Your current trinkets are superior. Sell it.

Sell it. The math shows there are better blue trinkets and this one actually gets worse as your gear improves!

Okay Mucho Gold here I come

Tried this macro tonight but it did not seem to work. It equipped the bow but didnt use it. After pressing the macro repeatedly, it would use the bow but will never open the spikes bag and get the arrows out.

Apologies if any of my questions have already been answered, I could only tolerate so much searching.

Hit Rating "Cap"

Everything I've seen says to have anywhere from 8.6% to 9% +hit. The commonly accepted number is 136 hit rating, or 89 with 3/3 Surefooted.

I have Surefooted, so 89 hit rating should be my goal. Yet I have 42 hit rating and I haven't missed a single shot in weeks. Even against raid bosses. I have WWS reports that show it, and Recap always shows the same.

The only thing I see that might make me special is I have the max possible +weapon skill. (+5 bows Troll racial, and +4 more from Scaled Greaves of the Marksman.) I've read many places that weapon skill helps your hit rating, but nothing that suggests that it helps that dramatically.

So from what I've observed, either the accepted hit cap is completely wrong, or +weapon skill has been poorly tested. Anyone know what's up?

Multiple Survival Hunters

Rather noobish question, but I saw no confirmation anywhere. Can Expose Weakness stack from multiple Hunters?

Passive Haste Rating (Hyjal / BT gear)

Does it affect Steady Shot? I assume it would still be a 1.5s cast even if you stacked haste gear.

GCD "Haste"

I read somewhere that haste affects apply to the global cooldown. They were full of crap, right? That would really screw with my shot rotation theorycrafting.

The Magical Auto Shot "Cast"

So... the last 1/2 second of your Auto Shot is the "cast" on it. From what I understand, it's why a base attack speed under 2 seconds wouldn't work for a shot rotation -- this cast cannot begin until your 1.5s Steady Shot has completed. This is generally accepted as fact, correct?

Anyone know if this 0.5s cast time affected by haste procs at all?

Where can I learn more about the mechanics of this silly hidden cast?

Newer testing has shown 9% Hit needed to be more accurate than the previous 8.6%.
Weapon Skill has not been tested effectively yet, but it's very possible that it's much more effective at reducing +Hit needed than previously assumed.

Expose Weakness does not stack. If it did, you would see absolutely stupid amounts of DPS in a raid with only Survival Hunters as DPS.

All hastes affect Steady Shot.

The only haste known to affect global cooldown is Bloodlust/Heroism

The 0.5 second Auto Shot cast does not seem to be affected by any hastes.
Since Steady Shot is affected by hastes, you can go under 2.0 final speed without delaying your Auto Shots (although this requires a lot from latency/reaction time). With the amount of haste available, especially for BM Hunters, so fast a weapon (less than 2.0) would be very sub-optimal.

My WWS reports include bosses in SSC and such, so yes. And I definitely never miss. So I can only assume that +weapon skill is god mode.

Interesting. That makes stacking haste gear very decent for BM... whereas I thought it'd quickly make you start clipping.

It's like a rodeo. Add in quickshots and rapid fire and see if you can keep up without clipping! Aye haste gear for us which is why they are reducing the amount of haste per point to help control crazy stacking.

I have been a BM hunter since 2.1 was released. I continue to read my class forums daily on the off chance that some "gem" of a post will tech me something new. However my time seems better spent reading the EJ forums b/c the posts and replies are informative, helpful and mods keep trolls away!

I am satisfied with my gear and enchantments but until we are able to down Hydross (current boss we are working on) my upgradeable gear is limited (I am aware of my bracers). I use the standard SS/AS macro w/ KC placed in there so it does not active the 0.5s AS cool down. I am always fully consumed i.e., rank V agility scroll (rank V strength scroll for pet), well fed and flasked on all none farmed content. BW and Trinket on all cool downs and such. If I am performing as expected what advise could I possibly give to my guilds other raid hunters that consistently under perform? If I am under performing what can I possibly to to help move this guild forward?

Links to armory and WWS reports!

Armory Link

Best Hydross Attempt

Recent Lurker Kill

Recent Magtheridon Kill

Last Karazhan I attended

I would like to think that my determination to be the best in class is one the reasons I consistently out perform the other hunters. However I don't necessarily think that is the case. If you armory our guilds other raiding hunters you'll notice that there isn't much a gear difference between us. I have spilled my guts on our guild forums and have received little to no response regarding employing the macros and strategies I have posted, most of which are available on these forums. As a raid leader would you honestly invite hunters that refuse to learn how to maximize their DPS through the use of Macros? Aadan our MM hunter flat out refuses to use a pet (b/c he is MM and not newb BM) or macros b/c he is comfortable with his DPS. How would you approach a raider like this? Terranon has been somewhat receptive to my instruction yet I don't see it in his DPS. I have been posting WWS reports hoping our raid leader would light fires under all the under performers butts.

Yes. A macro is not needed to maximize DPS; in some cases it's a lot worse than manually timing it, and it's often not as easy to adapt depending on what happens (not always applicable).

This is stupid. BM or not, the pet adds a fair amount of DPS.

I don't have any comments on your gear, etc, but I did notice you only (or in almost every case) use Steady Shot instead of other specials.
Replacing Steady Shot with Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot will, in most cases, increase your DPS, due to them dealing higher damage (on average) than Steady Shot. Note that this comes at the cost of increased mana usage.

And greatly increased concentration, since you can't use a single spam macro. In my opinion, not worth it unless all of the other decisions you make during a fight are on autopilot.

Especially if the MM hunter has Focused Fire, which I think all should. A blanket 2% increase in damage is nice.

It doesn't necessarily have to. I've been experimenting with downranking my shots and found that as an MM Hunter with Improved Barrage, a Rank 1 Multi Shot is great damage for little mana. For 100 mana, you get your base damage plus an extra 12% damage from Barrage, plus an extra 12% crit chance from Improved Barrage.

In my case, that equates to a shot that's (on average) 733 damage and +12% chance to crit. For only 100 mana. By contrast, my Steady Shot is roughly 667 damage and no crit increase and costs 110 mana. Multishot is better.

I don't use Multishot in place of Steady Shot, but if you can work it in it's great damage for low mana.

Nevermind. User error and first time user of WWS. Noticed that WWS broke down the shot total as non-critted and critted shots not total shots. Have to add these together to get total.



Testing dps on Dr. Boom and noticed something peculiar about shot rotation. Arcane shot had half as many shots as multi-shot but they are in the shot rotation the same number of times. Summarized stats below with castsequence.

Auto Shot : 23 shots
Steady Shot : 24 shots
Multi-shot : 13 shots
Arcane Shot : 6 shots

/castsequence reset=3 Auto Shot,Steady Shot,Multi-shot,Auto Shot,Steady Shot, Auto Shot,Steady Shot,Arcane Shot,Auto Shot,Steady Shot

Why would I only have 6 arcane shots and not 12 or 13? And while I'm looking at this why wouldn't I have a 4 to 1 ratio between Auto/Steady vs. Multi/Arcane?

Thx for your help.

Hmrf, that's odd, someone on the TKA thread where I suggested that same macro said it worked fine. We didn't get to Kael this week, and I have a feeling we'll probably have Monday off due to the holiday, so it'll be another week before I can try directly.

now i understand shot rotation quite well, but my question comes in involving shot rotation
in terms of dps while under Beastal wrath and beast within would i be hurting or helping my over all dps if i used rapid fire trinkets/racials to push my 2.1 speed weapon to 1.05 or should i for go that and maintain my normal shot rotation while i have this damage bonus

I have been running with 359 Weapon Skill and sub 50 hit rating for months now without recording a miss (Surefooted as well).

First off, thanks a ton for these boards. I've recently started incorporating the info from here and I have seen a marked improvement in my dps. As shown in the WWS links below, I've gone up about 130dps on average without major gear upgrades, just based on incorporating the info from these forums.

Below I've linked two WWS logs from Kara: one before I incorporated what I've learned here, and one since. The only changes I made were going 41/20 BM, working on my shot rotation (more about this below), swapping cheap AP gems for cheap AGL gems, swapping trinks to get my HR up, and gathering mats to get the +30 HR scope crafted for me (only 100g, including tips, versus 200g+ on AH). What I want to demonstrate is that following the advice here can make a HUGE difference to performance, without needing uber-gear or spending tons of moolah.

Pre-EJ Kara: Wow Web Stats

Post-EJ Kara: Wow Web Stats

Before I ask my questions, a few premises:

1. I do not own Excel, I will not bootleg it (sigh), and Cheeky's spreadsheet is too big to upload to Google spreadsheet (I am not terribly computer savy, so maybe there is another way to access it).

2. I do not use my Scopion because I do not want to get used to that dps with the nerf coming.

3. My pally is good and will BoK my pet, and healers will try to heal my pet (though it is not priority). Sometimes I get a shadow priest, sometimes not. Same with a fury warrior and enhancement shammy. My guild are not jerks about it, its just that I'm not super vocal about it, because I don't completely understand all the synergies and I don't like asking for things I cannot justify.

4. My guild is fine about letting me roll on whatever loot will help me.

5. I have started using Quartz and Karthu's Timers.

6. I realize that my current HR is high, but I believe that my current gear will only allow me to switch from 145 to 123, or thereabouts. So, I am taking the over until i get the gear to allow me to be at 139ish with better trinkets.

7. I am saving up to switch Savagery to +agl on my polearm, and +agil chants on my other relevant gear.

8. I am using a pet ravager.

So, my requests are for help getting my dps up (duh, I suppose). Gear aside, I see my shot rotation as my problem. I am trying to get 1:1 ss:as, as I understand it is optimal, but, I can't seem to shake 3:2 as:ss. I also want to work in KC as efficiently as possible. Even with those mods I have not yet been able to figure out what my server lag(/latency?) is. I have tried numerous macros that I found here and around the web, and also one I got from the very nice hunter, Aethryl, on Dalaran.

Here are the two macros I tried to use in Kara last night:

#Showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/castrandom [nomodifier, target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()


#showtooltip steady shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=2 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/cast Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

I can not honestly say I understand how macros work. I'm as much of a computer noob as one can reasonably be these days. Regardless, I did see that KC would be up and not triggered by the macro. I also found myself clipping a lot, so I overcompensated by holding off on using the macro or ss more often than not.

The only thing I see that looks problematic with my setup (pre-shot rotation), is that my ranged attack speed is 1.99. I assume my server lag is not good, because my computer is not swank. I also know that I do not have the world's greatest reaction time. My suspicion is that I am failing to properly time my ss within the 1.99 second window I have on AS (should I add 0.5 to that?).

I thought that a macro would continue casting ss, as, and kc in the proper order without my needing to click the button for each new sequence. I suspect I am wrong about this now. I do not understand how a macro helps if I still have to time using my macro just like I would have to time manually clicking my ss.

I am going to try the following macro when we finish Kara tonight:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast [target=pet, dead]; [pet] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2/target/combat Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()

I hope this helps me. Really, compared to my raid I am doing well, all thanks to you guys here at EJ. I finally feel justified in switching my raid main from my pally to my hunter. I know that my dps will go up naturally as I get better gear (I'm working on getting to 375 LW for the DragonScale chest unless I get the purple chest from Kara first). I have imporved a lot, but I want to keep improving.

In case my profile info to the left does not have my toon's Armory link (computer noob=me), here it is:

The Armory

So, to summarize my requests for help:

1. How can I get my shot rotation to 1:1 as:ss?

2. Can I do anything better with macros?

3. Is my ranged attack speed too fast?

4. Is there anything else I'm missing?

Thanks again to all you great EJ posters!

The best way to test these macros is the mob that can not die in Blasted lands in the area around Dreadmaul Hold. A lot of people are binding this macro on their scroll mouse button and just spam it by rolling the wheel.

My opinion is that you can do better without macros, you just have to test a lot your rotations and merge your latency/fps into them.

And i have also a question, are the buffs modifiers been calculating when you start casting a shot or when it goes off your weapon? For example, if i enable a trinket, start casting an aimed shot and before the aimed shot is fired the bonus of the trinket is expired, do i get the bonus on the shot or not?

Open Office will work. And it's free.

I know this isn't your question, but I seem to remember Blessing of Might being better than Blessing of Kings (if you can only get one) for pets.

Unless you're using a gun there shouldn't be any need tinkering too much with your current Hit Rating (if it's at 145).
Previously we used 8.6% as the needed amount of +Hit to never miss, but newer testing has put this value at 9% instead, equivalent to 142 Hit Rating.


I remember testing this with stuff like Furious Howl and similar things. I believe shot damage is calculated as you fire (cast finishes).

This is true, might is an absolute buff while kings is proportional. Because your pet won't have massively high stat levels the benefit of kings is less than that of might.

just wondering what an average amount of armour to add to bosses for cheeky's spreadsheet would be? It seems kinda odd to just plug in a number that makes my damage match ingame autoshots average.

is there a fixed number or is that the only way to figure it out?

This would be better suited in the spreadsheet thread.
I'm working on getting armor mitigation values for bosses, there's no other resource for this, as far as I know.