I hear ya.

The joys of hitting aimed shot just before your auto shot went off was priceless. Atleast those days are now gone. I'll have to test arcane shot later though since my mates are too lazy to help me out.

I really hate how this little bit of misinformation has become accepted as fact. Hunter DPS pre-2.0 was absolutely fine, and hunter damage now is still fine. The damage dealt by arcane shot was out of line - now it's more reasonable. Steady Shot is fantastic for sustained DPS without giving us too much PVP burst to unbalance things, and multishot - despite the talent nerfs - remains very powerful.

Hunter DPS before 2.0 was definitely not "absolutely fine". It was good, but I wouldn't call it great.

Sorry, but I don't consider having to get 8/9 CS in the the last 40 man instance made hunter dps 'absolutely fine'. Blizzard have constantly struggled with balancing hunters and while its great they finally got us right, there was a very long time the combination of itemization, pet unfriendly encounters and other factors that did not make playing a hunter fun. Im sure my view is more skewed than most (thanks in part to having a horrible DS drop rate) but the idea of having a dps class so reliant on a single crossbow as their source of power was just cruel.

Now we can look forward to more responsive changes (goodbye 'class reviews') and hopefully environments that encourage far greater use of all our abilities rather than a 2 shot rotation.

You can jump and scream and post your damage meters all you want Elendril, but I speak from personal experience not "misinformation interpreted as fact." I fully admit I didn't have many of the tools you had at your disposal. Particularly the trinket slots. Other things, like blessings of wisdom and kings combined with almost never receiving any group related buffs due to windfury or "caster" shaman groups (who scaled better than we did) definately resulted in our hunters doing poor on average compared to mages and rogues who weren't half asleep.

The jury's still out on our performance at 70. I'm optimistic it will be a far cry from my experiences before.

So far I've only got to level 66 before 2.0.6. Up to this point I was critting for about 1.8k with arcane shot. Last night the best I was getting 1.4k and thats still at level 66. And it was still critting for 1.3k on average on plate. I do feel it needed to be brought into line as a hunter's burst damage was getting ridiculous but I don't think it's a massive hit in the grand scale of things. Likewise Multishot was still doing very good damage with only a slightly noticeable reduction in crits and crit damage. Overall I'm not concerned about things. Blizzard have been looking at all aspects before serious end game raiding starts and tweaking classes accordingly. Some classes may be secretly sniggering that they remain unaffected for now (hi, paladin tanking!!) but I'm sure Blizzard will be nerfing those too, to balance things out in the not too distant future.

If I recall correctly, Crusader strike is a physical attack that deals holy damage which is mitgated by armor, it is also boosted by spell damage and debuffs on the target such as judgement of the crusader. If CS functions anything like Seal of Command, then it suffers glancing blows which show in the combat log as resists/partial resists, it sounds as if arcane shot has a similar system of resists based on relative skill/defence.

So there is something of a presedence for the way arcane shot functions.

Presently my normal Steady Shots do about 550-650 damage on level 66 mobs which I'm currently questing on. Crits are in the range from about 1100 - 1200. And this is not including the Rapid Killing Buff.

Talking about paladin abilities? Crusader Strike deals physical damage. It also does not glance, from what I've seen.


SoC procs/JoC do seem pretty similar to AS mechanics though.


A Seal of Command proc is a "physical" attack that deals magic damage. Judgement of Command also seems to be treated as a physical attack that deals magic damage as well. The damage from both can be partially resisted (25/50/75%) due to level based difference. That seems to be different from the damage reduction a glancing blow would suffer.

Well, for the record, and this is pretty offtopic, but isn't GH w/ talents absolutely more hp/sec than flash heal, in addition to scaling considerably better with +healing?

Crusader Strike is set up to work the same way Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst/Sinister Strike etc work - they are yellow damage, on the two roll system (I believe it was determined here to be a two roll system for yellow attacks) and cannot glance.

Also, slightly off topic, I believe that mathematically, the level based resistances are supposed to be equivalent damage reduction to glancing blows now, aren't they?

All this discussion about whether or not Arcane Shot should or should not be affected by armor, etc, is pointless.
The tooltip is incorrect (updated the change in base damage, but not the scaling part), the damage you deal ingame is not affected by armor.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that hunter damage horde side was terrible, since BoW and JoW certainly helped alleviate very real mana starvation. The most vocal critics of my claims that hunter damage was okay were horde, and so far everyone posting in this thread denouncing me has been horde, so that theory seems the most likely. Alliance side, though, hunter damage was competitive with every other class on every fight that wasn't horribly biased toward other classes mechanics or against our own. We might as well be talking about different classes, given the different tools at our disposal, so the personal experience we both speak from is very different. :-P

I actually don't even have any raid mods installed yet, so I can't speak for hunter raid damage at 70. I feel like I'm doing a lot of damage, but that might just be because all of my numbers are higher than they used to be :) It feels like the best buffs for us now are anything that provides haste rating, simply because of steady shot - my "nuke" right now is KOTS/Badge of the Swarmguard/Rapid Fire, and I'm looking forward to picking up an Abacus of Violent Odds.

I think its very different in total.

Level based resists (at 60) are 8 resist to all per level difference. That is 2% damage reduction per level on average.
At 70, it is untested whether it remains 8 resist to all per level, or remains 2% damage reduction per level.

Assuming its the worst, 2% per level, caster total dps loss per level is:

same level, 5% loss to miss rate, 0% loss to level based resists. Total, 5%, 4% mitigatable by %hit gear.
+1 level, 6% loss to miss, 2% loss to resists, Total is 1-(0.98 *0.94) = 7.88%, 5% can be recovered with % to hit
+2 levels, 7% loss to miss, 4% loss to resists, Total is 10.7% lost; 6% can be recovered with % to hit
+3 levels, 17% lost to miss, 6% to resists, Total lost is 21.98%; 16% can be recovered with % to hit
+4 levels, 28% lost to miss, 8% to resists, Total lost is 33.76%; 27% can be recovered with % to hit
+5 levels, 39% lost to miss, 10% to resists, Total lost is 45.1%; 38% can be recovered with % to hit

http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Spell_hit_chance

Melee is more complicated. There is both miss rate and glancing blows. In addition, % to hit in an off-hand weapon has a higher cap. Furthermore, yellow attacks can't glance (there are no spells that can't be resisted or miss).

Calculating the total damage lost as levels increase for a melee class is much more difficult. But lets take a pretty bad case, a Warrior with a 2H weapon with white damage. In this case, against a +3 target 40% of hits are glances for 25% lost damage, a total of 10% lost damage. If the base %miss rate is less than about 14%, melee gets less damage "lost" than casters for level 63's in white damage alone.

But it is far more complicated than that since there is a "crit cap" and the effects of %hit gear are larger for melee than for casters.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Weapon_Skill

As for ranged? No glancing, just miss rate. And the miss rate for a +5 mob is no where NEAR 39% like it is for casters. I forget the number, but I believe its in the teens of % lost to miss.

If there were a raid boss that was a +5, casters would be almost useless, with stacked %hit gear (15% of it) they would be ~2/3 dps effective compared to equal level.
Melee would have a huge chunk of white dps gone, but would still do reasonable 'yellow' dps.
Hunters would be only slightly worse off ( a few %) than with a +3 target, and could still reasonably reach the %hit cap if they really wanted to.


No, the caster level based resists and melee glancing blows are not the same magnitude as levels rise, they are just both things that you can't remove with gear (+skill on melee, or -resist on casters don't work).
The %hit per level tables for melee and casters are very different as well. They might both be ~5% at equal level mobs, but by +3 and +4 mobs the difference grows pretty large. Furthermore, casters have no attacks that go around their miss/resist mechanics such as yellow attacks.

It would make a lot of sense to me for mechanics changes that in general make all classes lose the same ammount of damage as target levels get higher. This would allow for +4 or +5 boss level raid encounters that are dangerous, but don't imbalance the classes. As it stands, you'd want all your dps to be hunters and maybe some rogues in such a +5 situation (though stacked +%hit warlocks and shadow priests would be weak but not impotent since they can get an extra +10% to hit in a talent -- that would be gone at a +6 target though).

Keep in mind that while auto shot, steady shot, and multi-shot won't glance, I've noticed that arcane shot versus even mobs that are 3-4 levels above resist so much that I just don't bother with it. The skill vs. defense calculation is far more unforgiving than +hit.

Considering this though, I don't think its that huge of a deal. When raiding we won't be fighting things more than 3 levels above us. When soloing our pets will miss, glance, and resist growl like crazy so don't expect to see hunters running around in Netherstorm having the time of their lives at level 62 :p (Unless they want to kite for a very long time I suppose).

It was interesting to watch the damagemeters before TBC, as we were killing the lvl 70 mobs outside Kharazan. Even with us mages bringing as much +hit as we could, we were well behind melee classes (and hunters) in DPS. But this is hardly anything new. It seems quite obvious that they've balanced top DPS after 3 levels. If they were to make bosses +5, it would require a serious rework of the resist system, as it would quite literally make casters useless.