Not that I've given this too much thought since I find it a pretty unlikely scenario, but letting gcd be affected by haste would be a fairly magical fix that solved most our problems. Then our only problem would actually be the .5 second cast and theoretical human response time in button-mashing.


I am not a big fan of this sort of response but here goes: There are other threads on this forum that deal with optimal castsequence macros. In fact there are allready three very extensive hunter-threads active at the moment. (hunting hunters in public, BM after 2.1, and the hunter mechanic after 2.0/tbc threads) Adding a fourth thread with similar discussion about optimal cast sequences serves no real purpose other than making it even harder to find the information and making the good members of this forum repeat their own work for newcomers every second week.




In short: no, this is wrong, please read on.

The way I model this, though I haven't seen much discussion on it and haven't really gotten it confirmed by anyone yet. Hopefully someone can now:

Your bow has a post-haste attack speed of S.
This gives your auto attack a cooldown C, of S minus .5 seconds.
And as always you have a cast time of .5 seconds on the actual auto shot.

Given S=2.1, C will be 1.6
0s Auto shot is fired
0s+C=1.6s Your auto shot cooldown is finished.
0s+C=1.6s Auto shot is automatically initiated and cast time started without any action required by the user.
C+0.5s=2.1s Auto shot fires and you start again.

It is in the period C that you will want to finish all and any special actions. Any action that stretches out of the C or any action taken between C<t<C+0.5 will halt or refuse your auto shot cast from taking place. Your auto shot cooldown will still be ready though, and it will be initiated on the first available space of time.

So if you fire ss at 0.1s and it has a cast time of 1.2s it will finish at 1.3 and you might even manage an arcane before the 1.6 mark. If all actions are finished before 1.6 and the character is free to perform his auto shot at that time, he will automatically do so and finish it by 2.1 if not haltered in some way. If you however decide to use a KC somewhere in between 1.6 and 2.1 this will terminate the cast time of the auto shot and it will reinitiate at the time the KC is finished. The cooldown will still be ready so all you really need is to allow the 0.5 second cast of the auto shot to restart the cycle.


To reiterate, because I usually lose my way when trying to explain something.
If your auto shot is toggled on it will automatically be performed by your client without any needed action at any time the cooldown is ready. This requires 0.5 seconds of you not performing ANY other action within this period. As soon as the auto shot is fired, this auto shot will be on cooldown for a period of [ "attack speed" - "0.5 seconds"]. This cooldown is the time between shots where you want all your other actions to take place. As soon as this cooldown is done you want your character to be free to perform his auto shot and restart the cycle.


PS. Now go grab yourself some stacked haste to give yourself a 0.95 attack speed and try to even hit an arcane every six seconds within that 0.45 second cooldown period without pushing back your auto shot with real live latency of at least 80ms and some possible minor fps issues. Even that gets fairly impossible.

PPS. Am I misunderstanding the phrase clipping? I always thought that was when you denied the next auto shot of actually firing at all, as in starting the next ss too soon. Meaning you lost an auto in your cycle. Whilst pushing your auto referred to being a tad slow on your ss so that your auto shot was performed some tenths of a second later than it should be.

When I use what I think is an essentially identical, KC invariably fires between the steady and autoshots, thereby delaying autoshot slightly.

Um, what's the difference? The only variable is how much you delay your next autoshot by. If you delay it by a few tenths of a second, you lose a few percent of autoshot DPS. If you really screw things up, you can delay it by a second, or two, or even more, and thus completely lose your autoshot DPS.

Both of these are clipping.

Double post

Nice job on the graphs. While some issues have been brought up about some of the finer details, I think that a visual representation is a great starting place for explaining the mythical 'shot rotation' to outsiders and newer hunters. Once all the details are ironed out, it will be a nice resource.

I have also been trying to simulate some of the shot rotation theory described in this and the other popular hunter threads, but I am having trouble finding a combat log with timestamps that show beyond seconds into milliseconds or the like. Occasionally I see posts in the EJ threads that cite a very detailed combat log. I have been using the mod Prat, but I can't figure out a way to configure the coding for the timestamp configuration to allow me to do this. Maybe it requires a different mod that I don't know about...in which case I would love to learn the secret handshake and join the club

There is just so much information about hidden cooldowns, haste effects, KC timing, etc that it would be nice to parse a combat log and see what, and more importantly when, everything is actually happening.

Combat logging:
Ingame, type /combatlog

The easiest way that I've found to think about auto shot:

Firing an auto shot has a 0.5s cast time.

The shot has a weapon speed - 0.5s cool down.

Activating auto shot sets the ability on auto cast.

It is unaffected by the global cool.

Any ability or movement will interrupt the casting of the shot.

That is exactly how I model it in the DPS spreadsheet. Everything else falls into place once you treat it that way.

I wonder if there reaches a point where haste effects can get a very fast weapon (High Warlord Recurve, 1.6s) to the point where the 0.5s cast time is the limiting factor. I'm not sure we can stack the ~300+% haste we'd need to do that, but it would answer a lot of questions if we could.

http://forums.tkasomething.com/viewt...er=asc&start=0
they discussed it over at TKA and some thought they could get to 0.46 seconds with the right weapon ... but that's only if the following things all stack (which hasn't been tested as far as I know.

with my own setup I've got 5/5 Serpents Swiftness, 15% Quiver and Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix
which gives an attack speed of 2.10 ... I thought 2.20 would give that little bit of lagtime but would still always be a 'safe' or clean rotation.

But 2.2 was just an arbitrary number - really I was wondering if I could use a decimal in reset=x or if it had to be a whole number.

Suppose I could go find out for myself and tell you

I'm driving the following Rotation with 5/5 imp. Arcane Shot and Sunfury. 0/39/22 - 12% AP-spec, 2,52 attackspeed, 2240 AP at 25% crit.
Auto = Autoshot
Ar = arcane shot
Mu = Multishot
St = steady shot
Kc = Kill Command
St-Auto-mu+ar+Auto-St-Auto-St-Auto-St+Ar+Auto-St-Auto

Illustraded:


..........Auto...........................Auto.............................Auto....... .................Auto
-------------------------..-------------------------..-------------------------..-------------------------
---------------..Kc.........---------------.-----Kc--..---------------....Kc........---------------..Kc
.......St...............................St...........Mu...Ar.........St.............. ..................St

...............Auto
...-------------------------
.---------------.--
..........St........Ar

Kill Command! can be spammed during the GCD betwen Multi and Arcane and after each Steady. Imho the maximum of Possible shots in 10 seconds.
It's slightly hard to keep this Rotation and you NEED a Shadowpriest to substain this high-dps-Rotation even with Felmana Potions but since now, I couldn't find an other Rotation with this ammount of possible Dps.

Anyone found an other possibility of max shots/minute?

Not a rookie mistake at all. My steady often out damages my arcane and I don't use it unless I'm on the move.

Something to consider though:

Does your bow speed leave so much dead time you are losing a huge amount of dps to dead time. If so you need to alter your rotations so you are firing 1.5 specials per auto as shown earlier in this thread.

If not you stand very little to gain from adding arcane. Possible 10 dps or so for a large increase in mana usage.

Well i've got sunfury atm... meaning... well.. basically 0.6 seconds dead time.. (give or take.. i aint a math genius) meaning... 1.2 Seconds in total with 2 steady/auto's... but the auto's have 0.5 sec cast time and apparently.. they need this.. so that makes it 0.1 deadtime per steady/autoshoot?

Or am i getting this completly wrong?

Sunfury with quiver and SS fires at 2.1

Steady with quiver and SS fires at 1.08

This means you could do the following:

0.0 cast steady (global cool tic)
1.1 steady fires
1.5 arcane fires (global cool tic)
1.6 auto begins hidden cast
2.1 auto fires
3.0 cast steady (global cool tic)
4.1 steady fires
4.1 auto begins hidden cast
4.6 auto fires (delayed by 0.4 seconds)

Repeat this slotting specials in as possible. You will delay every second or third auto shot by about 0.4 seconds but overall it will net you a pretty significant bump in dps.

It is pretty intuitive to understand, delay every other auto shot by 0.4 seconds, or suffer with 0.6 seconds of dead time.

It works on paper (you could also put KC in instead of a special if it's up) but such a tight rotation would suffer from reaction time and lag.

Actually if you notice there are only a couple places where you have to cast immediately after another action.

Arcane 0.4 seconds after steady
Steady 0.9 seconds after auto

If you can't manage those timing you are lost anyway.

Edit 1: Oh and at the loop of the rotation a steady as soon after an auto shot as possible, hardly an exception to hunter rotations. And not any more dependent on tight timings than any other theoretical rotation.

Edit 2: Also most of those places are where you are waiting on the global cool so button mashing will suffice.

I hate to sound like a noob on this my first post to this fantastic forum, but here it goes: When using the macros posted in this thread, when do i actually hit the macro button?

Do I (after casting hunter's mark and sending in pet) hit the macro button, wait for the steady shot followed by auto shot then hit the macro again immediatly following the autoshot? or do i just spam the macro button?

[edit] I agree with the next poster ... very good point. I'm sure there's a macro thread elsewhere
will look for an option to delete

I'd like to steer this thread away from posting more and more macros. By and large using macros will only help you become lazy and not improve as a player; as can be seen, there are people who clearly aren't grasping the mechanics of the rotation and rely on macros to do the work for them. I think that kind of situation ultimately won't lead to a better player, so can we get back on the topic of shot rotations?

[edit] I realize this sounds somewhat condescending, and that's not my aim, but I honestly don't think relying on macros is a good way to become a better player.

I've played my hunter for a long time, almost 2 years now, and I've never before tried a shot rotation macro, all my macro tinkering before has been things like a macro to yell "LEEEEROY JEENKINS" when my pet charges in. (funny the first 3 or 4 times)

The reason I asked about this macro in particular was not to try and derail what I think is a great and very informative thread, but rather because I recently got transfered to Azerbaijan and I now constantly play with at best 700ms lag and at worst 1800+. I therefore have notice a substantial drop in my dps becuase of my inability to timely get my shot rotation down. I therefore thought a macro might help circumvent some of the lag issues, and it seems to be working from my preliminary tests. My problem is I don't know the simple issue of when I am supposed to mash the macro button. I agree however with the general rule that people often over use macros and thereby "botize" the game at the expense of skill. I'm not trying to promote that mindset. I'm just looking for a simple answer to my question.

Keep in mind that without resorting to stopcasting, a shot sequence macro will magnify your latency problems. Castsequence relies on server verification that a spell has cast, meaning you are now waiting for both the send (start casting) and return (finish casting) messages before the macro can advance, effectively doubling your latency. Someone more knowledgeable than I may be able to help you more, but my gut says that using a cast sequence macro (again, without resorting to stopcasting, which will interrupt your auto cast time) will only make things worse.

It really depends how variable the latency is.

If it fluctuates as wildly as he says then he wouldn't be able to predictably cast steady shot early and counteract his latency. If you tried you would lose a ton of auto shots. He would have to wait for visual cues from the UI, react to those and press buttons. So you still end up with latency both ways and reaction time.

A cast sequence macro will make your life easier if your latency isn't just high, but also highly variable. It probably wont increase your DPS much if any though.