Survival Hunter DPS Vault of the Incarnates Raid Guide — Season 4

Below, you can find class and spec-specific advice for every fight in Vault of the Incarnates. If you are looking for a general overview of the Raid that is not spec-specific, check out our dedicated Vault of the Incarnates guides.

On this page, you will find Survival Hunter specific information to deal with each boss in the Vault of the Incarnates raid. These are not complete encounter guides but specific tips for doing the bosses as a Survival Hunter.

This page assumes that you already understand most of the mechanics of each encounter. These can be found on the full raid guide, so what is contained here are details specifically tailored toward Survival Hunter and how you can deal with each fight as best as possible.

All recommendations are progression-based tips and will not necessarily be the best for an overall DPS ranking.

To make importing talents easier, I have aggregated the builds into the list below into three main builds. Taking these as a baseline, you can handle all raid encounters in this tier.

Survival Hunter has several defensive spells that you should plan to use and rotate throughout mechanics. You should opt to use the smaller cooldown spells often as needed with incoming mechanics and save bigger cooldowns like Aspect of the Turtle for large incoming damage.

• Exhilaration
• Fortitude of the Bear with a Tenacity Pet summoned.
• Survival of the Fittest

Survival Hunter has a few cooldowns to think about using optimally on the fights in Vault of the Incarnates:

• Spearhead — Our 90-second cooldown. Not used at all times!
• Death Chakram — Our small, 45-second mini-cooldown.
• Fury of the Eagle — Barely counts as a cooldown, but is still worth explicitly saving for moments of big AoE, for example.

In addition to the general rotation, you want to keep in mind that your goal is to use your cooldowns as often as possible during an encounter. With that in mind, your secondary goal is to use them at the correct time.

I highly suggest using some Addon or WeakAura to track the estimated time to die of your target/boss target. Method Raid Tools has this as an option if you are already using this addon. By tracking time to die, if you know that you can only fit one more cycle of your cooldowns in before the boss dies, you can choose to hold these cooldowns to better line up with Bloodlust, your Potion, or even your other cooldowns, trying to look for opportunities to stack all of them.

• Prepare to use defensives when you get targeted by the add spawn circles and you are on low HP.

• Hold your first Fury of the Eagle until 10 seconds into the fight to overlap with the first adds. You will want to ensure you have Fury of the Eagle available for every add spawn.

• Nothing in particular, as this is a very straightforward encounter.

For more information, please refer to our Eranog guide.

• Prepare to use defensives when soaking the earthen pillars.

• No special considerations.

• Nothing in particular.

• Prepare to use defensives when you are soaking the Mythic mechanic with other players.

• No special considerations.

• Nothing in particular.

For more information, please refer to our Terros guide.

• The big spider adds do a lot of raid-wide damage. Prepare to use defensives in the later stages of their life.

• No special considerations.

• Be very careful with Disengage, as you will tend to slide quickly over the ice once you land, with no way of controlling your direction.

For more information, please refer to our Sennarth guide.

• No special considerations.

• Save cooldowns for a few seconds longer than usual on pull to fully overlap with the add that spawns. Use your next cooldowns on the first intermission, then on Earthbreaker Add Spawns in Phase 2, and then again in Phase 3.

• You can use Aspect of the Turtle to solo-soak the Phase 2 Ice Mechanic that requires you to spread.

For more information, please refer to our Kurog Grimtotem guide.

• Be prepared to use defensives on the platforms and when returning from the platforms to the boss during her AoE.

• You will want Fury of the Eagle for both of your assigned platforms. The best platforms to be assigned for are platforms 1 and 3, and you would want to hold cooldowns for both of them.

• Nothing in particular.

For more information, please refer to our Dathea guide.

• No special considerations.

• For boss duty, no special considerations.
• For add duty, use cooldowns at ~42s, ~2:51, ~4:51, and ~6:51.

• The adds and the boss will be spaced far apart, and you might consider using a Cunning pet, specifically an Aqiri, because they are 30% faster and will lose far less DPS moving from the boss to the adds and vice versa. This has slight negative survivability implications, so choose wisely.

For more information, please refer to our Broodkeeper Diurna guide.

• Prepare to use defensives for the pushbacks in Phase 2 and Phase 3 in particular.

• Use cooldowns on pull, first shield, third shield, and then again during Phase 3.

• Be sure to Disengage through the pushback waves in Phase 2 and Phase 3 to take as few ticks as possible.

On Mythic, I recommend the following strategy for surviving the Hurricane Wing knockbacks in Phase 1:

1. Disengage. Use Aspect of the Cheetah optionally only if an Evoker uses Time Spiral on the third.
2. Gateway
3. Use Aspect of the Cheetah to run against the wind, then use Disengage to return.
4. Aspect of the Turtle
5. Gateway

Note: If you are only doing 4 knockbacks due to your Guild's Strategy, swap steps 2 and 3 around.

For more information, please refer to our Raszageth guide.