McInaction

No you don't. Human reaction will always be off and so will the timer in your head. And when your entire dps relovles around your autoshot and how you time your other abilities around that you damn well better have a timer for it if you are at all serious about contributing your all to the raid.

Please don't come in here with a condensending tone and talk down to us when all you do it pass out the healthstones dot it and shadowbolt spam, thanks.

 

dakalro

[OFF-TOPIC rly sorry :)]
Your words hurt poor little me. (won't add more cause they'd be much worn insults and, actually, I don't believe them, I'd just be directing "anger" from one person to an entire class, much like you did)
And yes, every player thinks their main class is more complex. Get over it, they're the same. The more you try to get better at things the more you discover the complexities of the class and thus come to the conclusion it is more complex to obtain maximum efficiency (compared to the other classes you may play where you do not strive to get the same).

To everyone that commented on the importance of rotations ... please read up a bit before deciding to post an idea without arguments. Don't know what rotations are like in betas but a well executed rotation adds up decent dps.
[/OFF-TOPIC]

Now to what I wanted to post originally. Seen some tests on the net about reaction time. Purpose was to click a stationary, known button that lit up randomly between 1 and 7 seconds. Avg reaction time for most, 0.2 sec. On the proposed rotation method with the button row, lack of another cue (increasing/decreasing casting bar type) would end up adding that reaction time every time.
I believe that a cast bar will help with that reaction time. Practice would help more than those (go for pressing the button before the bar ends so that you actually cast when it does end - not possible with buttons lighting up imo). It seems to me that casting on gut would at some point become faster than reacting to a visual cue on the screen.

Bigwigs type bars that run every cooldown/cast-time, ordered by remaining time and recycled is the best option (including auto-shot timings that you have to wait for)

 

◊ Nfariessence

Non-hunter here, but I've dreamed of an Addon that could work for both Hunters and Affliction Warlocks that would allow you to use established theorycraft logic to optimize your shot/DOT rotations and would display what to shoot/cast when for keeping to that rotation. It's a tad more complicated with Warlocks since so many of our fights have multiple adds, or adding Life Tap into the rotation, and +damage gear and available healing can widely vary what's the best rotation.

If I weren't a coder (nor played one on TV) but had an idea of a useful mod, what's the best way to 'put it out there' for a mod maker to get inspired and pick it up?

 

Rennoko

Shot rotations are unique to anything any other class has to deal with. The reason being, is that if any class that has a spell, is to sit there and spam that spell, it will simply not let you mess up your dps by canceling that spell. Warlocks and mages especially should just leave this thread, simply because watching the DOT bar and waiting till it gets to zero and mashing casting spells, isnt even close to the same concept.

A good example of a spell that uses the same mentality as aimed shot/steady shot is slam, that is if slam did not reset the attack timer. Basically you have a cast bar, and an attack. If you use that ability just before an auto attack, you lose or delay damage.

Maximizing dps isnt as easy as mashing our cooldowns every time they come up, which has been proven many times. If it was as easy as 2 sinister strikes, a slice and dice, followed by 5 sinister strikes and an evic /REPEAT, we wouldnt be having this discussion.

The point is, that casting bars are nice and visually appealing, but really lack the insight to produce a max dps cycle. The difference between a hunter who has his rotation polished and one who doesnt is 100's of damage points. I use shot bars, but i find that between my lag and the server lag, i have to anticipate to cast aimed shot at the best possible time. This means that the better i get, the closer i am to casting that aimed shot a millisecond to late and losing an autoshot. The precision required to play a hunter at the max dps is really very difficult to maintain over any length of time.

Personally i take pride in being able to do a good rotation, since so few people understand how difficult it can be. Im really not sure that any addon would be able to help, simply because the real culprit here is the lag time of the shot. For people who have been using clipped cycles and mashing cooldowns every time they come up like our warlock friends, im sure an addon like this would help, but i doubt that it would be able to improve a solid rotation very much.

 

dakalro

This just proves you have no idea and are not interested to have an idea about what max dps for other classes means.

Show some interest and knowledge, then speak pls. Casting a dot before it has it's last tick makes it ineffiecient, removing it for a cycle or delaying for more than necessary, cause you got lazy, lowers dps. Like I said, get over the idea that some classes are more complex. Every class has complexity when you're trying to squeeze every ounce of dmg, it's not something unique to hunters.

 

Naghat

This is clearly valid and I'll admit I was a bit worried about the dumbing down of hunter mechanics. However, we do have some additional complexities to consider. Most pressing from the perspective of not interrupting auto-shot, haste mechanics are more prevalent. Some examples: IotH is up much more often, Rapid Fire cooldown is not static due to Rapid Killing, Drums of Speed, & Haste Potion.

Also, mana conservation/expenditure is considerably more interesting. Aspect of the Viper may be a reasonable panacea for our mana ills, but it would be nice to go with Hawk if possible. The consumption range between max rank Arcane/Multi/Steady using Hawk and Downranked Arcane/Steady using Viper is massive. The ability to guestimate mana usage and adapt on the fly will make a significant difference in DPS output.

Finally, we've been gifted two cooldown abilities we never had to worry about before: Beastial Wrath/Beast Within & Blood Fury (wow!). Although admittedly not available to all races/builds, weaving these in with our normal trinket usage will add at least a bit to the Hunter dps challenge.

 

McInaction

[OFF-TOPIC] Yes, I'm well aware. I was intentionally dumbing down the warlock class as he did to hunters in the hope that he would realize his own fault and save me the trouble of trying to type it all out. My personal opinion has always been it's easy to play any class, just difficult to play it well. [/OFF-TOPIC]

The diffrence between hunter A and hunter B in a raid situation is not gear or buffs of even spec, but who manages their rotation the best. It's the number one diffrence between a bad hunter and a great one.

That being said the removal of aimshot and the mana efficency shafting of multishot destroy and semblence of the current rotation, which was rather linear and limited in your options.

Now there are ALOT of options available resulting in many diffrent possible rotations, options that can't really be handled by 'okay autoshot is just about to finish is aimshot ready? aimshot!' cast-bar system. With several cast bars all cooling down and still having to maintain the autoshot flawlessly you're looking at 7, 8 bars and that can get rather confusing rather quickly. So I think it's a good idea to explore alternatives.

This just proves you have no idea and are not interested to have an idea about what max dps for other classes means.

See, I don't see it as the same. That's one ability interdependent of others. Refreshing your dot a tick too soon loses you some mana and a dot tick, negligable damage. Screwing up your shot rotation ruins your entire dps for the rest of the fight because you're no longer keeping up on your cooldowns and maximizing your damage, you signifigantly lose dps. I've missed a beat on a patchwerk fight and dropped not five hundred or a thousand damage but a hundred dps. It's insanely signifigant.

 

◊ Lactose

Well, if you have the system for it, dynamically updating which skills would be preferrable for DPS at any given time, you could have two bars:
Current action (most likely Auto Shot or Aimed Shot)
Next Action (timer showing when it's supposed to start, and what it would be)

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

bekayoh

My main is mage, and I recently got my very casually played hunter to 60. When I began doing instances I realized I was terrible on dps... I read some things on shot rotation and tried to get one going but I wasn't really successful until I got Bigtrouble. You can very easily do the same thing by paying attetention to your character/shot sound.. BUT sometimes I'm listening to vent or music or sometimes I am burried in a sea of tauren. A shot timer gave me a visual pulse of my shots that let me find a rhythm of my class. The same thing that a mage does with a castbar.

With my mage, especially with frost you do have a castbar in your head. Its not 100% perfect 100% of the time but it I'd say its pretty accurate after the 1 millionth frostbolt but that doesn't mean I would get rid of my cast bar. And when I loaded my hunter on my husbands computer I felt naked without my shot bar, the same way I would feel without a cast bar on my mage. I was actually quite worried about what I would do when TBC/patch hit since I don't really keep up on hunter news. I would be very interested in a mod of this type.

Show me on the paper doll where the devs nerfed you.
http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...s/brelarow.png

 

Lodi

Shame on the non-contributing "I'm so leetsauce I don't approve of this idea" posts.

You don't want to just light up a button in a reactive fashion; as Lactose, I would rather see a visual time remaining, or an "in advance" highlighting (audio is another option if you can stand it) - let people choose their reaction time - 200ms is common. Lighting up *before* it's time (but not too soon, thus the configurable reaction time). A ticking bar is good for letting people anticipate e.g. when is a good time to move about without losing dps.

As for 2.0 (pre-TBC), if you want to be lazy, spam arcane+multi 20 times/sec. I've always believed multi can delay autoshot, but the gain from timely use of cooldowns is probably positive.

 

Rennoko

The difference is that you have the ability to use casting bars or your eyes to know EXACTLY when that dot is about to tick off. The very second you see the last damage tick (The number over the mobs head), you can reapply the dot, there you go, you have maximized your dps for that dot. We have a dot too, and its very easy for us to maximize it by comparison.

Now certainly you have to do this for the other dots you use, but its the same principle. If you cast a shadowbolt when you should have cast corruption, you lose one dot tick of corruption at worst case. If i cast aimed shot when i should have cast autoshot, i lose a full autoshot. Since you dont know, autoshot makes up 50% of my damage. If i cast multishot when i should have cast autoshot, i lose 0.5-1 second of autoshot time. All this and we have no real accurate way of knowing exactly when the autoshot will go off without casting bars. Even worse, you have to start aimed shot before the autoshot goes off (Has to be purely anticipated) in lag to minimize losses on autoshot. Screw up, and you lose 2+ seconds of autoshot and half your dps for those 2 seconds.

All classes have their own challenges i will agree, but they are not all equal. I cant belive anyone would argue that there isnt a huge disparity between good hunters and bad hunters. This is why, because its not a matter of spamming 3 buttons with epics to do good damage.

After the patch is will be a matter of spamming 2 buttons until steady shot in the expansion. So for that i will agree that during that small window hunters are about like warlocks for maximizing dps.

 

Rennoko

Dont get me wrong, i think everyone has room for improvement, including myself, and i would love to have an addon like this, i just question how accurate it can be with the ingame lag and the milliseconds of time that pass during the window of "fire now". No matter how acurate the addon is, the closer you get to a perfect rotation, the closer you get to missing the next auto shot all-together and losing it.

 

• Dinian

In my opinion, the only addon that I'll probably be using or writing myself will be some sort of Auto Shot timer. To be totally frank, I'm surprised blizzard hasn't made this part of the built-in UI experience or at least an advanced option.

Frosting on the cake would be some sort of extension to the ticking autoshot castbar indicating when a Steady Shot cast at that point in time would complete auto-shot interruption so we can foresee any possible Auto Shot truncation.

That's about it.

P.S. I also feel quite vulnerable without my auto shot and/or aimed shot castbar when I play on other computers. Call it a crutch or whatever but it is definately part of my "secret sauce" for getting the best damage I can get in a fight, particularly since I upgraded from a Rhok to Ash and I'm still not completely comfortable with the new timing. Months and months and months of 2.5s autoshots gets ingrained into your muscle memory :-)

 

◊ Lactose

I swapped from 2.52 to 2.61 (Rhok --> Larvae) after about 1 year or so with Rhok'delar. It was very easy to notice the difference (or rather, it suddenly became a lot easier to mess up).

Edit: And yeah, suddenly playing without an Auto Shot bar feels awkward. Auto Shot timer + ItemRack, would be my two most "needed" addons.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

Pyros

One thing I noticed, might have just been my head tho is, almost everything you cast can delay autoshot by 0.5s if you use it at the same time, the autoshot is supposed to fire with the exception of hunter's mark. Which means using Kill Command, especially in its Rank1 beta version(why did they feel the need to remove rank2 is beyond me) might result in a net LOSS of dps overtime if you time it wrong a few times. This, the fact it's a proc effect and only stay lit up for 5(6?) secs, starts a global and does not so great damage; combine all this, and I'm not even sure it's worth pressing unless you can't shoot(5first seconds of a fight, and that's not even sure with misdirection rotations on the MT on pull).

 

Kyudo

I have a level 70 beta hunter using "Hemet's Elek Gun" and the 13% ammo bag. (I didn't have AV rep up when I copied my char over, meh) Last night, four of my giuldies and I ran Mana Tombs (~64-65) instance. For this I spec'd into MM with points in BM for imp AotH and Survival for Hawk Eye. (Talents in clude imp arcane shot but not imp stings)

Gear wise, I have about 1644rap, 20% chance to crit, self buffed and around 1750/22%crit in a 5-man without a druid.

I haven't played around with macros for putting misdirection on the tank, so for now that is a process I "click" though.

Typical multi-mob or boss, consists of:

misdirection on tank.
Hunter's mark
Aimed Shot (crits for around ~4500 on lvl65elites)
Multishot (crits for ~2000 on lvl 64 elites)
Arcaneshot (~1650 on lvl64elites) /////// Ideally, I get those first three off before the autoshot timer fires. This way the "aggro" generated under three shots is "misdirected" to the tank.)
(autoshot)+Steady Shot ///////timing of steadyshot is based off as soon as I "know" an autoshot is fired.
(autoshot)+Steady Shot
(Autoshot)+Arcane shot+steady shot

repeats.... (with multishot added in to follow on autoshots if multiple mobs are grouped together or when mana sonsumption is not an issue)

Basiclly, all actions are timed around being cast imidiately after an autoshot fires. Multishot is used based on mana consumption, number of mobs, whether it would interupt rate of auto fire, etc. Other shots are also added into the mix depending on what type of mob is being fought, on some mobs I use serpant sting (if I know they are going to be around long enough for the dot to be worth the damage done), scorpid sting or silencing shot. Most rotations are based around "is your cooldown up", "am I going to interupt autoshot with that", "will using this cause me to run out of mana too soon?" Once these requirements are met, I fire whichever ability offers the greatest damage.

I used Kill Command a lot before the change to the macro system to where now it does not seem worth the global cooldown to add the ability into a shot rotation (since it is HIGHLY situational based off your crits) My biggest challenge with this ability is figuring out a spot to hotkey it to that is not already taken. Most of the time this ability goes unused, with my prefering to cast a "spell" that has potential to crit for >1000 rather than kill command's >1000.

I used Aimed during combat whenever the tank switches targets and a "pause" to allow some initial aggro to be built before I begin the delicate dance of maxing damage without pulling aggro (sooner than I will be forgiven for doing it :P)

Of course this is just my first attempts at 70 to try out shot methods, but so far it seems to do some very impressive damage. (at least based on old level60 standards :rofl: )