How To Improve As Survival Hunter — Shadowlands 9.1
On this page, you will find out how you can improve at playing Survival Hunter in World of Warcraft — Shadowlands 9.1. We list the common mistakes that you should try to avoid and the small details that can greatly improve your performance.
Common Survival Hunter Mistakes
Overcapping on Focus
With 
Kill Command generating a healthy amount of Focus,
and 
Raptor Strike being relatively cheap, it is easy to reach
maximum Focus too often. On one hand, you want to never delay Kill Command too
much. On the other hand, you do not want to waste the Focus that it generates.
You should always use Raptor Strike enough to prevent you from ever capping
on Focus, without letting Kill Command be off cooldown for too long. The goal
is always to maximize Focus generation and spending.
(Not) Knowing How To Sim Yourself
It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Survival Hunter without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.
On top of this, simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.
How To Analyze Your Mistakes as a Survival Hunter
When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.
Changelog
- 28 Jun. 2021: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.1.
- 23 Nov. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Page updated for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
More Hunter Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Azortharion, a theorycrafter of all things Hunter-related for many years. He is an accomplished player with dozen of top parses for all specs throughout the game's history. He is also the Admin of Trueshot Lodge, the Hunter Class Discord, and you can watch his stream on Twitch. He even has his own personal Discord channel where you can get notifications about when the guides get updated and have direct communications with him.
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