Well in some sense you should stack all classes to their favor really. Rogues might like that oomkin aura for the fun factor and mages like that LotP for it's shiney color. Shadow priests certainly don't shadow weave for me as a hunter

But the short point is that hunters mana starve easily. More easily than other mana using DPS classes. We often contend with the smallest mana pool of all the classes as our gear usually doesn't heavily stack int, we usually don't have great mana regen, because thanks to the new shot rotation spirit is totally pointless to hunters and all our regens come from mp5 only. Our only innate mana regen mechanism is aspect of the viper, which is is mp5 scaling with our total intelligence, which again is thanks to typical itemization lower than other classes.

A hunter could certainly gear for massive intelligence and mp5 but that would gimp the damage level relevant stats of AP/AGI/crit/hit.

Think of JoW as something as helpful to hunters as CoE to mages. If you have it available and your group composition and the encounter says it's the best choice judgement, or best choice curse, one ought to go for it just to help the class perform.

Compare that to locks who have externalizable mana regen (life tap "leech healer mana pots" ) or mages who have evocate and mana gems. Both have larger mana pools by default and usually better regen on top.

As for logical explanation. Well blizz kind of decided that hunters should be more mana limited alone than other classes, I suppose. We do get utility that helps it. JoW as mentioned earlier is a judgement that helps no class as much as hunters I'd say only enchant shammies and palas like it too but they don't tend to be as mana starved as us. Dual wielding mana oils is another. Fel mana potion could have been called hunter mana potion etc.

On top of that hunter damage is a tad on the low end so hunter really do have to work to keep their damage levels up (and one can with effort). Any slacking will show on the damage meters because just spamming a few buttons isn't enough, timing those buttons right makes a big difference.
I'm not sure how to explain that but hunter dps isn't dominated by global cooldown-retrigger button tapping. It's dominated by the interleaved duration of auto-shots, steady-shots and the global cooldown, where the auto-shot actually defines the cycle length. Just spamming buttons can and now often will be suboptimal. Note that this last paragraph has nothing to do with group utility stacking. That's for every hunter.

But if you do bring hunters its certainly a good idea to stack utility for them as you should for any other class.

Actuall hunter dps is dominated by the global cooldown of steady shots. Since with haste effects we can cast them under 1 second but due to GCD we can't fire 2 in less than 3 seconds.

Well what you say explains why you can't spam 2 steady's in one auto for the typically available weapons. It doesn't explain how we actually fill shot cycles, hence why I said auto-shot duration dominates the cycle because that's ultimately what you time your cycle around. It's ultimately trying to minimize auto-shot delays while maximizing damage from filler shots.

That's how the statement was meant

Well, I doubt it's a gear issue because we both raid about same amount and he is Karazhan geared like I am.

This is just from the heroic 5-man I did a few minutes ago:
He has blessing of might, I have salvation. He is getting mana spring and bloodlust from me and sunder armor on mobs from the tank. I am sitting at 800-850 DPS while he is at 550-650. I can't say anything about his rotation but I can see that he is using steady shot from the casting bar on his unit frame.

This really interests me because lousy damage from hunters is starting to become a real pet-hate for me.

Someone said it before, Hunter damage is the most difficult out of any class to do. You are off by less then A quarter of a second and your dps drops by a metric butt ton. Also, they need a group dedicated to them to compete, ie Shaman, Shadow priest, feral druids and stuff...so unless you have enough hunters who are near perfect with their shot rotations to build a group around them, just take another mage or warlock.

Well doing good damage as a hunter now requires lots of paying attention and 99% of the players out there cba to pay attention as we all know. While a mage who cba can still do 90% of the damage as a mage who is trying, a hunter who cba will do 50% of another hunter. And that won't change any time soon unless they bring another hunter mechanics update in a future patch.

Agreed, if you have lag as a hunter, be it latency lag or fps problems, the dps will go down a lot. I always have around 200ms, I'm pretty sure I could do 50 more dps if I had a latency like 20ms. But I don't have any fps problems at least.

Can they really? Perhaps it's just because the buffs for other classes are more common and more "acceptable". Rogue DPS takes a big dive if they have none of their group buffs from a shaman, for example.

And TBC is the first time that Blizzard has really approached group/raid buffs for the casters, so I'm not sure it's fair to point at mages and locks as examples of classes that don't need group composition to succeed. We're designed not to. It was always a melee-only field before the 2.0 changes. Original WoW repeatedly, constantly would give casters longevity, but melee DPS boosts -- just look at the old world buffs, where casters get crap like mana regen, and melee get haste. Longevity is nice, yes, but it doesn't compare to damage. Even our class buffs like INT and spirit add almost nothing to our DPS (crit/int ratio being so high) and are really longevity boosts.

Also, it's possible that hunters are just less intuitively obvious what they need, and the hunters themselves aren't doing a good job of arguing for it. e.g. I know raiding hunters, doing Naxx, who weren't using mana oils on long fights.


And I actually think hunter mana is similar to warlock damage right now -- it's just Blizzard so far has taken two different approaches.

Without a shadow priest, warlock damage is pretty good. With one, we're awesome -- arguably too strong (although that may also be an artifact of the 25-man that "everyone" is doing, Gruul, being very dot-friendly.)

Without mana regen, hunter damage is poor. With one perhaps they are pretty good (I don't have experience with this, just going by what this thread sees.)

Blizzard might well nerf warlock dps hard, which would leave warlocks in the position of being unwanted on raids unless there is a shadow priest, but "balanced" if there is one. Who knows. Or they might address hunter mana regen issues. Either way, for primary classes, both have always teetered on the "useless/overpowered" boundary, and have been plagued with overpoweredness impressions thanks to pvp.


Warlocks are also very touchy on the "attention span = damage" side. Obviously I haven't played a hunter, but even the slightest wavering of my concentration on a raid and my damage suffers tremendously. I spend every half a second figuring out what spell I'll cast next because we don't have a rotation, and have many many different things we can do after each cast (another nuke? a lifetap? Refresh a dot -- if so which one?) -- and some decisions are far far far better than others, but you have to figure out fast which one it is. The difference between locks who are paying attention and those who aren't is extreme.

Kyth's last paragraph should ring pretty true for Hunters as well.
As for Miaxi, there's a big difference between bad players and bad classes. Don't make WoW General forums comparisons.
Another thing to note that in heroics Hunters often have greatly reduced DPS due to crowd control, either directly (e.g by having to crowd control something) or indirectly (e.g. unable to Multi-Shot due to crowd control). Pet DPS is also a bit tricky at times.

I'd say the lock dps differs a lot in raids like Kyth said. In last gruul kill we had one lock doing 230k and another doing 110k. Their spell damage was not the same but doing 2X as another lock, shows that lock dps is like hunter dps, only goes high with extra attention.

I'm very pleased this didn't turn into a "hunters are gimped in PvE" thread. I have not ceased to be impressed when our hunters are paying attention compared to when they are afk autoshotting. I suppose I might be tempted to afk if I did decent damage afk as well though. Wands (even with wand spec) doesn't cut it

Don't insult me, I never compared damage on trash pulls. My post was describing a burn-down on a single target and all I wanted to know was whether certain hunters are playing on auto-pilot or if things like that are supposed to be normal.

Group stacking means the difference between "good" and "great" for most classes. It should not be from "just above the tanks" to "hey, he is actually within top 5". If JUST the mana regeneration from vampiric touch makes this much difference, then something is wrong with the class itself.

Having a shadow priest is a massive difference for me as a beast hunter especially.

On one of our Gruul attempts I gained back about 30k mana. Due to this I was able to go full burn non stop without using pots. On trash in Karazhan I can also go full burn if a Shadow Priest is in the group.

The biggest difference for me though is the healing on my pet. Most people don't pay attention or its a low priority (which is understandable). If my pet dies I lose 2% damage immediately plus the group loses the 3% buff potential, and I'll lose about another 150+ dps. With a Shadow Priest my pet gets so much hp back from ve he never usually needs to be healed.

Its not mana issues there its his rotation and gear choice, basicly he needs a couple of L2P pills before he starts to group/raid.

We've had hunters high up without SP, sometimes with LoTP or Mana Spring instead but not often and rarely more than one of them.

Having any of the above 3 is not going to improve his DPS by 400+, thats a playstyle issue.

Theres plenty of hunter info on the official forums, and in the class mechanic ones here about how to maximize the potential of a hunter player, get him to read them all, then again untill he can recite them on VT to you. Hes most likely going to need some gear changes so help him get those, and make sure as hell that he uses Fel Mana Potions in raids.

all the hunters complaining on the hunter forums arent bad players and i hate it when people say "Less QQ more Pew Pew" or "Hunter DPS is fine, L2P" The truth is, hunter dps is not fine, it takes Way too much effort compared to other classes to do DECENT damage. We can do a lot of dps, it just takes perfection.

Compare weaving in two shots between autos with spamming fireball and scorch at different times...or throwing up DoTs and spamming shadowbolt until DoTs are about to wear off. There is a world of difference.

IMO, to fix hunter dps, blizzard would have to do something like, give steady shot a .5 cast time with a 1 sec cooldown or something that makes it so auto shots arent interrupted as often.

So hunters aren't the easiest DPSer to play well? big deal, they have easier times elsewhere. If people cant manage to play their class properly and dont want to put the effort in to improve, get them to reroll a mage for higher DPS with less focus required (not saying mages need no focus to be good, just with that little effort they will be higher DPS than the player on a hunter).

Face it, not all classes require the same skill or functionality to be 'good' on DPS at simple tank/spank fights, if people dont want to put the effort in but want different results, reroll.

Rogue DPS wasn't too hard beyond a simple cycle with your CPs, its alot easier to master the cycle of a rogue vs that of a hunter, the difference is your simply moving with (somewhat) fixed energy ticks every 2 seconds & combo points, instead of a 10-12sec cycle timed by #.#sec autoshots repeated constantly.

I would put affliction loc's performance relation similar (albeit not so significant) to that of a hunter however, rather than 'just play with your hair and click your dot buttons then spam your SB button like a rogue with SS' as you seem to think.


If as a raider people dont want to put the effort in to perform better in raiding, then remove them, some may be ignorant, others incompitent, the worst are the ones which really dont care.

All classes need to "time" their abilities. But right now with hunter's case, we need to time in terms of miliseconds. And it's not a good idea to go down that road in a game where people play with high latencies. If I was playing warcraft in LAN with 10ms, I'd be more than happy to depend on extremely precise timings for good dps, it's a nice challenge and brings a bit different aspect into a rather dull game in terms of quickness. But when I have 220ms and I'm depending on casting my steadyshot 100ms after my autoshot fires or else I'll clip the next one, it's not pleasant. I'm using such a big autoshot timer in the middle of my screen, just to see the miliseconds clearer until my next auto fires so I can use my latency, to send the steady cast signal to the server 200ms before the autoshot cooldown is there, so the server receives the signal right after autoshot is fired and starts casting steady. While it's good to know that there are ways to deal good dps as a hunter, I cannot possibly pay attention to all this if there are other things involved in the encounter. I can keep this up in a fight where I stand and shoot all night, but if I have to pay attention to other things, there's no way I can do the best dps the toon is capable of. And that is not the case with other classes. That's my main problem in this matter.

but its not just skill involved, having 200ms latency makes you have lower dps then someone with 50...why? because you will be delaying autoshots. And the difference between a hunter who gets everything perfect and one who is off by .2 of a second can be as high as 150 dps...its not a L2P issue. "My computer is better then yours, I deserve to do more dps" or, "I am closer to the blizzard servers so my dps is just fine, you need to L2P" Its dumb.

What you are seeing on the forums are people who know what they are doing (except for the MM hunters only using steady and auto) and they are getting COMPLETELY different results from others who also know what they are doing.

You get two people doing the same thing within fractions of a second of each other, one does a lot better dps then the other and the one who is closer to perfect (or has horrible rogues mage and warlocks) go, L2P.

Hunter DPS is fine, Its achieving that DPS that is broken.

Imagine if priests had as hard a time healing as we do dpsing. They would be complaining just the same. Or imagine if warlocks had to only shadowbolt between dot ticks or something ludicrous.

There is a slight difference between being able to think ahead and decide, "ok i can life tap now" and "Dammit, i hit my steady shot .01 secs early and just lost 800 damage"

Hunters really have three factors working against us for being able to sustain good DPS.

We're a mana dependent class with no real mana extending abilities. At a full DPS burn, I use about 100 mana per second, with no way to regain it aside from chain potting or VE.

Second is our pets. Some hunters are just bad at managing their pets, some are good, and sometimes that doesn't matter at all due to encounter design making pets more or less guaranteed to die. Unlike locks, we do depend on our pets for DPS, and without them we lose a large chunk of DPS.

Finally, there's the matter of our current shot cycle (which is less a cycle, and more spamming higher priority shots between autoshots). I need to continually watch my global cooldown, autoshot cast bar, arcane shot cooldown, and multishot cooldown, and decide which to use on a second by second basis; and then cast it within roughly a 0.25 second window, or I lose DPS.

The first two can be largely blunted by group composition (primarily being grouped with a shadow priest). The third, attention and skill only goes so far for, beyond that the only solution is throwing money at a faster connection/computer or waiting to see if blizzard will overhaul us again.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far and I think is noteworthy: The Hunter's pet. Tons of encounters in this game are pet friendly now, with only minimal micromanagement e.g; Running the pet out for cave-ins on Gruul, enfeebles on Prince, etc. A lot of people just discount pets, don't merge them into SW_Stats and then dismiss the hunter as a poor dps class. But considering the fact that pets don't bring any utility besides their damage, I think it's a mistake not to use them.

Aside from that, yeah. Mana sucks, spam-drink mana pots, Steady shot rotations require attention, etc. ad nauseum

I'm not sure what to say except that of course this is indeed the case with other classes. Look, I've got a level 70 Hunter who I rarely do much more than farm with and a 70 Mage that I've raided with extensively. I wouldn't pretend that I know as much about the Hunter class as I do about the Mage class but I do know a little. I understand that clipping an autoshot is pretty nasty on sustained dps. I also understand that interrupting a 3.0 + latency cast time fireball is really goddamn catastrophic for my dps too. That doesn't mean I don't try to get the same effect when playing a Mage because frankly, I can't afford to lose 10% of my casting time in average latency either. I too have a cast bar taking up a pretty massive amount of real estate

I'm certainly not without sympathy but I do think you might be surprised at just how many classes do have that sort of mechanic.

EDIT: I should note that I am not at all saying that Hunters are not impacted by timing plateaus. They certainly are and a bad connection can severely impact a shot rotation in ways that most other classes don't see nearly as dramatically. They keep trying to figure out mechanically how to make Hunter sustained dps work well but I still think they have a poor system in place.

Yes and no. Obviously any class suffers if they completely stop DPSing for a period (which is what stopping a fireball cast would be). Then again, there's no penalty for you prematurely pushing the fireball button.

The fundamental difference is that if your timing is off on spamming the fireball button by 0.25 of a second, you don't lose 800-1000 damage from it. If a hunter clobbers an autoshot, they do.