There is a hunter help thread for this sort of question. Please post there, we would like to keep this thread clear for theory.

Ok Will do

It is 142 hit rating to not miss according to current testing (9% hit). You'll find it pretty tough to resocket 2 hit rating I think.

Forgive me if that has been brought up already - I found some posts on it but they didn't fully answer my question - if your pet is a cat, would it be best to use claw and bite or just claw? Are the extra training points worth getting both? Should you spam them manually (which would get preference with the GCD)?

I'm probably going to switch to BM sometime in the future, but it will most likely be after the scorpid nerf. This question was bugging me. Thanks!

Pretty sure most people train both and leave both on autocast. Drag bite to the left of the pet bar and claw to the right of that. Should do the most special damage that way.

While theoretically the 2.7 speed weapons are better for BM, I'm guessing with good use of haste pots/abacus and multi shot, the slower weapons should come out ahead even w/o a DST.

I'm not sure how to include haste potions into Cheeky's spreadsheet, has anyone done tests on this?

The gear discussed here is mostly 25 man-related, but the theorycraft portion of it is across the board sound...at least in my opinion. I can understand how it can be overwhelming though because it is to me, too!

IMHO, spec first. Which suits you best? Look at your trees, make sure you're plugging in points where they will benefit you - and the raid - the most. Then look at gear, including enchants and gems. Do you understand how choosing, say, a +35 Agility enchant will affect your stats versus the +70 AP enchant? Keep in mind that some gear is better for certain flavours of hunter. Take a look at shot rotations. Do you understand how they work? Why they work? Which is best for your spec/gear? What affects your rotation positively, and negatively?

Being able to answer these questions even on a pretty simple basis implies knowledge of your class and a willingness to learn even more. If you can get a solid understanding of these kinds of things (again, in my opinion) then you've got a nice base to work from. The extreme number-crunching is fun but you can leave that to Cheeky while you get the bread and butter down pat.

That's a new one on me!

Why does this make a difference? Does it set the "cast order" for the pet?


For my BM pet (a cat) i train her pretty much every day with:

Bite
Claw
Dash
Avoidance
Cobra Reflexs
(And Growl for soloing)
Then I stack whatever resistence is needed, and spend the final remaining points on Stamina.

But i've never ordered Bite and Claw specifically.

This is correct. If you have the standard Weapon Skill for a Level 70 character (i.e., 350 Weapon Skill), then your base miss rate against a level 73 boss/mob is 9%. And, so, you need 142 hit rating (9.005%) to never miss.

However, if you are a Dwarf with a Gun or a Troll with a Bow (and therefore have 355 Weapon Skill), then you only need 6% (95 Hit Rating) to never miss against a Level 73 boss/mob.

Thank you for confirming what I have observed. Guns, lots of guns!

It's hard enough for me to keep my 93 hit rating there and still minmax my dps gear (I'll get 2 T5 pieces and end up losing about 15-20 dps over the max possible dps if I could somehow keep my hit rating at 95.) This has got to be a significantly more difficult problem for people who want 130 or more hit rating and still in SSC/TK.

I had all the hit rating I needed with T5...

It's just what I've heard. Whether it makes a difference or not I cannot be sure but it seems to make sense. Since gore/claw are less focus and have no cooldown they will be used up faster and use more focus (obviously). So you really want to make sure bite is going off when there is enough focus if you used the points to train it. Maybe the game uses it by itself I don't know. Just something I read somewhere and probably isn't true but doesn't hurt either I guess.

I've been wondering because trolls get +5 bow skill does that mean we only need 5.6% hit rating then? I heard 1 skill was .6% is this true?

Try reading a few posts up its all said right there - but ye less skill needed.

What nelf hunter doesnt wish he had rolled troll now?

There has been a lot of testing done on these forums regarding miss rate and the effect of Weapon Skill. Please see

[Rogue/Warrior] Weapon Skill Adjustment Discussion

If you want a summary of the work to date, start with post #500 and read forward from there.

Assumptions:

Cheeky's Spreadsheet is Correct
41/20/0
All RAPs and Crit% are preraid buffed but the DPS values include the listed values plus the increases from the following buffs: Blessing of Kings(on pet as well), Improved Blessing of Might(on pet as well), Improved Mark of the Wild(on pet as well), Ravager Dog, Flask of Relentless Assault.
Normal 1:1 Shot Rotation with Kill Command.
Pet=Raptor

I started at 1800 RAP and 20% Crit% and worked from there using 50AP and 1% Crit increments. (1900/22 would be 6 steps away from 1800/20 because you have 4 increments of 50RAP and 2 increments of 1 Crit%)


RAP Crit DPS # of steps away from 1800/20
1650 20 1810.39 -3
1700 19 1810.37 -3
1750 18 1809.25 -3
1800 17 1807.58 -3
1800 18 1826.26 -2
1750 19 1827.54 -2
1700 20 1828.30 -2
1750 20 1845.62 -1
1800 19 1844.71 -1
1750 21 1862.42 0
1800 20 1862.95 0
1850 19 1861.88 0

1800 21 1879.90 1
1800 22 1895.50 2
1800 23 1910.92 3
1800 24 1926.16 4

1850 20 1880.27 1
1850 21 1897.37 2
1850 22 1913.13 3
1850 23 1928.70 4
1850 24 1944.10 5

1900 20 1897.59 2
1900 21 1914.85 3
1900 22 1930.76 4
1900 23 1946.49 5
1900 24 1962.04 6

1950 20 1914.91 3
1950 21 1932.32 4
1950 22 1948.39 5
1950 23 1964.27 6
1950 24 1979.97 7

2000 20 1932.23 4
2000 21 1949.80 5
2000 22 1966.02 6
2000 23 1982.06 7
2000 24 1997.91 8

2050 20 1949.55 5
2050 21 1967.27 6
2050 22 1983.65 7
2050 23 1999.84 8
2050 24 2015.85 9

2100 20 1966.87 6
2100 21 1984.75 7
2100 22 2001.28 8
2100 23 2017.62 9
2100 24 2033.78 10

2150 20 1984.19 7
2150 21 2002.22 8
2150 22 2018.91 9
2150 23 2035.41 10
2150 24 2051.72 11

Using this chart I created the following Table. (Sigh...Paint For The Loss I guess)


It seems that BM hunters that stack up to 30% crit could do even better by trading in a bunch of that crit for RAP. But here is a window of the "sweet spot" for hunter dps.

I'm not sure what you want to achieve with your calculations.
The only thing you see is what a 50*X attack power or/and Y% crit increase will result in on your characters dps.
Some notes:
-If you want to compare for gear upgrades you should consider the item-stat value, 22.08 critrating = 1% crit = 44.16 attack power for your increments, or stick with the 50 ap and change the crit increments to 1.13%. Agility often shows to be a fun stat to modell with and without buffs, for example, 16ap gems often gives a better result on a unbuffed hunter while 8 agi (and 8 crit in some cases) gives a better result when including buffs like BoK,BoM and Flask because most buffs increase attackpower much more then they increase crit and by then making crits more valueble.
-Weapon damage and ammo damage will affect the damage contribution of crits, so with a better weapon more crits are preferable over extra attack power.
- Diffrent pets will scale diffrent with crit versus attack power, for example a Wind Serpent wants a realy high amount of GftT procs (prossible 42-43% critrate with 1 attack/second) to keep LB spamming while a cat or a ravager doesn't need more then maybe 15-20% crit to keep up with claw/gore.
- To be able to use KC after each cooldown you want a decent amount of crit, 25% crit will give you a (1 - 0.75^5) 76.3% chance to use KC after the 5 seconds cooldown when shooting 5 shots during the cooldown.


The damage scope are a flat amount added to 3 shots, auto-shot, multi-shot and aimed shot while the crit scope will add crits for all you're ranged attacks and also procs things like EW,GftT,KC.
As the damage scope adds a flat amount of damage it will benefit a faster weapon more, it's damage are affected by damage modifiers like FI and RWS but 5% extra on 12 damage are more or less nothing. Damage scopes doesn't scale with attack power, but crit's will affect it, it will add 2.3*12=27.6 damage on auto-shots with Mortal Shots talent on a crit so with 100% crit you will get about 13 dps (27.6 damage / 2.1 attack speed) increase on you auto-shots.

There should be a number of posts here and at the Blizzard forum with calculations showing that the crit scope are superior to damage scope. If you don't wanna dig through those posts, test the outcome in Cheeky's spreadsheet, you will only find that the damage scoop are better in a very few (and highly rare) cases like using a extremly fast weapon and only shooting auto-shots, having a very low amount of attack power (a naked hunter more or less) or having an already insane amount of crit (havn't checked but probarly above 95% crit or so).

In any normal case the crit-scope will give a better dps increase.

Thanks for the advice. I was trying to do different things before reading your post such as wind serpent and higher DPS weapons but am now going to have to go back and redo them.

The graph I made for the higher DPS weapon was only shifted up slightly so my hypothesis is it will probably only shift the new graph up and to the left one block. (That is going from a 80-100 dps weapon by the way)

Also for Wind Serpents, I noticed a very sharp climb with the old 50/1 increments so I am also guessing the climb will be further exaggerated from the 44/1 increments.

I would really appreciate some advice on the Leotheras and Vashj encounters.

Last week was my first lockout with a new raid group, and first time seeing Leo and Vashj.

I did pretty good on Karathress, topping the dps meter, but when it comes to the other 2, I totally sucked.

I think a major problem is not getting enough dps time, BM's shorter range really shows during Leo, I had to do a lot of running to get in range after inner demons and dodging WWs. I also did not use my pet as much as I could in fear of WWs. The result was getting beat on dps by our surv hunter.

I was pretty clueless on Vashj as well. I did ok(I think) killing elementals, but when they didn't spawn I just stood there doing nothing. Should I helped dps on the other adds? I was afraid an elemental would spawn behind me while I out of range dpsing elites/striders. I also had problems killing bats during phase 3.

Is BM supposed to suck on these fights, or am I doing something wrong?

Day 1
Wow Web Stats
Day 2
Wow Web Stats

While you included might and kings here did you also include the effect from hunters mark? The raw AP from hunters mark at 440RAP on a boss changes the scales significantly on a boss fight so much so that i find if i drop below 30% crit as a BM hunter my dps goes down (ok i know anecdotal)

If a BM hunter using only self buffs ie hawk has 1600 RAP his effective RAP versus a mob he shoots to full stacks of hunters mark is actually 2040 RAP and looking over your list there with 2150 being the top end scale of your dps list then stacking crit even at lower RAP levels like 1600 is not going to be a bad thing on bosses

I believe Cheeky's spreadsheet accounts for Hunter's Mark.

Those APs and crit% I listed were before being raid buffed and the DPS numbers include raid buffed that are independent of what party you are in. So if it say the hunter has 2100 AP that is what he has before he includes Flask and Blessing of Might and such but the DPS that is listed accounts for those so that the hunter would have an effective 3k RAP if Hunter's Mark is included.

This allows people to see what they will be at raid buffed because we all know crit% is worth more at that end.

Your damage output totals on Vashj are really poor. I'm not sure what duty you're on but I'm assuming that you are on Elementals during all of phase 2. Being BM on Vashj is fine but brutal sometimes because of lack of large burst on the elementals when TBW isn't up and the fact that phase 3 requires you to help kill bats. Again, your range is a hinderance to that duty quite a bit.

There should not be a single time where you are not doing damage on the Vashj fight. All of phase 1 is pure DPS, all of phase 2 is constantly handling a quadrant and dpsing adds. I handle an entire quadrant solo without an issue. We only use 4 ppl for elemental duty. I take the center. On phase 3 I shift to finish off any elites / striders and move to dps vashj as well as killing bats the second they come overhead (only for 4 bats then I forget about them), after that just dps vashj for the remainder.