Its not stacking crit AND MASTERY, its only stacking crit and going with the priority described on the case without CS Glyph (which requires no specific amount of haste). The reason for this is quite simple, most of us find it almost impossible to keep a tight 9s rotation, hence the CS glyph is wasted. Also related, the recent analysis on the effect of latency mean that, in most scenarios, you are actually doing a 9.5-9.6s rotation (correcting this means adding a ton of extra haste)

Edit:
Actually, after checking Cev and Cabelim, it seems they are using different philosophies when it comes to reforging. Cev is going for what I described above and Cabelim is going for stacking crit and mastery (which is what you described).

About stacking crit/mastery
I believe the idea behind this that crit and mastery offer dps gains that do not go away irregardless of whats going in any given fight (mastery less so because of phases in which AI hardcasting occurs).




One big thing that everybody should understand is that no amount of reforging (aside from reaching hit cap) will produce a significant difference in dps. The stat difference is very small no matter how you swing it. Focusing on your ingame performance is much more important by a wide margin.

To expand on chinoquezada's reply ...

There are many possible ways to be effective at playing MM depending on your playstyle, preferrences and situation. The primary recommendation that I provide in this guide is the one that I generally believe will work well for most players. However, I do provide some alternative suggestions.

For those with the T11 4-set, I point out 3 options in the Standard phase suggestions (these do not account for your latency):

- With the CS glyph, ideally having about 10.52% haste, although having a little more or less is not bad.
- Without the CS glyph:
-- A low haste case with dumping as mych haste into crit and mastery as reasonable. Only about 4.4% is needed, but more is not bad and a lot more is probably realistic.
-- A high haste case with ideally 15.12% haste. Less is okay.

The tradeoff between the 2 non-CS cases is an extra AS/SS per cycle, AIs being better to use more often due to the quicker cast, and more frequent autoshots for the higher haste case versus each shot hitting for harder on average (more crit) and possibly a little higher WH uptime. The WQ impact of more mastery roughly evens out with the less shots per cycle. Considering that 15.12% haste can be difficult to achieve, some go the low haste route.

The haste numbers above are for haste from gear only assuming 3/3 Pathing, ISS, and 10% raid buff.

While this is true, there are still a lot of other consistent ranking hunters who still don the CS glyph despite the low haste values and the recommendations posted here. Namely Taeyeon (Exodus), Dyveriate (Vigil), and Rogerbrown (Method).

Cev and Cebelim are actually the exceptions.

Regarding reforging, another factor behind the choices they made is they want it to be more flexible in case they want to play their chosen secondary spec since Mastery outweighs Haste for both BM and Surv (untill 1.66 at least for surv)

Some more information on the CS/no-CS glyph and haste amount tradeoffs for those with the T11 4-set.

This analysis was done using my hand analysis to determine ideal haste amounts per plausiable rotations, and then trying to achieve them in FD. I did the analysis with assuming the 50ms latency I experience, so results will vary for players at different latency levels.

I also realize that FD is not perfect, so the data below is just to illustrate the situation. Also, although I choose good gear choices, they may not be 100% ideal for each case, but should be close enough to illustrate.

First, I did the analysis using my 359 gear set and with my recommended build in the OP:

Case 1: CS glyph, 11.23% haste from gear (the 10.52% recommended plus a little extra easy to grab to account a little for latency) - 28815.30 DPS

Case 2: RF glyph, 5.64% haste from gear, dumped 2 points in Pathing to top off BD and Frenzy - 28798.45 DPS

Case 3: RF glyph, 12.54% haste from gear (not even close to the 15.12% recommended since could not really get more) - 28728 DPS

Then I did the analysis with a 372 "BiS" set:

Case 1: CS glyph, 12.43% haste from gear (the 10.52% recommended plus a little extra easy to grab to account a little for latency) - 32118.36 DPS

Case 2: RF glyph, 6.20% haste from gear, dumped 1 point in Pathing to top off Frenzy - 31804.22 DPS (running into the crit CA soft cap)

Case 3: RF glyph, 13.78% haste from gear (not even close to the 15.12% recommended since could not really get more) - 31866.22 DPS

As can be seen, there really is not that much difference in DPS between the 3 cases (at least at 50 ms latency). Thus, the choice is preferrential. I personally choose the CS glyph case since it seems to come out with a little more DPS and since the amount of haste required most closely matches the haste we get on gear naturally. If you have high latency, Case 2 is probably the best since its lower haste requirements makes it easier to acquire haste to account for more of the latency.

Keep in mind that the benefit of the CS glyph does not just exist when casting CS right off the 9s CD, it is also beneficial if it reduces the time at which you would cast CS without the glyph. For instance, if you end up being able to cast CS at 9.4s, that may not seem too good since it looks like you lost 40% of the glyph's benefit. However, if you didn't have the CS glyph, in this case your choices would be:
1) Wait 0.6s for CS to come of CD - not a good option
2) Cast another shot. At minimum that shot takes 1 GCD and your latency, and possibly longer if an unhasted SS. This means at the best cast with 50ms latency, you are casting CS at 10.45s. Thus, in this case, the CS glyph actually allows you to cast CS 1.05s sooner despite casting it 0.4s after it was off CD.

Of course, there are still cases where the benefit of the CS glyph is less than 1s, especially in the CA phase where we pretty much ignore its benefit. In addition, proper haste adjustments for not having the CS glyph will also reduce its value too.

Concerning the RF glyph, it is true that the 10% extra haste to your autoshots and aimed shots can be very powerful, especially when stacked with other procs. But for a 5 min fight, you only get the benefit of it for 20% of the fight. In addition, if some random event occurs during the RF that costs you shots, then you have just lost a lot of the benefit of the glyph. of course, this can be reduced by choosing safe times to use RF; however, on many boss fights, there are rarely 30s consecutively where you do not have to move or experience other effects that cost attacks.

With that said, the choice is still preferrential depending on what works best for you.

I have noticed on FemaleDwarf that if you remove AS all together and use SS Continually to Focus cap that it is a DPS increase. By Focus cap you do not dump focus on any thing but Chimera shot which could also provide these benefits.
1)Allow for faster hard target switching(putting up Serpent Sting), or switching to AOE.
2)It may also provide a little extra burst that allows you to spam arcane shot on demand such as Council to remove the Fire shield.
3)You will also have focus to dump AS during movement to minimize DPS losses.
4)Focus for tranquilizing shot.

Here are the 2 reports sorry I am unsure how to link them but you can search for them under the names.
With arcane 24965.03 DPS Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer
No arcane 26178.73 Dps Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer
1213.7 DPS difference

This was strictly for testing arcane and no arcane. Hard casting Aimed was not included.
The Gear set relies heavily on haste with 50% raid buffed

I used Chim glpyh for both Arcane Shot glyph was a DPS loss.

I am going to go over some of the damaging abilities and their differences. The other shots I did not include them because the differences were minimal.

With arcane
Steady Shot
118 shot 8248 avg dmg 981512 Total dmg 15.06%
Piercing Shot
300 ticks 1915 avg dmg 574500 Total dmg 8.89%
Arcane shot
71 shots 10981 avg dmg 779651 Total dmg 10.06%
Aimed Shot
14 Shots 38323 avg dmg 536522 Total dmg 8.3%

Total dmg 2872185 Dmg

No Arcane
Steady Shot
190 shots 8358 avg dmg 1588020 Total dmg 23.02%
Piercing shots
300 ticks 2681 avg dmg 804300 Total dmg 11.66%
Aimed shot
22 shots 38988 Avg dmg 857736 Total dmg 12.44%

Total dmg 3250056 Dmg

no arcane 3250056 Dmg
Wth AS 2872185 Dmg

Differnce 377871

It is also possible that the No AS rotation will have a lower up time on Piercing shots with Steady shot not critting in the 10 second AS rotation. using only 4 or 5 steady shots. Compared to the NO AS rotation with 8 per rotation.

P.s. I have not tested this with BIS gear where there could be a difference that arcane shot is better. This was only for my current gear set.

Do you have a link to the FD build and settings please as I am unable to reproduce your findings. To link them, click load settings, then click the figure of eight yellow chain icon. This will give you a direct link.

I was under the assumption(which I now know is wrong) that it was only beneficial to hard cast during RF and Lust. So I guess this would only be useful if we did not hard cast during dynamic haste effects.

I just picked up a heroic Prestor's Talisman of Machination. Now under the haste buff, should I drop the rotation for hardcast AiS?
Heroic EotC as per female dwarf is 50 dps higher, but with AiS hardcast in CA / without RF would be greater with the haste from Prestor's Talisman of Machination. Correct me of I am wrong.

Except with hard casting Aimed you lose dps if you cancel the cast because you have to move. That was the whole point of discussing Arcane in the first place. And as for what was he trying to prove, he was addressing previous post about top hunters stacking mastery instead of haste.

EDIT: Honestly FD is extremely confusing sometimes, I did a similar test as Whitefyst did, using my gear and as few haste as possible (7.24% from gear and 1/3 Pathing, which is as low as I can get), and CS glyph was still a good dps increase over RF.

Concerning your analysis, I have a few comments to put it into perspective so that people do not take the results of this particular case and try to incorrectly extrapolate it into others.

1) Your analysis was done with a high haste amount of 1965 haste rating or about 15.35% and with latency of 150 ms. In this situation, the SS cast time with the T11 4-set is about 1.19s, which is just about the same amount of time for the AS instant cast at the 1 GCD + 150 ms latency or 1.15s total. Thus, with equal cast time, the two shot's damages can be roughly directly compared. In the first case, unglyphed AS avg damage is 10733 and glyphed SS avg damage with excluding the CA portion (during which we wouldn't cast AS anyway) is 8881 with including the PS effect with the bleed debuff. Thus, even unglyphed AS still does more damage, with it even doing more damage glyphed. Of course, this doesn't account for the additional MMM AI damage from additional SS casts, but that is factored in the FD numbers later. The point here is that you were taking the average damage numbers for SS and AI from FD and the average PS numbers and comparing them to the average AS numbers. This is not appropriate since the average SS, AI, and PS numbers including their benefits from the high crits during the CA phase. Since you should not be using AS during the CA phase, this comparison is incorrect. The impacts of the CA phase need to be removed since that phase should be identical in both cases.

2) Your analysis stacked RF and Bloodlust together at the start of the fight. It is bad to use both together. 0.652s SS casts are a waste. You are much better off spreading those large dynamic haste effects around.

3) Your spec had 3/3 BD and only 1/3 Frenzy. This is not only less DPS, but also biases the results away from AS, which provides Sic'Em procs.

4) You are also using a Ferocity pet with 2/2 WH, which is currently not ideal. This resulted in WH uptimes of 48% and 31% in your cases. The best Ferocity pet situation is currently 1/2 WH and 1/2 SA. Once again, you set up biases away from AS.

5) The gemming in the case is non-ideal by giving up stats that would benefit AS in order to get haste to benefit SS. This biases the results against AS as well. Likewise, some of your enchants are unideal as well.

6) This is a big kicker. The option for ISS behavior is set to Standard Priority instead of one of the options to force refresh. Thus, in the all SS case, you have 100% ISS uptime. However, in the AS case you do not. Hence, you end up firing a lot of single SSs and not maintaining ISS uptime. This will be illustrated below.

7) You AS case does not disable AS during the CA phase as should be done. This costs not only the high crit/dmg SSs over this phase but also the corresponding number of AIs. This is also a big impact to the analysis.

8) The results are for ideal DPS and casts and does not account for movement, interrupting effects, and pushback, which affect your SS casts, even at reduced cast time, but not your AS instants as much or at all.

So the DPS of your no AS case was 26178.

Keeping that case, but:
- Moving a point from BD to Frenzy (increased DPS by 53)
- Moving a pet point from WH to SA (increased DPS by 84)
- Moving bloodlust to start after RF in CA phase instead of overlapping (increased DPS by 58 - the increase is small since as mentioned the SS cast time unhasted is already near the GCD + latency such that dynamic haste effects help it very little). I also realize that this is the most ideal location of the Bloodlust for a MM hunter but not necessarily the ideal timing for rthe raid or boss fight. This is much better DPS gain when hardcasting AIs in this phase.
- Regemming the Delicate Chimera's Eye in the blue socket in your chest to a Glinting and moving it to your gloves to replace the Glinting there (+32 DPS)
- Regemming the Adept in your boots to a Delicate (+44 DPS)

This is not necessarily the most ideal situation for your case, but it does increase it by 272 to 26450 DPS and serves as a decent situation for comparison.

Now let us do the following:
- Add AS into the rotation (-1105 DPS - but this is due to the large loss of ISS uptime due to the bad settings)
- Fix the ISS behavior setting to SS in pairs if less than 4s on ISS (+417 DPS). Note that the gain in FD here is not as large as it should be because of the save focus for CS and the SS pair modeling ending up with delaying CS sometimes. So CS sometimes ends up being cast later than it should be if doing a consistent rotation. This is also due to you casting AS during the CA phase.
- Disabling AS during the CA phase (+625 DPS)
- Replacing the KS glyph with the AS glyph now that we have a more appropriate number of ASs (+240 DPS)

So the DPS in the AS case with your haste amount is 26627 DPS, which is 177 DPS better than the no AS case. That really is not much on the surface, but the difference is even larger than that when accounting for the FD modeling pushing CS back in the AS case sometimes and the negative impact of moving, interrupts, and pushbacks on the SS cast case. Thus, in reality, the DPS difference can be significantly larger.

But we can still make some additional changes to increase DPS more:
- Replace the two Defts in the legs with 2 Delicates (+39 DPS)
- Replace the Glinting in your helm with a Delicate (+11 DPS)
- Change the refroge on your shoulders to crit instead of haste (+71 DPS)
- To make up for the lost hit by regemming the helm, reforge haste to hit on your ranged weapon (+8 DPS)

This leaves you at about 14.28% haste from gear, which is at a decent place per the recommended 10.52% haste from gear for having both the CS glyph and the T11 4-set and for accounting for the 150 ms of latency with your gear and considering your 1% haste as a goblin. If all other stats were equal, about another 10.7% haste from gear would be necessary to account for that 150 ms latency, but as you know additional haste comes at the cost of other stats so it is actually beneficial to reduce the benefit of the CS glyph a bit to have harder hitting shots. In fact, because of tha trade off and the value of crit, you could actually reforge/unreforge another 370 haste to crit and end up with 11.4% haste and about a 42.12 DPS gain in FD for this case.

One final thing to note is that the 14.28% haste from gear brings your AI cast down to 1.928s, which is much less than two AS GCDs + 2 latency of 2.3s. Hence, in the ideal case of no movement, interrupts, or pushbacks, casting AI is theoretically about 1680 DPS better (with the RF glyph instead of KS glyph) than the AS case. Thus, at that haste and latency, if you know you can fully cast your AI, it is better to use it as the focus dump instead of ASs. However, if there is the possibility that the AI could be interrupted, you are still off better using ASs.

At lower latencies and/or lower haste levels, the benefit of casting AI instead of AS is reduced. For example, at the 14.28% haste and only 50 ms latency, the DPS difference between using AI hardcast as the focus dump all the time and just using it during the CA phase and when under dynamic haste effects and AS the rest of the time is only about 650 DPS in FD. If I lower the haste on gear amount to 11.39% at 50 latency since not as much haste is required to make up for that latency, both the AI always and the AS mostly cases go up by about 100 DPS in FD. Note that the differences between the AI and AS cases listed are with using the RF glyph instead of the AS glyph. Obviously, using the AS glyph for the cast with most AS as the focus dump will decrease the difference more.