Hello everyone,

I've been a reader of these forums for sometime but always chosen to just read rather then post. Recently though I am finding myself in a situation with my raid group that we simply just can't answer from within our own ranks so I would like to bring the question to you guys.

Let me give a short history of our situation. Our raid group is comprised of a handful of veterans from previous groups that have various levels of experience up to and in some cases including Naxx. The numbers of those folks is under 5 though. The vast majority of our folks were brand new to 40 man raiding. Or at least, any experience they had was a random ticket to go with some other group here or there. When we started I'd say only about 20 if our people had even seen Molten Core and maybe 12ish of those past Gehennes. After 9 weeks of MC we cleared it out and beat Ragnaros in phase 1 without any sons spawning. Our elation over this success transitioned quickly into BWL where we got our first Razorgore kill that same day. 6 weeks later we killed Nefarion on our 3rd attempt ever. Now we are looking to transition into AQ40 starting on Wednesday of this week.

I have fostered the environment in my group such that our DPS crew is encouraged to "make the tanks earn their agro". Now, just to put it out there I am our raid leader but also the Main Tank so I fully understand the consequences of doing this. I have never asked our rogues or anyone else to slow their DPS with the exception of some of our more extreme warlocks and mages during the Broodlord fight. Outside of that fight, I really encourage our DPS to push hard and make the tanks work for it. Its been great and we have no issues with agro though to be fair we are alliance and thus have salv to help us out.

Anyway,... on to the problem. Our rogues just destroy things. We have a few mages and warlocks who can be particularly nasty as well. However, our hunters simply lag behind on the DPS. At least this is how it feels. However, I feel its important for me to understand what is a reasonable expectation to have for them. I know that of course certain fights favor damage from one class over another but our problems have been pretty consistent regardless of the boss. Our DPS lead (yes we have 3 main leads for Tank/CC, DPS and Healing) points out that consistently the hunters only have 1-2 hunters who are always at the very bottom of the top 15 list. The rest farther below. It seems to me that they should be higher then that on average.

So, what should I expect from my hunters? What is fair but still aggresive?

Here is our ussual raid makeup for our DPSers when we dont have to do specific group spreads for specific fights. Now there are some minor tweaks we make to this spread from time to time but generally speaking this is how we spread things out if we can.

Group 1 Tank group
Warrior (MT)
Warrior (OT)
Warlock (Imp duty)
Hunter
Paladin

Group 2 Tank/Off Tank healers
Priest
Priest
Priest
Druid
Paladin

Group 3 Melee DPS
Rogue
Rogue
Hunter (TSA)
Warrior (DPSer with BS)
Warrior (DPSer with BS)

Group 4 Melee DPS
Rogue
Rogue
Rogue
Hunter (TSA)
Warrior (DPSer with BS)

Group 5 Caster DPS
Mage
Mage
Warlock
Warlock
Druid (Moonkin form)

Group 6 Caster DPS
Mage
Mage
Warlock
Warlock
Druid (Moonkin form)

Group 7 Mixed group
Paladin
Druid
Hunter
Priest
Paladin

Group 8 Mixed group
Paladin
Druid
Mage
Priest
Hunter

I know thats a lot of information but I'm hoping to include everything I can think of that might be making a difference. So what should I expect from the hunters in the DPS/Total Damage arena compared to the other classes? Where should they match up? Of course once I know what to expect I need to explore how to get them there but I'd like to start by focusing on just setting the appropriate expectations.

Ask your hunters about their shot cycle, which is a huge part of their DPS potential. Compare their answers to the hunter DPS threads in the "Threads of Significance" sticky. If all they're doing is hitting a cooldown whenever its up, they're losing DPS. And certainly consumables help - are your rouges blowing pots on every fight while your hunters don't?

Whoa, I'm retarded.

^ That was an edit, for some reason I related this thread to Loatheb.

Trying my very best to ignore the two moonkin, Hunters are just like most other classes better on some fights than others. If you experience that they're underperforming across the board, ask the best one if he can look into what shot rotations the other guys are using. That's most likely the problem, as anyone can keep autoshot up.

An interesting setup you have there. We normally divide our groups a bit more evenly especially OT's and their healers. I'm just curious as to how you assign healers. 4 of your groups have no healers.
Do you actually assign healing groups for your healers or is it just all X-Healing?

For this discussion to be more meaningful and for hunters to be better able to offer specific advice, we need to know what fights you are talking about in particular. Is there a fight that you feel like hunters aren't doing well and the rest of the ranged is? Also, understand that if your mages are compentant, a hunter should never beat them unless there is some gimmick or something (fire immune mobs with fire mages). We should be able to keep up with or beat the warlocks though.

Shot cycle is important, but the specific cyle and whether to use a clipped or full cycle will depend on the specific ranged weapon that each hunter has.

One thing that we have done with our hunters to boost the damage output slightly is put put them all in the same group. They are also required to have wolf pets and have the howl macroed with Aimed (or multi). With all 5 hunter's wolves howling and buffing the party every 10 secs it can add up to a bit more damage out.

this may be a no-brainer, but i was pretty surprised when i saw this..

go near your hunters during trash, and see what kind of ammo they're using.

a hunter is THE easiest class to slack with, followed by rogues. with rogues, you can slap on some poison which is pretty cheap relatively speaking, for hunters, i know of some who simply refuse to use "expensive" ammo for anything other than a boss fight. i've stopped being surprised when i see the 9s/stack variety equipped for trash.

Ammo really isn't an issue, I pull good damage all the time with jaggeds, even on boss fights when I forgot to equip my thorium. (infact i only bring 5 stacks of thorium to any naxx raid because that's all I'll really need)

That's a good candidate for the "Stupid Things Said to Hunters" thread in the official forums.

Paying 10 times the price for Thorium Ammo nets you all of ~10-15 total DPS. It's a collossal waste of cash for anything but DPS race bosses.

Our hunters generally top our charts, doing around 1200dps on Patchwerk and a little under twice that on thaddius and loatheb. Hunters are an extremely powerful dps class, and if yours are at all competent they should be able to put out numbers like that on a regular basis

zero damage. hunters are so bad at dps that i don't bother equipping a weapon in raids nowadays because it's not worth the durability loss from being in combat.