Kurkis, I've been looking over your WWS logs (since honestly your dps is considerably higher than mine using equivalent gear) and I'm pretty puzzled by what I'm seeing regarding Wed Jan 23.

For example, on Teron Gorefiend, you fired a total of 2 Arcane Shots and 2 Multishots, meaning you essentially did the entire fight in a 1:1 rotation? I realize that for haste buffs (rapid fire and heroism come to mind) you'd want to use a 1:1 rotation, but in a 3 minute fight even with 2 rapid fires and a heroism that's still half the time you were doing 1:1 when you could have been doing 1:1.5.

Secondly, on Illidari Council I note you're doing the same thing. 45% Steady Shot, 35% Auto Shot (understandable difference because of the kiting necessary), 3% Arcane Shot, 3% Multi Shot?

In fact, now that I'm looking at it, almost all of your fights are far closer to 1:1 than 1:1.5. (looking at Bloodboil, Mother, Najentus).

For anyone who didn't catch the link earlier, I'm looking at Kurkis - WWS

Looking at Kurkis - WWS you're doing the exact same thing again. 41% Steady Shot, 36% Auto Shot, 6% Arcane Shot, 1% Multi Shot on Rage, 3% Arcane Shot and Multishot each again on Anetheron.

I can't argue with what you're doing, because you're seeing considerably higher numbers than I am but I am definitely intruiged with why. Any chance you could describe a bit of the logic behind your rotation?

The concept on how I play a Survival hunter is pretty simple.

BM hunters are the DPS powers that they are because they have 20% haste and a pet that does a good chunk of their damage. The idea here is to keep yourself hasted as much as you can during the fight so that you can run a solid 1:1 rotation allowing the benefits you get as a Survival hunter to help close the gap between Survival/MM damage and BM damage.

I generally do every fight this way - We pull and you have 15-25 seconds where the tank is building aggro, the mob is being put into position. During this time I am using a Steady, Steady, Auto rotation and I throw in Multi-Shots and Arcanes when my Auto shot lets me. Before anyone screams I will clobber auto-shots doing this and the world will end because of it, I don't care.

It is my opinion that a Feral Druid and Enhancement Shaman are the 2 most important things to have in your group as a Survival hunter. With that said both the druid and the shaman as well as myself have drums of battle.

After these 15-25 seconds are up the Shaman will pop Heroism and drums (45 seconds), Rapid Fire (15 seconds) when Heroism fades and then Readiness/Rapid Fire (15 seconds) again. At this point we are 95-100 seconds total into the fight and 75 of those seconds I am hasted. During the second Rapid Fire I make the decision to either haste pot or fel mana pot.

There are 2x when I will not do this. First being Kaz'rogal where I till take a Fel mana pot about 10 seconds into the fight so I can get as much mana back as I can at the beginning (even if I waste some of the fel mana pot) so that hopefully near the end of the fight I can sneak in a Super Mana pot. This doesn't always work but I try. The other acception to that rule is on Illidari Council where I Fel Mana pot the entire time and generally have to use Aspect of the Viper no more then about 30 seconds.

Generally, I take a haste pot after the 2nd Rapid Fire giving me a total of 1 1/2 minutes of being hasted running a 1:1 rotation. During that period of time I've pretty much just destroyed the mob and with running over a 50% crit w/ Master Tact up for a large portion of that time the crits are glorious.

We are now ruffly 110-115 seconds into the fight and all of your 'controlled' haste is done. By this time your numbers are going to be pretty good as long as you aren't bad at the game and you need to just run out the clock. You've got 1.5 - 2 minutes left in the fight. I will simply go back to Steady, Steady, Auto, and toss in more specials when I can. If DST procs and drums are running I can go back to 1:1. During the end all I am trying to do is sustain the damage.

My results are what I have posted. My rotation really is not as close to 1:1 as it looks on the shot chart. There are a few stray Auto-Shots that go during the course of the fight that cut the gap between Steady and Auto down. As you can clearly see though I favor Steady shot.

To address the Foam Finger Fans who will say you should do it differently... I do it this way and it works for me. There is more then one way to skin a cat and if you are having success as a Survival hunter or MM for that matter then indeed you should post your WWS and take us through how you play your character in the fight so that we can become more educated, thus allowing us all to improve our play.

Before I end my wall of text I'm going to give you guys all a free pro tip - Get Drums of Battle.

Unless you are one of your guilds main (insert profession here) there is really no excuse to not have atleast 350 LW as one of your professions. With that, the more drummers you have in the raid the higher your raids DPS is. In my guild we have something like 16 active drummers. Think about that.

Wow Web Stats

1924 DPS on teron last night, just by using a 1:1.5 rotation and a 1:1 rotation with Multi>Steady prio.
As for the drums you were talking about, I might do it it's just that I can only drop herbelism for it and I prefer flying around herbing a bit

I kite the mobs back to the NPCs. I have never used more than half a mana bar in any wave and easily have enough time to drink between phases. So, I don't think spending 3 points in TotH is necessary for this. I did spend 1 point, but that is just because there is nothing better on my way to MT.

It is quite nice, but this means that I never get a feral druid or agi totem using shaman.

I am pretty sure that monster slaying doesn't work on any mobs in Hyjal or BT, so that is pretty worthless. I didn't take WS over Readiness, I took it over a second point in TotH. I took Scatter Shot over Readiness. I have been playing this character since retail release and have had Scatter Shot since I turned level 30. I can't imagine playing this game without it!

WS isn't much use in raids, although I occasionally save a healer when a mob gets loose, but it is pretty good for PvP. Not as good as most CCs, but, it is great as an interrupt when I am trying to kill a healer (once every 2 min). It is also awesome for kiting in combination with scatter shot, frost trap and concussion shot. Occasionally, my arena teams fight a team that can't dispel poison. On those rare instances, it is good for CC as well.

As I have posted myself, I definitely agree that Feral Druid and Enhancement Shamans are the 2 most important group members for a Survival hunter, to not only increase our personal DPS, but to increase our average EW proc with a greater uptime due to 5% more crit from LotP and 2.78% more crit from a fully improved GoA and the 27.83 more AP on the EW proc due to that GoA. The SoE totem also helps our pet damage.

I also run with Drums of Battle myself, especially now that they are so much more cheaper to make than they originally were. However, unfortunately my normal druid and shaman group mates are not LWs too.

Currently, I use 3 rotations, 1:1 when hasted, 1:3 when can't multishot (since don't have IAS), and 1:5 when can multishot. I will have to experiment with your Steady, Steady, Auto rotation.

We have a tank kite the mobs back to the NPCs. If you're kiting and not dpsing then obviously you don't need the mana return. I'm going full out dps in that phase usually keeping up with if not toping the AOEr's on the charts so I'm burning my mana very quickly.

In our guild melee has dibs on the feral druid and I've never seen a GoA totem, the best I can hope for is a shadow priest but I'm usually in the outcast group of random warlocks and if I'm lucky and priest with spellsurge . I agree though I'd take the Shaman with GoA and mana spring over any other class but it doesn't look like that's going to happen for me.

Good point about monster slaying, my guild is just 2 weeks into hyjal and I didn't realize that. While I agree having scatter shot is awesome, Readiness > Scatter shot for raiding purposes.

It's nice to have a spec that is good for PVE & PVP but really its optimal for neither. If you're doing battlegrounds spec doesn't matter because you're just honor farming (and half the people you fight are terrible anyway). If you're doing arenas you need to respec or you're going to get crushed. I probably respec 4-5 times a week for different arena teams and raids. Blizz really needs to lower the respec cost, 50g everytime I want to play an arena game is just retarded.

But I do agree that WS is an awesome PVP ability, especially when you have scatter shot as well, having that many CCs is just sweet.

We run a cookie-cutter DPS group of MS Warrior, 2 Rogues, Feral Druid and Enhancement Shaman - We put the 2nd enchancement shaman in the tank group to help aid in his TPS w/ a Feral Druid and myself.

@Kurkis

I did some testing of my own with regards to this shot rotation/macro mash, and the GCD behavior seems very 'awkward'. As some others have stipulated on these forums, being able to get 2 specials (in this case 2 steady shots) off in a 1.5 second window (talent build permitting) seems like very odd behavior with regards to how the GCD used to work. If this mechanic is still in place in 2.4, then it will redefine how the hunter class as we know it is played, but I remain skeptic. Judging from the hastened fix to rectify the initial /cast !auto shot, /cast aimed/steady there may very well be a lingering issue that remained uncorrected, and thats what we're currently witnessing. Call me a hater or what have you, but this behavior we're currently witnessing just seems 'out of place'.


edit:


This is the image I have in my head every time I try and understand how what we're currently witnessing is actually producing positive results.

Here is my last Gorefiend attempt. Talk about a difference in DPS, maybe someone could enlighten me as to what I am doing wrong?
Wow Web Stats

I am using a 1:1.5 with 1:1 steady during haste (rapid fire since no shammy). Any help would be appreciated.

CSM-EH - Did you test just spamming your Steady Shot button over and over forcing in Steady Shots and letting Autos instant shoot when they were finished cooling down? 2:1

I did roughly 1.5 hours of trials using both the current macro of choice (/cast !auto shot, /cast steady shot) in addition to trying to manually get 2 steady shots in for every auto shot, both of which produced the same mental block. All I can picture is the above visually represented shot rotation and scratch my head in wonder.

Those numbers are not because I am sitting in 1 spot with a 2.61 weapon speed shooting Steady, Steady, Auto for 2-3 minutes.

During the first 20-25 seconds of the fight you are putting up mark, moving around, distracting shots whatever, you aren't in a true stand and shoot rotation yet. The next 1.5 minutes after that you are balls to the wall 1:1 which has been used as a viable shot rotation for a longtime.

When this controlled haste is over if you aren't over 2k DPS at that point you won't be over 2k DPS for the fight. You have maybe 2 minutes left in the fight at that point and all you need to do is sustain the DPS you have already achieved.

Now whether you do that w/ 2:1 or 1:1.5 it doesn't matter. Either way you are going to lose some of that DPS you created during the hasted state. The question is how much? On Anetheron for instance I posted something like 2135 DPS. I was slept towards the end of the fight when all of my haste was down where I was doing no DPS at all. Obviously that is going to effect your DPS since you aren't doing damage and even with that I still put up over 2100 DPS.

The point is the 2:1 or 1:1.5 for that short period of time should not cause your DPS to plummet. You can still expect to take a DST proc or two, quickshots if you are spec'd into that and the first guy in your drum order is going to be popping those again too.

Look at the shot chart for all of the fights in the logs. You don't see it read anything like 80 Steady Shots, 40 Auto Shots.

Drums makes a big difference and I can't stress enough getting your guild to jump on the bandwagon and go LW not only increases your personal DPS as a whole but the entire raid's DPS.

It is pretty simple - Every DPS class has trinkets and cooldowns they pop to do a large amount of DPS in X period of time. Any DPS class obviously will hit their peak damage capabilities when that happens. After that happens it just slowly diminishes the longer the fight drags on. The faster the raid boss dies, the better you look, your fellow DPS'rs look and ultimately your raid looks. Drums is an inexpensive way to push your raid to its DPS limits and the faster you can get your raid team on board with it, the faster you can benefit from it.


CSM-EH:

I think we are all trained and set to think everytime a special goes off an auto-shot goes off or we are doing it all completely wrong. The real raid world as you know is not the same as posting what you think it should be on a board or pounding arrows at Boom all day long. While I do not for a second want you to think that those tools are invaluable to the success of our class/spec they have to be taken for what they are. Theories and tests.

Somebody posted that if you use a 2:1 rotation or a 1:1.5 rotation pretty much in the end you shoot the same amount of shots in that period of time. You shoot X amount of total shots, you just take 2 different roads to get there.

In a situation for a hunter that is wearing PvP loot and Khara loot favoring steady shot may very well not be in their best interest. For a guy with optimal raid buffs and a 4 piece T6 bonus which is right out of the box 10% Steady damage increase, Steady shot is going to do more damage then auto to merit pushing back the auto shots and losing some so that they can gain more steady shot damage. Your gear is similar to mine and in our cases we both should agree that this makes the most sense.

Your spec I believe has imp arcane, and barrage. Your Steady is buffed from your T6, you buff your Arcane, you buff your Multi. This is fine, again there is more then one way to skin a cat.

I on the other hand choose to play to the strength of my Steady shot which means a 2:1 rotation and obviously keeping myself hasted to run a 1:1.

Considering that one of our raid leaders used to play a Survival hunter until he switched to his pally tank since we needed a dependable one more than another hunter, he appreciates the role of the survival hunter in raids and how much additional benefit the raid can get with having the survival hunter properly buffed.

In battles where the physical DPS tends to all be on the same target, I am almost always placed in the DPS group, which usually has:
1) Survival hunter (me)
2) Feral druid
3) Enhancement shaman (or other shaman with appropriate totems if enhancement shaman not on that night)
4) Rogue
5) Rogue (or BM hunter if only a single rogue)

Now its true that other classes could benefit from this group, like DPS warriors and BM hunters. However, we do not usually raid with any DPS warriors, since all of ours have been inactive for a while. I am given priority for the enhancement shaman over the BM hunters (and probably the DPS warriors) since:
- The Survival hunter being in this group not only improves his personal DPS, but improves the DPS of all physical melee on the target above what would be the difference to the raid for substituting another class for the survival hunter
- We often raid with 2 feral druids and several shaman (3-5), the remaining physical DPS is often placed in a group with the second druid and with a shaman that can still provide good buffs to them.

The result is that this group tends to lead our raid in DPS. On "single" target boss fights, the rogues usually lead the damage meters, with the shaman and me fighting it out for 3rd and 4th with maybe a BM hunter in the mix too. On AoE battles of course, mages and locks usually move up higher on the meters.

On fights where the physical DPS is spread out and the EW proc does not have as much benefit, the groups may be altered some for overall raid benefits for that fight. For instance, I am usually the only physical DPS on the striders in the Vashj fight so I can MD to the kiter, while the enhancement shaman is usually on the steps doing elementals with the BM Hunters, so for that fight, the BM hunters get grouped with the enhancement shaman during phase 2 and they are placed on the stairs to either side of the ehancement shaman to be in range for his totems. However, in phase 3, the BM hunters move to the bats and the enhancement shaman, the other physical DPS, including me, move to Vashj. Since the EW proc is very benefitial here in getting Vashj down faster and avoiding the worst of the bats, groups are switched so that I have the enhancement shaman again.

For me a typical non-hasted rotation with my current build is:

Auto - Steady - Arcane - Auto - Multi - KC - Auto - Steady - Arcane - Auto - Steady - Wild Card (Mend Pet, Mark, etc.).

I agree that when hasted, 1:1 is without a doubt the way to go, regardless of spec/talents.

I'll try and throw some WWS reports up for comparison after this week's clear.

Your guilds DPS in general on Teron is low so your numbers fall where they do. You can't expect to hit 1900+ DPS on Teron while the rest of the raid is 1500 dps or less.

As your guilds DPS increases you will see your personal DPS numbers go up as well.

Ok, just making sure I am not doing anything wrong.

Hey guys, for my alt hunter I am interested in trying the 0/20/41 build, but was wonder at what agility level/gear level I could do this relatively successfully. I have mostly pvp gear/gruul's/kara gear and a 3.00 speed bow (blue and crappy). And I can re-gem and re-enchant most of my gear for more agility, to about 500-550 agility.
armory= yarii on argent dawn.

Also, without the really nice haste trinkets and drums access I'd also like some advice on a shot rotation, from what I gather a 1:1.5 would be best? And is a spammable macro better than manual?

Yes, obviously if your raid has high DPS you are going to have higher personal DPS that goes hand in hand. However, you also cannot say if you are in a high DPS guild with drums you are going to produce huge numbers.

Drow's best performance on Rage is 12th which was obtained in one of the Hyjal logs I have posted here. This would mean there are 11 other guilds infront of us on that fight. A few days ago I looked at the fights from #1-#60 to compare my recent rage DPS to other top DPS guilds on that fight.

The only other hunter with comparable DPS to me is a BM hunter who I believe actually ran 10-20 more DPS then I did as Survival on the fight.

My point is if it is a matter of being in a top DPS guild and having 2-3 drums in the group means big numbers there would be more then 2 hunters in the top 60 Rage logs posting over 2100 dps. Now, I scrolled through those logs fairly quickly and may have missed somebody in there but if people are that concerned about it by all means look for yourself.

Being a Survival hunter means you get best group synergy w/ a Feral Druid and a Shaman. I expect to see those guys in my group. If some of you are in situations where you are Survival and being denied a shaman or druid then I feel for you and hope that you are able to show your raid leader the light and the importance of you having those 2 classes grouped with you.

But sure, I am not doing anything overly fancy or 'new age'. We shoot arrows and we have 3 shots to choose from in addition to our normal ones. I am favoring Steady shot moreso over the much talked about 1:1.5 rotation and I am just going to the extreme as far as trying to keep myself hasted as much as possible and this is not anything that is out of reach from anyone else reading these boards of doing.

I choose to do a 2:1 rotation over a 1:1.5 rotation on the slow times because after a few quivers of Timeless arrows on Boom I found that 2:1 for me does infact do more damage then 1:1.5, so I will stand by saying all hastes aside, 2:1 rotation is the best rotation available unless you spec specific something like 0/28/33.

I thought about when you told me to get 3/5 RWS because it was better then Master Tact. My only question to that is after thinking about it, why not just get 5/5 Imp Hawk and 2/2 FF. You lose 1% personal damage to give your pet 2% damage and you get Quick Shots over Barrage. This seems to be a better way to go since everyone pretty much agrees that being able to do a 1:1 rotation as a Survival hunter is a good thing. Why not set yourself up to do it more often by having Quick Shots? Just my thoughts.

I completely agree. I am BM for the past 3-4 months and i am going to switch back to Survival again. My thoughts exactly was to use Steady, Steady, Auto as much possible (as long as my mana allows it). As i am doing that as a BM at the moment (using a 3,0 speed bow, BT trinket and DST) with very good results. And yes, when haste is up (even IAotH which is not as big a haste as DST) it goes to a steady-auto.

I am currently examining WWS logs and my research is pointing out to MT instead of IAotH-Focused fire. And this because as a Survival, i don't expect the IAotH proc to be able to change my Steady, Steady, Auto into a 1-1 rotation and MT seems to proc often.

Feel free to share your views with me.

In my opinion you are, i may be wrong though. Why do you use Arcane Shot when it does less average damage than your Steady shot and at the same time it consumes more mana ? Additionally, that extra Steady shot that could replace that AS in your rotation is an extra chance for the BT trinket to proc.

Good, finally some feedback. I am not familiar with the 2:1, but from what youre telling me steady, steady, auto, steady, steady, auto and weave in multi when I can? Here is last nights Illidan kill:

Wow Web Stats

I am pretty pleased with that.

Edit: In the above WWS, my arcane avg is 845 while my steady is 705.

I'm really enjoying the conversation flying around right now its very interesting to see the different approaches.

However how could you accurately test a 1:1.5 vs. 2:1 on Boom when this would exclude the use of multi?

A 1:1.5 without multi is a weak 1:1.5 and you cannot use multi on boom tests because you will hit the bombs inflating your damage.

As far as all the IAoTH talent is concerned, most survival hunters do not take this talent because it results in a net loss in dps. Using a 1:1 rotation with 15% haste will not do as much damage as an unhasted 1:1.5 rotation. Then you must also consider the difficulty of switching rotations depending on random haste procs as well as the opportunity cost of those 5 talent points.