Hunter Simple Questions / Simple Answers: Cataclysm Edition - Page 19

Kaitain · 09/02/11, 8:38 AM

I have been trying out various Heroic fights in Firelands as BM this past week after seeing Kripparian's Ragnaros Heroic BM Video.

I found that even on static fights like Baleroc, the Focus Fire buff would drop of for up to 3 seconds before my pet reached 5xFrenzy again. This raised a few questions in my mind:

- Is this normal? It was a 10 man group but we had all raid buffs covered.

- In the the comments of the video linked above Kripparian states that he "just macros FF into all of his shots". When i try this I fairly often get stuck with 12% haste for 15 secs instead of 15%. So, is it better to have 12% haste with no gap than it is to have 15% for 15 seconds out of every 18 seconds?

Axillary · 09/04/11, 10:03 AM

I was a progression hunter in LK and after taking some time off am coming back for 4.3 and beyond but I have missed a lot of the hunter changes. Although brilliant, Whitefyst’s 37,000 word post (about as long as my thesis) is a bit hard to digest. I hope to clarify here that I understand it correctly.

The basic rules seam to be:
1. never cap focus
2. use SS as focus regen, always in pairs and always in enough time to maintain ISS
3. use CS whenever off CD provided it does not break rule 2
4. use AS as focus dump during periods of normal haste when target is at or below 90%.
5. Use instant cast AI procs whenever possible, provided it does not break rule 2, although KS and CS still take priority.
6. During periods of increased haste or when the target is above 90% HP hard cast AI to replace AS.
7. As always, use RF, rediness when appropriate, maintain a mark of some sort on the target and reapply SrS if it drops off.
Please let me know if/where I have gone wrong.

KaneParker7 · 09/04/11, 11:17 AM

Firstly, Welcome back to the game =P

I'm guessing you will have 0 pieces of tier 11/12 gear when you do come back, so this immediately means that you will be aiming for 1235 haste rating with 3/3 Pathing Talents.

You will need to run with Rapid/Steady/Arcane glyphs on your character to optimise this haste level.

Your rule points are correct bar number "4. use AS as focus dump during periods of normal haste when target is above 90%".

I'm willing to bet that you meant to say "use Arcane Shot once at 90% or less" and not what you wrote =P

As to whether you use Arcane Shot or Aimed Shot from then on is personal choice. The later means you take more haste than mastery where you can.

Personally, I achieved 31.3k in non heroic gear with the Arcane Shot rotation, so I will be sticking with it. It's amazing for movement heavy fights and the increase in Mastery(Instead of Haste) means you can do some nice AoE numbers with Multi Shot.

Final pieces of advise are:

1. Use Rapid Fire's at the start of fights (Over 90%) and during Termination Phase for maximum effectiveness

2. We are no longer a "Rotation" based class, if you think that, your in trouble! Focus on keeping up Improved Steady Shot and Firing Chimera off cool down.

3. If you know you have to move soon, begin stacking focus ready for the move.

4. Make sure your bringing the correct pet for the job. They have changed a lot since Wrath!

Happy Hunting

Whitefyst · 09/05/11, 2:45 PM

Originally Posted by Axillary

The basic rules seam to be:
1. never cap focus

Although it is never ideal to cap focus, sometimes it just cannot be avoided, especially with the T12 4-set when doing a AS focus dump CS cycle.

BTW.. a good recap of the MM guide may be found at the WoWHuntersHall.

kheranax · 09/06/11, 6:27 AM

Originally Posted by trugat

Beside of that, is there a tool that can help me analyze my shot rota? I am about 3k DPS behind another hunter at the same gear level and maybe I miss something.

Cheers!

In my experience you can actually do a pretty good analysis of this using plain old DBM (Edit: Recount! I meant Recount ofc), using it you can watch the number of shot types and start to see areas in which you are falling behind the other player. You can also see if there's any wild variation in the damage caused by another players shots in comparison to your which might indicate where certain glyph choices are favourable.

In the absence of a better solution at least, this will get you started.

Edit: Fixing stupidity.

LilM8 · 09/16/11, 9:15 PM

Hey everybody,

In my understanding the MM guide, femaledwarf.com and SimC say that instant shots cannot be queued and so latency always affects them, which means that if I have 100ms latency, my instants will need 1.1s "cast time" (GCD+lag) instead of 1s.

My question is: is this still the case?

I tried to test this myself: (Logs)

Test 1:
-0ms latency tolerance (so my spell queue is disabled)
-5 minutes of spamming my Hunter's Mark-button.

When looking through the log for SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS,0x0780000000F7829B,"Lilias",0x511,0x0,0xF13079A8000025FF,"Training sattrappe",0x10a28,0x0,1130,"Mal des Jägers",0x40 I found:
entries: 261
time between them: 302.375s
This means 1.159s per cast, which correlates nicely with my latency of about 150ms.

Test 2:
-400ms latency tolerance (the spell queue should be working now)

Looking through the log, I found:
entries: 298
time between them: 300.215s
This means 1.007s per cast.

Since my latency is not only 7ms, I would assume that the spell queue does also work with instant shots now.
I repeated each 5-minute-test three times, and the results were quite similar. However, there are some things I'm not sure about. For example, the logs are too big to manually calculate the time between each cast, so I could see if there have been some big lags in between.

What do you think?

R00k!3 · 09/27/11, 8:55 PM

When does the next Auto Shot after a hard casted Aimed Shot start? I noticed there seem to be irregularities at least when I observe my timers the Auto Attack often starts to cast 1 - 2 casts after Aimed Shot finished.

Shadowwaltz · 09/28/11, 2:57 AM

If your auto shot timer is 2s, your autos start up again 2s after the aimed. Otherwise people could just weave their aimed shots in between autos.

This only happens if you finish the cast. If you stop your aimed shot cast halfway thru, your auto shots go back to normal.

Hirgux · 09/30/11, 9:13 AM

@LilM8
I've run several test myself for testing this, because a guildmember said spellqueue would also effect instants for his warrior. So I did this test with lag tolerance set to 400ms; with a few torrents I got my world latency to ~250ms.

These are my results:

[14:53:27.296] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy

[14:53:28.314] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 18ms

[14:53:29.469] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 155ms

[14:53:30.694] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 225ms

[14:53:31.592] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 102ms

[14:53:32.427] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 165ms

---------------------------

[14:53:40.085] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy

[14:53:41.544] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 459ms

[14:53:42.906] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 362ms

[14:53:43.579] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 327ms

[14:53:44.841] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 262ms

---------------------------

[14:53:57.201] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy

[14:53:58.466] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 265ms

[14:53:59.194] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 272ms

[14:54:00.276] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 82ms

[14:54:01.192] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 84ms

[14:54:02.253] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 61ms

[14:54:03.522] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 269ms

---------------------------

The following two were without equipment (perhaps t12p4 meeses something up; but didn't)

[15:20:56.484] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy

[15:20:57.355] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 129ms

[15:20:58.507] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 152ms

[15:20:59.460] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 47ms

[15:21:00.265] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 195ms

---------------------------

[15:21:11.878] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy

[15:21:12.884] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 6ms

[15:21:13.728] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 156ms

[15:21:14.929] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy + 201ms

[15:21:15.764] casts Arcane Shot on Training Dummy - 165ms

As you can see the time between two AS - which should be ideally 1sec - varies in both directions; somtimes cast time in the log is >1sec and sometimes <1sec.

Anyone got any good interpretation of why this happens and if spellqueue really does/not affect instant casts?
Please feel free to do some further testing.

greetings

Shadowwaltz · 09/30/11, 3:12 PM

That's a bad way to test it because you're assuming that the combat log is 100% exact (it's obviously not). Instead, set a 10s timer and cast 10 arcane shots in a row, starting the timer at the same time you press arcane shot. Your 10th arcane shot should be cast @ 9s and the GCD from that last arcane shot will end at 10s.

You're gonna have to spec BM to do that many arcane shots tho.

Whitefyst · 09/30/11, 4:04 PM

Originally Posted by Shadowwaltz

That's a bad way to test it because you're assuming that the combat log is 100% exact (it's obviously not). Instead, set a 10s timer and cast 10 arcane shots in a row, starting the timer at the same time you press arcane shot. Your 10th arcane shot should be cast @ 9s and the GCD from that last arcane shot will end at 10s.

You're gonna have to spec BM to do that many arcane shots tho.

Not necessarily true. You can do it as MM under the right conditions (requires some help for testing though).

During a glyphed RF with ISS up and the raid haste buff, you can perform 10 consecutive AS if you start with a full focus bar and have a 33.33% haste from gear and Pathing and other sources. With 3/3 Pathing the requirement is 29.45% haste or 3772 haste rating. This can be achieved in a several ways, including:
- Have bloodlust at the same time as RF
- Wait until both haste trinkets proc before starting RF and the ASs. With just the 378 haste trinkets, you only need 616 haste rating on gear.

EDIT: I just want to point out that the fact that you cannot have ISS up throughout this whole scenario does not matter since the ability to fire the ASs is not affected by it since that haste does not affect AS cast time and does not affect base focus regen at all. Thus, you really do not need to have ISS up.

thumper242 · 10/11/11, 3:35 PM

Where did the BM thread go?

• VRoscioli · 10/11/11, 3:43 PM

Originally Posted by thumper242

Where did the BM thread go?

It's still there. It just hasn't had a post in over a month, so it won't display under the default options. At the bottom of the page (when looking at the list of threads), change the "From The" field to something longer than "Last Month".

redjohnsc · 10/21/11, 7:51 AM

Hi in the past I used addons such as heatsink or needtoknow to track internal Cd's of trinkets thus allowing me to stack my trinket procs with cds for maximum uptime. I have noticed that in cata it seems that the trinket proc rates are much lower it seems or perhaps im just using the wrong trinkets? Many times my Icd of a trinket will be expired and I will go threw a full RF without the proc is this still an efficent method to gain x-tra dmg?

Kaitain · 10/24/11, 10:30 AM

Originally Posted by redjohnsc

Hi in the past I used addons such as heatsink or needtoknow to track internal Cd's of trinkets thus allowing me to stack my trinket procs with cds for maximum uptime. I have noticed that in cata it seems that the trinket proc rates are much lower it seems or perhaps im just using the wrong trinkets? Many times my Icd of a trinket will be expired and I will go threw a full RF without the proc is this still an efficent method to gain x-tra dmg?

Having never once experienced your problem using NeedToKnow to track iCDs on The Hungerer and Matrix Restabilizer, they proc within a few seconds of the iCD finishing, it's possible your values for the iCDs are wrong?