Hi everyone, this is my first post here (a repost from the official forums, incidentally), and hoping for some good feedback because, from what I've seen, there are a lot of people here who know way more than I do about huntering.
I'll answer in advance some of the questions I got on the blizz forums, so some of this might be repetitive. I started each trial sub-10% hp to cheese berserking. I had a shaman in my party because A) i found plenty of shamans willing to help and B) it didn't occur to me I could use a shadow priest until after I was done. ALso, I realize there is a stat difference between surestrike and DS, however, because the meta that won out in terms of dps was in the helm with the shittier stats, I think the disparity adds to the validity of my conclusions.
Thanks in advance for your time. I'm especially interested in hearing how I could improve these tests and what things that did not occur to me may have skewed the results in favor of one thing or another. here goes:
Before we start, I realize the meta any given player should use varies widely based on spec and gear. But I also know BM is flavor of the month and that happens to be my spec, so here's my armory where u can see talents and gear (right now i think armory updated when i was naked during a wipe...but I do have gear I swear :P)
my armory:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/?#...oroth&n=Jurgen
The setup:
I got my DS helm today, and had a skyfire gem lying around, so i said hey, why don't i get a thundering skyfire diamond made and see how it goes. I did just that, and took my new helm to netherstorm where I shot Dr. Boom for 20 mins or so. In reality, my experiments were 5 minutes long each. I thought 5 minutes was a good period for a variety of reasons, but it's late so I won't get into them.
I had a resto shaman in my party for mana tide/spring. It was a diff shaman in each of these trials, and the second trial was actually done with an ele shaman (i compensated for lack of tide by popping two mana pots)
I know armory is being gay, but so you know, the helm I've been using up till now (and for hit/crit reasons I'm not sure I will stop using just yet) was surestrike goggles v2.0, with a relentless earthstorm diamond meta, and a solid star of elune to meet the socketbonus
I put the thundering in my demon stalker helm like I said, and a glinting noble topaz in the yellow slot
Trial #1 (Relentless):
http://img180.imageshack.us/my.php?i...7010503su1.jpg
Trial #2 (Thundering)
http://img507.imageshack.us/my.php?i...7013638wo6.jpg
Trial #3 (Thundering)
http://img162.imageshack.us/my.php?i...7022052im1.jpg
Note: during all trials I started the fight at sub-10% hp so that I could cheese berserking. During trial #1 and #3 I had the resto shamans drop mana tide when i reached 50% mana, and during those same trials I popped just 1 mana pot.
Conclusion: Thundering skyfire, as reluctant as I am to admit it because I'm alrdy below the hitcap and DS helm has 0 hit rating on it, is the obvious winner. The second trial, where I was with an ele shaman, featured a very bad mana spring that returned 40% less mana than the resto shamans' totems and, on top of that, he didn't have mana tide. using 2 unstable mana pots that trial probably didn't offset what I lost by not having a mana tide shaman. What you see in trial #3 bears this out.
Trial #3, the trial where I did the most dmg, was the one most similar to trial #1 in terms of mana. In both of these trials I ran oom at almost exactly 4 minutes into the trial and switched to viper. I used a super mana in trial #3 ( i ran out of unstables), but it returned as much mana as an unstable typically would so it didn't matter I don't think.
I wish I could have convinced the same shaman to stick around for 15 mins =( oh well. I can't remember what the term is called from my social psychology class, but there are several other things I can think of off the top of my head that could influence the data. The most obvious is lack of trials. next in line is lack of trials. After that, I could improve the credibility of my findings by doing more trials. Also, if I ran more trials likely everything posted here would be considered more accurate than it currently is. Furthermore, I didn't do enough trials, and so I hope to do more in the future. More trials also would be ideal. I firmly believe more trials are necessary before what I have shown can be considered hard evidence. Lastly, more trials would reduce the error in my findings.
P.S. .63 attack speed with everything going at once, for whoever is curious. Glad's heavy xbow is 3.1 speed base
EDIT: armory should be updated now
EDIT2: I've done a few more trials just now, had the same shaman stay through it all, here's what i got
(relentless, surestrike)Trial 1b:
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p...907_121411.jpg
I had a steady (lolpun) rotation this time, and my mana pot returned 2600, but I borked my cooldowns. Usually i pop them all at once before the first minute whenever I get quick shots and dspine haste up at the same time, but I got unlucky on procs, and it resulted in low damage
(relentless, surestrike)Trial 2b:
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p...907_122144.jpg
I was on top of my cooldowns this time but still a little sloppy (no double haste procs when i expected them ><) I forget how much my mana pot gave me.
(thundering, demon stalker)Trial #b:
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p...907_123357.jpg
Practice makes perfect, as they say, and as far as popping cooldowns at the right time everything went really well. I had no mana issues this time, for whatever reason (mana pot returned 2500 mana)This contributed slightly to the increased damage you see in this screen, but honestly, at the end I was borking my cooldowns intentionally to gimp my own damage so that this trial was more like the first 2. Getting 10 extra seconds of my brooch active than I had in the first two trials doesn't account for 10k increased damage.
Winner: Thundering, again.
06/10/07, 3:02 AM
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