Once you show me WWS of auto/steady for over 5 mins and then auto/steady/multi then I might actually believe that.

So, after all this talk I want to try BM for raiding (I leveled BM and did a ton of 5 mans that way.) Will I be disappointed if I try it before 2.1? Are the changes in 2.1 going to make that much of a difference in the dps (other than keeping my pet alive.)


BTW Goldengiff: My guild loves feral tanks so on fights they are not needed they go kitty and are in melee groups. If I get lucky I am grouped with them or a s-priest (if not then I am with 3 holy priest and a pally.) But, it is not uncommon (at least for my guild, which I like to think of normal(ish)) to be with a feral druid.

Yet another aside, how ofter do you other hunters get to be with a s-priest? 50%? 75% of the time? How often are you with at least one other player that helps your dps (shaman with mana totem and GoA, feral druid or s-priest)? I just want to know how much I should be bugging my raid leader. =p

Just shot about 100 times with steady and auto on rats and the difference was 175. Using Wrathtide and the 37 dps arrows. Still not worth the lost time on steady shot cast time or mana cost.

@Bigblue: You're lucky man. Our guild only has one feral druid worth mentioning and he's out MT so he's always in the "MT group". So, no dps from him. If we had another good feral druid then we might give him to melee, but we only ever run 3 rogues max, only have 2 hunters, and only 2 serious dps warriors (arena MS spec doesn't count). An ideal group for a BM hunter would be hunter, feral druid, MM hunter, SP, and shaman, but that would never happen :P

@osse: it deffinatly depends on the weapon you use. Sunfury bow is 2.9, wrathtide is 3.0, both are better for using multi-shot. What you aren't factoring in is the fact that altho haste will make the cast time of Steady less then 1.5sec, nothing except Heroism will lower your GCD. So you are still only shooting 1 Steady every 1.5sec. Haste doesn't increase your Steady DPS, unless it's counteracting latency issues, which everyone has to some extent. The ONLY reason you would use steady over multi is if you have a fast enough bow that it actually does less damage then steady or if you are having mana issues.

Just do WWS with both cycles Goldengiff and impress me. :/

OSSE!
I love your posts they always make me want to work hard on my hunter seeing how good a well geared and played one performs.

Anyways on to some other things. First of all im only a 67 hunter and play very little, and have little time to test, so this is just theorycraft which is probably wrong.

I believe you are using bows that are too fast. I believe the whole point of BM is the increased speed so you get more steady shots off. The following list is made assuming about 1950 rap and 25% crit the average damage from auto and steady are gotten from cheaky's spreadsheet.

Weapon- Auto Damage- Steady Damage- Time for rotation- DPS
wrathtide longbow- 1006.44- 1001.73- 2.1739- 923.7637426
sunfury bow of the pheonix- 995.6- 1023.69- 2.1014- 960.926049
wlofslayer sniper rifle- 914.3- 1010.67- 1.9565- 983.8844876
don santos rifle- 919.61- 1015.96- 1.9565- 989.3023256
scorchwood bow- 685.63- 934.91- 1.5942- 1016.522394
mamas insurance- 695.47- 947.74- 1.59942- 1027.378675
wrathfire hand cannon- 653.8- 978.04- 1.586956- 1028.283078

Im assuming the rotation is one steady plus one auto so thats the auto shot time or the time to cast a steady plus .5 seconds for auto which ever one is longer. Now i know some of these bows take perfect timing and like no latency but just posting what im working on now.
Now unless im completely wrong somewhere its funny how the green bows do better then the epics. Also the wrathfire hand cannon has a crazy dps considering the fact that you are actually cliping autoshots on it.

anyways just posting this for some reactions or to find out were i did something wrong.


Bah wish i knew how to post a table to make this clearer.

Next patch will you consider putting 2 points into Improved Mend Pet over Bestial Discipline? It just seems it would be nicer with making you as a hunter A) More Self Reliant and B) Less mana intensive. Even considering you have a shadow priest 100% of the time?

It just seems that Bestial Discipline + GFTT is a bit much even when spamming screech every time.

Thanks for the reply
I just used your spreadsheet to find the average damage for each shot not for the dps value.

And yes i know some of those numbers require perfect conditions.

To see the effect of lag on the rotation, lets use the wrathfire hand cannon
the average auto damage from you spreadsheet was 653.8
the average steady damage was 978.04
for a total of 1631.84
so the dps would be that divede by the time to cast a steady plus auto, so
1.5/((1.2)*(1.15))+.5 +lag
Lag DPS
0 1028.283078
.05 996.8746869
.1 967.3281342
.15 939.4826351
.2 913.1954004
.25 888.3391872

which makes it better then the wrathfire longbow for up to .15 seconds of lag (im not sure the average latency and reaction time of hunter so im not sure if this is good.)
I believe Osse said he has like 50 ms latency which would still leave him .1 seconds to get his shot off which im assuming is enough.

When i get up in the morning ill run some numbers on some more weapons, the barrelblade longrifle looks really nice. Ill look at the skyfire hawk bow, splintermark, felsteel broomstick, and consortium blaster. Those were the only ones that seemed like they would be worth looking at ill check their dps with different lag levels too and post my findings.

It seems slower weapons will always be more forgiving of lag. It's scary that a 1/4 second lag + reaction time with that weapon costs you roughly 20% of your DPS. That's huge.

Even with 50 ms latency I imagine Osse still has a .1 - .2 second delay from reaction time and latency. (Not sure how much gaming keyboards with spamming macros make up for this.)

I am (as a MM Hunter) frustrated with not being able to get a high-DPS 2.4-2.5s bow. My latency and reaction times make 2x special between autos a very dicey situation. Part of my personal reasoning for switching to BM is to keep things simple for myself.

Ishichin, I apologize if I came off harsh at all, reading my post now I'm not sure I struck the tone I intended to. I do hope the spreadsheet is useful to you, and feel free to offer any suggestions you have.

I tried dps on blasted lands with pure steady-auto rotation on 18/43 build, recap captured for 5 minutes shooting, I used mp5 flask to keep it up and super mana pots, 782 dps on me, 190 dps on pet, so almost 1000 dps without any buffs, although pets do quite high damage in blasted lands due to no misses. But in any case this was only auto-steady rotation reaching almost 1000 dps on 16.58% mitigation which is a bit lower than the standard mitigation on bosses without COR.

I had 80-100 ms in PTR.

Then I tried with 41/20 build. With steady auto rotation I did 889 dps and pet did 250 dps, recap captured for 4:27. 1139 compared to 972 on MM build.

Edit: Ran another test for 4 minutes, this time recap captured 782 dps on me. I don't know if recap is bugged in PTR but 100 dps difference between 2 tries seems quite weird.

Edit: A third test for 5 minutes showed 266 dps for pet and 864 for me.

Edit: Tried in MM build a rotation which shoots arcane right after steady and before auto whenever it's ready to go, suprisingly that rotation did less dps than auto-steady only rotation.


After 5 hours of trying different rotations, the best one turned out to be BM build with steady + auto + KC. Hunter dps going up to 870 over 5 minutes with just using mp5 flask. The amazing thing was pet dps going up to 320 with spamming KC. I remind that this is an unbuffed pet. Pets with battleshout+kings+might usually do 100 dps higher than unbuffed pets. Although this is a lvl 52 mob, so dodges/parries are minimum but in any case, this rotation turned out to be the most easily managable one with using castsequence for steady/auto and timing KC right after steady cast finishes and the most damaging one. 1186 dps against a mob with 20% mitigation over 5 minutes without buffs.

(Not to mention pet's growl ability was selected for not grabbing aggro every 20 seconds, meaning lots of energy was being spent on growl which will go to Lightning Breath in a raid)

Hmm.. 1.77 attack speed with Consortium Blaster, suppose I can give it a go although it'll use buttloads of mana. :p

Oh and not sure if I said it yet but the tests I did were on live servers, dps will go up quite a bit with the new stuff. ^^