To add to what you guys are telling Jynx. One of the earlier locks mentioned how keeping dots up, knowing when to life tap/sbolt etc. is all quite complex and can make a large difference in their dps. Now let's say this is equivalent to a hunter's shot rotation(though less latency dependent). Now let's say for several weapon speed ranges(2.9->whatever, 2.5->2.8, etc.) you're going to have to do a different, yet equally complex rotation. And the faster your weapon, the more latency becomes an issue. So depending on what weapon upgrades you get, your playstyle might seriously change, or like Eej mentioned, also depending on haste effects like Abacus, Rapid Fire, and Berzerking.

[Edited for Clarification]

Yes, that would greatly simplify things, but you're removing a couple of 800 pound gorillas from the equation there.

As an above poster said, that's pretty close to the problem. If you've got an Auto ticking every X seconds, you know that you can fit a certain rotation around it. Now you get a new weapon with a different speed and your Autos start ticking every Y seconds instead - the whole rotation you worked out and trained yourself to squeeze out with top efficiency becomes worthless.

At that point you have to go back to the drawing board and work out some other rotation that you think will maximize your DPS.

What's funny is that we're in this mess because Blizzard thought it would be a solution to slow weapons having a huge DPS advantage pre-2.0 due to rotational dynamics (edit: which were based around the 3 second Aimed Shot cast time, now replaced by the equally-annoying 1.5 second Steady Shot cast time). In another 6 months or so, someone will have worked out the optimal rotations for every ranged weapon speed and how much DPS they can do, and Blizzard might be in for some shocking surprises.

So did I...

Thanks for trying to wrap your head around it instead of pointing and laughing.

Eej, see post #281, 289, 313 Not much insight, but shared desire for some in any case.

It's not a hard problem to solve I think.

Really in some sense the reason why we have this mess is because blizz decided that the right way to handle that a hunter cannot auto-shoot while running is to give auto-shot a cast time. As running aborts cast time, auto-shots get aborted. But auto isn't a cast so on top of this we get interference of actively engaged shots with auto-shot.

This very idea is causing all the symptoms. One way to fix it is to have a separate check if a hunter is running and remove the cast time from auto-shot.

Then it would still be possible to delay auto-shot, but not to clip it. I.e. shot rotations stay still fairly involved and will incidentally still depend on weapon speed, but at least lag won't have a chance to swallow shots for you.

An even more radical idea is to decouple auto-shot. If that was in place shot selection would be a matter of shot cooldowns and mana management, much more in line with how mages and locks work.

I actually like shot rotations. But the old 9-10 second shot rotation was much better. Now we look at 2-3 second shot base skeletons. You can easily see that minor variations in 9-10 seconds have far less of an impact than in 2-3 seconds. On top of it in the old scenario when you clipped an autoshot, that was maybe 1 out of 3-4 and the way aimed used to work, you were guaranteed a chaser after cast is finished. Now we can in principle clip every single one and never see a chaser. In terms of shot fillers you have to work with 1.5+0.5 seconds and manage the relative timings of GCD time frames relative to weapon speed.

So basically you look at tight timing once or twice roughly every 3 second frame. How the timing exactly plays out depends directly on the weapon speed, and haste effects of course, which proc mid-combat and change the optimum on the fly. What exactly to weave in turn depend on shot cooldowns, which are on different length timers and don't make a periodic rotation (that is arcane and multi-shot cooldowns don't necessarily fall to where your optimal shot moment is, and their ordering drifts due to relative cooldown time).

This is a very dynamic problem and it's not even all that easy to theory-craft this with haste procs and such. Problem is that it's not like a set bonus where you change your optimal spell mix once. You are constantly adapting to dynamic proc changes. I certainly don't theorycraft new weapon speeds in great detail because it's too tough, I figure out rough outlines and the rest is practice and experimenting. In the end no matter what, due to procs it always stays a reaction game. Not pre-raid theorycraftable, even more so with latency variations that add to the weapon-speed/haste variation.

If that sounds like anything that resembles what other classes do to optimize DPS I don't know. I certainly don't do anything remotely close to this on my mage. For all other classes it's waiting for cooldowns and if you have multiple options picking the optimal one. But timing plays no tight role in this, i.e. no timing below GCD.

So to say that shadow bolt and dot timings chance don't really reflect all that hunters do here. We do the dynamic changing of cooldowns, but keeping track of timings (autoshot) that do not fall into the GCD rhythm at the same time. This last part is really crucial as a difference.

Best description I can come up with, imagine that an external metronome is ticking, your optimal performance as a lock or mage is not defined by the GCD and spell cooldowns, but by their relative placement to that external metronome. That metronome does not have constant speed, it can speed up due to talents and trinkets, and speeding up is in general good so you can't remove the variability. If you get a new haste item ("bow") the metronome changes it's core speed and the relative timing to other cooldown changes and the optimum changes, but again the metronome is variable speed. Now depending on the network connectivity of the day the metronome additionally varies, again changing the local optimal decision or if you can sensibly perform it.

It kinda is fun actually, since there always feels like there's room to improve.

The un-fun part is that after you do all that for 10 minutes, people rightly point out that you did as much damage as the mage that died halfway through the fight, and you wonder why they should invite you next time.

Go for it .

Note the network part though. Your DPS can suffer substantially even though you do the best you can. I think beside the mental effort/concentration, this uncontrollable chance to lose DPS is the main source of frustration for the more theory crafted hunters.

You can have poor damage performances and you can't craft/perform yourself out of it.

As said, I think shot rotations are fun, but the current one is just overdone and is so tight that network variations play a role when they really shouldn't. The old metronome was ticking at 9-10 seconds for hunters, now it ticks at 2-3s. And the penalty is higher as there is no aimed shot chaser mechanism anymore.

Keep that (2-3 second rhythm with sub 3 second shot decisions, minimizing delays) up for 7+ mins on boss fights.

I think I personally would enjoy this more if we talked 6s+ base rhythm and an independence of latency as a factor.

It's fun to figure out, no doubt about that, at some point it rolls over from being fun to being stressful.

It is an "always on" situation. Very few people can demand that much from themselves for very long without burning out. I am not one of those people and my hunter is mostly retired.

http://files.filefront.com/100mswmv/.../fileinfo.html

There's me doing just say, one full string of a shot rotation at between 97-117ms of ping. The autoshot/steadyshot were ended b/c the mob got into melee range at the end, but the autoshot should have gone off about .5s after the steady, without any delay. If you want, I can probably record a longer fight of like 1min or more so you can see how the different shoot cooldowns work out.

I'll upload another one when my ping gets worse. I'll try to get one in around 250ms to show how that's about the point where I start delaying autoshots if I use 2 specials, and one in at a much higher ping to show how bad it can be.

Also, this is as Marks/Survival, so no quickshots, no abacus, no rapid fire, etc. Just a 3.2 speed xbow with a 15% quiver.

The file is 1.47mb. The quality is really crappy though because I had to use Windows Move Maker(deleted Vegas for some reason, QQ). I can upload the .avi fraps file if you want(it's about 100mb) if you can't see what's going on.

The order of the shots was auto->multi->arcane->steady->auto, with the last two being cut off by the mob coming into melee.

For non-hunters, the relative timings are auto-shot cast bar vs steady-shot bar at the bottom of the video. Those two bars give the relative pacing of the rotations. One can clearly see the discrepancy at the end of the video and that part is what drives rotation decisions. Both bars are affected by haste, but only one is affected/defined by weapon speed.

I recorded another and put it up on youtube, another perspective of complicated shot selection. Proc management and stuff. It was just a heroic Quag, I had bloodlust for a good chunk of the fight and I proced Improved Aspect of the Hawk a few times. It's certainly not my finest work but as you can see by the apparently spasming Orc in the middle of the screen a lot is going on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abT2g-pIDY8

Edit: I died, he died and I ran out of mana at about the same time (1:30 into the fight) I was using a full burn priority queue with top rank spells.

Re: the warlock stuff up above; just imagine that your dots won't tick while you're currently casting a spell so you have to time drain life/shadowbolt etc between dot ticks. Thats pretty much what its like for hunters, except the tick speed varies etc.