decided to start SS'ing some dmg meters for threads like this one :-p

our raid tonight was something of a mess, so i didn't get as many meters as i would've liked, and didn't bother to record instructor since it was our messiest kill of all time. gothik i don't find very meaningful because so much of it is about actually getting shots off before the trainees die and spawn locations allowing multishot and such.

here's 4h, where i hit the first shield wall at both mograine and thane based on my position in the rotation:



here's grobbulus. we have our melee on him the entire time. the mages above me traded the ignites the whole fight.



this is last week's loatheb, which i happened to have in a screenshot for something else. i'm in the second spore group, and i misclicked my first KOTS so i didnt' have it synched with rapid fire :(



and here's the fight everyone uses to show how bad hunter dps is: patchwerk



on patch and grob i had mongoose and squid with no other consumables or unusual buffs. on 4h i had only squid. on loatheb i had every buff short of consecrated stones.

fuzzy and menime both also have full cs/slavemaker. liew has ouro gun and i believe 4 or 5 piece CS, and died early on 4h and wasn't there for patch/grob this week. #1 on patch is kingsfall/death's sting rogue, and the worst weapon the rest of them has is Maexxna's Fang. pretty much everyone is late Naxx geared, and the rogues at least on patch are heavily buffed because they have DPS competitions every week :-P also, they all have TSA and howl buffs from hunters.

i fear that most of you are overcomplicating the answer.

first a couple of scene setters:
my guild has only just stopped going to MC in favor of going to AQ40 more often, we have killed nefarian a total of 5 times, so we are only slightly more advanced than the guild we are looking at.

assuming that we are comparing a fully T2 equipped DPS players. using reasonable endavours (ie some consumables on bosses, none on trash( we are talking MC damage after all)).

the answer:

in MC there is no reason why your hunters should deal any less damage (across the whole raid) than any of your other DPS classes. there are too many fights were melee classes are not engaging enough and too many mages on decurse duty fights for the other DPS classes to really pull away from hunters.

our damage table at the end of every MC raid reads:
1 fury warrior
2 hunter
3 rogue/mage
4 rogue/mage
5 mage

and they are always the same people.

3 of the other hunters in the raid occupy spots in the top 10 and the last is newish and tends to be 15-20th :(

the results we have in BWL are similar, with the mages tending to finish higher and the warrior way down (as he is called upon to tank for some fights).

so, definitively your hunters are either not trying as hard as your other classes or they do not understand the mechanics of the hunter role properly (in which case give them the url for this site and a week to improve before you sack them).

I have fast cast and it doesn't help for hunters.

I think these hunters are either lazy, don't know what a rotation is or just don't care. Or maybe all of those things.

People read the wow forums and believe hunter dps is crap, so hunters figure why bother trying when we have crappy dps anyway? No body will know.

I think a high population of hunters are just plain horrible when it comes to dps. When I had strikers mark and all other hunters in my guild had Rhok I would still out damage them 8/10 times on bosses. Now that I have the Xbow from BWL it's not even close. I've now moved to a new guild and I out dps the hunters there even though they out gear me.

Seems like everything has been covered by all these knowledgeable hunters.

Surv or Marks spec? Marks = more dps
Arrows? Get the best you can afford
Pet? Get a wolf for furious howl and macro to your multi shot
Never FD drink if you can dps, use consumables or lower the rank on your Multi Shot so you can last the duration of the fight.
Read Lactose's post on shot rotations and find out what's best for the range weapon you have (clipped or non clipped)
Get an auto shot cast bar with a timer so they can improve their timing on aimed shot.

It's amazing how many of these suggestions, even though written for and about hunters, apply equally to the Warlock class.

wow Ele, i dont understand how your warlocks do so poorly on 4h. I remember doing 200k on that fight give or take.

Warning: potential derail ;)

It is also fascinating to look at alliance damage meters. In our Naxx clears, and basically most every other place too warriors and rogues crush hunters because of windfury.

Our guild is pretty low on shaman so we don't get grace of air, so I'm not sure if GoA makes up some of that margin.

There are a few things that will really help:

1) Have all your hunters put 31 points in Marks. Doesn't really matter where the remaining 20 go, but if they are not at the hit cap, make sure they max out Surefooted, it will add a lot more DPS than Improved Aspect of the Hawk. I'd max out both Slaying talents too; they're a flat out 3% damage increase in BWL.

2) Probably the most important thing. Now I never paid in depth attention to Lactose's spreadsheets, but I paid enough to know that you simply use Aimed and Multi shot when their cooldowns are up BUT depending on your weapon you may need to wait for your next autoshot to fire first. You can lose a lot of DPS from unnecessarily "clipping" your rotation.

3) If your hunters are mainly in Tier 1, mana will be an issue on long fights. Make sure you've got a Paladin assigned to keeping a constant Judgment of Light on the mob. Get your hunters to bring Mana Potions. Instead of waiting 'til you're OOM, use one as soon as the pot will put you back on full mana (i.e. I've got 2800/4000 mana, so pop a Combat Mana Potion). Just by doing that you will extremely hard pushed to go out of mana, even on those 15 minute Ebonroc kills.

4) Other mana consumables: Grilled Squid, Demonic Runes, Night Dragon's Breath, Mageblood potions.

5) Don't ever FD and drink! If you follow the above steps you will never run OOM.

6) Go all out, 100% (within reason). I use Mongoose Pots most of the time, simply because they are sick for Hunters. Crit is much harder to come by than for a Rogue or Warrior, and 50AP is pretty disgusting. They really are worth it. Use Thorium Arrows/Shells, especially on bosses.

7) Something no one has really mentioned so far, the pet. Use a wolf! You'll probably be in a group with a Warrior for TSA anyway. Get a Paladin to keep Blessing of Might on your pet and it'll maintain 100ish trouble free DPS on pet-friendly fights. In MC this is pretty much everything. In BWL this is everything except Razorgore phase 1, probably Chromaggus unless you're BM specced and Nefarian phase 1. Firemaw requires a bit of micro-management but anyone with half a brain can get used to it.

8) A few small things. Don't forget Rapid Fire. Use it in conjunction with any +AP trinkets (I expect all your hunters have Devilsaur Eye from their level 50 class quest) for maximum effect.

When we first started MC the only person I couldn't beat was a Fury Warrior dual welding Dal'Rends. To this day he is still untouchable, although he has seen a few weapon upgrades on the way. I'd expect decently blue geared hunters to destroy MC damage meters. Once everyone is in Tier 1, the rogues probably have the edge, then from Tier 2 and beyond the gap widens. Hope that helps!

fastcast doesn't work anymore in 1.12 afaik???

I personally find dps meters distracting and leave them for others to link later. My goal is always to do as much dps as possible, but its never a goal to beat other classes, I know my limits too. It really depends on the fight, but i've noticed other classes get lazy too.

I've actually found it the opposite, I do more damage when I have a dm running. Not too sure why really, but I'd guess its because if I start falling behind I try to adjust a little bit, and if I'm staying ahead just keep doing what I'm doing. I feel naked without a dm at this point, feels like something's missing from my dps. :|

I personally use damage meters to show me how much attention I am paying to the new House episode instead of the raid. ><

Reliably I'm the top hunter, even when I'm not using mongoose and such, but it's pretty noticeable when I either screw up my shot rotation or just am plain not paying attention.

As far as a wolf goes, the wolf will now howl whenever he has enough focus for it. Not sure when this started but I wasn't going to mess with the pet and forgot I had him out, only for him to start howling on his own (Howl was on autocast) whenever the combat flag hit. He'd then cast it again when the CD faded, or when he regened enough focus for it.

Mostly though the pet goes in with the rogues. (I am but 1 of only 2 TSA hunters in a guild of ohhhh 6 hunters so I'm passed around to those filthy classes ; ;) The pet is awful damage though, absolutely makes me cry when they post the complete dmg meters from fights like PW and it's like Ramoth: 15k or something ridiculous low ; ;

I make up for it by convincing myself that when a howl went off, some rogue got to use it with his BS!

I also think you should look at the hunters versus other classes, and their gear levels. It doesn't sound like they're putting alot of effort in, but if your other classes are just going nuts it could lead them to be skewed.

That said, it still amazes me the amount of hunters who don't know shot rotations, dont use pets, and don't know (or vehemently deny) that marksman is better for dps potential.

Someone even said there was a spreadsheet that showed LR was better than marksman, who spreads this stuff!

Definitely, it's really annoying when some peoples' alt Warlocks can outdamage mains because they have better optimization of spells and DoTs. Oh, and same applies with alt Hunters. I think those two classes definitely force people to read up and learn the best ways to DPS instead of just spamming a set of buttons in series (which, as a combat daggers rogue, I do tend to do).


Yea, I've actually started asking Shamans for GoA a lot more now, especially when we have a TSA bitch in our group :D

Works like a charm.

Sorry to get off topic a little but, this is what bums me down a bit. Comes TBC, my shaman will be DWing and providing a 10% AP buff but im not sure how mut *FUN* it'll be, waiting for WF flurry and spamming SS.... :( I'm missing my hunter more and more and more... I'm thinking about switching my main to my hunter since gear wont be an issue once we're all grinded up to 70....

I was always the type of person to max myself out with shot rotation and timing on my hunter... That i think i will miss it a lot on my auto-attack bot on a DW shaman.

You guys think i should switch main?

i think they were all being super careful, since we were having a bad night that involved two of the warlocks dying back-to-back to pulling aggro on our previous 4h attempt that went awry. 4h meters aren't especially meaningful at making comparisons, i don't think, given how much of it is based on when you rotate in to a horseman - i'm generally considerably lower because i run into the full duration of shield wall on mograine, but our DPS was a bit faster on this run and i hit the tail end of the shield wall on my second rotation in, which let me actually get a rapid fire/kots in for the full duration.

I can relate. Last night we pulled Zeliek to the safe zone 3 times by mistake and barely kept getting him back into position before a holy wrath. Only our second kill so the Mages and Warlocks are still figuring out the damage thresholds.

The difference will be minimal after the windfury nerf. BoM and Windfury will be about the same. For now the difference is pretty significant.

There was a hunter dps thread going over at FoH and I think it was Sean that posted some meters screens which had rogues/warriors way out ahead (they are Horde).

doesn't work for me anyways. not with standard castbar and not with ecb and it worked before :/

That's partly my fault :(

I brainwashed all of our Rogues into foaming at the mouth for Windfury.


I think in TBC GoA is going to be preferred by all rogues over Windfury, while Warriors and Paladins will prefer WF over the other possible air totems.

That really brings up an interesting dilemma, however. Right now the most optimal Horde melee DPS groups are 3 Rogues / 1 Warrior / 1 Shaman, do you break that up for TBC and give all your DPS Warriors / Ret Pallies WF, or do you put the shamans in groups with Rogues and Hunters and let the entire group benefit from totems / Unleashed Rage / TSA?

Seems to be working fine for me. At least I'm "pre-casting" all my chain fireballs/scorches, or that's what it appears to be doing.

Interesting damage meters Elendril. I know for 4HM, Grobbulus warlocks/firemage take the top spots with the majority of hunters in the top 10. Looking at your profile you seem to have quite a heavy AP based build. Personally im working towards a 30% crit (ranged), 9%hit build although it would be interesting to see how these compare. I've found some annoying times where i've made very good shot rotations but with no crits, and some where i simply just slacked but got so many crits and in the end the damage done was not so different, which really is the reason for a crit orientated build.

Sadly i have a soft spot for my bear ive had since level 16 so call me wierd/dumb for not using a wolf but i just can't let him go. More recently ive been a bit more aware of using the pet for the 4CS bonus more often and finding decent safespots. The only fights so far i don't bring my pet out is at KT p2, Sapphiron, Maexxna and Heigan. Also trying to make a effort to get major rejuvenation potions on sapphiron/KT where it seems hunters have a strong start but once thier mana is out DPS really starts to fall. I guess another step for me would be to make better use of trinkets, maybe obtain a JG or slayer's crest and do switch to seal of the dawn when thier cd hits.

As far as consistency goes i think hunters do/can perform strong (top 10) at Noth, Heigan and Faerlina provided you are regularly using the usual consumables. Non Naxx, Fankriss (if melee focus down worms), Emps and Ouro are also fights hunters can do consistently well.

PS. Also noticed you don't have the cap of 9%hit, do you think you feel a impact if any of 2% less hit on your dps? Have you tried using DFT or getting the cap and see how your dps differs?

you're misinformed, windfury owns for combat daggers.