If steady were changed to an "on hit" ability similar in fashion to heroic strike or maul, and steady scaled with the damage of the weapon providing a 100% increase in weapon damage rather than being static (steady currently does only slightly more than an auto-shot), it would provide hunters with something that would alleviate the weapon speed dilemma. It would definately need to be balanced, then rebalanced, then balanced some more, but there has to be a way for blizzard to stop making this silly mistake over and over again where weapon speed is the primary factor in ranged slot choices.
As it is, hunter rotations favor specific weapon speeds (not to mention there arent exactly a lot of weapon choices in the end-game), the all steady shot managed to do was force faster weapons to become the new Ash until we can stack enough haste to take advantage of slower weapons.
That's a great idea from a general DPS where I'm standing in one place anyway, but I assume Blizzard wanted a shot where I have to really stand still for a bit. So besides fixing the horribly broken rotations, it does have a big impact on our slightly-mobile DPS.
That's a great idea from a general DPS where I'm standing in one place anyway, but I assume Blizzard wanted a shot where I have to really stand still for a bit. So besides fixing the horribly broken rotations, it does have a big impact on our slightly-mobile DPS.
Why not have movement reset the shot timer? I like being able to move for about 2 seconds then stop and fire immediately, but honestly if they're worried about our mobility to the point where they think we should have to cast something constantly, why not actually cut the mobility? If steady shot worked outside the GCB like maul/HS do, it would open up a lot of weapon options for hunters. Yes, I know it would take a lot of the "skill" out of the class and people would be upset if they lost their epeen fluffing "I'm more skilled than you" timered ability. But lets be honest: latency and frame rate can be more debilitating to a hunter than anything in the current setup, bow speeds are pigeon-holed even worse than before, and honestly, our damage in PvP is in the crapper. They want us to spend mana on something, I can appreciate that. Steady shot can quite easily be that "something" without all the ridiculousness it currently brings.
I understand they wanted the higher damage rotations of hunters to be interuptable, because high, sustained, uninteruptable DPS in PvP is pretty over the top. I don't know what they could do to alleviate that.
As I imagined, Salvation is perceived as unimportant to the hunter because of feign death. So doesn't that invalidate the issue that was brought up earlier, that hunters have no innate threat reduction? It certianly should not be an issue, given that you can remove ALL your threat at will, every 30 seconds. So that doesn't seem like it's a problem in balancing hunters against other ranged DPS. Rather, the focus should be on competitive damage with comparable ease of use, and utility to the raid. I think utility is covered reasonably well in several places in the talent trees(Imp HM, FI, Expose Weakness). I know our hunters have improved solidly in the last few weeks. I guess it once again returns to the relative amount of focus or concentration necessary to do DPS comparable to a mage on a fire DPS cycle.
As I imagined, Salvation is perceived as unimportant to the hunter because of feign death. So doesn't that invalidate the issue that was brought up earlier, that hunters have no innate threat reduction? It certianly should not be an issue, given that you can remove ALL your threat at will, every 30 seconds. So that doesn't seem like it's a problem in balancing hunters against other ranged DPS. Rather, the focus should be on competitive damage with comparable ease of use, and utility to the raid. I think utility is covered reasonably well in several places in the talent trees(Imp HM, FI, Expose Weakness). I know our hunters have improved solidly in the last few weeks. I guess it once again returns to the relative amount of focus or concentration necessary to do DPS comparable to a mage on a fire DPS cycle.
It's not unimportant. I'd take Salvation any day over not having a buff. I'd just rather have various *other* buffs first, so Salvation isn't worth the opportunity cost of the other buffs.
And there are exceptions: Salvation on Curator was the most important pally buff I could get because it reduced the chance I'd get a flare on me and be unable to DPS it.
It also depends on how often bosses aggro wipe. Morogrim is (with our strategy) 15 minute fight for us, so eventually I just don't care about my threat reduction, FD did it's job. Every time I see myself even in the top 10 there I can FD, if it resists I still have plenty of time to try again.
Hydross it's trickier, it's possible to pull adds off the add tanks, and FD has a high resist chance there. I'd still rather have the DPS than salvation there, but it's closer. And of course Hydross himself is always resetting aggro.
And, unlike mages, warlocks, and rogues, we need 1 more pally buff than they do (might or wisdom). So it takes 4 pallies in a raid for Salvation to be generally available, and 3 is the "right" ratio for the raid, since that's a little over 1/9th of the raid.
That said, we do have a passive threat reduction, as someone pointed out, in the form of our pet(at least for BM) His DPS is typically 25-30% of my total, so he's kind of a 25-30% threat reducer.
The problem is that the TBC raid game is stacked with encounters that make the stated role of "safe DPS" almost meaningless, or a hindrance, and make hunters suffer as a result. When you have many encounters on enrage timers, requiring all out Zerging the DPS, Hunters are reduced to "another ranged DPS class" that fails to take into account their *main gimmick* and makes them an inferior choice to almost any other DPS.
I think this is a great point. I don't get the impression that Blizzard intends for us to be competetive DPS with rogues/mages/spriests/warlocks, but doesn't know how to make things that play to our strength (especially now that everyone has KTM to watn them of impending doom). Void Reaver is somewhat close, except its enrage timer means that we are more useful for Misdirect than for FD. If it were a longer fight, agro reduction and management would be a bigger role. (It'd likely also screw healers, so ... probably not a good idea overall. )
If I, as a rogue, had a full aggro wipe every 30 seconds, I would almost never have to worry about threat, ever again.
You're very right -- and, your previous post about the merits of preemptive FD instead of a reactive one is VERY valid, and something better hunters already do. However, there's a risk of doing it too-early.
It's really all about threat per second. We generate enough threat per second that if we FD too early, the tank won't have enough of a TPS lead over us to prevent us from overtaking him in the next 30 seconds. So, it's generally good to wait longer for a FD. Conversely, after a certain point in the fight (often close to the halfway mark) there's no chance we will ever catch up to the tank in threat.
Rogue threat management is aided not just by well-timed Vanishes and the innate threat wipe, but also by Feint. If hunters had a "Feint"-type skill, in addition to FD, we'd not have to worry about ripping initial aggro too early. (Still, I think FD works just fine.)
Back to the TPS thing. Imagine that a tank does X threat per second, and a hunter does H*X threat per second. If I throttle my damage such that I'm only doing ~X threat per second, I can avoid pulling aggro from the tank. Once I FD at a particular time (T), the tank now has X*T threat more than I do.
Now, I can do H*X threat per second (and our threat and damage tend to scale similarly) for however long it takes for me to catch up to the tank again. Let's call that time Y.
We need to ensure that tank threat at time T+Y >= our threat at time T+Y (HX * Y)
T*X * Y*X >= HX * Y
Y <= T/(H-1)
So, the amount of time before we have to FD again increases the later in the fight it is that we FD. (Vanish has the exact same mechanics, except that you don't get to do it as often... in trade for generating threat more slowly than we do.) This is why it's important for us to FD early, and then do it again. It also makes Misdirect an absolutely invaluable tool for the early phases of the fight.
Still, you're absolutely right -- FD early and often is sage advice. (Not FDing *too* early is the hard part, as it ensures your next 30-seconds are threat-capped.)
New to Elitest Jerks. I was redirected her from the official WoW forums.
A big, big thank you for everyone that included constructive, informative posts in this discussion. I've learned so much. I was one of those hunters who knew that weaving steady in between shots was vital but didn't understand all the finer mechanics. Now I know that my meta gem in my engineering epic helm sucks, serpent sting is garbage, I should download Quartz and I have .5 seconds more to consider amongst other things.
After reading every post in this thread and also that of the "Hunter Shot Rotation Illustrated". I think I have a much better grasp on what I need to do to improve my raid DPS.
If I may. Would anyone be kind enough to direct me to or paste a good auto shot/steady shot/kill command macro that would also not spam an error message on my screen (that ability is not ready yet) as that is what is happening with the one that I wrote.
Thanks again.
Merga
P.S. If I can give a little bit of advice to you long-winded writers. Paragraphs are your friend. I had to suffer through many a run-on paragraph. Even if the whole paragraph is still one topic/idea, f**k the grammar rules and just cut it.
New to Elitest Jerks. I was redirected her from the official WoW forums.
A big, big thank you for everyone that included constructive, informative posts in this discussion. I've learned so much. I was one of those hunters who knew that weaving steady in between shots was vital but didn't understand all the finer mechanics. Now I know that my meta gem in my engineering epic helm sucks, serpent sting is garbage, I should download Quartz and I have .5 seconds more to consider amongst other things.
After reading every post in this thread and also that of the "Hunter Shot Rotation Illustrated". I think I have a much better grasp on what I need to do to improve my raid DPS.
If I may. Would anyone be kind enough to direct me to or paste a good auto shot/steady shot/kill command macro that would also not spam an error message on my screen (that ability is not ready yet) as that is what is happening with the one that I wrote.
Thanks again.
Merga
P.S. If I can give a little bit of advice to you long-winded writers. Paragraphs are your friend. I had to suffer through many a run-on paragraph. Even if the whole paragraph is still one topic/idea, f**k the grammar rules and just cut it.
Look at, for instance, the BM Theorycrafting thread under Class Discussion. Search it for macros etc and you should find what you want. (The thread also has other good advice)
P.S. If I can give a little bit of advice to you long-winded writers. Paragraphs are your friend. I had to suffer through many a run-on paragraph. Even if the whole paragraph is still one topic/idea, f**k the grammar rules and just cut it.
Different boards have different styles. Our hosts here have encouraged one where being a little long-winded is generally preferred to being less thorough and I rather like that to be completely honest. Besides, reading threads at a reasonable resolution makes single or two sentence paragraphs look ridiculous and even more difficult to read.
You are welcome to your opinion of course but grammar rules are typically good guidelines.
1) Everything "wrong" with the hunter class stems from the fact that Blizzard had absolutely no idea what it wanted to do with hunters in the beginning, had no idea how to "fix" the class in the middle, and to this day has no concept/model to follow with which they can direct the class from a developmental standpoint. Only a few people seem to remember this fact, and most of those seem to skim over it. This is a big deal. A. Big. Deal. In the beginning hunters didn't even have mana. They had ENERGY. They were also supposed to be a pet-based class. Not a "how do I keep my pet alive to get that extra bit of DPS" class. A. Pet. Based. Class. This means that your choice of pet was supposed to be important - whatever pet you chose fundamentally altered how you played the class, or at the very least, the mindset of how you played the class. Anyone who has bothered to look at the Blizzard MPQ data can show you the last vestiges of this pet-based mentality. When Blizzard realized it couldn't balance "Energy hunters" and being "pet-based" meant that hunters were "too mindless" (not that it didn't stop them from making pre-TBC Paladins retard-central in terms of playstyle), at THE VERY LAST MINUTE they gave us mana, changed several shots, and basically told us to screw ourselves.
2) This lack of direction permeates the class to this day. As others have pointed out, when you level a hunter, you can play like an idiot and still win. Why? Because Blizzard doesn't know what the hell they want. From levels 1-10 YOU DO NOT HAVE A PET. So what do you do? YOU MELEE THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYTHING THAT MOVES. So armed with nothing better than freaking Raptor Strike you run around like a gimped warrior and smack stuff with your rusty freaking dagger hoping that the tetanus will set in long enough that whatever you're attacking will die. Then Blizzard tells you "OMG UR SUPPOSED TO HAVE A PET LAWL" and gives us the most convoluted class questline in history that really doesn't tell you anything about how the class IS SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYED beyond "Go tame something and feed it so it doesn't run away." Granted, this is important information, but is operationally void of information. What the hell does any new hunter do when he gets his freaking pet? He gets a pet, sends it in to attack, THEN RUNS UP NEXT TO THE FREAKING MOB AND ATTACKS IT WITH HIS RUSTY SWORD. Why? Because he has absolutely no incentive to do otherwise, and this is how the player has been trained for the first 10 levels of his existence. Ranged weapons are absolutely useless beyond the first attack because the mob runs into your minimum range and starts wailing on you - by that time you learn REAL QUICK that you better start putting high value in: 1) a good melee weapon, 2) good armor. By golly gee whiz, you're a freaking gimped warrior with a gimpy version of Heroic Strike. By the time your ranged attacks actually overcome your melee damage, it is too late. Conventional inductive wisdom has given you no reason to stop using melee attacks. "Tanking" as a concept is beyond you, and you only appreciate half of its value in your pet - the value of not taking damage yourself. The fact that your pet effectively tethers mobs to a single spot, allowing you to use your ranged attacks effectively, is left completely out of the picture, because your first experiences with ranged attacks left you getting the crap beat out of you by a mob while you swung your rusty dagger. One of your THREE viable shots, Multi-Shot, is dangerous to use in single PvE, and even more dangerous to use in instances. Aimed Shot "takes too long" and is only supposed to be used as an opener (a farce which became reality right before TBC hit). All you're left with is Arcane Shot and (lawl) Serpent Sting (which you get to trade for Viper Sting on caster mobs yay). Well that's really not all that much better than running up there and spamming Raptor Strike and maybe even Wing Clip, which is what you've been trained to do from the beginning anyway. This is WHY you see so many melee hunters. It's not their freaking fault. They haven't been given any in-game incentive to do otherwise until it's too late to change their behavior. The fact that hunters wear mail (which is extremely valuable in individual PvE) only reinforces this fact. Rogues wear leather and stand in melee, so hunters wear mail and stand in melee because they get a pet to help! It sound stupid to the people who "know better," but I'm not going to stand here and say that I would've known better had I not friends who were already raiders by the time I started the game to shepherd me along.
3) Hunter mechanics were broken FROM THE BEGINNING. Even something as simple as how we do damage was broken. Aimed Shot WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE SPAMMED IN ROTATION. Multi-Shot WAS ONLY INTENDED FOR MULTIPLE TARGETS (hence the 10-second cooldown - long enough in single PvE to only be used once, yet dangerous enough that you only used it in specific circumstances). The only things we were "supposed" to be using were Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting. (As a side-note, you guys do realize that the only reason they linked Arcane and Aimed Shot was to prevent Aimed->Arcane->Multi chaining? Guess the whole fact that they were forcing us to CHOOSE between one and the other completely flew over their heads). Yet it turns out that the best damage rotation, by far, is spamming Aimed Shot and Multi Shot. Blizzard, realizing they didn't know what they were going to do before, and realizing that this fluke of broken mechanics actually compensates for their complete lack of development (and hence balancing) of the class, take an ad-hoc results-driven, money- and time-saving view instead. "Well, that's not what we intended. But we didn't really know what we intended anyway. And hey, hunters are doing comparable DPS to other ranged DPS classes! Let's let them keep this until we figure out what we want to do." Anyone who thinks that this isn't how things turned out is deluding themselves. This is exactly what happened, and this is exactly how Blizzard rationalized completely ignoring the hunter class until TBC.
4) So then TBC hits, and what do hunters get? Steady Shot. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!? STEADY SHOT?!?!?! It belies the complete lack of time investment on Blizzard's part that their solution to the hunter problem was the inclusion of Steady Shot. You do realize that Steady Shot is just Aimed Shot lite? THEY GOT THEIR INSPIRATION FROM A COMPLETELY BROKEN, COMPLETELY UNINTENDED MECHANIC. Rather than allow us to keep using Aimed Shot, they basically removed it from our bars completely by forcing it to reset the Auto Shot timer, gave us Arcane Shot back as a throw-in, and dumped Steady Shots on our laps instead ("Hay guyz u have to WEAVE UR SHOTS insted of SPAM UR ROTATIN cuz U HAF 2 TINK WEN U PLAY LAWL" - real Blizzard quote, slightly modified for veracity). Yay, our pets got buffed. Yay, Arcane Shot does more damage (oh wait, that's too much damage, let's make it hugely mana-inefficient again). It was all a smokescreen. Nothing made that more clear than the change to Agility. Or the subsequent IMMEDIATE nerfs of Arcane Shot and Silencing Shot three weeks after TBC came out (AS IF YOU IDIOTS NEVER TESTED IT AT LEVEL 60 TO SEE IF ITS DAMAGE OUTPUT MIGHT BE MISLEADINGLY HIGH IN THE BEGINNING BUT WOULD LEVEL OFF ONCE EVERYONE HIT 70), and MONTHS before the vast majority of the playerbase reached level 70 and thus had any strong empirical testing of how balanced the classes were (anyone remember when the Warrior Class Forum got a post basically saying, "We are waiting for more data at level 70 before implementing nerfs/buffs" AT THE EXACT SAME TIME they nerfed the crap out of Hunters based purely on whining in the level 60 PvP bracket?). Don't get me started on how the TBC talents and talent trees have turned out. Or the changes to trap mechanics. Or the change to Feign Death. What about +spelldamage gear. Remember that? Come on, they still have those idiotic pants that add to pet stats rather than your own. Hell, if you're in the right progression range, you can ignore "hunter gear" altogether and just wear freaking LEATHER and you'd be just fine.
---------------------------------
Blizzard isn't going to change anything about the class anytime soon. The best idea - to make Auto Shot behave like Auto Attack - will pretty much never happen, because Blizzard si too married to half-baked ideas about "how the class should work" even though they really have no idea at all how they think the class should work. Changes to the timer? Don't hold your breath. Just accept it and either deal with it or move on. Steady Shot will remain the way it is, completely FUBARed and completely ruining the class's mainstream DPS viability along with its wholesale PvP viability (anyone who thinks hunters are even remotely as viable in an aggregate sense of both the population of players and the opportunity cost vs. other classes in Arenas is completely lying to him/herself).
I realize this sounds rather strongly pessimistic, perhaps even to the point of existential whining, but I just want to make it clear to the people who might be under some delusion that things are going to "get better." They aren't. What WILL happen is that, like Aimed Shot, like Feign Death->Freeze Trap, like BM+Steady Shot+2.0 Attack Speed or Survival+AGI Stacking, or even like stacking Scorpid Poison (an idea with which I'm vaguely familiar, har har), good players will find ways to get by, and perhaps even for a time do better than get by, at least for a little while. While the class as a whole, and the playerbase at large, suffers.
But hey, I haven't deleted my hunter, and I never thought of deleting him even though I no longer play the game on a regular basis. I don't have any alts above level 54 that I levelled on my own, mostly because I liked playing my guy just fine, as broken and ignored as he is by the developers of the game. I just don't live in magical fairyland where the elves and the gnomes live happily side-by-side, either.
"User is a tremendous douchenozzel"
-Actual EJ Forums feedback concerning Goreshot.
When asked about how they intend to fix hunters, they said they were fine and they will 'ratchet' up our DPS as necessary to keep us competitive.
Also, they have this strange idea that 'safe' dps is somehow worthwhile in a world with Threatmeters and classes who can out dps us without ever having to worry about pulling.
Haha that's great! But even so, in DDR the arrows don't move so fast that you have .5 seconds to see the arrow, find the step and hit it. It would be awesome, but still require insanely fast reaction times and focus. :P
Since the main object of an addon such as that would be to make a hunters job easier (not harder) I imagine one would make the timeline 20sec or so NOT 0.5s which would indeed be pretty intense ;p (see ugly ascii drawing for reference).
It's really all about threat per second. We generate enough threat per second that if we FD too early, the tank won't have enough of a TPS lead over us to prevent us from overtaking him in the next 30 seconds. So, it's generally good to wait longer for a FD. Conversely, after a certain point in the fight (often close to the halfway mark) there's no chance we will ever catch up to the tank in threat.
...
Still, you're absolutely right -- FD early and often is sage advice. (Not FDing *too* early is the hard part, as it ensures your next 30-seconds are threat-capped.)
Perhaps I'm not seeing this correctly, but I don't understand how this is different to any other class? I often see Hunters talking about how they "go up on threat very quickly" as if it is some Hunter trait, but I can really see no data that actually supports Hunters having a much higher TPS gain than most classes, other than their general refusal of Blessing of Salvation for another Blessing.
As I pointed out earlier, considering Hunters do roughly the same single-target DPS as many ranged classes (I know as a Mage, on many encounter our good Hunters are pretty similar DPS to me) BUT have around 30% of that damage coming from their pet, I really don't see how the aggro threshold is particularly worse. Fire Mages have 10% threat reduction from Burning Soul, so a Mage w/ Salv vs. a Hunter w/o Salv doing around the same DPS with the pet damage subtracted should only have ~7% less aggro generation, which is hardly notable for the first few seconds of a fight. If a Hunter is having aggro problems due to FDing "too soon" in the fight, I'd say that the Mage would probably be much worse off at that point.
I know that if I go balls to the walls Fireball spamming at second 1, chances are I will become threat-capped (or, most likely, pull aggro with fluke triple fireball crits or something!) pretty quickly.
Of course, the easy solution may be to give up Blessing of Wisdom or something for the first 30 seconds of a fight, and ask the Paladins to rebless off Salvation on the Hunters at that point?
Then again, perhaps that last suggestion just adds to the fun complexity of the Hunter class in raids?
Perhaps I'm not seeing this correctly, but I don't understand how this is different to any other class? I often see Hunters talking about how they "go up on threat very quickly" as if it is some Hunter trait, but I can really see no data that actually supports Hunters having a much higher TPS gain than most classes, other than their general refusal of Blessing of Salvation for another Blessing.
Yea I think some hunters forget that the reason their threat is moving much faster then others is because of BoS which a hunter should never need. Anyone can pull aggro if not paying attention but as a hunter even without BoS it is very hard.
Perhaps I'm not seeing this correctly, but I don't understand how this is different to any other class? I often see Hunters talking about how they "go up on threat very quickly" as if it is some Hunter trait, but I can really see no data that actually supports Hunters having a much higher TPS gain than most classes, other than their general refusal of Blessing of Salvation for another Blessing.
As I pointed out earlier, considering Hunters do roughly the same single-target DPS as many ranged classes (I know as a Mage, on many encounter our good Hunters are pretty similar DPS to me) BUT have around 30% of that damage coming from their pet, I really don't see how the aggro threshold is particularly worse. Fire Mages have 10% threat reduction from Burning Soul, so a Mage w/ Salv vs. a Hunter w/o Salv doing around the same DPS with the pet damage subtracted should only have ~7% less aggro generation, which is hardly notable for the first few seconds of a fight. If a Hunter is having aggro problems due to FDing "too soon" in the fight, I'd say that the Mage would probably be much worse off at that point.
I know that if I go balls to the walls Fireball spamming at second 1, chances are I will become threat-capped (or, most likely, pull aggro with fluke triple fireball crits or something!) pretty quickly.
Of course, the easy solution may be to give up Blessing of Wisdom or something for the first 30 seconds of a fight, and ask the Paladins to rebless off Salvation on the Hunters at that point?
Then again, perhaps that last suggestion just adds to the fun complexity of the Hunter class in raids?
On average our dps might be similar to other caster dps (not entirely true for low armor targets though) but dont forget hunters have some cooldowns which increase dps significantly and account for some high burstdamage.
Blowing cooldowns early in a fight (but giving huntersmark enough time to stack up) is obviously wanted.
I think you hunters are looking at it the wrong way.
As a mage on trash, I deal dps by doing fireball, scorch or fireblast, depending almost entirely on what button I feel like pressing at that time. On a boss, it's just a case of give the tank a few seconds ---> scorch ---> fireball + refresh scorch. Fact is though, there is not much difference in dps between a mage doing everything right and one that doesn't. Now as a mage that likes to think he does do things right, I wish there was more difference between the ok mage and the good mage.
So I'd like to thank this thread for inspiring me to roll a hunter!
Everything "wrong" with the hunter class stems from the fact that Blizzard had absolutely no idea what it wanted to do with hunters in the beginning
Big fat true on this. I have the same feeling that they have no idea about what hunters should do and where they should be. Hunters simply don't fit anywhere as ranged = magic damage, melee = physical damage (mostly).
Lesson learned: Never put class in rush at end of beta especially when you don't know about what to do with it later.
Now back to ideas. You could remove auto shot completely, make ammo and quiver some kind of one item or set of two items and if it would still add damage to shot let it affect all special shots. Buff special shots to compensate lost of auto damage. Yes that would quite change hunter into mage with pet but... Rotation would be just spam steady/arcane/multi + keep sting up all time for some buff (like scorch), maybe just make serpent sting useful by turn on AP scaling and let it stack 5 times.
Perhaps I'm not seeing this correctly, but I don't understand how this is different to any other class? I often see Hunters talking about how they "go up on threat very quickly" as if it is some Hunter trait, but I can really see no data that actually supports Hunters having a much higher TPS gain than most classes, other than their general refusal of Blessing of Salvation for another Blessing.
As I pointed out earlier, considering Hunters do roughly the same single-target DPS as many ranged classes (I know as a Mage, on many encounter our good Hunters are pretty similar DPS to me) BUT have around 30% of that damage coming from their pet, I really don't see how the aggro threshold is particularly worse. Fire Mages have 10% threat reduction from Burning Soul, so a Mage w/ Salv vs. a Hunter w/o Salv doing around the same DPS with the pet damage subtracted should only have ~7% less aggro generation, which is hardly notable for the first few seconds of a fight. If a Hunter is having aggro problems due to FDing "too soon" in the fight, I'd say that the Mage would probably be much worse off at that point.
I know that if I go balls to the walls Fireball spamming at second 1, chances are I will become threat-capped (or, most likely, pull aggro with fluke triple fireball crits or something!) pretty quickly.
Of course, the easy solution may be to give up Blessing of Wisdom or something for the first 30 seconds of a fight, and ask the Paladins to rebless off Salvation on the Hunters at that point?
Then again, perhaps that last suggestion just adds to the fun complexity of the Hunter class in raids?
Just watch Omen at the beginning of any fight. You will see the Hunters threat climb much more quickly than other classes in most cases. It's just the way our mechanics work and the lack of innate threat reduction. That said, it's really not a big deal. As other have said, an early FD is all it takes, and if it gets resisted, you just sit there like a tool and wait for a little bit.
Threat isn't a problem for Hunters. Or for any other DPS class in a raid setting, as long as they use their cooldowns appropriately. THAT is what most Hunters complain about. We are constantly told that we shouldn't be able to do ______ because "you get FD!!!eleventy11" Blizzard seems to agree with this line, always touting the Hunter as "safe DPS," but when was the last time "safe DPS" really mattered? I'm thinking Broodlord in BWL. Other classes had no difficulty whatsoever out-DPSing Hunters in AQ and Naxx without pulling aggro (and boy oh boy were they out-DPSing Hunters in those days!). I'm not expert on T6 raiding (on Kael atm), but in T5 raiding I can't think of any bosses where (pay attention to how I say this) a 30-second cooldown threat wipe allows Hunters to do significantly more damage than other DPS classes because of threat ceilings.
Hunter DPS is great right now, IF (big IF) you are excellent at the class. But the class is still flawed, as is Blizzard's seemingly intended design/niche for it. I said it earlier in the thread, so I'll paraphrase: It gets extremely tiring working so hard to stay competitive when every other DPS class has the option to relax and pump out good, solid DPS, or turn it on and fight for that top spot.
Just watch Omen at the beginning of any fight. You will see the Hunters threat climb much more quickly than other classes in most cases. It's just the way our mechanics work and the lack of innate threat reduction. That said, it's really not a big deal. As other have said, an early FD is all it takes, and if it gets resisted, you just sit there like a tool and wait for a little bit.
Well, honestly, this topic is a bit of an aside as the only reason I originally mentioned the threat issue was to illustrate a feature of the Hunter class that generally makes it pretty easy for newer Hunters to get into a long-term pattern of not paying attention or improving themselves. Laziness somewhat builds up over time, and reactionary FDing is a bad habit that most Hunters develop.
Truthfully, I find the whole "we shoot up quicker than everyone else" to be a bit of an excuse for poor aggro management habits, and unrealistic expectations of being able to pop every CD and start shooting as soon as the MT touches a mob without pulling aggro--all while telling Paladins to bless them with Might instead of Salvation. Nearly every other class is -forced- to learn basic aggro management tactics to survive. (If a Mage uses Icon, Combustion, and started chain-Fireballing the moment a Warrior hit a mob, I can assure you they would easily become threat-capped in a matter of seconds, if not pull aggro nearly immediately. And that's -with- Salvation.)
It's an interesting conundrum in regard to the Hunter class, really. On the high end, you have a required level of attention and playstyle that is downright insane, especially when you consider the timing micromanagement needed to do shot-weaving correctly. (I would imagine that AB-weaving Mages are the only ones that are very similar.) On the other hand, the realm of "lazy player doing OK" seems to sit only a hair below the high-end players in terms of guild tolorance and general raid performance.
After all, a well-geared Hunter character being played by someone who knows nothing about the class will do "ok"-ish in terms of DPS with the right pet/gear/random shots, and hardly has to learn anything about things such as aggro as long as someone tells them to press FD if the big mob starts coming towards them.
It's a very strange stratification which seems to make good Hunters very, very hard to find. I think the general barrier to entry on the more advanced tactics in regard to Hunter management cause many Hunters to get stuck in the rut of generally mediocre, settling and being accepted at a level of play that is a bit lower than would be allowed from other classes. I'd say one potential and simple answer to the "just don't get it" question is, "for the most part, they don't have to."
I think if Blizzard made the top-end not quite so brutal, while also slowly pushing people towards a smooth learning curve, things would probably be much better. I think nearly everyone would agree that Hunters right now are too reliant on precision elements that the majority of players have no chance of grasping. It also seriously limits the ability to add anything new or cool to the class in some ways, since you're just heaping on to an already massive pile of things to learn.
The big one is the first gotcha, and in itself it makes hunters unlike all other DPS classes. No other class has to juggle their autoattacks and specials to anything like the same extent. Rogues and feral druids have nothing that clips their autoattacks. Shaman shocks and pally seals/judgements/consecrate/etc are all instant casts. True casters like priests/warlocks/mages/boomkins have no autoattacks in the first place. The only exception is Slam for DPS warriors.
This means that hunters are the only class where screwing up the timing of your specials can actually lower your white damage - and it can lower it all the way to zero. You don't need anything more than that to explain it.
have you ever heard of something called Energy?
while i might agree that combatsword rogues just builds cp, unleash them with slice n dice and let their autoattacks roll away.
the rest of the rogues and feral druids have to keep a close eye on their energy bar & their energy ticks, while using adequate abilities and debuffs at adequate times.
while all you have to do is simply to keep your eye on your castingbar (i presume quarts) to optimize your dmg in the way you describe it, so please do not simplify other classes if you do not know them.
while i might agree that combatsword rogues just builds cp, unleash them with slice n dice and let their autoattacks roll away.
the rest of the rogues and feral druids have to keep a close eye on their energy bar & their energy ticks, while using adequate abilities and debuffs at adequate times.
while all you have to do is simply to keep your eye on your castingbar (i presume quarts) to optimize your dmg in the way you describe it, so please do not simplify other classes if you do not know them.
Not to get in to intra-class fighting, but DPSing as a rogue is nothing even close to DPSing as a hunter, energy or not. Backstabbing 5 times then hitting slice and dice / using a SnD/Rupture as combat is nothing even close to the tedium that is raiding hunter dps. It's not oversimplifying rogue dps, that's just the way it is. At best you have to adjust to Sealfate/(Durid equivalent) and the possible extra combo point from a finisher. No part of dpsing as a rogue will actually give you less dps using specials than just autoattacking, which is perfectly possible as a hunter.
Hovsa, I think you missed the point; a hunter who mistimes a Steady Shot (a very distinct possibility for BM hunters) so that it overlaps with their shot timer loses an Auto Shot and all the white damage that comes with it. A hunter using a steady/auto/arcane rotation might also lose Arcane Shot time by having Arc Shot off CD and not fired so they can maintain white damage from Auto Shot.
There is no way a rogue can clip off their autoattack as long as they stay in range. A rogue might foul up their special timing and lose rupture ticks or SnD uptime, but their white damage is constantly rolling. It might not be as much white damage as it should be if they lose SnD uptime, but it's not a complete loss of attacks.
More alarming is that most hunters I interview when trying to recruit, fail to answer questions as simple as "do haste effects/serpents swiftness influence steady shot?" or "why is it a bad idea to use serpent sting in a raid?" or "what is the max % hit chance you need for raid bosses?"
This is a big reason why. As a guild master or officer, or recruiter, your top priority is always teaching. If the leadership does not teach, the pupils have a harder time improving. In fact, a lot of guilds populate officers that expressly HIDE "trade secrets" from other raiders out of fear of losing their raid spot.
I've been in a guild where the top hunter and an officer had a special technique with his shots, and he would NEVER reveal what he was doing to anyone. When he quit playing, he let 1 other person know, but went into a secret channel and locked it off from everyone else so as to not let word get out.
After all, a well-geared Hunter character being played by someone who knows nothing about the class will do "ok"-ish in terms of DPS with the right pet/gear/random shots, and hardly has to learn anything about things such as aggro as long as someone tells them to press FD if the big mob starts coming towards them.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. A well-geared Hunter played by someone with no knowledge of the class will struggle to beat the MT on the meters. That's the problem, because if you stick that same player on any of the other DPS classes, they will do far better in relative terms.
have you ever heard of something called Energy?
while i might agree that combatsword rogues just builds cp, unleash them with slice n dice and let their autoattacks roll away.
the rest of the rogues and feral druids have to keep a close eye on their energy bar & their energy ticks, while using adequate abilities and debuffs at adequate times.
while all you have to do is simply to keep your eye on your castingbar (i presume quarts) to optimize your dmg in the way you describe it, so please do not simplify other classes if you do not know them.
We really don't need this thread to turn into something you would see on the WoW forums. I've DPSed as both a Druid and a Hunter at the T5 (and everything before that) level. Watching energy ticks, paying attention to Mangle/Rip cooldowns and powershifting doesn't even compare to the complexity of DPSing as a Hunter. The big difference, and I think someone already beat me to it, is the penalty for screwing up. If I mis-time something on my Druid, the worst thing that will happen is I can get a single Rip tick that didn't have the Mangle debuff. On my Hunter, I can overwrite an entire Autoshot (that's around 1k damage every 2.2 seconds; missing them adds up fast.
08/14/07, 3:11 PM
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