WotLK Classic Survival Hunter Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

For Hunters, Survival is the best PvE spec for at least the first tier of Wrath. Survival has exceptional base damage, which means you need virtually no gear to start pumping out huge damage in raids. That is not to say Survival does not scale well, just that early content is where it shines the most. Marksmanship will eventually out-scale Survival in later content primarily due to how strong Physical damage spells are with capped ArP.

This is the standard talent build that you should take for raiding and dungeons as a Survival Hunter. There are several points that can potentially be swapped around depending on your gear level and the situation, but ultimately this is close to what your tree will look like.

The first thing you might notice is only 1/2 points in Go for the Throat, but 1 point is all you need to essentially give you pet limitless focus. Similarly, you only need 2/3 points Expose Weakness for 100% uptime, and this even goes down to 1/3 points needed with enough crit much later on.

Hunting Party is another talent where you only need 1/3 points. If you need more hit to reach cap, drop points out of Hunting Party and into Focused Aim. Point for point, 1% Hit is worth far more than 1% Agility, but reaching hit cap should be very easy in raid gear. If your crit is low and you find that your Expose Weakness uptime is too low, feel free to add a point there by taking a point out of Resourcefulness.

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

Improved Tracking is a simple damage increase that gives you 5% more damage against anything you are tracking. Use the macro in our macro guide to automatically track anything you use Hunter's Mark on for the best ease-of-use so you will never forget to have this active.

Trap Mastery is a 30% damage increase to one of your best buttons, Explosive Trap.

Wyvern Sting is a useless button in PvE, but is still required to get to the points below.

Expose Weakness is why Agility is such a valuable stat for Survival Hunters. This gives you a huge AP bonus scaling off your agility with effectively 100% uptime, even with only a single point.

Black Arrow is another ability that is basically useless. You will only ever cast this in situations where getting a Explosive Trap off is impossible or impractical. Even with 6% increase damage taken, the damage difference between it and Explosive Trap is just not comparable.

Hunting Party is a necessary source of the replenishment buff for groups, but this talent itself is actually quite weak point for point. There are some builds that choose to drop this completely for points elsewhere, but in general it is still worth taking, especially since you need the mana reduction above on longer fights.

Explosive Shot is the best rotational ability that you have. This one attack will do 40% of your total damage on single target encounters and is what your entire build is based around.

Go for the Throat is a 1-point wonder. A single point in this talent gives your pet unlimited focus, which is a huge increase in the number of abilities it can cast. Do not miss this talent.

Aimed Shot is worthwhile, but not as huge of a point as people would realize. It shares a cooldown with Multi-Shot, which makes it only an increase in your rotation due to the extra damage from Sniper Training.

Glyph of Explosive Shot increases the crit chance of your Explosive Shot by 4%. Explosive Shot is your strongest and most important ability, so buffing it is an easy choice.

Glyph of Kill Shot reduces the cooldown of your Kill Shot by 6 seconds. Kill Shot is your hardest hitting ability by far, so getting more in per fight is an excellent choice.

Glyph of Explosive Trap enables the ticking damage from your Explosive Trap to crit. Now that we have Trap Launcher, you will always take this glyph in all situations.

Glyph of Mend Pet slightly increases your pet's happiness, which means you should not need to feed it anymore. It is a nice quality of life glyph.

Glyph of Feign Death reduces the cooldown of Feign Death by 5 seconds.

Glyph of Revive Pet makes it so you no longer get spell push-back when taking damage while casting Revive Pet.