Emie

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.

Unleash the gnomes of war.

 

diospadre

I don't know if this thread is going to go in the direction you had hoped.

 

Malan

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?

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Ghostz

Whoa, I'm retarded.

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

 

Mosh

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.

 

McInaction

Well dps is raid relative, if for instance your rogues and wars and mages are super-human beasts that just destroy everything I don't think your hunters would do a whole lot. Also depends on gear.

So for starters, ignore damage done and look at DPS. It's really up to you to decide what is good and what is not, there's no definate answer of 'xxx'. But I usually range from low 500's to the mid 400's (520-450 is pretty damn good)

Make sure your hunters are using consumables (this means mana potions and demonic runes in addition to dps pots). And you may also want to ask them what sort of rotation they are using.

(do they spam multi and aimed whenever they're up?, that's a no-go)


Edit:

To clarify about the shot rotation, the diffrence between a good rotation and a bad rotation can easily be a signifigant chunk of dps (like 100)

 

Kaide

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?

 

◊ Bruinbain

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.

 

Dwargue

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.

 

Howard Roark

Meh, I'll throw out a generalization:

Your hunter should be doing AT LEAST ~85% of what your rogues are doing damage wise, as far as MC and BWL are concerned. Gear is NOT and excuse.

it drops a bit in aq40, and then a little bit more in naxx, though

 

McInaction

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)

 

Zurai

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.

 

• Fogbug

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

 

Dwargue

coming from a rogue background, 1 dps gain is enough for me to give it some thought.

i guess hunters just don't feel the need to squeeze out every bit of dps they can.

 

Elendril

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.

 

Zurai

One thousand twelve hundred damage per second? I've never even heard of top geared elite fury warriors, or ignite-stealing fire mages breaking 1000 DPS.

 

McInaction

No, ammo is fairly insignifigant and is definately not the cause of hunters being substationally lower then they should be. I stated I do good damage with jaggeds (which I do) to emphasize that point.

Where there is a much larger problem it's not a good idea to pay attention to something as small and insignifigant as ammo until the larger problem is worked out.


That being said I still think they are using bad rotations.

Oh wow did I really type 520-450? I ment 1520 and 1450 my bad.

 

Apparation

umm

Apparation: PvE Shadow Priest

 

Zurai

Ammo is by far the least important thing we can do to increase our DPS. I could be using the 1 copper per stack newbie ammo and still do within 0.2% of the raid damage/dps I do with jagged arrows. I've been seriously tempted to do so, in fact, because I'm down under 50g at the moment and we're getting to the consumable-intensive parts of naxx.

 

Glaurong

Sarcasm translates so poorly in text.

Edit - Might as well contribute something.

If you are just getting started on AQ40 look for your hunters to be doing about 400-450 dps on boss fights depending on the mechanics.

If you blew through BWL that fast I'm guessing none of your hunters are in 8/8 ds?

Do any of them have the chromag xbow?

You are also relegating hunters to fill slots rather than grouping them beneficially. Using 1 hunter as the TSA guy is okay but you really want to stack up the rest with wolves, and make one of your moonkin druids go feral if you are going to compare you hunters to mages!

Log Parser for BM Hunters (Right click, save as) - Updated 10/11/2007

 

diotox

I wouldn't worry about the ammo, I'd go double check all their weapons. Judging by the sound of your guild's progression I would assume all the hunters have at least rhok delar by now, but make sure. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that you guys have gotten horrid luck on leaf drops (unlikely, but we've seen it happen), and chromaggus can go months without coughing up a crossbow. I could also easily see someone being a complete slacker on doing the demon quests even if they did have a leaf. Basically, do a "hurricane patrol" and make sure you don't have anyone using that stupid bow. After that you can discuss shot cycles and what dps strategy they are using. Remember, a lot of people even in raid guilds aren't really min-maxers and will do the bare minimum to get by. Sometimes this is a conscious decision on their part, other times they are just ignorant and would improve their play but they don't realize their play is bad in the first place.

 

Dwargue

i must conceed to this. With all the work from rogues like Kalman that have been posted here, as well as linked on the rogue forums, any rogue who wanted to maximize their damage can easily find the spreadsheets, spend 5 minutes to plug in the gear, and at least get a baseline for performance gains/losses.

alas, even at the naxx level, the guild i was in had people who still thought there was a hard-cap on +hit, who refused to believe that ACLG was godly, who refused to use SnD instead of Evis... these were the same people that really liked their matching T2 outfit though.. >_>

i suspect the same thing w/ hunters. Even though there's extensive writeups and simulations on damage cycles based on wpns, most hunters probably haven't made use of those resources.

 

Nurru

While we're turning this thread into a useless pile I'd like to recommend you move off an RP server if you want your hunters to do good dps.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Emie

No

Unleash the gnomes of war.

 

Judia

From a group that always runs with 5 of each class, and therefore needs hutners and locks to pull their weight, I would say that on a boss fight hunter dps is directly proportional to the amount of time spent standing still.

On a fight like bug trio, skeram, or Sartura your damage meter should looks something like
Mages
Hutners/locks
Melee dps

On a fight where everyon is static like fankriss it should look more like:
Mages/Roges
Hunters/Locks/Warriors

If someone is low, consider their gear, their consumables, and what they are doing. If you cant find the problem then start looking at their dps cycle. Hunters should be able to beat warlocks on anyfight that does not give a natural break in which they can lifetap, C'thun is a good example of a fight where smart warlocks can lifetap at times when their dps in unaffected.

I find the best way to handle dps issues it to tell the person at the bottom of the meter to ask the person at the top for tips, rather than to be too agressive in handling them.