TBC Classic Survival Hunter Spec, Builds, and Talents

For Hunters, Survival is a strong PvE spec, but is worse than Beast Mastery for personal DPS. Every raid will want exactly one Survival Hunter purely because of Expose Weakness. This talent is incredibly valuable and is one of the best talents in the game in terms of raid-wide DPS increases for physical DPS. However, you only need one application per raid - multiple Survival Hunters cannot stack it.

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Hunters.

This is the standard talent build that you should take for raiding and dungeons as a Survival Hunter. Because Mortal Shots is such an important talent, most PvE builds for Hunter are locked into a minimum of 20 points into the Marksmanship tree.

Most of the points in this tree are just taking the damage options down the tree. The optional points here are in Savage Strikes, which you could choose to put wherever you want if you plan to never melee weave ever. Deterrence is also not necessary, and you could also move the point around wherever you want. For instance, if you value AoE you might want 2 points into Clever Traps for more Explosive Trap damage.

Every other point in the Survival tree is set. You will notice that we skip over Counterattack and Wyvern Sting. These have basically no use in PvE, but if you really wanted to take them you could drop some points in Mortal Shots for them, or take 2 points out of Thrill of the Hunt, but your Mana efficiency would suffer.

In the Marksmanship tree, the only choice is where to put your second 5 points. You can choose either Efficiency or Improved Hunter's Mark. If you are the only Hunter in your raid, then Improved Hunter's Mark is required since it is a huge boost to all melee. If you are not the Hunter that will be using Hunter's Mark, then you could choose to use Efficiency instead and save some Mana.