The new patch will return some of the former glory to the Survival Tree, and BRK is planning on trying it out. Since we are focused on PvE Instances, the better traps, Wyvern Sting, and Expose Weakness look tasty. But what else is in that tree?

Lightning Reflexes. Oh, when BRK was a Molten Core and AQ-running hunter, he loved LR. He was a 0/21/30 Survivalist critting machine, and agility was king, and the trees were in bloom, and the girls smelled so yummy…

Sigh…

So what does agility do for us? It increased our Ranged Attack Power, of course, but it also increases our Crit, Armor, and Dodge. Agility is tremendously useful to us, especially if you are a Beastmaster; remember that when we raise our Armor, we increase our pet’s Armor as well.

It takes 2x more agility to make the RAP of a pre-BC hunter due to the reduction of the 1:2 ratio of agility to attack power to one-to-one, so RAP enchants and gear has been snapped up by hunters like crazy. There are some spiffy enchants that increase our RAP, and BRK has invested in them, natch. However, RAP isn’t the end-all-be-all. Damage comes in many forms, not just Auto Shot.

When the 2.1. patch is released, based upon the success we’ve had in the test forum, BRK is gonna try something new and go more toward agility for crit, with better traps, crowd control, and a different party buff… at the expense of… of Big Red Kitty.

“OMG! NO!”

We hear ya folks, loud and concerned.

“OMG! Does this mean that Survival is the new max-DPS build?”

Um, no it doesn’t. Frankly, due to the new pet spells, we believe Beastmaster will become even more dominate in the DPS war.

But we are going to trade a lot of pet DPS for instance utility and multiple-mob crowd control, and hope our DPS loss can be offset by crits. The more crits, the more DPS we retain, so agility and +crit gear is what we’re hoarding. As you can see from our signature, our agility has hit 555. With Lightning Reflexes, that’ll morph into an agility of 638. Is the 700 agility mark possible for someone not running Karazhan? It is our intention to find out.

The gear we’ve acquired to achieve this result? Well, we finally broke down and completed some 5-man group quests in Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm, and got some pants in a lower-level instance that we modifed to make them a little better than the blue Scales of the Beast that we had previously:

The specific talent spec we’re going to try first is not set in stone. Do we want frequent crits, or big and frequent crits? Of course, the ole BRK Ego would love big and frequent, but will our Feral Druid tank appreciate them? This, and more, still requires research and thought.

Are we going to stay survivalist? Probably not; we love Beastmaster and will return Big Red Kitty to his proper place of honor as soon as we find out just how much dps we lose. Our ego is much to big to fall down the DamageMeter too far.