Hi all,

I've posted a couple times in the post and gotten some great feedback to help me guide my raid group so I'm going to come to you guys with another question: How hard is a tranq shot rotation for hunters?

The deal is that we consistently see Flamegor and Chromagus frenzied much more often then they should be. Sometimes its flawless but it seems like the majority of the time there is always some problem or other. I have been talking with our hunters and generally the feedback I get is:

A) Timing a rotation is hard to begin with
B) Our hunters never got much Giant Stalker gear and BWL so far hasnt resulted in tons of Wrath gear for them: thus they say they don't have the +hit to compensate and miss a lot
C) A missed tranq shot messes up the rotation and sometimes its not immediately caught
D) We generally have 4+ hunters with Tranq shot. Assume its 4, if one dies then I'm told I have to expect less tranq coverage
E) On Chromagus I hear all the time about having to stay out to eat a breath to get off the shot. Or they get Bronze afflication and can't duck the breath resulting in a death leading to more of D

I've gone with another raid group and just seen regular consistent kills where the tranq shot was simply not an issue. However, not being a hunter and having not even played one passed level 20 I can't really approach the hunters and say "this is where you are messing up" or "this is where you need to change" in order to fix it. I know the feedback they give me (from above) and I know they use SimpleTraqnShot but I know we have got to fix this problem. We have way too many silly deaths and wipes but I dont know what I can do because of my lack of knowledge about the realities of the task for them.

Is the lack of Dragonstalker gear a valid excuse for so many missed tranqs?
Is picking up after a missed tranq that hard?
Is there a better way to time tranqs on Chrom so they don't eat any breaths?
How many hunters are needed to 'safely' run a tranq shot rotation on Flamegor and Chromagus?

Thanks ahead of time for any feedback. I'm just hoping to get some outside input that isn't biased or coming from a potentially defensive point of view on the subject so that I can figure out how to solve our frenzy problems.

Make your hunters download stranq 2. Your problem will be solved. EDIT: stranq = Simple Tranq Shot (http://wow.curse-gaming.com/en/files...mpletranqshot/)

BTW, flamegor and chromaggus are both doable just fine with 3 tranqs. There isn't a boss in the game that isn't doable with just 3 tranqs. Your hunters are being lazy bums and you need to apply some discipline, because tranq rotations are reeeeeaaaaaaalllllly simple. This is speaking as the hunter class leader of a mid-naxx level guild.

Very good coverage of this topic here.

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8722

No. You'll have marginally more missed tranqs, but it's really, really not an issue.

No, assuming your hunters can communicate with each other.

Teach your hunters to strafe. From personal experience, it's entirely possible to run into LoS, Tranq, and get back out in under a second.

3 and 2, respectively, though you may want a third on TL Chrommie for safety. Give your Hunters Hourglass Sand for the Bronze affliction.

Also, make it mandatory that your hunters install and run Simple Tranq Shot:
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...TranqShot.html
It has timers, a visual rotation guide, status for the other hunters (stunned, dead, etc.), automatic messages when a tranq shot hits or fails to hit, etc. It's a great help.

Get new hunters. Or/and tell them to pick up Warmongers and other +hit gear if they miss that much.
http://thottbot.com/?i=7194

Edit: Also, awesome cape, easy to get:
http://thottbot.com/?i=52567

Solid advice on the warmonger. I used one myself for a long time before I finally got enough decent hit gear not to need it. Cheap and the most %hit you can get out of your melee weapon slots. If your hunters don't seem enthusiastic, remind them that if their miss chance is that high, 3% hit is effectively 2.5% or so more damage in addition to the tranq benefit.

Tranq rotations are incredibly easy, now that tranq shot only fires when there's something to dispel. It's your turn to tranq, you spam the button, and viola.

Having been a hunter class officer though, i can tell you that too many hunters get caught up in doing dps instead of spamming that tranq button when it's their turn, which means they end up tranqing a second or three late. I finally ended up setting up parallel rotation groups, which greatly increased the odds of someone actually tranqing imediately.

I dearly hope the tranq gimmick is not going to be a feature in TBC raids.

It can be an issue with +hit if you're running only 2 hunters on Chromaggus. But then again if your healers are alert, a missed tranq or a missing tranq shouldnt kill your tank on Chrom.

On flamegor you can basically do it with 2 hunters, although it gets kinda pressed. I believe his frenzy cd is 8 seconds and may come at any time after that. So with 20 second cooldown on tranq shot and 16 seconds for each 2 frenzies (worst case scenario) you will see some uncovered frenzies. But with FOUR hunters - regardless of their +hit - you shouldn't have ANY trouble with flamegor, and very little, if any, with Chromaggus.

As said earlier, make them get the Simple Tranq mod. It works wonders. Just make sure they all have it. And +hit isn't hard to get, if they're lacking +hit they're slacking. Back when hunters were fucked and BWL was the all-new-cool place to be I was doing top-5 damagemeter damage on flamegor and keeping my tranqshots at time. With the new fix to spells (if there's no buff on the target, you cant cast a dispelling spell) the next hunter in line can just spam his tranq shot button when the last guy took care of the last frenzy, and he will fire immediately as Flamegor or whichever boss you're fighting is frenzied.

Seriously your hunter classleaders and hunters in general are not well enough into their class if they cant get something as simple as a tranqshot rotation going and working - in bwl of all places. O_o

Tranq. Is. Easy.

When it's your turn, you spam the button. Voila, insta-reaction tranq.
Pay attention if you're next for the miss message.

Stranq makes this completely trivial.

That's really all there is to it. There is ZERO excuse for slow reaction times, unless it's connection related. 3 is a comfortable number for any BWL boss, 4 is very safe assuming they're not AFK-raiding. (i.e. Autoshotting and mashing arcane/multi while watching TV.)

We started by having a 3 groups rotation (as we had way too many hunters at the time). Two groups of two and one single hunter firing if things seemed awry. Groups would rotate (grp1-grp2-grp1-grp2) making sure each time that at least two people fired so miss wouldnt be an issue (a bit like multi-taunting on Ebonroc..).

But this was too complex, requiring a good number of hunters and Frenzy vs tranqshot CD sync wasnt always top-notch. Nowadays, we use simpletranqshot with as an added backup our lead hunter screaming over in our ears with her very high-pitched voice. Everybody but the hunters and the Lead just muted her on TS (yeah, no vent..). In the end, it kinda worked.

Tranqshot rotation should not be something very difficult to setup. And anyways, once the first few tranqshots are through and the cooldown rotation makes the firing ordre obvious, it's more "you may fire when ready".

I remember two scenarios when we had a hard time tranqing. The first was a Gluth kill with three hunters, where one of us ran with the kiter paladin to give him pack. He only tranqed in "oh-shit" situations. It was very close sometimes, but if we all would have had capped hit it wouldn't be much of a problem. I also remember one flamegore kill when we were tired and just said "FFA tranq" in the hunter channel. I believe that your hunters might be going with this strategy if they have trouble keeping a boss tranqed with as much as four hunters. FFA tranq is not something I recommend. The first few rounds worked okay, then one missed and we waited for someone else to fire for 2-3 seconds, then we all fired at the same time and after that the rotation was completely broken for the rest of the encounter.