Wind,

yes, use the 3:2 or cast/cast macro with the kill command/lightning breath line in it so you can cast all three of those spells with one button and avoid possible mistakes by having to hit 3 different buttons repeatedly.

You're right that you're losing about 60 agility by using badge axe over the trollbane... I would make the decision between the two as follows:

A. if you are using badge bow, get the badge axe as well since it will be VERY Difficult to maintain a 1:1.5 rotation with that weapons speed. Youl'll be forced to use a 1:1.4 rotation and so speeding it up with the haste from the badge axe will be quite useful
B. if you're using a 3.0 speed weapon, use only as much haste as you need to keep a 1:1.5 rotation going... this means that the 55 haste from the badge axe will likely make you shoot way too fast and so you would do well with trollbane... Either way... you might consider the S3 axe in this case.

Hmm,

After reading a lot of replies here i was shocked at the amount of DPS people are claiming they do. 1800DPS? 1600DPS?
i have 4 set bonus of tier 6 and i normally get around 1300 DPS in BT. I use 1:1:5 rotation and use a wind serpent with go for the throat etc. raid buffed my agility is around 1300 with GOA and crit chance 52% with LOP. I should be doing more DPS? When I don’t have GOA or LOP its around 1100DPS o.O!
My unbuffed agility is 941
Crit chance 38.01%

The World of Warcraft Armory
That is my armory page and my current spec, slightly weird but it gives me more agility.

If anyone could give me any advice on how to increase my DPS? Or any item/spec changes that would benefit. I would appreciate it..I dont really understand how these people are claiming 1600DPS/1800DPS with surv spec and i want to know!

Thanks
Sarah

Without a WWS report we can't really tell you what you're doing wrong. You're spec isn't helping your DPS much I would go for one of the standards discussed here at length depending on your gear level.

I've managed to get my hands on a few hearts of darkness recently and crafted the Bindings of Lightning Reflexes. I'm also next in line for Cloak of Fiends whenever it drops but I have a question as to where to spend my badges next. Should I get the badge chest and further increase my haste (at the cost of almost 1% crit) or get the badge xbow for higher dps (but at the cost of 22agi/25ap and some crit over sunfury bow because of losing troll racial for bows). I've put them both into cheeky's spreadsheet but the both provide roughly the same boost from what I can see although I may have some settings wrong or something as I am somewhat newbish at cheeky's spreadsheet.

Neither of those encounters is particularly good for evaluating your shot rotation due to the amount of movement involved. That said, the number of shots fired looks reasonable to me for a decent rotation, your crit % looks good as well.

I did notice that your shots are hitting a bit lower than mine normally do.

Gorefiend, RoS, and anything in Hyjal save Archimonde will give some better numbers to look at.

I think ppl are referring to DPS on specific fights not the overall DPS for the raid duration.

There are some fights that are good for judging your DPS. Teron Gorefiend is a good one to test on in BT to get an idea of what your raid DPS really is. I do between 1600 and 1750 on that fight but the end raid stat will be more like 1100. On ROS for example I sometimes do 2000+ but this is not a true picture as the head has 0 armour.

I would suggest that if you can add some haste gear then you can use Manito's macro. The ideal (and also my aim atm) is 80 haste with a 3.0 sec bow for a Heavy Steady 3:2 rotation. That seems to have been tried and tested for max dps. However, you can also use that Macro with only 25 haste and it works a pretty nice 2:1 with a 3.0 sec bow. The beauty of the macro as it works with extra haste very well. (Ignore the fact I have the Badge bow on atm - when I compare to the Serpent Bow the DPS is so close I cannot work out which is best. )

Just throw in the odd multi shot at the right time for some additional pew.

Personally I am going for Cloak of Fiends (ZA) and Shivering Felspine (Sunwell Trash) to get me near enough to the 80 haste mark but there are other options: Bindings of Lightning Reflexes (BT Trash Pattern), Valestalker Girdle (MH) and Hard Khorium Band (Sunwell Trash Pattern - assuming you can find someone to make you one for a reasonable fee).


I find that Readiness spec works best for me atm as you can do 2 x Rapid fire in a row. Try to mix this in between bloodlusts and other haste adding abilities and you will kick bottom with ur gear. But there are a number of different specs you can play with.

Concerning spec - I would get rid of combat experience as it does not give you as much benefit as you might think. I think you need to go for one of the tried and tested specs and you will have more joy.

Have a look at Rivkahs guide:

Rivkah's World of Warcraft Notes: Survival Hunter Raid Basics

It will help you choose a spec.

You can test on Dr.Boom in Netherstorm 4/5 times with different macros and specs to see which one works best for you.

I sound like I know what i'm talking about right? - Well most of this was learnt in this thread.

Maybe you missed the analysis done recently about shot rotations and maximizing DPS.

Essentially, weaving arcane and multi shots when possible should in theory produce better DPS than a 2:1 by a fair amount and a 3:2 by a reasonable amount as well. The only time you're better off just spamming auto and steady shots is when you hit the 1:1 haste level.

With your gear (Zombeana) I would suggest the 20/41 spec (as myonions did) and I would stick to the 1.5:1 rotation for the most part. See where you end up with those changes.

I apologize for double posting but the quality of discussion here merited an effort to show something in support of my claim.

I used Rivkah’s EW calculator: Rivkah's World of Warcraft Notes: Survival Hunter Raid Basics


Assuming a raid makeup including:
2 rogues, a dps warrior, enhancement shaman, a ret pali, feral druid, protection warrior, 1 BM hunter and 1 survival hunter

[at 1000 agil] that's a total of 673 dps gained with a 100% expose weakness uptime [+22 TPS].

From 1020 agility your raid will gain 255 AP for a total of 686.23 dps gain assuming 100% uptime. In addition your protection warrior will gain 22.44 TPS

I used 100% uptime for 1020 agil only to compare with the set Rhivkah gave. From the 2% agility increase of Combat Experience the raid gains what looks to be only about 13 dps and maybe one more threat every sec for the tank. I am less sure of the benefits of hybrid versus 0-20-41. Of course the given make-up could easily include more melee and hunters in a raid group. This would escalate the importance of max agility. Is it enough though?

I was thinking about this information, and do you have an OOM time for these different rotations. It's all well and good to keep these rotations going like the 1:1.4 and 1:1.5 however, I have found them to use excessive amounts of mana. This results in having to use (fel) mana pots rather than haste pots. Furthermore, do you include drum rotations, heroism usage.

Pretty much all the top survival dps WWS reports that I have seen have hunters using 2:1/3:2/1:1 changing rotations depending on their current haste.

Well the big issue with combat experience is the amount of agility it gives you is teeny. If you're running at 900 agility unbuffed, that's a whopping 18 agility, buffed at 1200 is 24 agility. Instead you could be gaining 2% total dps. I ran the math on my calculator (which for the record has estimated numbers for dps and will never be 100% accurate) with my typical raid makeup and 24 agility gains the raid 18.43 dps with 90% uptime. Assuming you are putting out 1300 dps, 2% dps gain would be 26 dps. So ya I know on paper combat expertise looks good for a survival hunter, but it doesn't seem to be as good an RDPS gain as ranged weapon specialization. Plus in smaller environments (5-10 man) or with less physical dps the gain would be even less.

I will say that my dps was similar to yours shortly after I hit 4 pc T6. I don't think I was timing my shots optimally or something but really when I swapped out my belt for the haste leather belt (only haste I had at the time), put on my DST, switched to 7/20/34 and switched to the heavy steady rotation, my dps went up like 200+. So for me it was a good change. However my gun seems to be easier to reach the sweet spot on haste than the 3.0 weapons most survival hunters are using, so that probably made it easier for me. Now that I have a shivering felspine I'm at a fairly good speed and I've been very happy with the change. I don't know if it will work better for you though since you have a different speed weapon and different gear.

In reference to the WWS you posted, Council is a very bad fight for dps measurement, I don't think I've ever broken 1400 on that fight because there's just so much movement involved and I have to keep up scorpid sting as well. I also notice you're the only hunter. I've noticed that when I'm the only hunter it tends to hurt my dps some, probably due to the way the hunter's mark buff scaling works- it takes longer to ramp up. Illidan is also terrible for dps measuring. I tend to do my best dps on fights like Teron and Rage. I find RoS not so good for dps measurement though because of the terrible pushback in phase 2, plus it tends to be so threat tight for me that one FD resist can kill my output.

I've read the recent analysis posted by Whitefyst and it's very interesting but I have to say that basing an entire analysis of shot rotations on Cheekys may not make it completely accurate. Cheekys can only model things so well and I have a hard time believing that all the conventional wisdom currently being followed in the survival community is wrong because analysis of spreadsheet data says so. It may be one of those real world application versus on paper sort of problems or it may just be that people just aren't as good at reproducing perfect rotations so the heavy steady style leads to people doing better in practice, but based on my own experience and what I've seen people doing in general, I have to take it all with a grain of salt. The fact that nobody seems to be able to consistently agree on what the perfect spec and rotation is for survival (even for a specific gear set) indicates to me that the differences aren't as big as folks make them out to be in the first place and that the variations have more to do with playstyle.

I'm really looking forward to this expansion so we can stop arguing about perfect shot rotations and get back to arguing about basic specs

Is this "heavy steady rotation" the standard BM 3:2?

I got a DST recently and have about 122(97 if I use Gorefiend's cape) passive haste, but don't have my 4 pc T6 yet. Not sure if I should too respec to 7/20/34 or stick with my current 0/2X/3X spec with the 1:1.5 rotation =/

The World of Warcraft Armory