Survival

The Survival tree is one of the three Hunter talent trees.

Raiding focus
Hunters opting to spec into an end-game raiding and dungeon DPS role find their talent points spent in skills focusing on damage over time and crowd control. These points tend to focus on three sub-types:
 * Base damage modifiers
 * Attribute modifiers
 * Crowd control and raid utility

Damage modifying talents
These talents focus on directly modifying the base damage of various spells and abilities. They focus on damage coefficients instead of base stats or derived stats such as agility or attack power.

The main damage-dealing talents specific to the tree are:
 * Explosive Shot
 * Black Arrow

These two attacks provide most of the damage-dealing potential for the class in the form of DoTs.

The primary damage complementing talents in this role are:
 * Lock and Load
 * Removes the cooldown of Explosive Shot when trapping a foe with Freezing or Ice Trap(See Lock and Load). Allowing this DoT to be placed more frequently increases DPS.


 * Sniper Training
 * Increases crit chance percentage of Kill Shot and base damage of Steady Shot and Cobra Shot.


 * T.N.T.
 * Grants your Black Arrow, Explosive Trap and Immolation Trap a 12% chance when dealing damage (Referred as "ticking") to trigger Lock and Load.

Raid utility and crowd control
One of the most iconic mechanics of the hunter class is the trap system. There are a variety of traps that can either deal damage or control mobs in a raid environment. One of the most critical hunter talents, Lock and Load is most easily proc'd by a hunter's crowd control traps. Thus, it is important for a hunter in a raid or dungeon environment to force a mob into one of these traps.

Investing in Trap Mastery increases the usefulness of traps by increasing the damage output or snare duration of various traps.

Survival Hunters have yet another Crowd Control tool: Wyvern Sting. Even with the longer cooldown and shorter duration than Ice Tap, it has one great advantage: It cannot miss it's target (Providing that the Hunter is hit capped. Additionally, the survival hunter has been granted Hunting Party talent, that increases the melee attack speed of all party and raid members by 10%.

PvP focus
A survival hunter brings the most utility to an arena, battleground, or Wintergrasp siege not from the damage dealing ability, but from the crowd-controlling talents. While the above talents are all still useful in a PvP environment for dealing damage, a hunter can see its survivability increased through crowd controlling enemy players using the following skills:
 * Entrapment
 * Ice Trap and Snake Trap activation immediately results in rooting of the targets in the area of effect.


 * Wyvern Sting
 * Thirty second sleep effect on the target (six seconds in PvP), followed by fairly powerful Damage Over Time effect.


 * Noxious Stings
 * Wyvern Sting affects dispeller for 50% of remaining duration.


 * Mirrored Blades
 * During Deterrence, you have 50/100% chance of reflecting spells cast at you.


 * Counterattack
 * After parrying opponents attack, you can cause some damage and root the target for 5 seconds.

A PVP-focused hunter can still benefit from several, if not all, of the raiding talents. Bonuses to agility and and base damage will make you a more deadly hunter, but the talents above will increase your survivability when confronted by targets that require kiting. On the other hand, a talent such as Sniper Training that requires being motionless is essentially useless in a PvP environment, which often requires rapid "turn and burn" maneuvers. This maneuver involves jumping forward (and while maintaining forward momentum) flipping 180 degrees to fire an instant cast shot, and then turn another 180 degrees in the direction you jumped. This allows you to fire direct damage, Concussive Shots, or other crowd controlling attacks if you are being pursued by warriors, paladins, death knights, or rogues. This is iconic Hunter skill, called Jump-Shoot.