I am curious to know what kind of percentage stings make up of a hunters total damage. My main is a warlock and I am having a difficult time getting any dots to stick due to Hunters using stings. I tend to use CoD as it keeps up my burst damage when I am life tapping, but doesn't add to my DPS like other dots do. It appears that the hunters are using serpent sting as an opening move, which means any fight where you get feared there is little chance of keeping a dot up over the half dozen persistant stings.

So should I be suggesting that hunters stop stinging or am I the person at fault. If its me, how should I alter my gameplay?

A fully talented Serpent Sting with 200 +damage (which would be a hell of a lot for a hunter) does 830 damage over 15 seconds.

An unmodified (no SM, no DS) Corruption with 200 +damage (which is very little for a warlock) does 1022 damage over 18 seconds.

Tell your hunters to stop being stupid, and put your main in your profile before Kaubel sees you.

Stings are inefficient debuff slot hogs. As a hunter you will have better mana efficiency and more dps if you simply use that mana for your rotation, unless you have an over abundance of mana, in which case you still shouldn't cast it.

I cast serpent in three situations: Kiting in pvp/pve, popping some dots on adds that don't go down quickly and won't have all 16 debuff slots used (adds on Noth etc) and generally to keep a rogue from vanishing away from me. That's about it. Mobs that I grind don't live past my first couple of shots making it a waste, and it's too worthless in raiding to yield anything from casting it.

Serpant sting is roughly ~30 dps.

And it's still a waste of a debuff slot in almost any situation.

I do like to toss rank 1 on to knock off warlock dots on farm content tho :)

Stings are very mana inefficient for the damage. We don't allow our hunters to use them in most boss situations. For trash and stuff like that we really don't care, but you'd be hard pressed to see a serpent sting up during Loatheb or something like that.

Yes.

Serpent Sting is very inefficient in my opinion and it pushes away useful dots. The amount of time, damage and mana that it takes is definitely not worth it. I just basically use it on mobs that are weak to nature.

On boss fights where you are prone to running out of mana before the boss drops (fuck you BoW) stings are a complete and utter waste. On trash clearing, which is a big part of instance running that people forget about since you can't make a spreadsheet for it, stings are good stuff since you can distribute your damage a little and are not likely going to run out of mana.

Stings = bad on bosses but good on trash