Rokh, I am curious if you have tested out your S3 weapon yet.

I have run a few tests with my S2 X-bow, and although it used to outperform my Prince bow as MM fails to do so as BM. Personally, I have been 2v2'ing with a frost mage, and I have found the DPS of the Prince bows to be superior to the stats of the S2 x-bow.

This is a PvE thread though, it is not my intention of hijacking it by any means. Just curious to know how your S3 weapon is performing.

This is my first post here, so bear with me.
I was curious whether the item [Talon of Al'ar] is really as worthless as people say or is it viable for raiding. If this was discussed in another thread I would greatly appreciate it if I was redirected to it.
Thanks in advance.

I can't really give you any math now, but the Spreadsheets say it's quite bad. I have it, and I must agree, it seems I'm better off with my Dragonspine + Hourglass of the Unraveller combo, but that's a personal opinion. The thing is it utterly sucks for a BM spec, since you're not going to use arcane shot in rotations. Even for the MM or SV specs, you're probably going to like a flat critical or AP bonus more than something that depends on a shot you may not use every time it's up. I'll look for a discussion on it and see if i can link you to it, though.

EDIT: you might want to use [ item] and [ /item] to mark out item links Excluding the space after the first bracket of course.

EDIT 2: found you a link: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t15179-h...26/#post491298

Hi Everybody, first post there but i've been reading for quite a time though and really appreciate the material that can be found here and the overall quality of the posts (gratz to the admins for that). On to my question:

I've been thinking about respec'ing from MM to Survival for some times now, i've stocked up on Living ruby, looked for +agi gear, and made some calcultations using Cheeky's spreadsheet ( great tool !! ). The problem is that in all the gear scenarios i've imagined, the raw MM dps was always like 80 higher than SV dps (980-1060). As i've more and more trouble to keep up with our rogues dps and maintaining in the raid's top 3, i wondered what you guys would think of it, and especially if the mana granted by Thrill of the Hunt and the additionnal raid dps coming from Expose Weakness would make up for the loss of raw dps.

Thank you for the answers




ps : and no, i won't go BM, ever

At a Karazhan level, Survival is somehow expected to uderperform; since you'll likely not have enough Blessings and totems to go around, and the item budgeting is pretty mixed, so there's not really too much agility to stack.

About after you start getting gear off Gruul - Magtheridon and early tier 5, survival becomes better. Again, this is not just the gear, but 25 man raids allow for more shamans, paladins and generally purpose oriented groups. Plus, your contribution to the raid will be larger because more physical dps classes are available. All in all, it's expected for SV to have a little theoretical disatvantage in terms of dps, because you're sacrificing a lot of AP (master marksman, trueshot and careful aim) and 5% damage from RWS. But, thrill of the hunt helps make up for that in a way, because you can still shoot a few more shots than a marksman before you run dry, and the spreadsheet doesn't reflect that.

I think you've pretty much said it all ...

MM will produce a personal DPS slightly superior to SV.
EW will increase your rogues' DPS as much as it does yours.
You won't be able to keep up with rogues and stay number 3, and you will not go BM.

The additional "Raid DPS" cannot really be counted in your own DPS.
When I was considering going SV, I checked how much AP EW would provide, multiplied this by the number of physical damage dealers in the raid, and divided the total by 11 or 12 (11 AP for 1 DPS in a raid buff environment doesn't seem excessive to me, even though 10 or 12 might be more accurate, I took 11 from the Enh. Shaman thread, I think). I compared this to my raw persaonal DPS difference between the two specs, and chose accordingly.

But one thing is sure : if you spec into SV for more raid utility, at the sacrifice of personal DPS, don't do it to try and keep up with your rogues : you lower your own DPS to increase theirs.
The "necessity" to keep up with rogues or to be in the damage meter's top 3 is another topic, I guess.

Well, at 600 flat raid buffed agility, Expose weakness effect is equal to trueshot aura. Of course, expose weakness is raid wide, trueshot is party wide, so we can almost say it's better, depending on group setup. So, basically, at any point past 600 agility, Expose Weaknes starts beating Trueshot. Of course, getting 600 UNBUFFED agility by stacking green items of the monkey will mean your other stats are abysmal. Getting 600+ (heck, even 1k+ if you like) agility by tier4/5/6 level epics makes your expose weakness better, but the added stats (AP, crit, armor penetration, etc) also make your attacks a lot more damaging.

Overall, there's no official number to when Survival starts to rock, but I have to agree, it's pretty stat reliant. As a personal experience, I do a lot better with 720 unbuffed agility and 2000 AP than with 800 agility and 1800 AP. (i have a pair of old [Felsteel Longblade]s that i sometime use for mana oils instead of [Axe of the Gronn Lords])

Thank you all for your enlightening answers.
This is pretty much what i was thinking about : finishing my +agi gear before making the jump (600 raw agi seems a good goal).
Thanks a lot for your advices

Yeah Enova, I figured my number was wrong. It's been a while since I looked up data on EW builds. Considering 600 is the break-even point for EW vs. TSA, that's probably the number worth shooting for.

The theory crafting on Talon of Al'ar can be found Here. Some BM hunters actually use arcane shot and multi shot in their 1:1 shot ratio because its more damage even if its less dpm. The problem with the talon is it only affects your special shots and does not affect your auto shots. Currently there are much better trinket choices readily available.

I was wondering how MM raiding is in terms of mana, damage and stuff. Atm we're on Illidan and my GM wants me Survival for MDs and buff, but maybe when I get +tier 6 (mana regen) and illidan's bow I might consider MM, how are MM raiders doing atm?

Because you need 143 hit rating to never miss. You are just very, very, very, very unlucky.

No more updates here ? I hoped the first page would become a small compendium.

The problem with MM atm is: It only outperforms BM in pet-hostile encounters (like Archimonde). The buff is the worst of all 3 speccs (at least, it´s the most unflexible). It´s the most mana-inefficient specc atm (MM has to use all special shots, BM can perform at a very high DPS with a Auto-Steady-rot, SV has the better mana-household through talents).

So overall: You might be able to out-dps BM on some encounters. But generally you´ll be behind, except you get grouped with a SP an the BM not (which is highly unreasonable, since you as MM don´t have to offer a buff to a caster, but the BM-hunter has). Also, you´ll never be able to beat the utility of a SV.

I consider that a fair trade, since MM is the best arena-specc atm.

While the general statement is true, an Arena-typical Marksman spec comprises talent choices different than those of a PvE-Marksman spec. I would not want to raid in my Arena spec, nor compete in Arenas in my raid spec, even if I happened to choose the majority of both specs' talents from the Marksmanship tree.

That´s true, I should have added that as a side-note. You´ll not take impStings, impConcussiv, ConcussiveBarrage for a PvE-specc and you´re not going to take impAotH or FocusedFire for a PvP-specc since you´ll want to have 16 points in SV. I just meant the general tree, which is the most viable for PvP at the moment.

I really can´t see the conclusion so wholly as you draw it Mugsley. In my opinion it´s just what most hunters here also do claim: That MM can out-dps BM in pet-hostile encounters (especially MH & BT). I can´t see Cheeky´s text telling, that MM is better from T6 on, it just scales better from a certain point on (which seems quite convincing, since the Pet is the part of the dmg that scales the worst). Though, I haven´t had the time to look at the numbers very closely.

Also, the analysis doesn´t take mana-issues into account (which seems considerable, since you have to draw a line somewhere, if you want to do some sort of benchmark) which are definitely a way bigger issue for MM than for BM.

The third thing that jumps in my eye is, that cheeky used a 0/4x/y build for MM, which doesn´t provide maximum-dps (7 or even 20 in BM should result in more dps for MM).

Mugsley, I am not seeing the same conclusion either. Cheeky did two analysis's, the first ignoring haste altogether and the second incorporating haste.

The first analysis found MM to scale better largely due to BM's inability to upgrade from the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle, which he stated. The second analysis incorporating haste gear found BM to once again scale better as the spec would have access to the higher DPS weapons.

[EDIT] Left out a pretty important not.

My apologies. I equate better to scaling better (still not 100% on the difference). At any rate, at least that gives some information you can play with. Again, sorry for the confusion. I qualified that Cheeky used certain specs that may or may not be ideal.

TBH I don't even see why MM would scale better from a certain point. BM will always always always give 20% more dps for you and your pet where as 10% more AP is never ever 20% more damage. Tbh I think BM scales even better with better gear. Granted I never checked cheeky to see if the scale on MM is better with full t6 but I just don't see why it should be. When you take the limit of AP >>> infinity, then TSA and Careful Aim bonuses disappear since they are constants, the only thing remaining is 10% more AP and more damage from Multishot. That's vs SS. I just don't see how.

This seems basically convincing but you forget some details. MM also grants you 5 % more damage (also scales until infinity), 45 % of Int as AP (not much, but also scales through) as well as 12 % more dmg and Crit on Multishot. All these add a bonus to the MM-scaling.

Furthermore you have to consider the proportion of Hunter vs. Pet in your dps. Just a random number to illustrate that: Say, a MM-hunter does 90 % of his dps himself the BM does only 70 %. The result is, of course, that 90 % of the MM´s dmg scales nearly 1:1 with his gear bonusses whereas only 70 % of the BM´s damage does, since the pet simply scales far worse than the hunter himself.

All these combined lead to the assumption that there must be a break-even-point, where MM scales better onwards than BM. The only question is, whether this break-even-point is in reach with gear available at the time being - and Cheeky already showed that it is possible to gear to that point.

As a side note: Why does (following the above thoughts) MM not scale better at all but needs high-end gear to do so? I think this might be due to the abilities that enhance MMs scaling. The only really scaling-ability of BM is SS which basically scales with every stat. MM-skills are more specific in terms of scaling. Multishot - of course - only scales with the use of the ability. 10 % more AP scales better with increasing AP than with Crit, only RWS does fully scale. That might the be the reason for the disparity in scale concerning T4/T5/T6-gear.

You are forgetting that a BM hunter makes much better use of raid buffs. That is a huge advantage and needs to be considered if you are going to try and do this comparison.