What is Shot Rotation?

In its simplest terms Shot Rotation is the order in which you choose to fire your special shots. Many hunters in wow start off as ‘mad button mashers’ hitting whatever button doesn’t have a ‘little spinney clock thing’ on top of it.

What that ‘young hunter’ doesn’t understand is the damage they do can be greatly increased by just hitting the buttons in a different order.

Scope

This guide is intended to give a visual representation of the damage done by a hunter over time with the purpose of helping the level 70 hunter decide how to play with their current setup and improve their 'endgame'.

The Concepts

There are some building blocks that you need to understand before you can really get into thinking about shot rotation.

Cooldown: this is one you should be used to already, this is the time between casting any individual ability and casting that same ability again.

Global Cooldown: also known as GCD. This is the minimum time between casting one spell and any other spell.

DPS: Damage Per Second – hopefully self explanatory, your DPS is the amount of damage you do to an enemy in 1 second of time.

DPM: Damage Per Mana – this one is a more advanced concept, not because it is difficult to understand but because you’ve got to crack out a calculator to figure it out. DPM can also be thought of as efficiency.

DPM is important when dealing with any fight that has the potential to use all of your mana. Once you run out of mana, your DPS drops significantly.

Visually, the shots look like this



We’re going to skip the DPM of Aimed shot for now (you’ll see why later on) for now lets look at a few calculations. Assuming a hunter has 2000 Attack Power

First looking at the Serpent Sting, at maximum rank it does 660 Damage over 15 seconds, for 275 mana. The effective DPS of your Serpent Sting is 44. The DPM: 2.4.

Second we have Arcane Shot, (15% of Attack Power + 273) for 230 Mana. More difficult to calculate the DPS of the shot as it is instant … in this case I will calculate it based on the GCD it triggers (1.5s). The effective DPS of your arcane shot (with 2000 AP) is 382 the DPM: 2.49.

Thirdly, we’ll look at Steady Shot, (20% of Attack Power + 150 + Normalized Weapon Damage) for 110 Mana with a 1.5 second cast time and no ability cool down time. This shot improves based on the Bow you have & on a reasonably obtainable weapon like Valanos you have a an effective DPS of 411 with a DPM score of 5.60.

Serpent Sting: 44 DPS 2.4 DPM
Arcane Shot: 382 DPS 2.49 DPM
Steady Shot: 411 DPS 5.60 DPM

Finally looking at auto shot we know that it does weapon damage plus attack power plus arrow power (referred to as Normalized Weapon DPS) but since it costs NO it is your most efficient attack. The DPM is INFINITE.

Auto Shot: Normalized Weapon DPS *INFINITE* DPM

There are of course all the other ones to worry about but it’s more effort than we need … 2 things to take away from this

#1 – For doing Damage your Auto Shot is the most efficient
#2 – For doing damage Serpent Sting is your least valuable shot
#3 – For doing damage Steady Shot is your MOST valuable special shot.

So what are we ‘Shooting For’?



The ideal shot rotation would probably look something like the above picture over time you would shoot things in the following order.

Steady / Arcane / Auto / Steady / Kill Command (if available) / Auto Steady / Multi (if no Crowd Control)

[repeat]

There are a number of things that can go wrong with ‘the perfect shot rotation’ some of the biggest variables can’t really be controlled for. Human Reaction time & Lag can prevent you from getting it exactly right. As long as you know what you’re *TRYING FOR* you’re going to be miles ahead of the competition.

So what about the other guys?

The above might seem obvious when you’re look at it but compare to what happens if you pick the same set of shots in a different order.



One Hunter told me he always liked to fire his instant shots first … they just feel faster so they’ve got to be better … *BUT* look at the space between Auto Shots. Any time the Auto Shot is not counting up is a waste of time on your most efficient shot.

The (sort of) Myth of a Fast Weapon



If you have a bad rotation you’re going to be doing less than your optimal damage. A slower weapon is more forgiving of bad rotation, a slower weapon is more forgiving of LAG and Human Reaction Time but isn’t necessarily *better*



Recall that the MOST efficient shot you have is Auto Shot. The second most efficient shot is Steady…

Imagine if your weapon & talents allowed you to ONLY use the two best shots that exist for a hunter.

You’d be working with the best possible damage per mana … which means you’ll still be shooting when others are out of mana. The reality of a fast bow speed (or so it would seem) is that if you adjust the shot rotation you can do the same or even more damage over the longer term.



One trap you can fall into with all that time before the Auto Shot goes off is starting a new Steady Shot too early… this is bad



Although aimed shot does a good amount of damage, it resets the Auto Shot timer.

In the time you are casting ONE Aimed Shot you could have cast

1. Auto Shot
2. Steady Shot
3. Arcane Shot

And you’d be most of the way through casting another Steady and Auto Shot

Essentially, shooting *ONE* aimed shot costs about the same as shooting almost *FIVE* other shots .. though it only does the damage of about 2. It does however retain its value for when you are initiating combat with a misdirect or whatever people to with it in PVP.

Summary
At the end of it all, Shot Rotation comes down to 2 things

#1 – Choosing the Most valuable shot you currently have available
#2 – Minimizing time spent not ‘casting’

If you’ve got a slow attack speed – you will have enough time to safely fit a Second Special into every second or third set of shots… that is less efficient in terms of mana consumption but does a lot of damage sooner.



If you’ve got a fast attack speed you’re going to leave out … well … basically everything but Steady Shot



If you count the number of ‘Damage Pointers’ you’ll see that the same number of attacks happens in each so both wind up being perfectly valid choices for shot rotation … but it does depend greatly on the gear that you actually have.

Back to Damage Per Mana (Rotation Cost)

If we look at the two ‘good’ rotations we’ve got one final concern which is the final cost.

Rotation 1 (Slow) =
Steady / Arcane / Steady / Steady / Multi (or Arcane with Improved Arcane Shot)
Which in Mana Cost is =
110 + 230 + 110 + 110 + 275 = 835

Rotation 2 (Fast) =
Steady / Auto / Steady / Auto / Steady / Auto / Steady / Auto
110 + 110 + 110 + 110 = 440

In the end we have the Marksman’s (Slow) Shot Rotation hitting 9 times in about 10 seconds for the cost of 835 mana. In that same amount of time, the BM (fast rotation) hunter is hitting 9 times for the cost of 440 Mana. There are a number of talent choices that alter this Efficiency for example would reduce the cost of the slow rotation to about 750, many Survival Talents reduce the cost of this by some factor that I’ve not actually worked out (If I were to estimate it would reduce the cost by about 40% of your crit rating = 10% with 40% crit).
Rotation Cost ... possibly available in future.

Conclusions

In terms of Damage Per Mana - Steady Shot is the best one available to us. In terms of Damage per second Steady Shot comes out ahead when measuring arcane against the Global Cooldown is causes (though there is a case for Arcane shot if there is "free time" available for it on a slower weapon.)

It seems that the new ideal shot rotation would be based on an Auto Shot speed that allowed a hunter to do a constant rotaion of *JUST* auto and steady ... with minimal time in place to account for Lag and Autoshot Hidden cast time (0.5 s).

DOH! Did I leave that in? Someone else on another forum had already corrected me and I'd reworked the calculations based on it.

It seems I accidentally left mention of the arrows in the bit about describing the value of steady shot.

The Damage Per Mana is roughly correct for both Arcane Shot and Steady Shot

Haste effects on the cast time of Steady Shot do not effect Global Cooldown so do not actually improve SS

Aimed shot has been discounted because it resets autoshot timer and hasting it shouldn't effect that

True, however haste effects cause the half second lead team between the end of a steady shot cast and the time it takes an autoshot to fire to fall partially inside the GCD. This makes it possible to fit more auto/steadys into the same period of time, regardless of the GCD

This isn't strictly true, because there are 2 actions (that I can think of) which can take place while under GCD but not casting anything: Kill Command, and Autoshot.

It absolutely affects rotation. My current steady-auto rotation wouldn't be possible without it.

My bow speed with passive haste effects is 1.88. If haste didn't affect steady shot the fastest I could cast would be:
0.0 Start Steady
1.5 finish Steady
2.0 finish Auto (0.5s delay after steady)

Because haste DOES affect steady it's something more like:
0.0 start steady
1.1 finish steady
1.88 finish auto (can't fire faster than autoshot timer)

That definitely improves my shot rotation. (In practice I end up with about a 1.92 shot rotation due to latency, but that's still faster than the 2.0 I'd have if steady shot didn't get affected by haste)


Another thing:
KC doesn't trigger global cooldown but Autoshot can't happen within 0.5s after a KC (it interrupts the 0.5s autoshot cast)
So the autoshot timer in your beastmaster example would be a bit longer (depending on latency, dead time, etc) when you use KC than when you don't.

Let's say a 1.8 speed weapon (after 15% quiver).
As you do it:
0.0 Steady Shot start
1.5 Steady Shot fire (0.5 Auto Shot cast start) + Global Cooldown cleared
2.0 Auto Shot fire (delayed 0.2 seconds -- 11% of Auto Shot time)

With haste applied to Steady Shot:
0.0 Steady Shot start
1.3 Steady Shot fire (0.5 Auto Shot cast start)
1.5 Global Cooldown cleared
1.8 Auto Shot fire (not delayed)

Of course, what you're missing the most, I feel, is something accounting for lag, which might be much more important for these timing things. Hastes, however, do affect things.

While I'm not going to debate the mechanics issues that others have brought up, I'm kind of glad someone has put together graphical timelines. While I would say most if not all of the contributors to hunter threads on this board visualize it abstractly, trying to convey that abstract information to the hunter masses is a bit of a headache. Once the mechanics are ironed out, it would be very nice to put together a good set of graphical guides that would benefit the masses.

That's how I do my KC's - auto->kc->steady->auto. Just maintain that while managing cooldowns/trinkets/etc.

Commendable work here, I've never played a hunter past 20 and I can fully understand this concept thanks to the diagrams. Very nice. =)

I really have to second how useful this is in explaining things to our hunters who don't theorycraft very well (or at all).

Serpent Sting can be counted just like Arcane Shot, except with a 15 second cooldown. If that is the case, Serpent sting does more damage per 1.5 seconds than Arcane shot, 440DPS, which is also higher than Steady Shot.

Of course that depends on having an open debuff slot, but for the time it takes to cast, Serpent Sting is better than Arcane Shot.