Hey community.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t survival BIS weapons on P4-5 actually druid staves? Been looking at the items, and it’s hard for me to find something better than Staff of Primal Fury in P4, and Stanchion of Primal Instinct on P5 (with the exception of Shivering Felspine on phase 5, which is a trash drop, and therefore less reliable). That is by sheer amount of Agi and armor pen (49 AGI and 315 armor pen on primal fury, and 75 AGI and 350 armor pen on Primal Instinct).
Sure, you can probably squeeze a bit more personal DPS from a combination of fist weapons/daggers in p5 (but not in p4), but is it still worth the raid buff bonus from all that agi on Primal Instinct? Also, Halberd of Desolation might have been a contender for P4, but I don’t feel like I need that hit, or that 100 AP is worth THAT much armor pen (315!!). I don’t think it’s even better than having a combination of Claw of the Phoenix from A’lar and Claw of Molten Fury from Frost Wyrm at p3.
As a rule of thumb, my calculation is that 1% crit is worth about 50AP (was about 32-36 by most estimation in vanilla classic, so it makes sense to me to round it up to 50AP for TBC). Meaning that with BOK 1 point of agi is worth about 3.1 AP in damage as a survival hunter (1 direct AP, and every 40agi = 1% crit, plus stacking agi bonus from survival tree+BOK and added exposed weakness). I also refer to 16(1%) haste similarly as 1% crit, and to 100 armor pen as 0.8% damage as well, although it depends on the amount of armor reduction at the raid at the time. It’s obviously not a perfect calculation, but it gives me a sense of what’s better by converting it all roughly into AP value.
Please tell me if I’m wrong about the weapons based on that logic.