Hunter Shot Priorities – Survival

Today I’m going to continue going over Hunter shot priorities for raiding. Consider this part two of my “phoning it in series.” Yesterday I covered Marksman and today I’ll cover Survival.

Again the key to any priority system is to fire your highest damage shot whenever it is available.

SURVIVAL

The primary shots that I use for Survival are,

1 – Kill Shot – This is the money shot. It does the most damage. Use whenever it’s ready.
2 – Black Arrow – In addition to it’s damage it now procs Lock and Load. It has six ranks /wink.
3 – Explosive Shot – It take 51 talent points to get here. I’m guessing it’s pretty good.
4 – Aimed Shot – This is a nice filler when things are on cool down.
5 – Serpent Sting – Nice synergy with Noxious Stings.
6 – Steady Shot – It’s better than nothing. Please weave this in there. I see many people that don’t.

I usually open with Black Arrow but you could just as easily start with Explosive Shot. I also have a tendency to refresh Black Arrow over Explosive Shot as well, but It’s okay (and perhaps more dps) to prioritize Explosive Shot first.

For the most part it’s pretty straight forward until Lock and Load procs. Once that happens it’s all about Explosive Shot.

My personal preferences when it comes to Lock and Load is to,

Fire Explosive Shot – wait – Explosive Shot – wait – Explosive Shot

A lot of people like to weave in an aimed or steady shot between Explosive Shots. The only shot I will weave in is Kill Shot. That shot just rules.

For an in-depth explanation of how to execute Lock and Load I refer you to this post over at OutDps.

In addition to my regular shots I also use Rapid Fire and Kill Command and have them macro’d to all of my shots.

Here is an example of a macro that I use for Explosive Shot.

#show tooltip Explosive Shot
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast Rapid Fire
/cast Kill Command
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/script UIErrorsFrame: Clear()
/cast Explosive Shot

Breakdown by line,

Line 1- This will display the tooltip for Explosive Shot.
Line 2- Turns off the sound effects. This will prevent you from hearing messages like “That spell ins’t ready yet.”
Line 3 – Casts Rapid Fire.
Line 4 – Casts Kill Command.
Line 6 – Enables the sound effects.
Line 7 – Clears text errors such as “That spell isn’t ready yet”.
Line 8 – Casts Explosive Shot.

Well that’s it for today. If you have any suggestions on how to improve my Survival shot priority let me know. Seriously, let me know. We’ve got a level 39 hunter in our guild who just soloed King Bangalash (a level 43 elite) with a cat. Once he starts raiding I may be coming to him for advice. I can’t have that. /gkick maybe?