"We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Survival Hunter in Dragonflight and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From new talents you’ll pickup on the way to level 70 to the unique Dragonflight utility that will make you an asset to your allies, join us as we explore Dragonflight Survival Hunter!
About the Author
Hello! My name is Doolb and I am a huge fan of Survival. I’ve been playing WoW since 2006 and have been a huge fan of Survival ever since Legion’s pre-patch and we picked up the spear. You can always find me hanging around one of my favorite places on the internet: Trueshot Lodge—the best Hunter Discord server around. This guide is a collaborative effort between myself and Thyminde (aka Velratha) and will be frequently updated. Feel free to stop by TSL and ask anything you need!
Why You Should Play Survival Hunter in Dragonflight! (…And Why You Shouldn’t!)
If a fast paced, nearly GCD-locked melee damage dealer sounds fun to you, keep reading. If a versatile, pet-using, highly mobile, damage dealing swiss army knife sounds even better, then good news: you’ve found your home. Survival Hunter is in many ways, very similar to its Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth versions. If you’re new to the spec, you can expect a back-and-forth rhythm of a priority system. You spend Focus with Mongoose Bite, your pet generates your Focus with Kill Command, and you manage your wide tool-kit to ensure you’re generating as much Focus as you can to maintain high stacks of Mongoose Fury as efficiently as possible.
There are a few key differences with our previous iterations—namely the heavier importance of Mongoose Bite. In Dragonflight, we also have access to a lot of cool talents that were previously mutually exclusive with each other. Can you say Guerrilla Tactics and Butchery at once? We also get some really cool new toys like Explosive Shot and Spearhead. In a huge surprise, we also get Death Chakram brought forward from the Shadowlands! Shout out to Maldraxxus.
However, it’s not all peaches and cream as we still lack unique utility and some would even say being a melee DPS is a bit of a hassle. This means we’re very much at the mercy of Blizzard as without proper tuning, there are not many reasons to bring a Survival Hunter over another DPS spec.
We invite you keep on reading on what to expect in the Dragon Isles on your Survival Hunter!
Why You SHOULD Play Survival Hunter in Dragonflight!
- New Talents at Level 70
As you level up in Dragonflight, you’ll get access to more talent points that finish up your build. In our general tree you’ll get to fill up Serrated Shots and Arctic Bola for a nice source of passive damage as well as finally having an on-demand Serpent Sting and its enhancement: Poison Injection. You’ll also get more points to play around with in the Survival specific tree. This lets you more easily flex in to the extra range from Lunge and snag a very impressive single-target cooldown in Spearhead and Deadly Duo.
These talents, as well as the rest of the build, come together to really help Survival push a very nice niche as single-target burst and is great for any priority target that needs to die ASAP. With access to the DoT from Spearhead and the extra bleed damage from Serrated Shots, your execute damage coming off of your massive chains of Mongoose Bite will be quite satisfying.
- Survival Hunter Utility
As a Hunter, one of the most useful utilities you bring is access to Primal Rage, a temporary raid-wide Haste buff. This is identical (and shares the Sated debuff) to the abilities brought by Mages, Shaman, and Evokers, so in a larger group this can be less appealing as it will almost assuredly be covered already. However, this does help your kit out in smaller group content such as Mythic+!
Aside from Primal Rage you also have access to a large amount of crowd control abilities. These can be used to make you and your tanks life in Mythic+ easier (or shine in PvP situations) and can even be used in various Raid settings to help control the mobs. Our other noteworthy piece of utility is Aspect of the Turtle which can be cleverly used to survive situations you normally shouldn’t and cheese mechanics in Raid or Mythic+. Lastly, we have access to Tranquilizing Shot which is great for removing Enrage or beneficial buffs from your target. Typically this is more useful in Mythic+ than Raid, but it’s quite nice to have.
- Strong Burst/Sustain
Survival has access to builds that can push out a strong amount of burst damage sustained damage during our cooldowns. Spearhead focused builds can slam an immense amount of Mongoose Bite on your target, stacking up the Bleed quite high and turning your target into paste on the ground. Conversely, you can also build your talent tree around Coordinated Assault and cleave a very nice amount of damage to 4-targets due to the great combination of Coordinated Kill and Birds of Prey. Another strong benefit is that you don’t need to sacrifice ST damage for AoE damage as we have in the past.
Our first tier-set in Dragonflight also pushes this aspect as well! With a nice passive buff to our Mongoose Bite through the two piece ( Hunter Survival Class Set 2pc) as well as the four piece ( Hunter Survival Class Set 4pc) giving us empowered AND free Mongoose Bite you’ll see your Mongoose Fury stacking high and fast, as well as hitting like a truck.
- High APM / Involved Priority System
Survival offers a very high APM and focused (ha!) playstyle, which can be very exciting to play around and properly manage your Focus. It’s a fast-paced specialization with plenty of opportunities to express your skill when you play around your Mongoose Fury stacks.
- Mobility / Flexible Range
As a Survival Hunter, you have quite the toolkit to navigate the battle field. Abilities like Trailblazer, Posthaste, Pathfinding, and Aspect of the Cheetah keep you slippery and mobile, giving you enough movespeed to get to where you need to go and fast. We also have Harpoon and Flanking Strike to get your target from a nice distance. That’s not all, our cooldowns Coordinated Assault and Spearhead also include a charge to immediately close the distance on your target, the latter of which has a 50 yard range!
Finally, with Lunge and Aspect of the Eagle let you fight from outside of melee range, which can be very convenient or even necessary for certain mechanics to retain uptime in situations where your fellow melee DPS can not.
Why You SHOULDN’T Play Survival Hunter in Dragonflight!
- Raid Utility
As stated above, Survival Hunter has a very expansive utility kit when it comes to crowd control which can be great for dungeons or PvP. However, that’s not typically the most useful thing in Raid. Not only is our Raid buff ( Primal Rage) brought by several other classes, many of those other classes have more Raid applicable utilities to bring. At the same time, we don’t have any exclusive buffs like many other classes or group defensive buffs, so for Raid environments we are very much at the mercy of tuning. This leaves us extremely vulnerable to DPS tuning with us essentially having nothing to give to a raid.
- Defensives
Like many specs, we are losing many defensive tools we had in Shadowlands from Conduits. Even though we received a baseline Survival of the Fittest and a new tool in Fortitude of the Bear, we no longer have things like Marksman’s Advantage or Resilience of the Hunter. The new defensives we get have far less uptime than our conduits, and when compared to other specs, they’re just an objective downgrade in every sense of the word. For example, at a default Astral Shift lasts longer, has a shorter cooldown, and reduces more damage. This isn’t to say every class should be mountainous beef gods or easily capable of brushing off most damage, but it does look like the squishy Hunter saga will continue for now.
- Mongoose Bite Skill Expression / Burden
Mongoose Bite has a renewed focus in Dragonflight and a new priority system is in place for the spec compared to what we’ve been playing for the last year. For beginners, this can express itself in a very common mistake—often times many players new to the spec put an extreme importance on Mongoose Fury above all else and thus, ignore other fundamentals of the spec. This can lead to wasted cooldowns, open GCDs, and even a Focus drought, which further intensifies this mistake. Not only that but in previous expansions we had Alpha Predator to act as a sort of failsafe with the second charge of Kill Command. Unfortunately, nowadays the second charge is locked behind far too many points for it to be an optimal pick.
Ultimately, this sort of priority system can be seen as a confusing downside to many players and is thus something to consider when choosing to play Survival Hunter.
With that being said, even veterans could be concerned at this new priority system. At the end of the day, with enough practice under your belt, properly managing your Mongoose Fury and Focus will become second nature. It’s also not particularly hard to set up a WeakAura to track Mongoose Fury and for all the Survival Hunter enthusiasts out there, you could find yourself wanting more ways to express your skill."
A long article that could have been shortened by saying you will be spamming Mongoose Bite now instead of WfB.
The abilities are cool but they only build up for one single spender we have to spam (now that Vipers Venom adds Serpent Sting to your MB it trivializes our one dot we had to track), no wonder people find that boring. There’s no synergy, and there’s no real burst window now either, so the entire kit will always feel samey because the core is so basic and the rest of the buttons are “press these on cooldown”. Honestly I think the core kit (KC, MB, SS) needs reworking into something more engaging that the other buttons can work well with. Anything to give us more to do and utilize more of our kit in more interesting ways.
