Survival Hunter PvP Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

Survival Hunter is a powerful Hunter specialization with high burst and overall damage, strong mobility and crowd control potential.

The Survival Hunter damage rotation leaves a lot of space for skill expression and outplay potential. Survival is a hybrid between ranged and melee DPS, where much of the rotation can be done from range, and getting into melee range is only required when dumping focus with Raptor Strike/ Mongoose Bite and for using Muzzle.

The Survival Hunter rotation in The War Within does not require you to apply dots before being able to do meaningful burst damage, meaning that you are free to swap targets at short notice with low opportunity cost. Coordinated Assault has been entirely reworked and can be played as a one-minute offensive cooldown ( Symbiotic Adrenaline) or into one of the most dangerous offensive cooldowns in the game ( Relentless Primal Ferocity).

Survival cleaves a lot in its rotation, and in The War Within Explosive Shot becomes more central to the rotation with new talents Grenade Juggler and the newly designed Bombardier. Wildfire Bomb damage over time effect now rolls over, meaning Survival Hunters do not need to wait for the effect to end before throwing their next bomb.

Doing maximum damage as Survival in The War Within now revolves around consuming a Tip of the Spear whenever using your heavy hitters.

There is flexibility in the PvP talents available, with niche utility options that aren't available to Beast Mastery or Survival Hunters ( Sticky Tar Bomb, Mending Bandage and Tracker's Net).

Once you are comfortable weaving in and out of melee range during your burst windows, kiting in-between, timing your crowd control windows, and maximizing your consistent damage outside of cooldowns, Survival is an incredibly fun and rewarding specialization.

Survival rewards opportunistic and aggressive play as well as knowing when and how to kite between damage windows. You win by setups, burst, and punishing enemies that misuse defensives or position poorly. Survival is not a spec that wins by one-shotting, and playing to maximize damage done (and reduce damage taken) is how it competes with other specializations that may be more forgiving when it comes to burst or crowd control.

• Kill Shot and Black Arrow will now appropriately damage their primary target when out of combat.

• Deathblow no longer incorrectly has a reduced chance to proc in PvP instances.
• Pack Leader: An issue preventing Frenzied Tear from activating consistently has been corrected.
• Resolved an issue that was causing Wildfire Bomb to consume multiple stacks of Tip of the Spear per cast.
• Pack Leader: Scattered Prey will now correctly increase Butchery's damage for Survival Hunters.

These bug fixes will help Survival in arena. The particularly important one is the Deathblow fix, which had made the talent Sic 'Em obsolete following the 10.0.5 rework.

The fix to Scattered Prey makes it a competitive option on the choice node with Covering Fire, but as most of the damage from Butchery comes from Merciless Blows rather than Butchery itself, Covering Fire will likely remain the more reliably powerful talent.

• New Talent: Deathblow. Kill Command has a 10% chance to grant Deathblow. Deathblow: The cooldown of Kill Shot is reset. Your next Kill Shot can be used on any target, regardless of their current health.
• Steady Shot now generates 10 Focus baseline for all specs.
• Tranquilizing Shots empowered by Kodo Tranquilizer will now prioritize players.
• Improved Kill Shot has been removed.

Developer's note: Each Hunter specialization has a way to generate Deathblow, but only Marksmanship referred to it as Deathblow. These changes are meant to unify the Deathblow design while still allowing each specialization to interface with it in a unique way.

• Howl of the Pack now also increases Wildfire Bomb damage by 20%.
• Wild Attacks now also increases the damage of Raptor Strike/ Mongoose Bite by 20%.

• Lunar Storm's visual effects have been updated.
• Symphonic Arsenal damage increased by 200% (for Survival only).

• Ruthless Marauder has been redesigned. Fury of the Eagle's damage is increased by 10% and damage from Fury of the Eagle has a 20% chance to generate a stack of Tip of the Spear. When Fury of the Eagle ends, your Haste is increased by 8% for 10 seconds. Now a 1-point talent.
• Merciless Blows has been redesigned. Butchery causes affected targets to bleed for heavy damage over 8 seconds.
• Sic 'Em has been updated. Kill Command's chance to grant Deathblow is increased to 15% and Deathblow now makes Kill Shot strike up to 2 additional targets. Your chance to gain Deathblow is doubled during Coordinated Assault.
• Exposed Flank has been updated. Now empowers your next Kill Command to deal 50% increased damage, strike 3 targets, and generate a Tip of the Spear stack for each target it hit.
• Grenade Juggler has been updated. Now resets the cooldown of Explosive Shot instead of automatically firing it. Developer's note: By allowing you to manually fire Explosive Shot, we can open up this talent's ability to synergize with existing effects (like Grenade Juggler's own cooldown reduction) while also eliminating some frustrating edge-cases.
• Butchery damage increased by 50%.
• Butchery no longer has charges and its cooldown has been increased to 15 seconds.
• Fury of the Eagle damage increased by 25%.
• Fury of the Eagle channel time reduced to 3 seconds (was 4 seconds).
• Fury of the Eagle now consumes a stack of Tip of the Spear when the channel begins, and the damage bonus will persist for the duration of the channel.
• Kill Command resets no longer reduce the cooldown of Fury of the Eagle.
• Tip of the Spear's consumption grace period has been reduced to 0.3 seconds (was 0.7 seconds).
• Relentless Primal Ferocity now grants 2 additional stacks of Tip of the Spear (was 1).
• Frenzy Strikes Wildfire Bomb cooldown reduction per target hit increased to 3 seconds (was 1 second).
• Killer Companion now increases Kill Command's damage by 10/20% (was 5/10%).
• Bombardier's aura is now removed at more reasonable times.
• Spearhead's cast animation now blends with other animations.
• Spearhead will no longer go on cooldown if the pet is out of range.
• Ranger and Terms of Engagement have swapped positions in the talent tree.
• Harpoon will now find an appropriate destination during the Rasha'nan fight in The Dawnbreaker dungeon.

This rework finally brings Pack Leader in-line with Sentinel. The 20% additional damage to Wildfire Bomb and Raptor Strike/ Mongoose Bite is a huge swing in what the Pack Leader tree brings to the table.

Meanwhile, the heavy increase to both the damage and cooldown of Butchery combined with the new damage over time effect Merciless Blows creates a lot of potential new talent builds, especially in area of effect scenarios. Survival Hunters will not only do huge area of effect damage, but also be able to to "funnel" that damage (increase single target damage by doing area of effect damage) using the synergy between Butchery resetting the cooldown of Wildfire Bomb via Frenzy Strikes, and Wildfire Bomb reducing the cooldown of Butchery via Covering Fire.

Incorporating Butchery into your rotation may require a slight adjustment in playstyle for some, as you will want to use it as often as possible, which will require moving into melee range regularly.

The rework to Grenade Juggler also gives Survival Hunters a higher degree of control over their rotation and in particular, whether their rotation will break crowd control at inconvenient moments. The reduction is randomness here also makes it easier to play around the breakable version of Freezing Trap instead of taking Diamond Ice.

Despite the buff to Relentless Primal Ferocity, Survival Hunters are going to be encouraged to stick with Symbiotic Adrenaline to have higher uptime on Vicious Hunt and Pack Coordination during their Coordinated Assault, due to the Pack Leader capstone, Pack Assault.

Survival Hunters playing Pack Leader for the first time will also appreciate the additional on-demand survivability from Den Recovery as well as well as neat tricks such as catching someone off-guard with a Muzzle outside of melee range using extended Cornered Prey range.

It is possible that the Fury of the Eagle changes will make it powerful in certain matchups, but the talent options for Survival are so strong, and Fury of the Eagle so easy to get countered on, that it's unlikely to be played with any consistency.

• Survival of the Fittest now provides 25% damage reduction in PvP combat (was 30%).
• Survival Tactics (PvP Talent) now has a 2 second duration (was 3 seconds).

• Sentinel: Don't Look Back effectiveness reduced by 50% in PvP combat.

• Nerub-ar Palace 2-Set Bonus: Now increases Wildfire Bomb damage by 8% (was 5%).
• Nerub-ar Palace 4-Set Bonus: Now increases Raptor Strike/ Mongoose Bite damage by 20% on targets affected by Wildfire Bomb (was 10%).

This round of PvP tuning aims to reduce Hunter's survivability. The nerf to Survival Tactics particularly will make it so that you are less likely to survive a stun using only a pre- Feign Death.

The nerf to Don't Look Back in the Sentinel tree has indirectly made Pack Leader a more viable defensive choice because Den Recovery has not been reduced.

The damage buffs to the 2-set and 4-set Survival tier bonuses are a welcome change, although as three of the five tier set pieces have Critical Strike rating and Mongoose Bite/ Raptor Strike are not a major portion of Survival's damage, you may still prefer to run only the 2-set instead of taking the 4-set bonus, for the slightly better stat distribution.

• Vicious Hunt damage decreased by 10% for Survival.
• Howl of the Pack critical strike damage bonus increased to 11% for Survival (was 7%).
• Furious Assault damage bonus increased to 60% for Survival (was 30%).
• Cull the Herd damage over time increased to 60% for Survival (was 30%).

The nerf to Vicious Hunt and buffs to Howl of the Pack, Furious Assault and Cull the Herd are aimed at making sure that Kill Command does not take priority over other heavy hitters in your rotation when playing Pack Leader. Even with the adjustments, this does not affect the recommended Survival talent trees because Sentinel simply provides more damage than the bonuses from the Pack Leader Hero Talent tree.

If you are running Pack Leader, for example in double DPS 2v2 to benefit from the on-demand healing from Den Recovery, you should try to align Spearhead with Howl of the Pack procs to get the maximum benefit, although if the timing isn't ideal it is fine to use Spearhead even without the proc.

The Furious Assault and Cull the Herd are nice passive damage increases that do somewhat close the gap between Pack Leader and Sentinel.

• On the Survival Hunter PvP Talents page, you will find an analysis of the talents available to Survival Hunters, as well as an overview of the PvP talents, with advice on which ones to take and under which conditions.
• On the Survival Hunter PvP Pets page, you will find an overview of the advantages of each pet type with advice on which ones to take and under which conditions.
• On the Survival Hunter PvP Rotation and Playstyle page, you will learn how to use your spells, depending on the situation (dealing damage, surviving, controlling enemy players, etc.), and what is generally expected of your class and spec in PvP.
• On the Survival Hunter PvP Stat Priority and Gear page, you will find the stat priority to follow in PvP, as well as advice for choosing your gear, which may vary depending on your playstyle and composition.
• On the Survival Hunter PvP Best Races page, you will find lists of the Alliance and Horde races, ranked by how good they are for Survival Hunters in PvP, as well as explanations regarding why and how their racials benefit you.
• On the Survival Hunter PvP Useful Macros page, you will find a collection of useful PvP macros for Survival Hunters.
• On the Survival Hunter Arena Composition page, you will find the list of the most powerful Arena compositions featuring Survival Hunters in both 2v2 and 3v3 modes.
• On the Survival Hunter in Battleground Blitz page, you will find a summary of how to play Survival in Battleground Blitz specifically, including the playstyle, role in specific battlegrounds, talent builds, and macros.