Survival Hunter DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

One of the primary, less intuitive minmaxes in our rotation is playing around Sentinel's Mark procs. These procs have a 20% chance to happen whenever you spend Tip of the Spear on any ability.

When this happens, your Wildfire Bomb cooldown is reduced by 6 sec, and your next Wildfire Bomb deals 130% additional direct damage.

Because Wildfire Bomb has 2 charges, we have some flexibility in when we use the second charge. After all, as long as at least one charge has its cooldown ticking, we are not losing out on anything.

We use this flexibility to "fish" Sentinel's Mark procs by spending Tip on other abilities, so that we can maximize the Sentinel's Mark coverage of our Wildfire Bombs.

Because each proc eats 6 seconds of Wildfire Bomb's cooldown, however, and because we do not want to ever sit on 2 charges of Bomb (as that is a waste), we establish a "cutoff" where we give up on fishing and use our second Bomb charge regardless, if there is less than ~7 seconds (6+GCD) until it reaches 2 charges.

One of the primary, less intuitive minmaxes in our rotation is playing around Sentinel's Mark procs. These procs have a 20% chance to happen whenever you spend Tip of the Spear on any ability.

When this happens, your Wildfire Bomb cooldown is reduced by 6 sec, and your next Wildfire Bomb deals 130% additional direct damage.

Because Wildfire Bomb has 2 charges, we have some flexibility in when we use the second charge. After all, as long as at least one charge has its cooldown ticking, we are not losing out on anything.

We use this flexibility to "fish" Sentinel's Mark procs by spending Tip on other abilities, so that we can maximize the Sentinel's Mark coverage of our Wildfire Bombs.

Because each proc eats 6 seconds of Wildfire Bomb's cooldown, however, and because we do not want to ever sit on 2 charges of Bomb (as that is a waste), we establish a "cutoff" where we give up on fishing and use our second Bomb charge regardless, if there is less than ~7 seconds (6+GCD) until it reaches 2 charges.

Wildfire Bomb is a core ability for Survival. Its damage is split into its "direct" damage, which is buffed by Tip of the Spear, but it also leaves a 6-second DoT which is unaffected.

One of the most crucial things to understand about Bomb is how it targets. You throw it at a target, and then the Bomb explodes once it reaches that target. The Bomb explodes in a cone behind the target and a small radius circle around the target. In other words, if the mob is tightly bunched with a bunch of other mobs, then Bomb will hit them all, regardless of how you are facing.

If, however, the target are a little bit more spread out, then you will need to rely on the cone behind the target, and "behind" in this case is relative to your position. In other words, you are effectively throwing your Bomb through your target, so that it will hit the ones behind it. Angling and positioning your character appropriately relative to the targets you want to hit is therefore essential to maximizing this ability, particularly in Mythic+.

Takedown is Survival's primary cooldown. It is a relatively simple 1:30 cooldown that can be reduced to a 1-minute cooldown with 2 points of the Savagery Talent. It deals heavy damage on use, and then increases all your damage by 20% for 10 sec, and doubles your auto-attack speed.

The most unorthodox thing about this cooldown is its extremely short duration. In WoW, the vast majority of DPS cooldowns are 15-20 seconds long, but Takedown only lasts 10 seconds. This means that if we want to pack heavy damage-dealers into its duration, we do not have a lot of time to do so, which informs our opener choices and occasionally Trinket choices (30-second on-use trinkets are not so great, for example).

For Sentinel, Takedown's button will turn into Moonlight Chakram once pressed. This ability deals heavy damage, and can even reduce the cooldown of Wildfire Bomb by 10 sec if Stalk and Strike is chosen. We only get one use in our Takedown, but because it takes quite a long time to do all of its damage, we are incentivized to use it somewhat early on in our opener. If we do run Stalk and Strike, it is also important to dump our Wildfire Bombs before using it, so as not to waste the cooldown reduction.

For Pack Leader, Takedown immediately procs Howl of the Pack Leader, causing your next Kill Command to summon a Beast. This "stacks" with the naturally occurring, cooldown-based Howl procs, and you do not need to worry about sending Howl procs before activating Takedown.In addition, your first Kill Command inside Takedown will also launch a Stampede. This is a roughly 40 yards long "line" of beasts that charge at your target, and it gets placed when you press the Kill Command. It deals heavy damage to all enemies inside it over 7 sec.

Because this effect is placed the moment you cast your first Kill Command in Takedown and does not move, and because it is a long line that originates from your character position, aiming and positioning this line is essential, particularly in AoE situations.

You want to place the Stampede in such a way that it will cover as many targets as possible, for as long as possible. Positioning your character so that the line extends through not just where the mobs currently are, but if they are moving, where you think they might be going, is essential to making optimal use of Stampede.

Volley is a talented 45-second (or 30-second) cooldown mostly associated with AoE. It is actually a fairly simple button, but there are common misconceptions about its use and value.

Essentially, because of the nature of the Precise Shots mechanic we explained in the previous session, even though Volley gives us Trick Shots, it is actually relatively uncommon for us to make any use of this "free" Trick Shots whatsoever. Because we tend to run Talents where Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire both give Precise Shots, we have to use a PS Spender in-between all such casts. Because of this, even if Trick Shots was permanently active, we would actually play more or less the same; the need to spend Precise Shots is so pressing, and all of the Trick Shots that Multi-Shot also gives is sort of a happy accident.

This limits Volley's role to two things; a simple damage dealer, and a Double Tap activator.

The Double Tap Talent does not stack, and it triggers off of Trueshot and Volley. In many cases, it is very tempting to cast Volley right before or after entering Trueshot, but this is a trap. When running this Talent, it is mandatory that we get a Aimed Shot or Rapid Fire in between our Trueshot and our Volley, whichever order we are using them in.

I recommend sticking to a simple rule; when running Volley and Double Tap, start your Trueshot windows like: Trueshot, Aimed Shot, Volley.