Survival Hunter DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Shadowlands 9.2.5
On this page, you will find the best gear and best in slot items for your Survival Hunter in World of Warcraft Shadowlands 9.2.5.
If you were looking for TBC Classic content, please refer to our TBC Classic Survival Hunter gear and best in slot.
Gearing a Survival Hunter
Welcome to our Gearing Page for Survival Hunter, this section will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.
For more detailed information on Stat Priority, please visit our Stats page.
For more detailed information on Gems and Enchants, please visit our Gems and Enchants page.
We also have a page dedicated to simulations for different aspects of your character. These can be found on our Simulationspage.
Tier Set Bonuses
The Tier Set Bonus for Survival Hunter can be obtained from the Raid, as well as the Weekly Great Vault. Tier bonuses exist on Helm, Shoulders, Chest, Gloves, and Legs, and you need 4 pieces to complete the set. The bonuses are as follows:
Survival Hunter 2-Piece — When
Kill Command resets, it has a 40% chance to make your next
Wildfire Bomb incur no cooldown.
Survival Hunter 4-Piece — Your
Wildfire Bombs deal 30% additional damage. This bonus is increased to 80% for bombs empowered by the 2pc bonus.
The set bonuses in combination are extremely strong for all situations, but especially AoE.
Since you only need 4 pieces while there are 5 in total, this means that you
can omit one piece in favour of a stronger one with better stats, or higher item
level. The most obvious candidate for this is omitting the Legs in favour of the
Epochal Oppressor's Greaves from The Jailer, which are 7 iLvls
higher than the tier legs.
You can also use the open slot for a Legendary craft, provided that you have the other 4 pieces required to finish the set. Legs are another good candidate for this, but so is the Chest and Helm.
In the longer term, you can use the Creation Catalyst to convert any
item of the aforementioned slots into a Tier item, retaining its item level and tertiary stats. This means that you could convert the
Epochal Oppressor's Greaves into a tier item eventually, and then use
Creation Catalyst to put a Legendary in your high-budget Helm or Chest
slots.
Domination Gems in Patch 9.2
Domination Gems do not work in any Patch 9.2 content, and are no longer within the scope of this guide for that reason.
The Importance of "Simming Yourself" as a Survival Hunter
At this stage in the game, and despite the stat priority, there are so many variables and so many layers of optimization that you can apply to your character that there is no way for a guide or anything else to tell you exactly what gear you should wear. This is why we always recommend simulating your own character using Raidbots. The website can help you choose items, trinkets, Legendaries, Enchants/Gems, and even Covenants, Soulbinds, Conduits, and so on.
Upgrading Survival Hunter Gear with Valor Points
Patch 9.0.5 reintroduced the Valor currency. For more information on where to get Valor from, how it works, weekly caps and more, see our Valor page.
Survival Hunters should upgrade the items with Valor that will benefit the most in the moment. The easiest way to figure out what is best for your specific character is by using Raidbots' Droptimizer. You can select "+10 Weekly Chest" as a replacement for the highest item level Valor upgrade. Below is a list of item slots that you might want to upgrade first.
- Your weapon is by far your strongest item, and should always be the top priority to upgrade.
- Trinkets have a major impact on your DPS, particularly on-use ones such as
Inscrutable Quantum Device and
Overcharged Anima Battery.
- Aside from this, the best scaling items tend to be Helms, Chests, and Leg items. Wrists and Cloaks are low-priority as they have relatively little Agility on them.
Trinkets
Thanks to Bloodmallet.com, a comprehensive list of available trinkets for Survival are listed against each other below. Keep in mind that this only a guideline, and that you should be simming your own character if you care about optimizing it.
Note on the Inscrutable Quantum Device
While the Inscrutable Quantum Device trinket performs exceptionally
well in simulations, its use in Raids is very varied, as there will be many
situations where it will not proc its powerful stat proc, but instead heal
someone, or give a healer Mana. Raidbots offers the ability to sim it at
different "odds" of getting a stat proc beyond the first use. Use this in
conjunction with log analysis to find out if you should be using this Trinket.
Stats
Many people have a tendency to overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is nearly always better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item level gear with great stats. The exception for Survival Hunters would usually be Mastery, which is terrible in all cases and should be avoided, but keep this general principle in mind when considering gear. For more detailed stats information, please refer to our dedicated page.
Overall BiS List for Survival Hunter
This does not include trinkets as they are covered in the above chart. It also does not include Legendaries, as we have a dedicated page for those.
Changelog
- 31 May 2022: Page reviewed for Patch 9.2.5.
- 21 Feb. 2022: Added information about Tier Sets, its acquisition and slot choices and added Sepulcher gear to the BiS list.
- 07 Dec. 2021: Updated the recommendations for Legion Timewalking Trinkets after new sim results.
- 01 Nov. 2021: Added information about the new Legion Timewalking Trinkets, and how useful they are.
- 03 Sep. 2021: Updated the optimal Domination Gem Set Bonus and individual gems.
- 02 Aug. 2021: Updated the optimal Domination Gem Set Bonus after Blood Link was buffed.
- 28 Jun. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 19 Mar. 2021: Added a note that Mastery should nearly always be avoided.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Added a section dedicated to Valor Point upgrades.
- 09 Jan. 2021: Added note about the Inscrutable Quantum Device.
- 27 Nov. 2020: Updated the Trinket Sims.
- 23 Nov. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands.
- 15 Oct. 2020: Updated the BiS Bracers, Belt, Gloves, and Rings.
- 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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