Sunday, December 19, 2010

So You Want to be Heroic SV, eh?



Well then it's time for a little rundown of how to spec properly to perform admirably and kill things efficiently. But not only that, we currently need CC in pretty much every heroic and we just happen to have a CC that's pretty much universal. I'll go over that post spec development.

Here's what I have yet to actually gotten around to changing my talents to but I'm pretty sure would prove the most beneficial to you: 0/9/32 aka:
You'll notice that there are some fun little things like Trap Mastery and Survival Tactics and some may be wondering "WTF, where's teh pure deeps?" Well that's wrong of you to think. Bad. Bad person. No cookie for you. Plus if you look at it the only other really viable options there are Hunter vs. Wild and Point of No Escape. But for very valid reasons, which I'll discuss after the rest of the spec breakdown, Trap Mastery and Survival Tactics are your best bets.

Tier by Tier Breakdown


SV is now the perma-fast spec. Crazy, I know, BM got booted out of that spot when it lost Serpent's Swiftness. Pathing helps with that, and haste is your best friend now that most of our abilities trigger only a 1 second GCD. Well maybe not BEST friend, but definitely a great companion. Improved serpent sting is pretty much raw damage increase hidden in neat little side effects. No strict % increase damage, but it does initial damage and has a higher crit chance, both of which prove very useful.


I may have mentioned something about CC earlier. These are big ones to make sure you can actually do it. Trap mastery jacks up your freezing time to 1 minute and 18 seconds, (1.3 minutes), and Survival Tactics reduces the chance it's resisted. That along with being appropriately hit capped should ensure that your trap (if placed properly) works every time. The other side effects are nice, and trap mastery does improve overall damage done, but I like it for the CC enhancing personally.


Focus regen for our 2 major shots? Yes please! And LnL is an absolute must as SV, plus if you're freezing stuff you get it to proc immediately, killing mobs faster, meaning less worry for the tank and healer.

Tier 4: 3/3 Resourcefulness, 2/2 T.N.T.

Faster traps and Black Arrow is always a good thing, especially if you miss seeing and invisible wall behind you and you launch your trap onto it so then it's just floating there. Stupid invisible walls. And T.N.T. makes your lock and load proc from doing damage a couple different ways (both having proved their usefulness to me in heroics fairly recently).


So looks like we took everything this tier had to offer. That's 'cause they're all sweet. Toxicology doubles crit damage from Serpent Sting and Black Arrow. Wyvern Sting...well that's actually more mandatory than awesome, but It's definitely proven useful when tanks don't realize that mages can't sheep dragonkin. Noxious Stings is damage improvement while Serpent Sting is up (you may notice a theme here...) and Hunting Party is physical haste to you and your party, and like I said before Haste is a great companion.


Hunters do their optimal DPS while standing still, Sniper Training utilizes that to enhance your damage potential. Serpent Spread, while it may look somewhat bothersome and not worth it, is probably one of my favorite talents. You know those times when there's just a craptonne of little mobs and everyone's AoE does like zero damage?*cough*whelps*cough* Well the mechanic behind serpent spread negates that problem (to a degree, your multishot will still do very little damage). It applies serpent sting at half its normal duration but otherwise the same as your regular one to everything that multishot hits. It's not treated like an AoE, it's treated like I individually targeted each of them and applied the DoT. That mixed in with Improved Serpent Sting means you can do the most AoE damage on massive groups out of any class/spec. And even on small groups it's still very useful, and coupled with Trap Launcher + Explosive Trap, you've got yourself entirely viable AoE now that we don't have Volley.

Tier 7: The Final Tier, Black Arrow

It's pretty much the same as it's always been. 15 second uptime, does damage, increases damage done, chance to proc Lock and Load. Still useful and something you shouldn't be without.

Now that we've got SV fleshed out nicely, where do we go from here?

I'll tell you where, the MM tree. The first two tiers of BM just don't have anything very worthwhile as an SV hunter.

MM tier 1: 2/2 Go For the Throat, 3/3 Efficiency

It's always nice to have your pet do more damage, focus regen for your pet is gonna be more useful to you than Rapid Killing is. Efficiency is kind of a no-brainer. Lower costing Explosive and Arcane shots? Yeah, definitely a good thing.

MM tier 2: 2/2 Sic 'em!, 3/3 Careful Aim

More pet damaging skeels! And Careful Aim is a pretty potent skill for what is the starting equivalent of the Killshot health range. Actually, I'm kinda torn between 2/2 Sic 'Em! and 2/3 One with Nature, though the focus regen of AotF is only when you take melee damage, so it's not really that great for PvE.

SPEC OVER, DISCUSSION BEGIN!

Alright, so spec's been hashed out. Shot Priority time, goes like this:

Kill Shot > Black Arrow > Explosive Shot > Arcane Shot > Serpent Sting > Cobra Shot

That's the general priority, but Focus conservation comes into play quite majorly when attempting to optimize damage output. Basically what that comes down to is this: You're Explosive Shot has only got 1/4 of its CD left, and you've got enough time for either an Arcane Shot or a Cobra Shot, but not enough focus to use both Arcane Shot then Explosive Shot. What do you do?

Answer: Cobra Shot. Focus regen, and Explosive Shot is undoubtedly a higher priority than Arcane Shot. Basically, you only ever want to use Arcane shot when you've got an excess of Focus, which does happen every now and again, but more often than not you're going to rely more on Cobra Shot for those times when your major 2 shots are on CD. Plus Cobra Shot increases the duration of Serpent sting, so you rarely ever have to re-apply it on boss fights, unless there's big adds that need killing. Which happens.

Mkay, shot priority's done...what's next...CCing I guess.

Trap Launcher + Freezing Trap. If the tank likes you, he'll let you pull with it. If he doesn't, well then your attempts to freeze stuff have to be placed in a spot where the mob will run over/near. And if no one else has viable CC, you do technically have 2 CCing skills. Just make sure that the Sleeping one is higher on the kill order than the frozen mob.

Pet options, there are so many of them! It comes down to what buff they'll provide and group composition a lot of the time, so if you've got a dedicated group of people you run with, you can cater to it and support the team. But if you don't want to have to worry about that and are just using the dungeon finder a lot, go with something like a Wolf, Cat or Raptor. I like using a wolf, increased crit chance is always nice, especially for SV hunters (though it doesn't stack with Leader of the Pack).

And with that I think I've covered just about everything I need to for Cataclysm Heroic SV huntering basics (spec and priority, I'm still not entirely certain about secondary stat importance). Most of it will apply to raiding too, so this should carry over into it nicely.

Cheers,
~Tox


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