The problem with buffing steady shot is that it will effectively render arcane shot useless in PVE, its near useless as it is at the moment if you have proper armour stripping on a mob, in fact I rarely use it nowadays unless my mana is running low and I have to swap a rank 1 in for a steady in my rotation.

I don't understand how people can manage to weave two specials between Autos with Sunfury back-to-back (e.g. Auto->Steady->Arcane->Auto->Steady->Multi->Auto). Doesn't the GCD on the second Steady cut so close to (or, indeed, clobber) the third Auto that tacking on Multi (or Arcane) at the end pushes Auto back by a full second? Intuitively, this doesn't seem optimal.

I was under the impression that most people with sunfury weaved an extra special in after every other autoshot, so:
/Auto Steady Multi /Auto Steady/ Auto Steady Arcane /Auto Steady

I can do this with a little difficulty when latency is minimal with my 2.7 Don Santos' gun so i assume its not too bad with a 2.9 Sunfury

Ahh, yes. That sounds workable. My latency (150-200ms) is such, and I am under haste effects so often (<3 Dragonspine Trophy), that I usually don't bother with more than one special per Auto. Such are the perils of living in EST and playing on a PST server, I suppose.

How do you manage to do that? And what's your latency?

I've been trying for a week now to get even a single arcane to go off between steady and auto on my recently acquired Steelhawk (had been using Emberhawk previously). Have tried threading manually, spamming castsequence macros, and even out of frustration programming a G15 keyboard macro to spam faster than my fingers could just to see if it was possible. For some frustrating reason I cannot even delay my auto to get the arcane off. It always falls after the auto.

I guess my latency of 400-700 is going to stop me from ever threading instants for raid-quality dps. Or perhaps the problem is "jitter," as I've seen latency variation called by another poster here.

If you have trouble threading in two shots between autos, try BM for a bit. You only ever have to thread in one special between autos so its much easier to handle. The only downside is you will not get the full benefit of Serpent's Swiftness as someone with less latency because there is a high chance you might delay your autoshot still. But fret not, you will still gain more dps by taking those points over not taking them...with the right weapon.

The X-bow gives the best theory craft rotation that i've been able to calculate:
timings are shown between shots.

4 Auto
4 Steady
2 Arcane
1 Multi

auto
steady
1.500
arcane
1.283
auto
0.217
steady
1.500
multi
1.065
auto
0.435
steady
1.500
arcane
0.848
auto
0.652
steady
1.500
0.630
auto


Not much slack in the rotation though. The multishot especially is likely to push back the auto. I'm going for the bow then I'm going to test this rotation. It needs 5/5 imp arcane.

Does anyone know exact multi-shot mechanics? Is it 0.5s cast + 0.5s of auto suppressed? No haste effects? That's what I expect from the tooltip and other mechanics.

Hi all!

Norwest, I tried to figure out why your theorycrafted rotation would require any points in Imp Arcane Shot but failed... As far as I can see the two Arcane Shots are 4 GCDs apart = 6 secs. Please explain.

The rotation seems exceptional, although I'm still trying to figure out whether it's possible on a real environment given latency, human error, etc.

Cheers!

P.S. I'm playing with the "auto-steady-AS/MS-auto-steady-auto" (and the results are very good) but this rotation with AS/MS back to back seems like it would be a good step up in DPS (if feasible on a real environment).

P.P.S. The only very probable delay (due to timing errors) worth noting in your rotation seems to be the one on the 4th autoshot (the one which starts the last auto-steady-auto cycle) for approx. 0.3-0.6 s; that is with some slack on most of the shot timings throughout the entire rotation.

1.5 steadies are just not possible though with latency and human reaction time (even spamming a macro 10 times/second is a .1 sec delay. doctor boom testing of a steady/auto rotation (w/ an extremely fast bow) with a timer mod might give you an idea of how reliably fast you can spam shots.

has anyone crunched numbers for a BM hunter wearing large amounts of leather agi/ap gear and using a low mana shot rotation (steady/auto only)? it seems like this may become the baseline post-patch. if we can't beat that setup, then there is little reason to try to thread extremely technical cycles.

Myself being non-BM for raids and specializing in "technical cycles" I've also been getting this feeling as of late. Which is also relevant to the current topic in that, as you say, "if we can't beat that setup, then there is little reason to try to thread extremely technical cycles". And for BM and 1special-per-autocycle I really don't see either Sunfury or Gladiator's as the best options because of the amount of time spent in waiting for the next autoshot.

[Added 27.04.07]
Last night I got the chance to fiddle with the Gladiator's Xbow during a Gruul raid. I tried the rotation suggested by Norwest and it actually worked very well. Tried it both with a macro and without a macro. Workable both ways without any points in Imp Arcane Shot. And yet, I felt frustrated. The amount of effort required to manage that really tight rotation without a macro was way too much. Very doable, but way too detrimental to overall enjoyment. The DPS was there, the fun wasn't... For me there are two ways to resolve it: 1) macro, no regrets; 2) just switch to a talent spec and weaponspeed that would be more beneficial for a simple 1special-per-autocycle rotation.

I also feel that any haste effects such as Dragonspine Trophy or IAoTH would've been in fact detrimental to my DPS. RapidFire was OK at least in terms of timing since it brought me to 2s attackspeed so I just shot auto-special-auto.

Time to go camp Mr.Boom and figure those things out...

Has anyone run the numbers comparing Sunfury to Barrel-Blade? I just picked up the Barrel-Blade and wondering if Sunfury is worth the upgrade assuming it ever drops.