Bang! (Or Twang!), A Hunter's guide to succesful Huntering!

As per a request...

(Hunter>Rogue>Druid>Warlock>Shaman)

Feel like Pulling that off?

The hunter, in my opinion, is the best of the pure-DPS classes.
Rogues? Puh-lease! Tanks love our misdirect!
Mages? Meh... saving the squishies with frost traps is fun!

Hunters, along with the awesome DPS they can drop, have extreme utility. we can CC, we can DPS, we can even TANK (More on that later)!

For a straight DPS build, i use
06/14/51 (Will find link later).

Glyphs:
Glyph of Feign Death - Cooldown reduction on the best hunter ability of all time, Feign Death.
Glyph of Killshot - Cooldown reduction on my Second Fav. Hunter Ability, Nice!
Glyph of Steady shot - Increases damage when Serpent sting is active (Which it should always be!)

The Most important part of a survival hunter's build:

Lock n' Load!


This means that you should try and keep Black Arrow up as often as you can (ticks run out before cooldown) and whenever LnL procs, you have two free explosive shots.
NEVER use arcane!
For the love of god, do NOT just spam the button twice. Explosive shot does 3 ticks of damage in 2 seconds:
1. On Impact
2. After 1 second
3. After 2 seconds
The global cooldown between shots is 1.5 seconds, so you should wait an extra .5 seconds so as to get that last tick of damage (which for me, is upwards of 4k, always.) I recommend throwing up the 2-second cast that is Steady Shot, just for that extra damage in between!

Trap Dancing, Tricky to Master, Great to Learn
If you look at the LnL tooltip again, you see that it will proc when a trap is activated. The easiest way to exploit this is to do what has been dubbed 'trap dancing' by the hunter community. It involves standing close enough to the boss that when you deploy the trap, it is activated by him, but far enough out of melee range in order to be shooting at the same time. Though I would normally loathe to recommend 'testing' anything on this boss, Loken is the ideal place to try trap dancing. His aura that increases with distance from him forces you to be just outside of melee range, which you must be in order to trap dance.

(EDIT- After testing, this doesn't seem as viable when you've taken points in Sniper Training... the buff from sniper training does better for DPS. use it on adds that run amok and you should be fine. Still works on Loken when you have to be real close.)

Now that we know how, what traps do we use?
- Frost and Freezing Traps - Situational. Should only be used on bosses with adds. EX... The Black Knight. You can lay a freezing trap in front of the corpse of Aerlias B rightstar before he gets ghouled, disabling the add and giving you a lock and load proc to start your DPS early.
- Explosive and Immolation Traps - NEVER use these when trap dancing, as they share a cooldown with Explosive Shot.
- Snake Trap - Best for single-target DPS, applies DOTs to the target, which are always useful for keeping DPS up.



Before I show my shots, let me explain priority. Priority means simply that one shot takes precedence over another. for example, My shot priority is:

Hunter's Mark (Obviously)
Explosive Shot > Black Arrow(Helps Proc LnL) > Serpent Sting(Empowers my Steady Shot, My gear set increases its damage) > Multi-Shot (In place of Aimed) > Steady Shot

This means that I fire them, shot for shot, but as soon as the cooldown on one of the first ones expires(Or Serpent sting runs out) I hit those cooldowns. My ACTUAL rotation works something like EXP, BA, SS, MS, St, EXP , (LnL proc!) , EXP, St , EXP, MS, St, St, EXP, BA...