Test Driving Survival  

21Jan09 15:58 CST
I am officially 7/13/51 until the mess that is the Beast Mastery tree, and the whole exotic pet situation, sort themselves out.

It feels a bit like new clothes, nice, but unfamiliar. After some theorycrafting with Shandara's DPS Spreadsheet, I used a training dummy session as proof of concept. Initial numbers were a little dissapointing. I found myself clocking about 1750 DPS sustained (only 250 or so from my cat), and pushing 2000 if I started burning cooldowns.

Decent, but not what I'm used to. Two main factors were really throwing off the test. One, random latency spikes of 3 - 500 ms make getting into a rhythm with the rotation difficult. Two, a target dummy is mechanical, and therfore untrackable. So Improved Tracking does not function in the test environment. I can compensate in my calculations, but it's not as easy as applying a 5% increase across the board.

Improved Tracking increases all Non-Periodic damage done to the target by 5%. The means it does not apply to stings, traps, explosive shots, or pet Damage over Time effects. What does that leave? If your a survival hunter Auto Shot, Steady Shot, and in my case my Cat's claw ability. Recount tells me these three things account for about 57% of my total DPS, after applying the 5% damage buff to these abilities from Improved Tracking, it seems it's about a 2.85% buff to total DPS or 57 at 2000 DPS.

I'll be running with Glyphs of Steady Shot, Serpent Sting, and Immolation Trap for trap dancing. Between the trap mastery talent, and the glyph, immolation trap hits like a truck for 4700 damage over 9 seconds. Granted, you can only trap the target and trigger Lock 'n Load (LnL) once per 30 seconds, but averaged out this is another 156 DPS. Add the extra Explosive shots chance from LnL, and trap dancing should be a good 2 - 300 DPS ahead.

The rotation is simple, it looks something like this. When one reaches the end it starts over, rinse and repeat. This refreshes Serpent Sting at slightly less than the 21 seconds, to ensure it doesn't fall off, and blast Explosive Shot every time it's up.

LnL rotation is equally simple, just popping Explosive Shots and slipping a Steady Shot in between each one, to avoid clipping the last tick of the damage over time effect off the previous Explosive Shot. The Final Shot in the LnL rotation becomes the first shot in the normal damage rotation, and the cycle continues.

Survival scaled remarkably well with raid buffs, and I'm hoping to see what kind of numbers I put up in Naxxramas tonight.