Even though Beast Mastery still caused me to move slightly more quickly than usual, I tend to think that if anyone native to the tree had been watching, they probably would have commented that they had never seen it being used so slowly.

My primary rationale for this, of course, is to minimise threat, but a secondary priority is mana efficiency. There are few things I dislike more than having to kite mobs if it is avoidable, and as such, I tend to study the threat meter very attentively, and follow the pet's lead with attacking. This isn't necessarily just hollow, obsessive perfectionism, either; there are certain situations (such as multi mob tanking) where keeping mobs focused on the pet is vitally important.

Keeping a careful eye on my per-mob mana consumption is also critical; as I've stated before, with Surv anyway, running out of mana will kill me more often than running out of health will. I almost feel like posting in the Suggestion forum and asking if Blizzard could give Survival an equivalent of Spiritual Attunement, but I suspect the thread would get swamped by people telling me that I'm playing the wrong class. ;-)

Speaking of which, Omen 3.0 was released not long ago. It seems that with the new patch, Blizzard have finally released a native API for threat meters, (a wet dream come true, as far as I'm concerned ;-)) which Omen now uses, so I encourage any of you who still don't have it, to go and get it. Truly reliable, up to the second threat monitoring is a real Godsend.

My early AB games went well, but as time went on I began to notice some serious problems. Although I was able to use Bestial Wrath for some much needed vengeance upon the Priest class, (a Shadow Priest is customarily one of my few truly feared enemies with Survival, believe it or not; primarily due to the dreaded Mana Burn and Silence) I had difficulty against other classes.

For one thing, with Survival, I'm used to being able to kite melee classes to death. I hadn't realised, however, just how much apparent tanking was actually involved in said kiting, because as Beast Mastery, Warriors were killing me in 2-3 shots, whereas with Survival it usually took at least a couple more, even when kiting with a trap and Serpent Sting. I did notice that my health was down by around 1.4k as Beast Mastery; this apparently made a real difference. The Warrior is generally my easiest class to kill with Survival.

Given that I had thought BM was our anti-caster tree, the other thing that surprised me was in one particular match, where I started to get almost constantly slaughtered by Warlocks. My theory on that was again the health issue, since draining health is primarily what Warlocks do.

I'm actually torn on whether to keep trying with BM, or simply to go back to Survival. Even though I'm not planning on using BM permanently, part of me feels that in order to be truly proficient as a Hunter, I ought to be at least passably decent with all three trees. I'm wondering if respeccing for Endurance Training and Thick Hide rather than Imp Hawk and Focused Fire would help much. Thoughts?

Big Red Rhino added to my blogroll.

Just added the Big Red Rhino to my blogroll.

His blog is one of the more interesting ones that I've seen for a while; he offers guidance and extensive analysis in the area of pet tanking, with the Tenacity pet talent tree. From what he writes, Tenacity pets are substantially more capable than we may have initially anticipated. Apparently a Tenacity pet recently main tanked Gruul.

Since, as I have already written, Tenacity is likely to be my own primary tree of interest where the new pet talent system is concerned, I will likely be keeping a close eye on his site. It is recommended.

On Survival pet synergy

On looking at a recent entry from Mama Druid a few minutes ago, I noticed she mentions respeccing her Hunter to Beast Mastery, because she felt there wasn't enough synergy with her pet. Pike also made a post about that issue earlier, as well.

I want to talk a bit about this, because I suspect that a rather unfortunate perception has arisen about Survival being (at least potentially) a no-pet-required tree. This topic is also going to go into my rationale for using Survival, more or less in general, since for me, a pet is still very much at the core of the class.

I've written before (at fairly great length, admittedly) about how I feel that Beast Mastery is an offensive spec, whereas Survival is primarily defensive. While that has changed to a degree with WoTLK, (due to Lock and Load, Explosive Shot, and Hunter VS Wild) Blizzard fortunately hasn't ripped the tree completely apart to the degree that I initially feared that they would, and aside from the change to EW, the fundamentals are still there.

That means that a Beast Master's focus is going to be, as Big Red Kitty has often stated, primarily on overwhelming damage. BM was the greatest of our three trees for that before WoTLK, and the word on the forum is that it's still no slouch on the damage meter these days, either. Because of that, a Beast Master is going to want a pet with a high damage output, (a Cat, a Ravager, a Raptor, or possibly still a Wind Serpent) to augment and maximise their own high base damage output.

Something else I also need to mention here is that for Beast Masters, threat isn't quite as much of an issue, I suspect, as it is for me. The reason for this, is that Beast Mastery does so much more damage, that even if they do pull threat, the mob will die more or less a split second after it leaves their pet anyway.

Because of this focus on high damage, Beast Mastery is very good for rapidly killing single (or smaller numbers of multiple) targets. Beast Mastery is also substantially more effective than Survival against caster classes, specifically, in PvP.

On the other hand, Survival's focus, as I said, is on defense. I get +10% Stamina from the Survivalist talent, and I also now get the equivalent of 30% of my Stamina as Attack Power, which, although that translates into damage, gives me an additional incentive to get items with more Stamina on them. With EW nerfed, Surv is also back to having the lowest direct damage output of any of the three trees, even with Hunter Vs Wild. If I spec for Explosive Shot and work very hard, I might just be able to scrape even with Marks, but I'd really have to work for it.

For the last several months, since the Charge nerf, I've had a Wind Serpent as a pet for general use. However, he's a DPS pet, so as Survival, I really don't feel the synergy with him, either. It's because his focus and intent is on DPS primarily, and mine isn't.

My focus isn't on being able to kill single targets as fast as possible, at the expense of threat, like Beast Mastery's is. My focus is on being able to survive an unplanned attack of 4-5 mobs, and kill each one sequentially, while not generating too much threat, so I don't get swamped by all of them at once.

Because of that, I'm a bit less like a Hunter in the exact same sense that Beast Mastery is, and a little more like a Paladin. I'm not an actual Paladin, no, and I wouldn't want to be entirely, (although I do have a Paladin alt, and I love that class as well) but a useful analogy might be to think of a Beast Mastery Hunter as also having some things in common with a Demonology Warlock, (because of the pet) whereas I have more in common with a Ret Paladin. (Remember my Dark Knight post?)

In order to avoid building up threat against a group like that, I have to perform a very delicate balancing act. I need enough damage to sequentially kill mobs reasonably quickly, before they kill the pet, because if the pet dies, I will follow, maybe 2-3 seconds after.

I can't do too much damage however, because if I do, I will pull more threat than the pet, to the point where even Feign Death won't work, and I will get swamped and die. I also need to make sure that my individual attacks don't cost too much mana to use, because if they do, I will run out of mana before the last mob is dead, and being out of mana will kill me before being out of health does; I can't kill a mob quickly with only autoshot.

In that sense, again, Survival is like Retribution. A Ret Paladin without mana is dead, and for me it is exactly the same. I have a lot more health than I do mana, but every ability I use relies on mana, and I have even less mana than a BM Hunter, because I need item space for Agility rather than Intellect. An empty mana pool means no ranged or melee specials; auto attack only. Even more importantly for me, it means no traps, Feign Death, or Mend Pet. I die far more often from running out of mana than I do from running directly out of health.

Paladins have things which I, as a Hunter, don't. They have plate armor, and they also have the (limited) ability to heal themselves. Hence, if Survival is going to be able to handle even small (4-5) groups of mobs, I'm going to need more health and armor than what I alone have. That's why I need a pet. I need a pet to boost my defensive capability, (health and armor) and to juggle threat with, to the exact same degree that a Beast Master needs a pet for damage. If I don't have my pet, against groups, I will die just as quickly as a Beast Master would.

DPS pets also generally have less health and armor as well, in exchange for their high DPS, so that causes me to feel that synergy even less.

Hence, for what I do, I don't want a pet that does a lot of damage, at the expense of less health and armor. I need a pet that is going to be able to take on a lot of mobs, one after the other, and stay alive (while I keep Mend Pet up, of course) for as long as possible.

So I need a pet that:-
a) Has a lot of health and armor.
b) Generates a lot of threat.
c) Preferably has an ability which allows them to get to a mob quickly, so it can begin attacking a mob the instant the mob hits my trap. This positioning is even more important in places where I don't have a lot of room, possibly because of other mobs. Sometimes I need to make sure a mob stays exactly where I want them, because if they're allowed to move around too much, or run away, I can get adds, which depending on the situation, (if it's more than half a dozen) can cause me to die.

If my pet does some damage, that's a bonus, but I'm not looking at it from the point of view of it being bonus damage, but bonus threat, which helps the pet keep the mob away from me.

That's the single most important thing to understand about my approach, in comparison to Pike's, and that of other Beast Masters.

Beast Mastery sees the world in terms of DPS, and wanting to maximise it. I, on the other hand, see the world in terms of threat, and wanting to minimise it, while still doing just enough damage to be able to kill mobs. Damage is actually a secondary priority, because of the fact that I understand that if I'm applying damage in the correct way, (burst for low armor, dots for high) the amount I need on a per-mob basis is generally minimal anyway.

Take a look at the image at the top of the page. ;-) My boar is in that picture, and I still have him. I'm going to spec into Tenacity with him and try it out, and now that we have more stable slots, I'm going to possibly get a Carrion Bird for AoE as well.

Boars, like me, get +10% to their health. Boars also have very high base armor. Boars also still get Charge in the Tenacity tree, (for holding a mob in place over the trap, even when Entrapment or TNT doesn't proc) and they also have another talent called Guard Dog which increases their threat, Blood of the Rhino, and Pet Barding, which add even more to their stamina and armor, respectively.

So in closing, I still do absolutely need pets. Beast Mastery uses a pet as an extension of its' role, which is damage output, and I use a pet as an extension of my role, which is defense. Granted, it might add a bit more direct synergy if Blizz were to add +5% or so directly to pet Stamina as part of the Survivalist talent, but I'm not too bothered if they don't.