Gemming for Survival

In the Burning Crusade, gems for hunters went as such - Agi, Agi, Agi.

In the world of Wrath, where the old be-all-reign-all spec was BM, and where pet attack power scaled with its owners', BM hunters were encouraged to gem for Attack Power. Trueshot Aura now scaled to 10% of AP instead of giving just a flat 120.

Gemming for Survival is easy. If you're a BC-baby like me, you won't have any problems. Just keep stacking Agi gems like you used to. Spread out into other gems for Metas and socket bonuses if you must, but Agi conquers all.

Why? Agility is the reigning stat for Surv hunters. In BC, there used to be a minimum amount of Agi you needed before you could spec Surv to raid.

Expose Weakness grants 10% of our Agi in a fight whenever we have the buff up. (And if you have a decent amount of crit, it'll be up at least 98% of the time in boss fights) Agi contributes to Crit, which is what Surv is all about. Agi scales with Kings.

You could gem for Crit of course, but it's highly inadvisable and just plain silly.

Here's a list of gems that have Agi as a stat on them. I'll only include Wrath blue-quality ones here, since the BC gems are pretty much irrelevant now. If you want to look for the BC-era (or Wrath green-quality) gems, just plug in the name of it (eg. Delicate for Agi gem) into a search engine like Wowhead.

Red
Delicate Scarlet Ruby

Orange
Deadly Monarch Topaz (personal fav)
Deft Monarch Topaz
Glinting Monarch Topaz
Lucent Monarch Topaz

Purple
Shifting Shadow Crystal
There is supposed to be a blue-quality version of this gem... except Blizz apparently forgot to put it in the game. The best avaliable now is of course the Perfect version of this.

And finally, the gem that I really wish they didn't make - Tenuous Twilight Opal. I can understand Enhancement Shamans or maybe Ret Paladins wanting it, but with the ability to regen mana whenever we want (Viper!), I really don't think its a wise choice of gem for any hunter. And especially for Surv, where we get AP from Stam.

HUNTERS SHOULD NEVER STACK MP5.

Thank you.

Sapphire Hive Queen and PTR update

It seems those who were able to tame the Sapphire Hive Queen before this patch comes out will be able to keep it. There's a slight bug with the stables though, and you won't be able to view her in the stables window.

The proc chance of Lock and Load has also been increased in the latest version of the PTR from maxed 7% to 10% from Serpent Sting. It's not as much as I hoped for... but it's better than nothing I suppose. I don't see it proc much more often than before, so I really don't see much difference. :\

Maybe the RNG gods aren't with me today. And I still think they should increase it to at least 50% and have some sort of visible way to track the cooldown. (Perhaps a debuff, like how Heart of the Phoenix places a debuff on you once you use it...)

On the topic of the PTR... gonna have a slight rant about huntards again. There was this guy in Trade complaining about how Explosive Shot sucked. I so happened to run into him at the training dummies, and of course inspected him... My god, he was rocking with the Armor Plated Combat Shotgun, Vereesa's Chain Belt with a 24 Stam gem, and a really, REALLY bad Surv spec. It had points in Deflection and Counterattack instead of Survivalist and Hunter vs. Wild, and no points into Hunting Party.

I kinda cracked, /facepalm'd, and went off at him saying not to complain about his dps because he had a bad spec and bad gear. So what does he do? He ran off, and copied my spec. Argh. God I hate it when people do that. When are people going to learn that spec =/= skill?

How to: Thaddius (heroic) video

We finally downed Thaddius on 25-man tonight, along with Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad.

Sadly, no Envoy of Mortality for me yet. :( Also lost a roll on Drape of the Deadly Foe, le sigh.

Anyways, the video shows how I do things as Surv... because yeah, I stayed Surv for 25s this week, hehe. I wanted to see how it'd hold up against BM/Readiness, and surprisingly, it's pretty good. Notice the trap dancing on the adds. It would have been impossible to trap dance safely with the charges though, so the only time I can proc LnL from traps is to drop a trap when running from negative to positive side.

More experimenting with Surv

As mentioned in a previous post, I thought I'd save 10mans for Survival testing. Well, tonight was the guild's weekly 10man Naxx, and I thought I'd try out a different spec from last week.

This week, I put in that one point in Go for the Throat (which in my haste last week I forgot to do) which was suggested on the EJ Surv hunter thread.

Instead of putting full points into Sniper Training and 1 in Imp. Feign Death, I decided to go Trap Mastery and Resourcefulness this time. Because this was a clean run of Naxx (as opposed to just two bosses like last week), I had more opportunities to use Explosive Shot's AoE capability.

My main rotation on trash would be to wait for tank to pick up and establish aggro, run in and drop an Explosive Trap, wait for Lock and Load to proc, use up L&L's charges, and then Volley until Explosive Shot is off cooldown.

Usually, after proccing L&L, you can just sit back and literally listen to the fireworks. It's like music.

What surprised me though, is that I topped dps for most bosses. (Of course discounting the fact that we'd taken a few undergeared people in to get some loots for them...) There were a few fights were our Fury TG Warrior out dpsed me, but that was by a rather small margin and so I don't really mind.

Since there is no WWS report tonight, I can't really tell how well Replenishment went for the raid.

See that Explosive Shot three in a row crit? Oh yeah baby...

Thoughts on Survival

Against my better judgement, I respecced Survival for our guild's 10man Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad kills tonight. One of the new healers who'd just dinged - a CoH priest - was complaining of going oom halfway through the fight because we didn't have a Replenishment class. So I decided to take a dive into the deep end and throw dps out the window while I did so.

So I dragged my ass down to IF, respecced, and banged on the Heroic Training Dummy for a while, figuring out a good rotation. Right after that, I got asked on a heroic Halls of Lightning run, where I was mildly surprised by the dps output it was doing, especially on boss fights. (Hello, 10k Kill Shot crit!) Funny story... we actually killed Loken 5 minutes before the instance reset and I didn't manage to loot my badges, Stone Keeper's Shards or the quest item... boo!

Anyway, I rock up to Sapph, and we down him on the first try. I'd read some surv hunter reports that they'd run up to the boss and drop an Explosive Trap on their heads to proc Lock and Load. While it's not one of the most dignified things to be seen doing, especially on Sapph, it does result in a chain of Explosive Shots, and hey, more crits mean more uptime on Replenishment, right? Absolutely!

I even have a WWS report! It's my first time actually seeing one of these things in action, so bear with me if I'm a bit excited. According to WWS, my Replenishment buff caused our healers to gain an average of 14k mana. It's not stellar as far as mana replenishment goes, but I guess it's not bad? Forgive me if I have no clue how this works for healers...

I came 4th on damage, and 6th on dps for that fight. Not too shabby for damage, but a little lackluster for dps... but I was expecting that.

On to Kel'Thuzad. We wiped the first time due to an unlucky number of mana explosions on one of our druid healers, and an unlucky ice block on the add tank right before the adds came up, but we did get him down to 10%.

Anyways, second attempt went better. Here's the report for those interested. On this fight, Replenishment restored about 15k of healers' mana. I also switched aspects 5 times on the fight, something which is also interesting. As with Sapph, I was periodically running up to KT and dropping a trap. It was actually pretty amusing to hear our DK tank - who is formerly a hunter - ask if he should be doing anything, because he thought it was something the boss did.

Came 3rd on damage and 4th on dps, slightly better than Sapphiron. (It's the not having to move out of blizzards... I swear)

I wasn't feeling on top at the end of the raid, but after our resto druid posted the WWS reports and told me that Replenishment was actually helpful to him on those fights, I kinda feel better now. It is nice to actually have some utility other than just bring the huge numbers in, and I think I will be respeccing for guild 10s to Survival from now on. :)

Special thanks to the guild's resident grumpy resto druid for posting that WWS report!