Just out of Curiousity, How much better is BBL than Sunfury if you have DST. I currently have Sunfury but don't have the option to get any other Range Weapons at the moment and wonder if I should try for BBL or just wait for Britzleblitz when I get the chance.

Sir, I have used the spreadsheet, and I suspect in this particular matter I've used it a little more than you. It was a common belief that BBL was better, but in the last several posts of this thread here http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17999-h...s_spreadsheet/ it was disproved. BBL does not beat britleblitz in theoretical DPS and will fall even more short in actual DPS for fights that require any movement. I simply said the weapon is not best. If we are to presume best weapon, then I will presume best gear as well. They go hand in hand. Also remember for the slower weapon you need to switch to a 1:1.5 rotation while unhasted. You will see a bigger DPS increase like that.

As Shaile suggested, use the spreadsheet.

I would but I'm stuck at work all day and can't download the spreadsheet here.

I doubt it. As i already said, theoretically archi bow might be better under perfect conditions if your guild has illidan on farm and you still do gruul for example but that applies to very few and is under extremely specific conditions (having exactly the right amount of haste for your weapon, in case of 3.0 thats 15% or pretty much every haste piece you can get ahold of). Dont bring funny theoretical games with a spreadsheet into practical situations for most hunters, and no if we are to presume best weapon we Do NOT presume best gear simply because the best weapon is available to pretty much every guild in the world larger than 30 members while the best gear is available to pretty much the top 1-3% and will stay best weapon up until you got the best gear there is for every slot on your character.
Noone cares about getting highest dps stat on cheekys excel sheet more than for a peculiar dps competition with no relevance to practical situations, noones gonna run naxx for example for [Might of the Scourge] quite frankly. And unless you can theory craft the dps loss from movement id suggest you stay out of guesses like that, just because the auto shot is faster doesn't mean you loose more dps while moving, it only means you have to stop more often, but unless i see some math i wont speculate in the dps loss or difference between slow and fast weapon. Also a 1:1.5 rotation isn't automatically more dps. That only applies to a slow weapon which BBL is not. With a tight enough rotation 1:1 is always the best dps. Even under Rapid fire.

cheers.

With your current gear unbuffed its 9.09 DPS better, and raid buffed 14.11 dps. If you have BBL, i wouldn't take britzlebritz striker until you got every haste gear in the game. But id definatly take it over sunfury.

The real problem with that particular thread is the Improved Faire Fire debuff being part of the rules, I don't understad that, does everyone raid with Moonkins suddenly? Without that extra hit, the whole gear setup goes out the window, and you need to find more hit. Biznick's might make up for that, but I sort of doubt it.

Anyway, on the other side of the coin, I think it's just as ridiculous to assume that guilds farming Illidan are still killing Doomwalker as it is to assume those guilds aren't farming Gruul. Plenty of guilds aren't going to bother to fight for Doomwalker when there are Tier 6 raid bosses to be farmed. So either way I think BBL is just as rare as DST for a hunter.

Either way, use the spreadsheet, plug in your gear, and put in BBL, then use Sunfury and DST and see what your DPS is. That's the best way to see how gear changes generally affect your raid DPS.

Sir, I provided you with mathematical proof that BBL is not the best weapon for hunters. You responded with nothing but opinions. As Rokh said, assuming people have BBL is on par with assuming they have DST. As a side note, you don't need a guild to kill Gruul. I lead PUG's into Gruul every week. When the DST drops it will be mine. That increases my chances of getting it by quite a bit. Time shall tell.

Archi's bow is better under perfect conditions, and it's better under imperfect conditions. The gap increases under imperfect conditions. There is a very simple way to test this. Go to Nagrand over near the forge camps and kite some of the elites "bosses" there using both a fast and a slow weapon. Run a good damage meter. There is no greater means of testing damage on the run than a simple kite. If you want a little more challenge go kite the huge rock guys in southern SMV. Either way, you're going to notice your arcane and multi shots are hitting harder. You aren't likely to get an auto shot off every time the "CD" is up, but when you do it will be more powerful. The same can be said for your steady shots.

Obviously this is an extreme and exagerated method of testing because most fights won't require the constant movement that kiting does, but it is a very easy way to model slow weapon > fast weapon on high movement fights.

I understand why you say BBL is the best weapon, I have said it in the past myself, when another person suggested to me that it might not be the best weapon, I did some more research of my own. That person was right. "Best" is "Best" is "Best". Best is not conditional. If you mean BBL is better during a lunar eclipse, then by all means say so. If you're going to make a blanket statement saying BBL is best, period, no alternative, I'm going to have to call you on it.

Being confident in what you know is great, but over confidence to the point of dismissing what others say without consideration only blinds you to what could be a better alternative.

The new "broken" autoshot-link is true. I suddenly am doing 20% more dps with the macro posted above. Let's hope blizzard doesn't fix this soon enough

This has been hotfixed last night.

/cast !Auto Shot abuse is not possible anymore.

Hello Fellow BM raiders, help me out a little please. I'm at work so can't give exact numbers but hopefully we can figure this out. I tried looking for an answer, but there are soooooo many pages here. Search didn't help.

I'm a pretty standard 41/20/0 spec, have about 1850 Attack Power and 31% crit. I have pretty decent gear, one of which is my DST, which may be part of my problem.

#1. Cheekys spreadsheet suggested I use a 1:1 priority rotation using Arcanes and Multis instead of the normal Steady / Auto 1:1. I tried that, seemed better on raids and on Dr Boom testing. Life was good. I was using my Sunfury.

#2. My WSR finally dropped, Cheekys said it was better then my Sunfury, so I was glad. So I scoped it up and got me a new ammo pouch. No other gear changed, yet my DPS has dropped. I tried using a normal 1:1 and not a priority, and it's still lower.

I am using a macro for both rotations. This weekend I went out to DR Boom. I did many 2 Minute tests, and using either a 1:1 normal or a 1:1 priority, my Sunfury was out performing my WSR.

Any explanaition? With my DST am I really better off with my Sunfury?

Do you raid at a relatively high latency?

I need a little help concerning macros: I´d like to use a macro simply including steady shot and KC (no castsequence with auto). I tried to simply exchange the /castsequence with /cast steady shot in the standard BM-macro posted many times in this thread, but the KC isn´t performed at all. I´m really not good with macros so I would appreciate some help.

I had the same issue and wrote this small macro with my little "know-how" gained here.
It doesn't generate any errors on your screen, shows the tooltip of steady (wohaa, amazing =)) and on the icon itself the cooldown of KC. So you can see when your last KC was executed and/or if there was a crit for the next KC (icon is greyed when KC isn't up).


Edit:
I'm not a friend of pure macro-button-mashing and therefore try to weave in steady shot manually.

Long time reader, 1st time poster.

The macro I use for this is:

This macro automatically casts kill command right before any time you try to cast steady shot. I replaced my steady shot button with this macro.

My understanding is that the DST is so coveted by BM hunters because it allows us to replace the Wolfslayer with sub-optimal speed weapons (Sunfury, Serpentspine, Ancient Amani) and make up the difference. Check Cheeky's sheet to be certain, but that was always what I saw when comparing DST/Slower weapon and noDST/Wolfslayer.

I was Wondering i keep seeing in the thread that a 2.6 or 2.7 Speed bow/gun is better for BM dps?
I'm wondering why this is i all ways thought the slower the weapon the more haste you could Stack and not hurt your
Auto shots?What am i over looking here?

EDIT. Please delete if possible,thanks.

I can confirm what omegatron is saying. I don´t have a clue why, but since 2.3.2 I don´t clip shots anymore. It´s quite easy to reconigze whether I do clip shots or not with EavesDrop and I always clipped an Auto here and there in the past (I use a 2.9-speed weapon, unhasted). I come to assume something might have been done to the 0,5-sec-Autoshot cast-time. I have no other reasonable explanation.

Oh, by the way: I don´t use a macro so I assume it has nothing to do with new macro-mechanics or likes of this.

Thx for the reply. According to Cheekys, I should gain about 15 dps using the WSR over the Sunfury. I only used the WSR for about a week before the patch, and it "seemed" like it was better. Yet testing on DR Boom proved differently, it played out like Omegas numbers above. So it seems like "something" may be different.

Were not raiding tonight, so I am going to get you guys some actual test numbers and WWS reports. In some ways, I'll be happy if I can use my Sunfury, but in others I'll be mad I wasted a scope and mats for a good ammo pouch.

(sticking in bm as convenient/logical thread)
dragon/human slaying > mortal shots?
couple of guilies are convinced this is so, sticking die hard to their 41/14/6 BM specs.
now i've always thought mortal shots was basically a no s*** talent for dps that you always got regardless of primary tree. just seems logical that being around a good 35% crit raid during a raid, doing 30% more dmg on a crit, equating to a ~10% damage gain, is always a better choice than the slaying talents when you have to choose between.

am i wrong? have hunters changed that much since i stopped playing mine (2.5 yo char) for a shaman?

Go 41 / 20 / 0

Its better dps.

Well, every hunter that's even worth a raid spot will have x/20/x for Lethal Shots. Simple as that, and I'm an advocate of hunters getting spots. However, a point is better made with some simple math.

Assuming 30% crit chance, 100% hit chance, and an average, non critical shot (this can be either auto or steady shot, there's the same equivalence) damage of Y, while every other variable remains unchanged.

Control values; Neither of the talents in question
(1.00*70 + 2.00*30)*Y = 130*Y

Slaying talents (which, is worth mentioning, aren't working against undead, demons, elementals or uncategorized enemies, which rules out Magtheridon, Al'ar, Hydross, Void Reaver, Supremus, ROS, Mother, Illidan, lots of trash and all of Hyjal from the benefit list)

(1.03*70 + 2.06*30)*Y = (72.1 + 61.8)*Y = 133.9*Y
That means that on average of 100 shots, they'll do 134 shots worth of damage, or an average 3% more damage compared to the control value

Lethal shots (independent of target type, by default)
(1.00*70 + 2.30*30)*Y = (70 + 69)*Y = 139*Y
By analogy, firing 100 shots, they'll do 139 shots worth of damage, or an average of 6.9% more damage compared to the control value

Sorry if my explanation is confusing, or not based on real numbers, but that's the best I could muster at this hour. Overall, it all comes down to the fact that 30% on crits is better than 3% on non crits and 6% on crits, and the fact that Lethal Shots is independent of specific targets.

EDIT: Also, it's useful to know that a 41/14/6 build will never benefit from all 6 points at once, regardless what combination of 1d3 Humanoid slaying, 1d3 Monster Slaying and 1d3 Hawk Eye.
In effect, I'm comparing a 3 talent bonus to a 5 talent bonus (Aimed Shot does not impact calculations).

Hawk eye has no effect on the numbers displayed above; in fact, Hawk eye has no effect on dps whatsoever; it's an utility talent, and, as such has no place in a raw dps BM build. Humanoid slaying is nothing more than a PVP talent, really, after it stopped affecting Undead and demon type of targets.