Papi Xooll's Survival hunter PVP guide
Alright, so I'm not the best in writing pretty guides, but since I've been having a lot of requests for it the past week, I'll give it a shot! It's not really a guide, more if a help-like thingy.. post.. with tips and gear options and advice..
Anyway.
So who am I?
My name is Xooll and I am a big fan of unconventional builds and playstyles. After getting bored of Marksmanship, I tried BM hunter. This was fun for a little, but since I rarely play arenas, and only do battlegrounds/world pvp, this was not the spec for me. After a while of searching, I ended up with trying out Survival. I heard everyone say that it was bad, couldn't find proper guides on it.. But instead of finding that de-motivating, it started to intrigue me more and more.
Not knowing what gear and talent setup to use, I came up with the following:
Head: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51460
Neck: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51822
Shoulders: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51462
Back: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=47545 (or the horde version of course)
Chest: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51458
Bracers: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51352
Hands: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51459
Waist: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51350
Legs: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51461
Feet: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=54577
Ring: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=50618
Ring: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=54576
Trinket: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51377
Trinket: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=50363
Weapon1: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51522
Weapon 2: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51522
Bow: http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=50733
So so here I gem 2x43 spell pen and 2x25, giving me 136 spell pen to deal with most resistances. Trust me, you'll want that amount. It will increase your damage a lot. The rest I gem all yellow slots with resil, all red slots with 10 agil/10 resil. This will give you somewhere around 1225 resilience.
Make sure you use titanium weapon-chain on one of your weapons and get 3% hit from your talents. This will put you at 5.25% hit, so you should be good. Don't waste any gems on att power or arp. You want agility and crit. Also, in contrast to some weird popular believe, don't just go full wrathful and gem stamina: this does 0 damage, really.
With the build I just recommended, when everything procs, you'll have over 9k ranged att power easily.
Play around with the talents however you want. If you don't know what works for you, you shouldn't try play survival yet. The only thing I'd say is mandatory is glyph of explosive shot.
I do have to say, I use this build when doing solo world pvp. Combined with Engineering, buffs and potions, I'm basically unkillsble and have stable dps. Not the highest, but with the abilities survival gives, you have insane outplay potential.
When playing battlegrounds with my guild, I know I have proper protection, peels and heals. So in this case, I just use full BiS pve gear, not with Ashens Ring, but the previously mentioned two. Since this comes with a lot of damage already, I make sure to gem into 1400 armor pen. This way not only cloth wearing classes melt, but plates too. Only run this of you're sure your team is peeling for you and you have good heals. Because with full pve gear, rogues are drooling to kill you. If you're just queueing solo, run with the first build.
As with the first gear set, even in full pve gear you HAVE to run 135 spell pen, same way as with the other build (2x43 +2x25). This increases your damage a lot. Sometimes when queueing AV in full pve gear with my guild, I actually run Glyph of Explosive Trap. This makes my explosive traps able to crit, doing up to 2.8k damage/tick.
If you wonder what talents I am personally running with feel free to look me up on the armory. I have one talent set with 3% hit for the 1200 resil gear-set, and one with 1% hit for the full pve set.
The reason I'm not putting talents in this "guide" is just because I'm writing this quickly on my phone, don't know how to do it, and also feel that the talents in the Survival tree have a lot of different options to choose from. What I mean by that, is that there are multiple playstyles to create. You have full damage options with stuff like "Sniper Training", melee stuff like "Counter Attack", etc. Anyway, try out some different builds and have fun with it.
As a little last word id like to say that Survival is a talent tree that is very unexplored and unappreciated. It has a bad name, because of guides where people say "go full WF". I'm all honestly, after playing all 3 specs for a while, I dare to say that SV doesn't underdo MM in open world pvp or battlegrounds at all. It is a spec you can really adapt to your own playstyles, which is great. If you're an experienced hunter that wants to try something different, then this might be the route for you to take.
A special thanks to Greatjon for his advice, help with the damage spec and being a great inspiration. Also thanks to Snoosnoo aka Chad for coming up with the title of this post.
And of course a shout out to all my bois and grills in Old Division.
