Although I have not been on the PTR, I have looked over many of the boss fights which do contain a significant number of adds ( ex. - Beth'tilac, Lord Rhyolith and Alysrazor). I would be surprised if these adds are immune to ice traps in the same vein as adds on Cho'gall or Nef. I would be the first one to admit that spec'ng for adds is not what one prefers to do but if your able to control the adds and add DPS to them I would see this as a benefit to the raid despite the apparent loss in single target DPS.


If you are trying to optimize for single target DPS then I agree Sic em seems a better option.

Given that there's no way to tell a macro to "pick the most central mob of the type I want to aoe", targetting the closest is the best you're going to get with a generic macro. You're free to manually target a central mob if you prefer, if you read the two posts you'll note that the macros don't change your target, they just pick a target if you don't already have one - having it pick the closest one is still better than spamming your Multishot button for a GCD or two before you realize you have no target and aren't firing anything.

Also in heroic 10 chogall it's pretty easy to reliably stack all the bloods in one spot since you only get one adherent at a time, but on 25 that is probably harder. As long as you get the pools in a line leading to you, you can still snare/root the closer pool to allow the spawns from the the farther pool to catch up before unloading AoE - multishot's spread is more than enough to cover everything within 1 pool's radius from any mob you target on the periphery - it's the case of 2 pools side by side that becomes problematic. I haven't killed Magmaw worms since normal mode, but don't remember having issues getting multishot to hit them all. The only thing that's been consistently difficult to Multishot in the tier has been the adds on Heroic Conclave - we usually have a healer stand on a frost trap to help group a few for aoe.

Given the amount of focus it takes for multi-shot, I would think it better to target a new mob manually over automatically selecting the closest mob. Especially since the closest mob could have some distance on the rest of the group if it was the first to leave your ice trap area.

I guess my point is that while some macros may be convenient, their effectiveness can be very situational and may have a negative impact since it allows the user to pay less attention.

If you're in a situation where you don't want the macro targetting for you at all, then you shouldn't be using a macro at all, since "multishot IFF I have a target already" is already the functionality of the multishot ability. The question was how to use a macro to get back to the old funcionality of having multishot pick the nearest target after your current target dies, for use when this isn't an issue.

If the closest mob is out of the pack, I would hope you wouldn't try to multishot it, via macro or not.

I've been messing around on my hunter, getting it to 85 and testing out each DPS spec.

One thing I've noticed about Explosive Shot and Lock and Load that no one seemed to have mentioned:

Maybe I haven't read through this thread or paid enough attention to it, but when the DoT changes occured with Cataclysm (clipping last tick extends), this also follows through with Explosive Shot, as it's tick effects are a DoT.

On LnL procs, ES ES AS ES with even minimal latency will allow all 9 hits of ES to tick. (Note that you can replace the AS with CS if you get LnL proc while low on focus)

Something like this timeline, assuming 50ms latency:

0.00s ES1 Hits (#1)
1.00s ES1 Tick 1 (#2)
1.05s ES2 Hits (#3) ... ES DoT extended by 2sec
2.00s ES1 Tick 2 (#4)
2.10s AS
3.00s ES2 Tick 1 (#5)
3.15s ES3 Hits (#6) ... ES DoT extended by 2sec
4.00s ES2 Tick 2 (#7)
5.00s ES3 Tick 1 (#8)
6.00s ES3 Tick 2 (#9)

Note that if you spam ES ES ES, you lose the second tick from the second ES.

Not only does this still give you full ES damage, it will cools down 1-1.67sec faster depending on if you normally instant or CS between the first and second ES, as you use up the procs quicker.

If this was already mentioned and found worse, then I apologize for bringing this back up.

I did some experimenting with the explosive shot dot. I can definitely reliably get 6 ticks of explosive shot (firing twice in a row) if I make sure that the 2nd explosive shot doesn't hit the target till after 1s is left on the DoT (which makes sense given the way dot extensions are supposed to work). I was also able to establish that if I hit 2 explosive shots fast enough, it is possible for the second one to hit before the first one has passed the 1s mark, thereby leaving me with only 5 explosive shot ticks instead of 6 (even though you'd think the GCD would prevent this). So you can still clip if you're a little too quick on the draw but if you're careful you could definitely use your LnL effectively this way.

::tumbleweed::

This place really died once MM went to the lead.

Anyway, now we're being showered with haste and a superior tier in the Fireland gear, might it finally be time to consider a fourth Cobra Shot between Explosive Shots?

The calculations done by Warcraft Union spoke of such brutal haste levels that, even with a few heroic pieces of gear here and there, I never reached even half of it. If I recall correctly it was something like 3k haste and I think my reforged best barely passed 1.5k though I did not gem or enchant for it either.

A quick browse over Zeherah still says MM wins over SV by 1.7k DPS in my gear though the equipment is still reforged for MM. As an aside most hunters taking advantage of the Wild Hunt bug should be respeccing their pet to remove the two points in it or it strangles pet DPS.

When I tested I used the two points in Careful Aim and put them in Sic 'Em with the pet respecced for 1 in Wild Hunt and 1 in Shark Attack. Removing Wild Hunt altogether was a 500 DPS loss.

Based on my gear (ilvl is 368, 4 piece t11), my best dps spec is 7/3/31 with 2/3 Bestial Discipline and 2/3 in Frenzy. That comes out just a small bit higher on femaledwarf than 3/7/31 with 2 points in careful aim. Not sure if that comes out as the best spec for everyone regardless of gear, tho. I'd assume that since this spec buffs the pets rather than a casted shot for the first 10%, it'd end up being the better spec in real world, not just on the spreadsheet, but I'm honestly not sure.

I should also note that I'm reforging pretty heavy into haste (~2000 haste rating currently) to get to a plateau of 3 cobras + 1 instant without delaying explosive.

SV Hunter Haste Plateaus

That will provide you with some decent info on haste plateaus. I also noticed your armory has 2/2 Sic'em which is ~220 dps higher than the one you linked.

Edit: The haste levels you currently have are close to what you would need without the T11 4pc bonus to cast four shots in between Explosives.

yeah, I was playing with femaledwarf and haven't made the spec change in game yet, just saying what I found was the highest dps spec for my gear.

The haste plateaus on your link are for getting an explosive off every 7 seconds, not every 6 seconds. Right now my Cobra without heroism/RF is 1.38 seconds. 3 of those is just over 4 seconds, plus one instant is just over 5 seconds. So adding in GCDs, I can do the following. (note: for all the rotations below, obviously the instant can happen any time in between the cobras as focus allows)

time - shot
0.00 - Explosive
1.00 - Cobra
2.38 - Cobra
3.76 - Cobra
5.14 - Arcane/Black Arrow
6.14 - Explosive.

Alternatively, if I need to pool focus, 4 cobras puts the 2nd explosive shot at 6.52, so I'm only delaying by about a half second. Obviously lag factors in there some, as well.

I could reforge into a little more haste to get to exactly 6 seconds, but delaying by that little bit and getting the additional crit is more of a dps gain according to the spreadsheet. Basically, I reforged into Haste until Crit became more valuable, then I reforged the rest of my mastery into crit.

This is actually reinforced by the post you linked - I'm above the "First Soft Plateau" and below the "Second Hard Plateau", and as it says: "It is absolutely worth reforging into haste if you’re already at or beyond the soft plateau — though obviously you’ll want to stop that reforging once you hit this second hard plateau."

From what I can tell, this is the best haste plateau to go after. The next plateau is a 1.25 second Cobra, which puts you at 4 cobras between each explosive with no push back. This gives you a ton of bonus focus, so you can swap in instant shots easily, but you're not getting significantly more damage from Arcane instead of Cobra, plus you're looking at down time anyway, you're either doing Ex-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Ex or you're doing Ex-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Instant-Ex with about half a second with nothing to do between the instant and the explosive. I guess you could do Ex-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Instant-Ex and have Explosive essentially on a 7 second cd, but that seems counter productive. If you had the focus you could do Ex-Cobra-Cobra-Cobra-Instant-Instant-Ex with Ex getting delayed about .75. Not sure if that's a good idea either.

The reason ISS is, for lack of better word, useless for both SV and BM is that SS is so inferior to CoS that the 15% haste has no chance at making up for the lack of damage from 2 SS over 2 CoS in its short duration. Since SS has the same casttime as CoS, you will always be able to use the same amount of CoS as you spend on SS, which translate sdirectly into teh difference between SS and CoS damage being lost for every SS. 15% haste i not enough to offset a deliberate loss of damage for 2 CoS every 8 seconds.

That aside, "its possible to sustain a rotation of 4 focus shots Cobra, 2x Steady, Cobra, Explosive" Regardless whether you mean 4x CoS, 2x SS, CoS, ExS or something else, that rotation is far beyond 6 seconds (just from the GCD), which is the CD on ExS, so the only way to sustain such a rotation would be to push ExS, which again, translates to a damage loss.