Hunter DPS and PVE Raids - Page 3

sovelis41 · 04/01/07, 4:51 AM

I have to agree with most points here and say that, in general, hunter dps mechanics have changed quite a bit from 1.x-2.0. Once I was able to work it out and get in a good shot rotation, my dps was pretty good, into the top 5 in some fights. There were a couple things I noticed though that had a huge impact on my dps and the meter in general. For one, the fel mana potion could probably be the #1 consumable a hunter wants to keep in his bag. When I started using these on a regular basis, my longevity went wayyy up.

I'll go back to Elendril's comments about steady shot. If I see a hunter who is kind of low on the meters, relative to me or another hunter, usually you can look at his shot-breakdown and see that they are indeed not using steady shot quite as much and using aimed shot or multi too much and perhaps clipping their autos. Also, if you happen to be the odd-man out and don't get in the group with the feral druid and the shaman, your dps is going to suffer tremendously =p. Kind of sucks when it's you, a dps warrior, and a rogue together and the rogue is taking your TSA and the warriors BS, and giving nothing in return, selfish bastages.

Phanuel · 04/01/07, 5:16 AM

Disconnect Autoshot from our casted shots finally? :/

Grogzor · 04/01/07, 5:38 AM

Originally Posted by Phanuel

Disconnect Autoshot from our casted shots finally? :/

But that would make sense now wouldnt it? I mean, the only factors for choosing a weapon would be damage range and DPS...who cares about speed.

♦ Oggie · 04/01/07, 7:02 AM

Originally Posted by Grogzor

But that would make sense now wouldnt it? I mean, the only factors for choosing a weapon would be damage range and DPS...who cares about speed.

I am fully confident that blizzard would find some mechanism to tie weapon speed hunter damage capacity.

Moridin · 04/01/07, 7:24 AM

Originally Posted by Grogzor

But that would make sense now wouldnt it? I mean, the only factors for choosing a weapon would be damage range and DPS...who cares about speed.

That would be... heavenly. At the moment getting down to 3FPS on Leothras the blind is not very fun (yes, crappy computer, but also crappy place, I am way way above that on fathom lord etc).

Gonkish · 04/01/07, 5:50 PM

I'm just throwing some things out there:

- Trapping shit is incredibly tricky (and, often, fickle), and requires us to pay attention to where the trap is, what kind of mob it is (caster/ranged/melee), etc., on top of keeping track of how long we have left on the trap cooldown, AND making sure that the mob will trigger the next trap (i.e., making sure it's not going to take a strange path to you). On top of that you might want to hit it with another distracting shot while trapped to make sure it doesn't flip out and go onto a healer or something, and then you need to worry about things like trap resists (which, because we lack spell hit, and survival is a bad, bad joke of a tree, is a very real possibility even in non-heroic 5 mans). All of this makes your DPS suffer, as you're not actively hitting the things that are getting killed while futzing with the CC.

All in all, it's a hell of a lot more involved than any other form of CC, with the possible exception of things like Sap or MC. On top of THAT, it also means your hunter, provided he's not completely brain dead, isn't going to be using Multi-shot. Which may not sound terrible, but that's a huge portion of how we kill things, especially MULTIPLE things, and even more so if you're specced into Imp. Barrage in Marks. THEN you need to worry about actually killing things while doing all this other shit. God help you if you get a trap resist, because now you're kiting until the group can handle the loose mob. Point + click this is not. (Though it is thankfully 1000 times more viable than the old days of trapping dragonkin in UBRS.)
That said, a competent hunter should be capable of doing this on the fly, provided you let him know which mob you want trapped. If you just go "trap something" as you pull, and then magically expect it to be pulled off to the side while you're tank is attempting to get threat on a pack of mobs, you're only fucking yourself. Distracting is really good at generating threat (which is why I always use it when Misdirection is up), but a defensive stance thunderclap or a few bear swipes will make it an utter bitch to pull things off of a good tank.

- Shot rotations can be tricky at times. If you're good at it, it shows very quickly, and if you're not (or you're lazy like moi), you'll see it just as fast. Lag also plays a factor. If you're casting a steady shot, you may inadvertently have it start casting a bit later than you'd expect, and now you're going to run into some trouble down the line, due to the fact that your timing is off. As your ping gets worse, your output suffers, because you're losing precious fractions of a second to network issues and the GCD. I generally get ~100-150ms ping to Mal'ganis, even at peak hours, and I occasionally still get situations where I just have to skip a Steady Shot or Arcane/Multi because if I did cast it, Auto would be delayed. So either way, I lose. It's incredibly frustrating, but a fact of life. At the very least, it makes things somewhat interesting. I can't tell you how many videos I've watched from a Mage's POV, and he or she is quite visibly standing there mashing frostbolt or fireball repeatedly, ad nauseum. That seems incredibly boring to me, and yet at the same time, I envy them because if they're in a fight like that, they're not repeatedly forced to choose whether or not they will cost themselves significant portions of their DPS output the entire fight.

- Mana is, as it has always been, a huge factor. The "mana wall" is alive and well, despite repeated proclamations of its demise. Even WITH an Alchemist's Stone, Fel Mana Potions, full raid buffs (including BoW), and Aspect of the Viper, I can and will run out of mana VERY QUICKLY, especially if I am the only hunter in the raid and thus probably want to keep Scorpid Sting on the boss as much as possible. JoW is a massive, massive boon to a hunter, especially now that we attack much faster than we used to in the pre-2.0 days.

It's also the reason that our T4 set is absolute garbage compared to Cryptstalker. The 6 piece Cryptstalker bonus, for the uninitiated, grants you 50 mana every time you crit at range. (This includes multiple crits from Multi-Shot.) That equates to an absolutely stupid amount of mp5 over the course of a long fight. Looking at the WWS parse of our last Magtheridon kill: I gained 7,844 mana from JoW, 6,400 from Fel Mana (w/o the Alch stone), 5,986 from BoW, and 4,450 mana from Adrenaline Rush (the 6pc Cryptstalker bonus). That's 4,450 mana that I had to do NOTHING for beyond wear what is essentially the best gear available to Hunters right now, due to absolutely atrocious itemization and Blizzard's odd nerfing of actual upgrades like the Fiend Slayer Boots from Karazhan.

Unless they pull something out of their ass in 2.1, I cannot see any reason in the foreseeable future to ditch this bonus for raids. The T4 set bonuses are awful, and even with the best socket gems you can find, it's STILL an overall downgrade (or, at best, a sidegrade) from gear I got in a 40 man level 60 raid zone months ago. Cryptstalker's bonuses are, quite simply, too good to give up.

The saving grace of Hunter DPS when we're out of mana is Steady Shot. With 5/5 Efficiency (which, if you're any kind of a raiding spec, YOU SHOULD FUCKING HAVE MAXED OUT), it is 99 mana. I've had it crit on a fully sundered raid mob for upwards of 2k. Even WITH that fantastically low cost, I am often times sitting there doing nothing but waiting on AotV ticks (or a potion) to bring me back above 99 mana so I can cast another one. We are incredibly bound to mana regen, repeatedly denied it, and yet again this makes the 6pc Cryptstalker bonus absolutely amazing. If I crit a Steady Shot on a mob right now, that Steady Shot just cost me 49 mana, and probably hit for over 1200. If that mob also has JoW on it, and that particular hit procced the mana gain, I just hit it for around that much or more, and actually ended up with MORE mana than I started with. Extrapolate that over the course of a longer fight, like Magtheridon, and the benefits are obvious.

Gonkish · 04/01/07, 5:59 PM

(Continued, this is much longer than I anticipated...)

In my time as a Hunter I've come across several things that have been echoed back and forth amongst other people in the class, that I honestly thing they should really do in order to make our class behave less strangely:

1.) Give us an alternative to Multi-Shot, sharing the same cooldown, which is essentially just a single target version of Multi-Shot (same damage, etc.). We fire it constantly at single targets ANYWAY (and that is really strange), why not give us the option to choose between one or more? Hell, make it the same cost as multi-shot, we won't care, all we'll notice is that we're able to actually do more damage when shit is CCed. (Steelfleece was saying this back in AQ.)

2.) Make Serpent Sting scale with AP. Viper Sting is FINE and doesn't need a buff, but Serpent Sting is basically just a "put this on a rogue who has already blown CoS to piss them off" button and that's about all. No one ever uses Serpent Sting as 660 damage for 247 mana is atrocious. It's a complete waste of mana for anything BUT pissing off rogues. Scorpid Sting should have a longer duration. The mana cost is fine, but it's a useful raid debuff that gives Hunters a reason to exist beyond "LOL DIS IS DA TRANQ BOSS", and keeping it up as much as possible is an incredible mana drain to an already mana starved class. Why can't it just be 45 sec.? One minute? I don't really see it being incredibly overpowered in PvP, either, so why the shaft?

3.) Survival. No one (or at least, almost no one) is Survival. Why? The layout of the tree is a mess, and there's no tangible benefit to spec beyond Surefooted compared to MM or BM. The cornerstone of Survival is Master Tactician and Lightning Reflexes, which simply aren't enough. Gimping Lightning Reflexes completely destroyed Survival's capability to compete with the DPS of a Marks or, oddly, a BM hunter, and giving it an extremely fickle method of maybe once sort of almost kinda matching the output of the other two specs is just... dumb. I don't know what else to say. Readiness is of marginal usefulness in a raid, but is, I'd imagine, quite nice in PvP. That said, you're such a ranged gimp if you're that deep in Survival that you'll probably still die anyway, even if you need to be trapping more than once every 30 seconds.

Beyond that, the entire tree is just a mess. Trap Mastery and Clever Traps should be combined. The slaying talents in the first tier should be combined. (Alternatively, one of the better ideas I've heard is to give us bonus damage to the type of mob currently being tracked.) Imp. Feign Death should either be given some additional functionality, or be completely replaced/merged with something else. Lightning Reflexes should be returned to it's old values of 5/10/15/20/25%. Expose Weakness should probably last a bit longer (especially because it's a nice talent for raid utility). Wyvern Sting... I don't even know what to suggest for it. (From what I hear it's either awesome or completely stupid.) Master Tactician needs some sort of change, either increasing the duration of the buff, increasing the proc rate, or SOMETHING to allow a Survival hunter to ramp himself up to a point where he can be competitive with the other two specs. Aside from that, I don't have any major issues with Survival. Then again, I've never specced into it, and don't have any plans to.

4.) This is a general issue with a lot of classes, I know, but why is it that gear like Outland Striders are completely superior to basically anything short of Kara loot, for a hunter. Why is it that Kara loot is, at worst, inferior to tier 3, or, at best, a sidegrade or marginal upgrade (AFTER you socket it with the best things available)? That makes no sense. At least we're not alone, but, as much as I love my Cryptstalker pieces, I'd really like to actually be able to upgrade from them sometime in the near future.

5.) Take Kill Command off the GCD. As a Marks hunter, I have absolutely no reason to use this skill. I'm scrounging for mana as it is, my pet is NOT buffed to hell and back through BM, and there's simply no reason to even have this bound or on my bars. The biggest limiting factor of KC, however, is that it is on the GCD, and thus needs to be cycled in with all the other myriad shots and such. Even if you're BM it's still doing less damage than a Steady or Arcane, and on top of that it can be dodged, blocked, parried, or miss, like any other melee attack. (Read: This is not a tangible benefit over something that will not miss, be dodged, blocked, or parried, AND will hit harder.) Taking it off the GCD would not make it completely overpowered, as it still has a decently long cooldown, and can only be activated a certain time after a RANGED crit.

6.) This ties in directly with #5: Give hunters a trainable, passive pet ability like the Warlock Felguard's avoidance. Right now, asscleaves, shadow novas, rains of fire, etc. end up making your pet die very painfully, very quickly. (Ask any of your rogues how awesome it is getting destroyed by any one of these lovely abilities!) Conversely, Blizzard absolutely insists that our pets MUST factor into our output in terms of balance. Yet they then make sure that the majority of raid bosses have some giant, pet (and rogue

) destroying AoE of doom that completely contradicts that statement. Let us spend the training points, if we so desire, to give our pets a chance of just avoiding these recurrent AoEs of doom. You can even make it a purely PvE skill (read: Curse of Doom), but Hunters NEED this, ESPECIALLY if they're BM.

For example: Magtheridon is actually a fight that's pretty easy to use your pet on, provided you pay attention to where it is. On the Mag kill I mentioned before, my cat did 67,776 damage total over the 12 minutes of the fight. (To both the channelers and Magtheridon himself.) I am NOT BM, and I was NOT using Kill Command. When you add my DPS with that of my pet's, I ended up as #3 on the DMs, after two well geared, pro-as-hell rogues who really know their shit. (Khazal and Wodin, in this case.) Had I NOT used my pet, and just had him standing by me, or parked him outside the room, I would have been roughly in the 6th or 7th position on DMs. (For reference, I had no Shadow Priest, was using Fel Strength Elixirs, Ravager Dogs, Elixirs of Major Agility, etc. but no flask.) That's a huge difference. Our pets NEED avoidance, plain and simple.

Sorry for the OMG WALL OF FUCKING TEXT. I've just been milling this over in my mind for a while now...

One of the better threads from the dreaded WoW forums that I've come across concerning Hunter DPS can be found here. He's basically echoing exactly what I've just said, and he links to some other threads which have some good ideas, but I don't agree with everything they're stating. The post contained in that link, however, makes a lot of sense.

Elsia · 04/01/07, 6:33 PM

Well agree to everything in principle. Maybe with the exception of traps.

I actually like how traps function and that their use isn't trivial. I really thing Blizz has gone the right direction with the trap redesign (in combat use, cooldown times, talents in survival). Now one can spec traps and can make important factors easier, like reduction of them breaking early, or removal of the retrap cooldown gap. One can still live with none of these talents but it comes at a cost of extra effort. A trap specced hunter (17 pts surv) can chain trap with minimal risk (main risk being that another mob runs by just as you try to retrap) and also with minimal loss to DPS (basically one GCD when the trap cool is up). Traps matter because there is a lot to CC.

They ought to be more tricky to handle because we get the advantage of CCing almost everything under the sun. Other forms of chainable CC has more limited applicability or different forms of risk.

Traps in my mind are really a big part of the reason why hunters fair well in Heroics and Karazhan.

And the way trap control works, it supports situational awareness and doing what's needed (like the distracting shot to keep aggro as mentioned, or cleaver positioning, which fits the hunter class as we are the one class where worrying about positioning is built in due to the deadzone). I think traps are kind of fun to play really.

I always felt that judging "dps" classes just by dps misses the variety in situational utility that is really more incorporiated at least in Heroics and Karazhan. If someone engages in needed utility functions (like chain CC) it ought to be kind of OK that they drop in the DPS meters some. In the end it matters that the encounter gets beaten, and if no CC means wipe, and the somewhat lowered DPS still makes it beatable, nothing is lost really as the fight is won. Maybe we'll get a recap version that shows number and duration of CC as a stat to diversify performance measures of folks more.

Elsia · 04/01/07, 7:03 PM

Another point to be made on hunters is the DPS vs hp tradeoff current itemization often gives us. If one really wants to optimize damage, we end up doing this at the expense of survivability (and mana pool). If I'm in max dps gear there is a good chance that I compete with other classes (and win that race) for lowest HP. That mail means nothing in heroics and later is obvious, so in some sense I make myself into a 1-shot wonder if I go full DPS gear. It's tricky and I tend to carry a stamina set as well and selectively swap in pieces at the expense of damage if survivability is an issue.

Here a good example from the armory (at the snapshot now):

http://armory.wow-europe.com/#charac...lscream&n=Osmo

AP 2314
Hit: 72
Crit: 21.49%

But:

Hp: 5648
Mana: 6343

I'm not that high up, but being over 2k AP selfbuffed, I sit at 6108 hp. This isn't my peak DPS gear, but already has 1 items swapped in for survivability.

Mages and locks easily beat that.

zepi · 04/01/07, 8:40 PM

Originally Posted by Elsia

Mages and locks easily beat that.

Only if they choose stamina over +dmg. It's easy to get similar numbers for a mage if you go only for +dmg, gem yourself with Living Rubies only etc. You've end up with exactly the same ~5.6k HP.

Now most mages don't go that route, as we've got ~ decent epics that offer similar DPS to no-stamina blues with a sacrifice of only 1-2 +dmg for each gearslot, but for those who go for "of fiery wrath" for the slots with worst epics / rares end up being real glass cannons.

I have no idea how much hunters have to sacrifice to get 2.2k+ selfbuffed AP, but atleast ~2k is obtainable without much sacrifices.

Lumi · 04/01/07, 10:02 PM

While not actively raiding at the moment, I will agree that without mulit-shot and the addition of babysitting a trapped mob, my 5-man dps is significantly lower than the other classes I group with. Combined with obscene cleaves and aoes in heroics its really ugly for my pet too. The only shining point is the near-universal nature of freezing trap.

RK · 04/02/07, 12:41 AM

Originally Posted by Miaxi

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.

I wish our hunters were the writing type. Our hunters are top-notch DPS and always have been, but I couldn't tell you how they've organised their rotations (it does help that they're consumable junkies and would use everything other than flasks on any serious attempt- checking the difference between the consumables your hunters are using and the consumabls everyone else is using might be an idea- but it goes way beyond that).

OTOH, I see huge discrepancies in the output our mages put out, and I have no idea why.

From the damage meters I've seen here and from my direct experience, I'm willing to theorise that:

1. Warlocks + shadow priest is ridiculously synergistic. shadow weaving and misery is probably too much, in all honesty (and curse of shadow from the other end doesn't exactly suck either). No-one else gets that level of difference just from one other spec being present. They really did splurge a bit too much on making "face melting" raid-viable, between shadow weaving, misery, VE and VT.

2. Besides the aforementioned locks and shadow priests, rogues > all as long as the fight doesn't restrict them a lot.

3. All DPS specs are competitive on damage with all other DPS specs, and player skill and consumable usage will differentiate them. These isn't really any "order" that DPS should always end up on if a fight isn't biased towards a particular damage type, other than either rogues or a warlock-who-gets-to-use-CoA leading.

Kyth · 04/02/07, 12:44 AM

Originally Posted by RK

1. Warlocks + shadow priest is ridiculously synergistic. shadow weaving and misery is probably too much, in all honesty (and curse of shadow from the other end doesn't exactly suck either). No-one else gets that level of difference just from one other spec being present. They really did splurge a bit too much on making "face melting" raid-viable, between shadow weaving, misery, VE and VT.

How much does rogue damage go up with shaman totems? about 15%? (which is what shadow weaving is)

Misery+themselves (or another fire mage) is the exact same bonus for a fire mage as a shadow priest is for a warlock -- fire mage doesn't even need to depend on an offspec being present. And CoE is the same as CoS.

Northerner · 04/02/07, 1:40 AM

Improved Shadowbolt is the real tipping point in my opinion. There is quite a bit to be said about raid damage role balance but frankly, it's been done to death and I am extremely tired of trying to defend an indefensible position.

Let's just say that WoW's present system seems to be either a) not working well or b) working well and intended to make most every class capable of similar dps constrained primarily by spec, situational fight mechanics and, of course, consumable useage.

Lycur · 04/02/07, 2:03 AM

Originally Posted by Northerner

working well and intended to make most every class capable of similar dps constrained primarily by spec, situational fight mechanics and, of course, consumable useage.

This is certainly my interpretation. From an end user point of view I'd also say it's the best/only way to do it: as long as any one class is clearly more desirable for a given role than another the less desirable class(es) get shafted. Conversly if everybody's equally suited to every situation than the game's quite bland. Of course, at least from a PVE perspective, this means that class balance ~= encounter design, but they've put in a fairly reasonable spread of stuff playing to everybody's strengths with absolutely nothing that makes any given class/spec useless (at least pre serpentshire, I can't speak for anything past Grull).

Trifle · 04/02/07, 2:26 AM

Despite not being able to play much due to work hours and time zone differences, I like to think of myself as a decent hunter. There are however, 2 things that absolutely cripple my dps on raids.

Firstly is the mana issue; I don't, and never will, have 6 piece cryptstalker, and the difference is nothing short of phenomenal. Secondly is that I play from overseas and have a latency between 400-800ms.

The first is a matter of gear, consumables and raid composition so it can be fixed if I had more time to raid. The second is what frustrates me, as it degrades my dps so dramatically and can't be fixed short of switching to a less populated server.

Kyth · 04/02/07, 2:51 AM

Originally Posted by Northerner

Improved Shadowbolt is the real tipping point in my opinion. There is quite a bit to be said about raid damage role balance but frankly, it's been done to death and I am extremely tired of trying to defend an indefensible position.

Part of the balance on ISB is that crit is a horrible, horrible stat for a warlock casting shadowbolts (which is the only spell that can proc it -- fire-destruction uses incinerate.)

Even as a shadow-destruction build, Shadowbolts were making up at most 40-45% of my damage. Meaning crit, which is already expensive relative to +dmg, applies to at most half my spells, making even more an expensive proposition. 20% shadow bonus is great, but the only reason it's at all valuable is because it does in fact apply to the mob (versus mages, who get more bonus damage from crits via talents than we do, and who get more out of crit in general, but the bonuses only apply to themselves.)

I'm not saying it's balanced or isn't necessarily, just saying that I'm sure the general uselessness of crit for a lock is partly what is on the designers' minds with respect to ISB.

I guess you could do something like take a warlock who was at 100% of your raids and have them gear heavily into crit, spec deep distrction, and then gimp their own damage output by just casting shadowbolts for 20% increase to everyone else -- I'm not sure how much it would be worth it though with only 25-man raids (and assuming a balanced raid, which I think is important to assume -- the vast, vast, vast majority of raiding guilds in WoW are not heavily stacking their raids for each fight.) And even then, the more shadow casters you have, the faster the debuff wears off (each shadow nuke consumes a charge.)

Elsia · 04/02/07, 3:10 AM

Originally Posted by zepi

Only if they choose stamina over +dmg. It's easy to get similar numbers for a mage if you go only for +dmg, gem yourself with Living Rubies only etc. You've end up with exactly the same ~5.6k HP.

Now most mages don't go that route, as we've got ~ decent epics that offer similar DPS to no-stamina blues with a sacrifice of only 1-2 +dmg for each gearslot, but for those who go for "of fiery wrath" for the slots with worst epics / rares end up being real glass cannons.

Well it's basically subjective. I felt I had to be in the glass cannon gear to keep up with mages and locks who are in more balanced gear. I don't ever see locks with low stamina because stamina is too much overall utility for them and mages don't seem to need to.

But do slot allocation differences scale the same way? Hunters apply their AP on a finer granularity than mages their spell damage (more tricky to compare to locks). Would that have an impact? Not that this is how I ended up stacking non-sta gear. It just happened that way in an attempt to stay with other damage dealers and after the fact I'd compare survivability/hp.

cladnin · 04/02/07, 3:21 AM

Originally Posted by Kyth

How much does rogue damage go up with shaman totems? about 15%? (which is what shadow weaving is)

Misery+themselves (or another fire mage) is the exact same bonus for a fire mage as a shadow priest is for a warlock -- fire mage doesn't even need to depend on an offspec being present. And CoE is the same as CoS.

Really my issue with shadow priests is their all around amazing-ness. Shadow priests not only have amazing damage, but also the most ridiculous mana regen for their ENTIRE party and on top of that 20%dmg for themselves and locks, 5% for any other magical damage. Their all around utility is amazing, and to boot, they can be top dps.

Sienna · 04/02/07, 3:23 AM

I was using an all AP based gear on my hunter, I had exactly 2400 AP selfbuffed with around 20.5% crit. But my hp was 5900 and I decided not to go down that road, changed my gear, now I have 2230 AP, 24% crit and 7200 hp. A lot more balanced and I don't feel like I lost a great deal of dps and I certainly am not afraid of getting one shotted any more.

• Snowy · 04/02/07, 3:33 AM

Derail incoming...

Imp SB synergizes so well with me because dots don't even consume one of the charges. If I see the proc up, usually I will refrain from casting MB or SWD to attempt to preserve the charges until they fall off naturally.

Anyhow I find it odd that suddenly people are wondering why shadow priests and warlocks synergize extremely well, it's not like anything is new here except for Misery, which applies to all casters. The only difference is a few shadow priests are actually desired by most raids now.

Generally speaking, our DPS meters can see almost any class near or at the top. It really depends on the consumables used and effort put in, and if your guild is anything like mine, sometimes people bring their A game, and sometimes they bring their B game which is usually still good enough for almost anything, but makes them slip on the meters.

Phantasmique · 04/02/07, 7:56 AM

Its beyond my imagination why there are peoples who believe that Steady Shot is really imba, Multi>Arcane>Steady for a MM hunter since we are talking about PvE raids where the hunters have this spec, if they dont have it then they dont care about doing damage properly at raids and they shouldnt be given as example

Hunter with mana issues and not bothering to use dark runes/mana pots/oils :

Rank 1 Arcane Shot > Steadyshot
Rank 1 Multishot > Steadyshot

Hunter that is bothering to use mana pots/oils/darkrunes/whatever and nuking like there is not tommorow to keep the highest possible DPS up :

Max Rank Arcaneshot > Steadyshot
Max Rank Multishot > Steadyshot

SteadyShot was made to be used when Arcane/Multi is on CD so the hunter wont autoshot only, too bad that "many" hunters havent figured that out and their rotation includes 2 shots instead of 3 thus losing a lot of dps

Conclusions :

A good hunter that has good and up to date balanced gear/has good PvE spec/uses tons of consumables/has good rotation etc... still wont be able to stay in top wich is normal because of his gimped group while the other dps classes are getting extra buffs,the hunter above will be at the same level of dps with any other dps class if he gets his extra buffs aswell while being above at pet friendly fights, example as rogues leeching warrs/shamans and casters leeching Spriests/shamans so the hunters need shaman/feral druid (Spriest arent really needed for the type of hunter listed above because the hunter can cover up the nuke like there is no tommorow mana usage with BoW/Mageblood/Oils/Fel Mana Pots/Dark Runes/Ocasional Totem while also getting extra agility/strength for pet), why the hunter has good DPS in Karazhan and not at 25/40man raids? ...simple

...rogues/warlocks/mages arent getting so many extra buffs as 25/40man raids thus giving them the extra edge to stay in top

There is the other type of lazy hunter who doesnt care about his spec or bothers too much with gear/consumables while also not using his pet as much as possible, this type of hunter shouldnt be called hunter and more like a wannabe warrior in mail with a ranged weapon, /gkick

Our mana problems will be fixed soon when the Survival tree will be buffed a bit thus allowing us to use Thrill of the Hunt wich will make us to stop relying so much on mana consumables while also buffing our HP thus allowing us to use the glass cannon gear with more ease than now, at that point there is no excuse anymore that the consumables are too expensive or the gear too gimped for stamina and if a hunter wont stay close to the top or stay in top if he has a good group then its player fault 100% and the sentence should be " the player cant dps" instead of "the hunter cant dps", at this moment the MM spec does around 15% extra dps than Survival and things will get even later when the Survival tree will be buffed a bit

Phantasmique · 04/02/07, 8:05 AM

Originally Posted by Sienna

I was using an all AP based gear on my hunter, I had exactly 2400 AP selfbuffed with around 20.5% crit. But my hp was 5900 and I decided not to go down that road, changed my gear, now I have 2230 AP, 24% crit and 7200 hp. A lot more balanced and I don't feel like I lost a great deal of dps and I certainly am not afraid of getting one shotted any more.

Edit the 24% crit chance please with lower and there are "very few" fights at wich we need stamina gear while at most of the fights we can use the glass cannon gear with ease, this will be fixed in the near future anyway when Survival tree will be buffed thus allowing us to get 10% extra HP while being even with MM tree at dps, also we will get a little edge at non friendly pet fights at wich Survival wont have Focused Fire talents while MM has them

Elsia · 04/02/07, 9:19 AM

When I checked the armory, it read 23.61% crit, just slightly lower AP and HP to make these numbers close enough to be believable. Certainly no point in bickering over 0.39% crit as armory doesn't always snapshot us in the gear we raid in. It was clear from the post that these were rounded ballpark numbers, and as such they are about right compared to what I found on the armory. If you doubt numbers, check facts first

gimpynerd · 04/02/07, 9:22 AM

Originally Posted by Phantasmique

Its beyond my imagination why there are peoples who believe that Steady Shot is really imba, Multi>Arcane>Steady for a MM hunter since we are talking about PvE raids where the hunters have this spec, if they dont have it then they dont care about doing damage properly at raids and they shouldnt be given as example
...

I'm not trying to start an argument, but this bit is of personal interest to me. I have come to wonder why the general population of wow hunters think that a pure mm spec is the only way to deal damage in raids. I have a bm build and I consistantly out-damage mm hunters. Recently, in our first magtheridon kill I was top dps.

While this might not be the route for everyone, doing substantial raid dps is what this thread is about. Bm hunters have a 3% group damage buff that stacks with other bm hunters. If all your raid's hunters were bm and you put them all in the same group with say, a shadow priest, that priest would receive upwards of 10% extra damage, while you receive mana and misery which buffs your arcane shot. This is on top of the 17% or so extra damage you are going to get just from having 5/5 serpents swiftness. A shadow priest in your group is also quite capable of keeping your pet alive through most of what it will go through.

While I do think physical dps as a whole needs scaling buffs, and maybe hunters need a little bit of adjusting, I do not think it is near as bad as most would think.