I wouldn't say *alone* your pet does 300 dps, because any hunter who has any clue will have GFFT, and if he's good at rotating shots, it will bump up that pet's dps by a non trivial amount.

But after the chips fall down, a BM pet does a significant amount of damage.

With regards to the thread at hand, I agree completely. The hunter class is incredibly easy to play to 70 (It's a joke), so it creates two problems:

1. We get a lot of noobs. I'm not going to say much, since every class has their noobs, although it seems like hunter noobs manage to create a lot of notoriety for us.

2. It doesn't prepare us for raiding. I was somewhere in...BWL (pre-TBC) before I figured out what a shot rotation was (I was doing something close to it, but it was very sloppy at best). And this was when shot rotations were a joke- autoshot-->aimedshot, throw in a multi as appropriate, win at life.

Now it's a lot harder- as gonk said earlier, it's the only class where using your abilities can make you somehow do less damage then before.

We don't get steady shot until 62, and there's really no explanation ever how to use it properly ingame; it requires a lot of feel just to get it working properly.

Overall, I'm happy that they made the hunter class a viable dps class, but it saddens me that the good hunters on my server is a very, very elite few, and that there are so few people that even have a chance to make it up there.

its incredible how one-minded most of you hunters are with the "we are the only class that requires timing" and likewise statements.

sure hunters are problably difficult to master, but so are alot of classes, the only real "easy dps" class/speccs that comes to my mind are combat rogues, fury warriors, ms warriors and ench shamans.

those are the single four classes that can just spam abilities where timing is insignificant and still have a top-shot dps. (feel free to contradict me)

While I'm getting your point, that "safe DPS" maybe is not as important as it should be, I disagree strongly that it is of no problem for "any other DPS" class.
Just ask dps warriors, locks or shadow priests and sometimes even rogues on Gorefiend, Bloodboil, Kaz'Rogal (that §$%&&/%$$ stun really hurts aggro generation of the tank) ...

Sure, if everything goes to plan all these are not necesserily threat capped ... but just one longer string of avoidance on the tank part (resulting in rage starvation) and all these DPS classes can sit back for a while, twiddling thumbs.

Safe DPS still matters. Maybe not as much as it should, but let's not negate that it's out there ... and sometimes with real consequences.

Keep holding your Heroic strike button and you will end up doing less DPS than before as a fury warrior

Also, I've heard that timing Slam can be like the shot rotation a hunter has if you're a MS warrior.

Enhancement shaman is pretty much 2 buttons every 10 seconds if you're not into Totem Weaving which actually requires some timing.

I was thinking about the problem and suddenly I just found which could be the solution to completely remove it:

1.- Change steady shoot to 0.5 sg casting time as autoshot.
2.- Change its cooldown to mimic exactly the cooldown of the autoshot, so that no matter when you press its key its cooldonw will finish just after the autshot is fired.

This way we would solve the anti intuitivness of the problem and make it impossible to clip the shots by a big ammout. Also the burst damage is not really increased as the behaviour of steady+auto+steady is like steady+auto+arcane.

Clipping would still be an issue (pressing the steady key just when the autoshot is going to be fired) but a minor one.

As with the current itemisation we cannot fit 2 steadies into an autoshot the change for PVE would be small. For PVP perhaps we would see a rise of steady use (and hunter DPS increase), but taking into consideration that we are so easily LOSed or converted into dead meat by focused firing it should not be so huge.

The big problem is if this is easy to code into WOW or not and that blizzard will probably never hear about this idea .

Do most hunters explicitly position behind a 25 man boss before sending pets in to prevent boss haste via parries? I've never thought about it but it makes sense. Assuming the tank does not move the mob very much during the fight. If there is a lot of repositioning on the tanks part, do hunters reposition as well to be able to put the pet behind the mob?

I wouldn't say explicitly to avoid the parry haste, but to reduce the dodge and increase DPS.


I do try to position behind bosses. In that particular case, it punted a warrior and ended up spinning a bit so that was the main reason my pet was on the front side. Well, not just this one. Seems to happen a good bit honestly.

I captured a scorpid like Zork said, and trained him in Poison 4. However, I never see his poison stack, I just see a single application of it ticking down. I have found this thread to be very informative, but I did not understand what Zork said when he said:

For bosses manually activate poison _after_ you got the beast with + trinket buffs. You will get a big poison stack that refreshes himself everytime.

I have no idea what he means when he says "after you got the beast with + trinket buffs". Can you enlighten me as to how to get the big poison stacks with this pet?

Thanks in advance.....C. Acord

Have Scorpid Poison autocast turned OFF when you start the fight. Send your pet in and get set up like you do on any normal boss fight. Once you have some room from an aggro standpoint (maybe go 20 seconds of DPS and then FD), you pop TBW and your +AP trinket and then turn Scorpid Poison autocast on. What this does is applies the first stack of Poison to the target while you have incredibly high AP/dmg, and that is magnified by each stack after that. Make sense now?

The problem with comparing slam to hunter rotations is that you have a much larger window of opportunity for it. Yes, slam is similar in the way you have to handle it, however it is no where near as unforgiving or as tedious as steady shot rotations.

I somehow missed the post you were replying to about druids, but I agree. My main was a feral druid for the first half of TBC, and I find going back to him in dungeons to be relaxing in comparison to playing my hunter. Druid rotation: 100 energy, mangle > shred > shred > shred, shift and/or just wait for 100 energy, > rip, mangle, shred, shred, etc to infinity. I just hit a single button every second (or few seconds as they case may be) and don't have to worry about whether or not I'm going to screw up my auto attack timer. With hunters its a whole 'nother ball-game - I would compare it to going from little league straight into the majors. You really would not know until you actually picked one up and played it for weeks or months on end in raids.

Even mages with their quartz lag bars and timing their casts with stopcasting aren't as bad. Take that dynamic, add in a shot with a 1.1-1.3s cast time (depending on the haste), then imagine having an extra window for timing on top of that along with multiple other casts to track and ensure you aren't clipping auto shots. If you think its easy you are welcome to come try it out.

Yes, that illuminates Zork's comment to me....thank you.

However, I am still not seeing the poison from the scorp stack more than once, and I was under the impression that it would with poison level 4. Am I missing something here? I specifically un-trained my scorp out of level 5 poison and re-trained with level 4 poison because 4 is supposed to stack and give awesome DPS.


C. Acord

Try the scorpid poison counter add on. Gives you number of ticks, time left, and last tick amount. Not the best add on ever designed but it does it's job - helped me learn.

Scorpid Poison Counter | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com

Slam resets the swing timer, so it is nearly as timing/latency dependent.

Druid powershifting is also timing dependent, but still easier than proper hunter shooting.

Won't it be interesting if the fix for latency dependent fireball (for example) spam dps does nothing to make getting the auto/steady/etc. out without any latency-induced dps dropoff from autoshot delays?

What is Dr. Boom?

He's a mob in Netherstorm, just north of Area 52. He doesn't attack back at you, but don't get in range of the bombs!

Oh....I knew about *that* mob, but the way people in this thread talked about "Dr. Boom", I thought it was some kind of DPS-testing facility....

He pretty much is :P

On a related note, has anyone else noticed a slight drop in damage on Scorpid Poison as of the latest WoW build? I could have sworn getting self buffed ticks for 700 with inferior gear to what I have now (less AP), and now I'm getting on the lines of 511. I could be mistaken..

A lot of people playing the hunter class I have found to have little or no gaming background. As silly as it sounds I put this down to the Pokemon / Tamagochi lure along with the popularity of Legolas. If you don't beleive me think how many bastardised versions of the name Legolas you have seen on a hunter. I guess a lot of players who are new to gaming are really drawn into the class by the idea of having a companion you can feed, name and have adventure with you.

A lot of these people will never run damage meters, research damage rotations or experiment with specs because really they just don't care enough. On the other hand you have people who have been gaming for a long time tend to get quite competitive about it.

I think a lot of the image that hunters have are fueled by the overwhelming majority of players in the class who don't come from the gaming background and won't be as skilled, researched or motivated as those who are.



There are then those who are in end-game raiding guilds. I know from personal experience that every raiding guild I have been in there has been a very large disparity between the lowest DPS hunter and the highest. This is moreso typically than any other DPS class. This has been the case from my initial guilds through to the high level guild I currently reside in.

It made me realise that it's not just a gaming background but a gaming background where timing was important. Fighting games are a good example of this. It's just not just a case of knowing what you are doing but just having the natural timing to do it all, something Sim City or Sims will never bring. I think if you have this then you'll have no problem performing rotations and optimising dps in those lab-test situations .

As far as PvP and Arenas goes it goes a step further introducing thinking on your feet and strong awareness which I'm glad to see crop up increasingly on PvE encounters too. The first real test of that was probably C'Thun which really showed up people who were just slaves to rotations or healing bars from those who actually checking on what's going on around them.

So why is it that even at end game you have a very small proportion of Hunters who are very skilled at PvE and PvP? Is it because it's a tough class to play?

The class certainly requires some skill but to someone with a broad gaming background it isn't really with practice. I just think that the people with that background have tended to opt for other classes. The reputation we have as a class of being 'huntards' comes from the swarms of non-gamers playing the class who have filtered into top end guilds due to a lack of supply of the really skilled players out there.

For those of you out there who do know what they're doing, it's because of balancing to aid those less skilled that we are able to put out the DPS that we do and utility in PvP which at times can be exceptional.

I know what you are doing wrong. When you want to activate your Scorpid Poison. Don't just use it once (left click on it), turn in on Automatic (right click it) at that point. That's why it's not stacking. Hope that helps.

Cool. One Q though -- does salvation reduce the amount of threat that is transfered when we do misdirection? I'd prefer not to test this in a raid.

It transfers the threat we would have done with our shots to the tank, so yes. With salvation we give that much less initial threat to the tank, which is another reason I prefer to rely on FD. Unfortunately if backfired on me the other night in gruul when I had 2 resists in a row on our first 2 attempts. I had never seen a resist in there until that night, and then it happened almost 4 times in a row causing me to slow down to auto-shot to avoid passing our hateful strike tank in both attempts. With salvation you will never see resists, so in fights with lots of random mobs around it might be the best option. I always run with salv for trash (as do all of our DPS). Mana is never a problem since we get time between pulls while the leader marks targets to drink up, and salvation lets us burn through to the boss faster.

Uh, salvation has zero to do with whether or not FD resists.