Netherblade

Hey all, hopefully somebody can help..

Summary = Im not sure if our hunters suck at DPS or basically the entire class is just 'not that good' when it comes to DPS in PVE raids. My main is a caster, myself having never played a hunter - I don't know the answer.

On Gruul, for example - I noticed our hunters were always consistently the lowest DPS of the classes, just (a little) above the main tank/offtank. If I saw a mage/warlock at this level id remove them from the raid fast, but im so accustomed to seeing hunters with shit dps it seems like its the norm. On a recent Gruul fight - for example - we saw Hunters with ~120 000 damage (Gruul dead at 16 growths) when the main DPS classes could easily achieve 250-300 000.

Is this acceptable? Normal?

Id like to hear from anyone who has awesome hunters in their guild - how well do your hunters perform in 25 man raids. If you could use Gruul specifically and say how much damage hunters are capable of in a ~14-16 growth kill, it might help shed some light on this for me.

 

Apate

The gruul thread has quite a few posts regarding good hunter DPS, you might direct a search there.

See you, auntie.

 

MikeMo

If the hunters are appearing just above the main tank I would assume you and others in your raid have not updated either your damage meters or SWStats in quite a while. After 2.0 hit both damage meters had a problem not counting hunter autoshots and all hunters who did not have those particular damage meters showed up directly above the tanks in overall damage. I would highly suggest updating.

I'd almost guarantee this is your issue. Especially if you check the hunters and they are using consumables and running through mana. No way will even a bad hunter pull only just above the MT/OT in damage if they are going through mana.

 

• Erongg

Check the last 5-10 pages of the Sustained DPS thread for WowWebStats (WWS) breakdowns of Gruul fights.

 

Elendril

While this is addressed in other threads...

I did over 3x that damage on our first pre-nerf kill, so yes, hunters can do far, far more than that, especially now that we can basically just never have to move.

http://files.lostanarchy.com/tmdy/gruul/index.html for stats on that kill.

 

◊ Kyth

Let's say you do have the updated SWStats.

Are there any specific "gotchas" that make a difference for hunter raid dps?


(To use my own class as an example, there are warlocks who don't use immolate because they're "shadow damage" -- this lowers their DPS. Even more so, there are warlocks who just spam drain life rather than shadowbolt, this lowers their DPS even further. So these two simple tips can help turn an underperforming lock into an average one overnight.)

 

Elendril

The number one reason I've seen for poor hunter damage is underuse of steady shot.

 

Cel

The hunter class has seen SO many changes with the introduction of the expansion. I would agree that underuse of steadyshot and lack of understanding how a new dps cycle should be constructed in place of the old multishot/aimed shot rotation would be the cause of poor dps on the hunter's part. If a hunter does poor dps, the first thing you should look at is how many aimedshots they fired off during a given attempt. More than a couple and the hunter is likely using out dated shot rotations.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

Elendril

Actually, that may not be true - while the #1 reason I've seen for properly prepared/enabled hunters dealing poor damage is underuse of steady shot, the most significant reason most hunters probably fail at DPS is mana starvation. Hunter DPS in even fairly short fights is very much bounded by mana - if I don't chain-chug potions or have a shadow priest, I go OOM incredibly quickly. With a shadow priest, I can maintain a full DPS cycle for a long time even without mana pots, which lets me use things like Haste potions if I really want to push my damage. I think mana raid groups undervalue the importance of mana to their hunters and quickly put shadow priests in other groups.

 

◊ Kyth

We run very short on shadow priests right now (only one), so that might be part of it.

I know they weren't using steady shot much at the start, but looking at recent skill breakdowns at least one of the hunters is (50-55% auto; more steady than arcane.) Could a hunter at 4.5% on one kill (top dps on the kill was flasked) and 5.2% on the next (no flasks, but everyone told to use oils/food/elixirs pots) be just mana starvation?

7 minute 20 second or so fights each time. Top DPS, a lock, on the 2nd fight was 964 dps sustained (2nd place was 710dps - rogue). Hunter was 444dps.


Are there critical group buffs a hunter should be getting that would account for such a discrepency? I know we tend to just put the warlocks and hunters "whereever" and we build groups around the mages/rogues -- just history, since they didn't do good damage before 2.0 and you want to maximize the effectiveness of your group compositions.

 

• Playered

Hunters are still somewhat like they were before; its easy to be the 'average' hunter which has rather mild DPS, but people really need to work pretty hard and want to put the effort in to become a noticably good DPSer worthy of being in the top 5 constantly.

Sadly most of the people who have that level of motivation tend to roll a different class :P

 

alienangel

Does anyone other than perhaps a Moonkin gain more from being given the shadow priest than your hunters would? My experience is that our mages and locks do amazing damage even without shadow priests in their group, and still benefit from them being in the raid. They gain even more from being with a Wrath of Air shaman. On the other hand, hunter damage with mana to do all attacks is dramatically different from when mana starved. Of course healers get shadow priests too, but many healers seem to manage fine without being in the shadow priest group, so I'm confused how much they need them. Is it just a choice between making your healers and your hunters chain pot?

Also, the synergy between a Feral Druid + BM Hunter + Shadow Priest + MM hunter in one group is amazing

 

• Playered

I never really looked into it purely about how much people really 'need' a shadow priest.
Healers can generally get by (esp with feral druids IV),
Hunters need to downrank to endure without them usually ontop of Fel Mana chains,
Warlocks can just lifetap (boohoo GCD whine) and get a heal,
Mages... well I've only honestly heard 1 mage ask for a SP because he actually has mana issues... normally they dont say if they need it or just want it (they would also have a Shaman too)
Ele Shamans & Moonkins need one too if they want a chance in hell on being decent on damage, perhaps not the shaman if he gets enough crit (40%+).

 

◊ zeidrich

Silly question, but when you're running OOM so frequently, is there a JoW up on your targets? How much does that impact your sustainability?

 

Avellyr

I would say JoW is almost as good as a shadow priest for our regen. The problem is that light is usually kept up for the melee, and having more than one paladin in any raid, especially a 10-man is not always guaranteed.

 

Goreshot

To echo the comments in this thread:

1) Hunter DPS used to be idiotically easy to do. You would spam two shots whenever they were on cooldown. That's it. Nowadays you have to actively time your shots and try to weave them between Auto Shots, while maintaining Steady Shot rythm (casting Steady Shot immediately after an Auto Attack = not as easy as most might think). If you try to spam shots, you end up hurting your DPS and wasting mana in the long run. This type of damage cycle is significantly more difficult, requires much more focus, and is more prone to latency/timing issues than the DPS cycles of other classes, who generally just have a priority queue or a set rotation of spells/abilities to spam. This is why you see hunters who do competitive damage while there are others who languish at the bottom.

2) Hunters are significanlty more mana dependant than they were previously. We have no time to live outside the 5-second rule beacuse we are constantly using a special shot. However, if a hunter has no mana, he is essentially relegated to "wand" (aka "Auto Shot") damage while waiting for mana to come back. This is only exacerbated by the fact that hunters don't have much in the way of mana regeneration/efficiency talents or abilities. With the exception of the Tier 2 Marksmanship 2%/4%/6%/8%/10% reduced mana cost talent (which many hunters only put a few points in, because Improved Hunter's Mark is much better for raid-wide DPS), the only other mana-saving talents are in Survival. Lawl Survival. Hunters must chain-chug Fel Mana potions in order to maintain their mana pools. Doing this will still leave you OOM after ~7 minutes or so if you max-rank your shots. Even if you use Mana Oils and Mageblood potions (I know this because after 3 drinks I'll be OOM before my next pot timer is up). Mana-increasing buffs like BoW/JoW, totems, Shadow Priests, etc. will significantly increase hunter DPS in long fights, especially if they are forced to use their potion timers for non-mana potions.

 

◊ Kyth

That's why I'm asking.

We put the ele shaman, top 3 magic dps, and a shadow priest in a group together, and it was very effective. We don't have hunters clamoring for a shadow priest -- maybe they should be, maybe it *is* the best option -- or maybe it's throwing good money after bad, if the DPS is far lower than it should be even without a shadow priest.

If indeed the numbers are reasonable for mana-starved hunters, and the only option is a shadow priest for them, then it could be worth the experiment (might either way be worth it.) Otherwise, yes, putting your top dps all together with a wrath of air totem, mana regen (save on runes/lifetapping-induced cooldowns/mage downranking), and health regen (reduce the amount of time spent drain-lifing or bandaging) is a good way to make sure Gruul dies.

The goal is Gruul dying, not "add a bit of dps to an underperforming class" (if that's indeed the case.) While hunters might benefit more, on paper, given equal skill/effort, having tranquil air up for our first kill (when our tank was using GoA instead of Windfury) definitely made a huge difference in our ability to kill him (for example.)

In a guild where you might not have equal effort from everyone, it can be worthwhile to pile a bunch of eggs in one basket. But you might also be short changing some very good eggs (to stretch a metaphor too far.) Hence questions (on someone else's thread. *cough*.)


I'll admit I don't know what we're doing about judgments, I'll ask our paladins. (Horde, we're new to paladins.)


(edit) apparently due to having 2 paladins on each of the last two gruul runs, both holy spec'd, we haven't had any judgments on Gruul.

(edit2) Going to push to get a hunter in with a shadow priest, get JoW on Gruul, and make sure the hunter has enough consumables; we'll see if this is a mana issue. Thanks for the help here.

 

Phantasmique

True

We are being put into gimped groups whitout Spriests or even a Shaman then we are expected to stay in top of dps with other classes....right...., i use Dark Runes/Fel Mana/DW Oils/Mageblood/BoW etc.. to keep my mana up but with a totem from a Shaman or Spriests things are getting a lot easier

Besides our mana problems, there are a lot of silly hunters who still run around with gimped spec/silly items or use an outdated/wrong rotation as said above :P

 

Eleonoway

I'm a hunter and I usually end up 1st in Damagemeters, Recap and Sw-Stats, I also compare with other players. I even managed to pull aggro off the MT on Curator during evocation... ok that's maby not that good a thing, just wanted to mention it. I usually manage to weave one steady shot and something else (arcane, multi, sting) between each autoshot. but it's true, we definitely are very mana-dependend but with BoW, viper and JoW if I change aspect at about 30% mana it decreases very slowly and even when everything's gone there's still always enough mana left for a steady shot between every auto. I agree with you, there still are many hunters who use the old shot rotation but I'm doing my best decreasing their numbers whenever I encounter one.
We aren't doing Gruul yet (raid never becomes full...) so I've no idea how much dps I could squeeze out and I also haven't quite found out how to see personal dps with the named addons and I wouldn't dare to estimate but it seems to be enough ^^.

 

Elsia

In terms of base mechanism hunters have probably changed more than any other class in 2.0.1. Really rock solid theory craft on shot rotations and which build truly optimized damage and precise knowledge of weapons speed in various build situations is still sparse though some stuff that's reliable has come out. (For solid info on the basics at least find Lactose's theorycraft info on the hunter forum).

Beside mana issues and good shot rotation as appropriate for the weapon (most are slowish, allowing to squeeze in a multi or an arcane between auto-shots, but some favor a plain steady shot spam) the sheer basics is of course diligent use of long cools (rapid fire, trinket cools) whenever they are up.

Shot rotations, especially those that try to squeeze a second shot within an auto are very lag sensitive, because the timing is very tight. This is a drastic change from the type of rotations we had pre-2.0.1 where there was a concentration moment every 9-10 seconds (well, if you clipped your cycle there was no need to concentrate actually, just spam when it's up). Top steady shot cycle means tight timing roughly every 3 seconds (depending on weapon speed and assuming a slow weapon). A mistake (like a too early next steady that clips an auto, or systematic delay due to slow chasers) can make a rather noticable difference in damage output.

But check build and gear. Hunter DPS really does need some looking after (to me it felt more so than pre-TBC) to be competitive. For MM build definitely look for AP>2000 self-buffed and not totally gimp crit rating and solid hit rating. This isn't hard to get with pre-Karazhan gear and a few enchants. The whole thing looks very different for other builds though. Unfortunately the build question isn't settled yet and once more solid theorycraft is in, it may well turn out that at least two if not all three trees are raid viable (with variation), it will still matter where the points are though.

A trap utility MM build (0/44/17) for example is very neat for heroics and Karazhan, but certainly loses some DPS (I'd say roughly 50dps between the respecs from a pure damage MM).

A hunter who wants to keep damage up at a high level in long fights should be ready to use mana regens liberally and certainly stay AotH all the way through if that is at all managable. And as others said, JoW, BoW, spriest, shammy all help in fact just BoW and JoW make a huge difference. Often BoW is in fact the best utility blessing for long fights, if you have two BoM, if you have three BoK (some might prefer BoK earlier due to the mana scaling). With misdirection and diligent FD use, BoS really should be only needed in aggro-sensitive boss fights (i.e. if a hunter pulls aggro at curator during evocate, he forgot to FD in time to prevent reaching the top, as they should have).

P.S. forgot to mention, dual-wielding mana oils is very neat for long fights. I usually carried both my polearm and 2 1-handers for that case. Oils stack so it's double the return. That's another 28mp5.

 

Miaxi

No offense but I find these claims about heavy group dependency quite controversial. Other DPS classes can compete without buffs stacked in their favor and I get very suspicious if an MM hunter has done 2/3 of my damage while receiving buffs from me AND benefiting from sunder armor.

Could anybody give me a logical explanation for that?

PS: Using synched DamageMeters 5.6.0, so it's not the autoshot issue.

 

Sienna

So you do around 1500 dps?

 

• Valoran

The answer has already been stated in this thread, that hunters depend more on their (rather limited without comsumables) mana pools to output decent amounts of dps. Buffs are what allow them to up their dps, especially on long haul fights.

You could argue that this makes hunters poorer for DPS than other specific classes and that by adding shadow priests and shaman to their groups is a waste but as Kyth put it earlier, 'The goal is Gruul dying, not "add a bit of dps to an underperforming class"'.

Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is that the relative increase in a hunters DPS from having more mana available to them is higher than that of say a mage or warlock, who don't have as serious innate mana issues.

 

Sienna

Explanation for you doing 1500 dps or the hunters doing below 600 dps? I don't have any explanation for either. If a hunter can't do as much as a shaman, there's something wrong there.

 

• Playered

Windfury, SoE, Mana Spring?
It would help to know the general DPS you both had rather than a rough "66% of my damage".

That aside it looks like a rotation or gear issue from the Hunter in question, or perhaps he has very bad latency and is unable to pull off a rotation well.

For Rogues its a very easy rotation on their damage, for Shamans I dont believe there is one (?) or atleast not on the same level, for Hunters however you can most likely miss out on around 50% of your potential damage if you dont use a decent rotation/cycle.