hello,

having just read through the hunter damage cycle posts i just wanted to get some confirmation on the best damage dealing one handers out there for us hunters.

my belief is (excluding pvp weapons):

1 kingsfall
2 hatchet of sundered bone
3 silithid claw
4 fang of the faceless (all pvp items also)
5 brutality blade
6 doom's edge, and sycthe of the unseen path


is this correct? please bear in mind i got my sycthe 3 nights ago and am really hoping someone is going to tell me that it is better than my brutality blade :(


wispy
shadowsong (EU)

you missed maexna's fang (poor rogues)

same as the hatchet i believe.

Maexxna's fang is 1% hit instead of 1% crit. A good bit worse than the Hatchet.. Probably falls between Brutality Blade and the Fang of the Faceless. Not sure without running it through a spreadsheet though.

Maexxna's Fang only gives %hit, which hunters typically have plenty of...

I'd put Pugio on there above Brutality Blade, though. And for a noncapped hit hunter it's probably better than most 1-handers. I don't think a hunter should even really think about using a one-hander without 1% crit.

One of the Hakkari Swords is 28AP 1% Crit

HUNT00R WEAPON !!!!!!!








Sorry... Just had to do that..




Get a nice 2H weapon and enchant with 25 agility. THis way you piss off just one guy ( warrior probably or some paladin if you alliance ). Two 1 hand weapons you piss off 2 rogues at least.
Srsly. The Frankis spear is awsome for hunters.

Interesting note: Aside from Kingsfall, Brutality Blade is the highest %crit one handed weapon in the game.

DPS wise it doesn't match up as well, but if all you care about is crit, snag one. Only it and Kingsfall have agility AND %crit.

You have no idea how much this annoys me. Why oh why does blizzard hate to stack agility and crit on items, especially weapons and jewelry? Set pieces seem to be the only place we get that anymore...

What would be the perfect hunter weapon? Take Severance, make it a polearm(to keep warriors away), and change the strength to agility. Maybe lower the DPS a little to give it a small amount of intellect, or a bit more stamina. Now THAT'S what a hunter weapon should look like.

I've seen this before, and honestly none of my numbers reconciles with any of his numbers. However this was a month or so ago, so I can't remember why his numbers don't make sense.

Actually now that i look at it quickly, it MIGHT be becuase he only looks at autoattack dmg, and doesn't go via cycles. This will severely underestimate crit since it won't count the bonus dmg from either aimed (+600) or multi (+171) in it's crit calculations.

Anyhow it said wierd things like doom's edge was actually good, when the spreadsheets (and my anecdotal experience) beg to differ.

Edit: I want to emphasize that I don't mean there were minor discrepencies, I mean they were totally off the charts incomparably different.

Say hello to my little friend:
http://www.thottbot.com/?i=53656


For the people with blocked web access, I'm talking about Harbinger of Doom, a dagger drop from Naxx thrash, +8 agi/sta, +1% crit/hit. Unique, but very sexy.

Un^H^HFortunately, it's a very nice dagger upgrade for rogues, so I don't see myself sporting one any time soon.

I would think core hound tooth would score more highly than the scythe/doom's edge. Isn't the tradeoff at likely gear levels +1crit = 32 RAP = 12 AGi, approximately.

Other than that, your list for pre-naxx weapons is what I have using the above relation (which is based on optimal cycles), except you forgot the Hakkari MH, as someone pointed out.

you're pretty much right.

With BoK, the Brutality Blade works out to about the same as the Silithid Claw in my theorycrafting, but is experimentally superior due to pure crittage.

Crit scales better than other stats. For example, in Theorycraft (try one of the various hunter spreadsheets) during one of my Survival phases, I found that the 16 Agi axes appeared to give only slightly less DPS than the 1 crit/28 AP weapons. Since those Axes also gave other nice bonuses (Stamina, mana regen), I tried it out for real. Over the course of a couple weeks raiding, I noticed my DPS standing had slipped noticeably, more than I had expected from Theory.

Sadly I've retired the axes, and expect they'll be part of my huge "drop mining - huge DE fest - relearn mining" festival once I stabilize my gear on lvl 70 blue replacements.

Keep in mind these caveats:
A) If you aren't at tohit cap already, that changes the dynamic considerably.

B) Melee classes get first dibs - Kingsfall will have to drop a dozen times before a hunter sees it. The Hatchet on the other hand isn't usable by rogues, is too slow to make furious warriors happy, and spends lots of its item points in AP making the stats much less attractive to folks who CAN use the +tohit. In other words, it's the only Naxx weapon a hunter is likely to be allowed to bid on w/o lots of other drops filling up folks slots.

C) The BC Agi stat change pretty much destroys any Agi based weapon on that list (except Kingsfall, but it won't be godly awesome like it is now), while the conversion to "tohit ratings" will nerf our overal tohit as we level, and thus improve the standing of the +crit/+tohit weapons considerably.

Regarding #16 C). I'm rather concerned at potential hunter changes. Not in regards to OMG nerf that will be flooding the WoW forums, but in my overall decision on items. Beyond the Hunter Set, I am trying to make a valid choice on items to fill in the rest of the slots beyond 8/8 or 9/9 set pieces.

Weapons, rings, neck etc: Items now such as Prestor's or Band of Reanimation which flood agility and are on par with many of the highest crit/ap items seem to have their value change considerably under the light of a potential hunter re-eval.

How are hunters upgrading themselves with consideration to their own raid-dps and fair distribution of loot while also thinking about long-term value come TBC?

BTW, I'd prefer Dragonfang Blade slightly to Doom's Edge if only for the change of STR->STA.

It's also my understanding that how much 'rating' 1% crit or hit on a current weapon will have in the expansion depends on it's ilvl, right? This would tend to result in the lower level weapons (ie : brutality blade) that are currently high value because of hit/crit being surpassed by higher ilvl equivalents much more dramatically.

Personally I'm not worrying too much about accounting for the changes come TBC. It seems increasingly likely current end-game gear won't last all that long while leveling up (I guess depending on if you choose to level in instances, where you may find replacements, or just by pure grinding).

Added to that there's no way of knowing if/how they're going to change "hunter items" from having pure Agi to some Agi and (R)AP.

Thankfully, I've been MM for a very long time and never contemplated a switch so I've been gathering +AP items all along. Something we all will need to keep in mind is the iLvl of the items we're spending our DKP on if we're keeping an eye to the future. Since it looks like our set items will be re-itemized to yield the same RAP, I think rings, neck and cloak are the most obvious places we need to be careful. I'm hoping to collect an AQ40 choker to replace my ony pendant (and don't plan on trying for prestors. . they're still pretty expensive points-wise for our raid) and I've already gotten a Cloak of Firemaw and master dragonslayer's ring. . . not sure what I should try to pair that with. . . I suppose Ring of the Qiraji Fury.

Another concern is weapons and their iLvl scaling. Currently I run with the FotF + Hakkari Warblade combo. I'll have to check the iLvl of all my items when I get home. . . but right now the "upgrade" from one of those to a silithid claw is very small. . . but could be huge come the xpac.

So my short answer to the question is, I intend to gather +AP items with a high iLvl without overspending points for 'em. I am still going to go full-bore after T3 pieces. ;)

It would be nice to see some current live game weapons in their now TBC form, so it hunters could know current item's power in TBC.

I recall that BB will be 28 crit rating, and I recall seeing Rhok with 14 crit rating.

So the BB is from a level 58 quest, and is something like ilevel 60 to 63. Rhok is ilevel 75 and if I recall correctly they have the same crit rating (14 crit rating per current 1% crit).

So I guess that ilevel will have little influence in an item's future crit rating/hit rating, so all the ilevel 60+ items will all have the same 14 crit rating/whatever the standard hit rating is for 1% hit (maybe 12?).

Nobody mentioned Harbringer of Doom ? 16 RAP, 8 stamina, 1 crit/1 hit - i think thats very good.

My guess is all current items will keep the level 60 crit/hit/spellpen/whatever ratings. That gives us "incentive" to upgrade to new gear, which is after all the driving force behind their income from the game.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Iblis, Blade of the Fallen Seraph (1 crit/hit, 26AP)

No one's mentioning the %hit items because %hit is wasted iLvl to most naxx-level hunters. I'm capped at 9% hit without any naxx gear and neither of my weapons have %hit. Iblis and Harbinger are substantially better in the hands of a dual wielding melee character (even ignoring weapon DPS) than a hunter.

Not to mention they just don't stack up compared to easier to get items (Silithid Claw, FotF) for pure DPS.