Survival Hunter DPS Spec, Builds, Talents, and Pet Talents — The War Within (11.0.5)

This is the strongest pure single-target build for Survival and should be used for practically all such scenarios. Its main weakness is downtime, caused especially by your pet being unable to attack for prolonged periods of time. In practice, this is rarely an issue, however, and there is no single-target boss in which I recommend another build.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

This is a solid alternative if you do not prefer Pack Leader's playstyle. It is around 3-4% worse in pure single-target, so I do not recommend it for competitive play. It will also tend to lose even more than Pack Leader in practical situations because of raid bosses frequently moving out of your Lunar Storm circle.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

This build is our default recommendation for Mythic+, as it does not suffer from downtime between pulls like Pack Leader does.

While I strongly recommend that you run the build exactly as listed, there are a few changes you could make to suit your personal preferences, though I cannot stress enough that significant deviations are likely to cost you significant performance. A lot of work went into every talent picked, combining simulations of single-target, pure AoE, and mixed dungeon simulation scenarios with a variety of pull sizes and durations.

The main change you can make is swapping Flanking Strike for Sulfur-Lined Pockets. This saves a keybind and is simpler to play while still being competitive. The main drawback is that because Sulfur-Lined Pockets can "munch" the Explosive Shot procs granted from Bombardier, you cannot control when that powerful triple- Explosive Shot gets fired, even in situations where you would actually rather save it for an upcoming add phase, or larger pack. Still, I recommend this swap if you are new to Survival.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

This build is a viable alternative to Sentinel, but suffers greatly from downtime, and is worse defensively as well.

It is very similar to our Raid AoE Build for Pack Leader, but we sacrifice some more single-target to do AoE, while also simplifying our rotation by getting rid of Flanking Strike and Sic 'Em.

While I strongly recommend that you run the build exactly as listed, there are a few changes you could make to suit your personal preferences, though I cannot stress enough that significant deviations are likely to cost you significant performance. A lot of work went into every talent picked, combining simulations of single-target, pure AoE, and mixed dungeon simulation scenarios with a variety of pull sizes and durations.

• Ruthless Marauder can be swapped to Flanking Strike for a little more single-target and priority-target damage, but an extra button in your rotation.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

This is my recommended build for Raid encounters that feature significant AoE. It seeks to keep as much of Survival's single-target power as possible. We shift out of the heavily single-target-focused Spearhead nodes and collect powerful AoE nodes in Tactical Advantage, Explosives Expert, and Fury of the Eagle. We lose 5% of our max single-target potential to do significantly more AoE across the board, particularly in bursty scenarios which Fury of the Eagle excels at.

Survival has several talents that lets us basically choose what our cooldown cadence should be. This build is a 2-minute build by default, but if you find that a fight's add spawns demand a 1-minute cadence, then you can choose Symbiotic Adrenaline instead of Relentless Primal Ferocity to facilitate this.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

The Delves build is very similar to our Mythic+/AoE build, but grabs some talents that bolster pet tanking survivability in Wilderness Medicine and No Hard Feelings.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!