Survival Hunter Guide - Talents, Rotations, Races & More

Playable Races

Alliance - Human, Night Elf, Dwarf & Skyborn

Horde - Orc, Tauren, Troll & Skyborn

Recommended Races

Dwarf provides 3 useful abilities and is probably the best race for leveling to 30 as Alliance. Mace Specialization gives you 1% crit when using a mace. Stoneform grants you immunities and Physical Damage Reduction and Big Game Hunter increases you damage to beasts (which you'll see a lot of while leveling up)

Night Elf provides you their new ability Elune's Light which provides 10% increased Critical Strike Chance for 15 seconds. They come with passive movement speed and dodge chance as well, making them great for moving through the world a bit faster and providing a bit more survivability when enemies start hitting you. Wisp Spirit grants you 75% movement speed which hopefully you don’t need often, but is great for getting back to your body and back into the action.

Troll is great since you’ll be fighting a lot of beasts in the early game and they have 5% increased damage to beasts. Their Berserking buff grants you 10% attack speed for 10 seconds and they also have Rapid Regeneration which allows you to restore 50% of your health every 3 minutes. Add in Regeneration which allows 10% of health regen to continue in combat and they’re the only race in the game that has 4 directly beneficial buffs for the leveling journey 1-30.

See our complete racial abilities breakdown for details on every race.

The primary Skills you’ll use are Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite & Strider Kick. You'll also want to open on enemies often with your ranged attacks like: Auto Shot, Multi-Shot, Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot & Arcane Shot.

Tame a Boar early on, it's charge ability is great for engaging with enemies quickly and building threat. Boars aren't picky eaters either which makes it easy to keep them happy. Once you can, tame a Strider. Tallstriders get Dust Cloud providing Armor Penetration which synergizes with the Hunter very well.

Make sure you always have your relevant tracking ability active once you get Improved Tracking talented. Track Beasts, Track Humanoids & Track Undead are all going to be great since you'll fight so many Beasts, Humanoids and Undead in the early leveling areas.

1. Send your pet in to start the fight, apply Hunter's Mark and be max range to start attacking with your ranged weapon.
2. Open up on enemies with a powerful shot like Aimed Shot, get your Auto Shot off then follow it up quickly with either Serpent Sting or Arcane Shot early on & Multi-Shot once you obtain it at level 18.
3. The idea is to pull threat off your pet and have them come to you so you can start smashing them with your melee abilities.
4. Hit them with Raptor Strike and Strider Kick. When you can, use Mongoose Bite Counterattack for extra big hits. You're talenting into Parry quite a bit so hopefully Counterattack can proc regularly, even early on.
5. Keep in mind you can use Deterrence often to take less damage and proc your Counterattack even more. It does have a 5 minute cooldown so keep that in mind and maybe save it for when you really need the avoidance (like when you accidently pull multiple enemies).

Take note that even with Predator's Edge you'll probably still do more dps with a 2 hander so your melee abilities hit very hard. You can play around with dual wielding and two-handers and see what you like best.

It feels weird focusing on melee as a Hunter, especially considering that Hunter is known as the fastest and strongest leveling class in the game with it's ranged power. This build should be a lot of fun though. most of your ranged power is still being used to engage with enemies and you'll be way stronger when they're in melee range to finish them off very quickly.

Make sure to visit your Hunter Trainer at levels 10, 16 18 to acquire skills like Tame Beast, Mongoose Bite & Multi-Shot.

Always keep some food in your bags to feed your Pets to keep them happy. Certain pets like certain food, so make sure you know what type of food your pet likes. The Boar will eat almost anything so this shouldn't be an issue unless you pick a different pet.

Keep your quiver or ammo pouch topped up and always stock up when near a vendor. Make sure to upgrade your arrows or bullets whenever you reach a high enough level to do so.

A Survival Hunters Favorite Stat is Agility, followed Strength & Intellect. Agility increases your Ranged Attack Power, Attack Power and Critical Hit Chance. Strength furthere increases your Attack power as well. Intellect helps quite a bit with your mana. Always look for items with Agility/Strength on them as the priority and take the other stats when they show up.

When playing in a party the gameplay mostly stays the same. You'll likely have someone tanking the enemies for you so you don't to worry about pulling threat as easily, and can unleash your power much more freely.

Make sure to keep Hunter's Mark up on the main target and allow your tank to get threat on a few mobs before unleashing.

Frost Trap and Explosive Trap are great to use when fighting multiple mobs at once. You can slow the entire group down to help your tank kite and prevent the strays from reaching your ranged party members. Explosive Trap is a great way to deal AOE damage to the group while you keep blasting them with projectiles.

Check our tier list to see where Marksmanship lands for leveling, raiding and dungeons.

Find the balance between using your ranged and melee power. Let your big ranged attacks get some heavy damage on targets then finish them off with your melee abilities. You're the master of ranged it would be a shame not to use it at least some of the time!

Keep your pet on defensive so he doesn't go around like a psycho attacking everything in sight, this can get you into trouble quickly, especially in dungeons and raids.

Auto Shot Macro

This macro allows you to spam a button as you change targets to keep shooting with no interruption.

#showtooltip Auto Shot
/cleartarget [dead]
/targetenemy [noharm]
/cast !Auto Shot

Melee Macro

This one button macro will go through you melee abilities to do maximum damage when being attacked.

/startattack
/cast Raptor Strike
/cast Strider's Kick

Counterattack Macro

This one button macro will go through your Dodge/Parry Counterattack melee abilities to do maximum damage when being attacked.

/startattack
/cast Mongoose Bite
/cast Counterattack

Pet Attack

I love putting this on mouse wheel forward to send in my pet. You can also macro /petattack into your auto shot macro, but I prefer to have more control of my pet at all times.

/cast Charge
/cast Dash
/cast Growl

Pet Passive/Follow

Great for mousewheel backwards. This will make your pet come to you to get out of danger.

/petfollow