should the fact that steady shot does extra dmg to dazed targets make us put concussive shot in our macros? thoughts?

No.

1: concussive costs more mana than steadyshot
2: it costs an equal amount of time (roughly)
3: it adds about half the damage of a steadyshot

and most importantly: anytime where dps actually matters whatever you're shooting is immune to daze effects.

I was looking on Cheeky's spreadsheetes and it is telling me that [Shivering Felspine] with 35 agility enchant and a 10 agility gem in there is better then [Dagger of Bad Mojo] X 2 with 20 agility enchants on both, for survival spec. I was seeking advice on if this was true or not. If somone could please tell me what they think it would be great. I was told haste / armor ignore were not calculated in on Cheekys Spreadsheets.

Hey guys, I just started a hunter and was wondering what is the best choice of gems for BM? Pure agility, attack power, combo gems? Also, does the melee hit cap apply to Hunters also? I tried searching through the forums, but mostly all I find about gem choice is directed to Survival hunters :\

As BM

Priority 1: Get to hit cap
Priority 2: Agi

That's more or less it... if you find yourself severely lacking crit you could gem for that instead but generally these are what you put into each colour socket.

Yellow: Hit rating until you reach hit cap (either straight hit gems or hit/agi gems)... afterwards, put in crit gems if you want the socket bonus or agi gems if the bonus isn't worth it (You're looking for the greatest overall stat gain here)
Red: Agi... pretty simple (can put in an agi/hit gem here if you're still missing hit rating)
Blue: Agi/stam gems if you a) want the socket bonus (similar to above) or b) if you need to meet a meta gem requirement. Put in straight agi gems otherwise.

I would assume it would be due to the fact that you haven't reached the Haste Cap and/or you don't have many Armor Ignore effects on the mob you're modelling with (Sunder, FF, CoR).

Remember to plug in your specific Latency when you do your Shot Rotation and to doublecheck the Buffs tab.

Cheeky's does calculate ArP, if not then I have to wonder why it adviced me to get a few certain ArP items where the kicker was the ArP and not the other stuff.

In any case the Felspine is better for a few reasons. It has more Agi 97 vs 82, that is a bonus for Surv obviously. But it also has a fairly large margin on AP. 217 vs 162. So in the end the 280 ArP needs to overcome not only 15 Agi and 55 AP, but also 52 Haste. Seems like an impossible job really. Unless you would end up at 0 armor at full benefit from the daggers I have heavy doubts that any situation can make the daggers worth more. The Felspine is just so perfectly done and at such a high itemlevel.

Try "HAEP" instead. There's a decent resource that I used to use over at HAEP: Homepage, but you may want to try tweaking the values it uses a little. Personally I think it vastly overvalues MP5.

Put your gear into the spreadsheet, set up your rotations/buffs/pet, hit 'calc attributes' on the gear page, then go to the settings and results tab. In the top right corner there is a table which shows the DPS gain from adding 1 of each DPS stat based on your current gear.

Aftder taking a quick look at it, I would have to recommend against using it. The ratings it uses are horrible. Even if you define your own ratings, it only accepts whole numbers, so it will be very inaccurate, and it doesn't even have an option for armor penetration, so many BT/Sunwell/Badge gear will be underrated by quite a bit.

If you want to plug the values into a site, lootrank and wowhead are superior options. Or, you could just use the gear planner implemented in Cheeky's spreadsheet.

I'm seeking a bit of advice. I have 2 [Breeching Comet] that i'm holding on to in the bank and i don't really know what to do with them. I'm using [Halberd of Desolation] as my primary weapon but wanted to use the 2 1h for mana purpuses with Aspec of the Viper. Should i socket with +int gems and put 30 int enchant on them or go with agi and only use dual mana oils? I know if i go with intellect on them i can use the extra mana pool at the biginning of a fight and switch to my 2h after i spend it. Is the loss in dps neglectable compared to putting Agi enchants?

Obellix,

You're on the right track as far as dual wielding goes. It has many advantages. It's oftena straight DPS upgrade because of superior weapons, and the double weapon oils is just the cherry on top. However, I would suggest farming ZA until you have two [Dagger of Bad Mojo] and sticking 20 agi on them. This is assuming you can afford the hit loss.

I would advise against int enchants. The larger mana pool just doesn't last long enough and the 40 agi loss is a big hit to your DPS.

I carry a couple of "int" weapons on me for when ever I need to put up AotV. I want to regen mana as quickly as possible, and the "int" weapons will do that quicker than your agility weapons. I have even set up a macro to do the switch, so when I put up viper, it equips my int weapons and when I have regen'ed enough mana, I go back to hawk and it equips my agility weapons.

In some situations I will even put mana oil on my int weapons that I dont have equiped because I know I'll be switching and want to regen my mana as quickly as possible. I sometimes burn through alot of mana oils, like on Council it is a long fight, I have mana oils on both my normal weapons and both my "viper" weapons, as we don't usually have ret pally in the raid, and even chugging fel mana pots I run out.

It is not a bad idea at all to have a couple int weapons for certain situations, as long as you also have good normal weapons to use. The [Breeching Comet]with agil in them/on them is better than [Halberd of Desolation] if you dont need the hit.

I upgraded my [Netherbane] and [Claw of Molten Fury] and put int on those weapons for when I need to put up viper. Works out well in those situations.

If you're looking for int/viper weapons, you're better off putting 30 int on breeching comets and putting int gems in the pair.

Halberd's ilvl is so much higher than mgt items that it's hard to justify the downgrade. If you socket 2x10 agi, the difference between the two is 10 agi (5 from gems, 5 from enchants) vs 10 ap 35 hit and 27 stam. So if you need none of the hit, it's a slight upgrade in dps with a loss in survivability. HOWEVER, it's probably a better idea to trash some hit gems and end up benefiting from the 2h.

While 2x mana oils is nice, I can hardly think of a time where the extra 14mp5 was *that* important. Two int weapons in viper is just about enough to sustain mana infinitely for me =\

Thank you all for the quick replies. Seeing i'm not using the Comets i thought i'd put them to good use and basicly switch to them with a macro when i'm low on mana and switching to viper until i can take another mana pot. Our guild is 3/5 MH and 3/9 BT as far as progression goes and i know there are a few mana intensive fight so i wanted to get ready. Until i get the daggers from ZA i think i'll try it out and see what kind of mileage i get. Thanks again for your input.

I'm having trouble setting up the macro to switch weapons with viper. It works but somehow i have to click it twice for both weapons to equip. Is that normal or am i doing something wrong? So far i tried with /use /equip and /equipslot but nothing really works as i thought it would. Care to post your macro Ezumaki?

#showtooltip Aspect of the Viper
/equip Breeching Comet
/equip Breeching Comet
/cast Aspect of the Viper

Should work on paper; I'm in a BG at the moment but I'll try it when I get out, though I only have one Breeching Comet...I'll use mah skinning knife for the other hand :>.



Also, since I'm posting, I'd love any critics you guys could give me. I recently regemmed my Belt / Legs and looking for other ways I could improve. I know my obvious upgrades are [Berserker's Call][Tsunami Talisman], etc. I'm working on my vials / ZA stuff.

Oh, that's what I meant with regemming, I added all that I guess the Armory just didn't update.

Yeah I think my macro it would be weirded out by the fact that it would assume you mean one Breeching Comet and not realize you have two. Your best bet (if you find that macro functionality annoying) would be to download Outfitter and set an "Aspect of the Viper" outfit up with your two Breeching Comet's on. That way whenever you switch to AotV it will equip them.

Yeah just checked; my gems haven't updated. I have +5agi / +5hit in the yellow sockets and +5 agi / +7 sta in the blue sockets. Also before the Steadying Bracers I was using Vindicator's :\. Yeah...

Would anyone mind taking a look at this:

WWS Loading...

And telling me how he is performing? We were doing some somewhat joke sunwell attempts today since like 5 core raiders didn't log in, but I'd still like to see if I can't point to some pointers for the newer guys. I know he's doing well on the meter, but his DPS is lower on quite a few attempts.. I just linked the longest attempt for reference. Here is his armory, also - The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm just going to throw this out here, because many people use Cheeky's spreadsheet. While it's a great piece of work, do NOT blindly use it to attempt to compare items with haste to items without haste. Cheeky has done his best to make the haste stat work, but it's a monumental task. I bet he is looking forward to 3.0 when it will be possible to model haste accurately.

The thing with haste is, it's value is dependant on so many factors. Not only your existing weapon speed, but also your existing haste rating; the latency you play with; the fps you play with; the amount of drummers in your party; if you have a DST and/or ImpAotH; the type of rotation you perform; the method you perform it in, either macro or manual; the frequency of macro inputs you use if you use a macro; the type of macro if you use a macro, etc.

The best way to figure out how well haste is for you, is to do a test in a raid or at Dr Boom. Equip the amount of haste you want to test, and record your shots for x-minutes under a controlled environment. Devise a standard system or timer. Then equip the alternate amount of haste, and record your shots for x-minutes also. DST/IAOTH procs may alter these results, so make sure to either unequip these or make room for them via a large test pool in an attempt to average the effects out, or at the very least compare to proc rates in each test to try to normalise the results. Make your own spreadsheet which lists your average shot damage (including crits/misses) with full raid buffs and the gear you would be using at the level of haste you are testing. This can be found using Cheeky's spreadsheet. Use these values with the amount of shots you performed in the Dr Boom test to find out the real average dps from each set you tested, one set which included the haste item, one set that did not.

Yes it's a drawn out system, but it's really the only accurate way in my opinion. Having said that, I only did this once. It was during my initial testing of /cast/cast 2:1 rotation macro vs 1.1:5 manual for Survival dps, with various haste levels. It was well worth the effort, but I dont go through the whole process any more as most item choices are quite obvious upgrades/downgrades. The spec/rotation/playstyle comparison was significant enough to go to the effort however.

I'm not speaking on behalf of Cheeky here, but I think he would agree with me when I say that using his spreadsheet to value haste items without using some human thought and common sense would be foolish.

I cant really find an answer for this so i thought i'd post it in here and hopefully not get flamed to death (official forum ftl).



Basically the problem I keep running into is that my performance as a hunter seems to vary by a VERY large degree between weeks (with the same raid setup).

What i've noticed from doing test runs on dr boom (mobile atm, cant link) is that for every 200 shots that i fire (using any rotation type) anywhere between 10-60 shots just disappear into nowhere... i can do a simple 1:1 rotaion and only have my combat log record 150 shots


Has anyone run into anything like this in the past? I'm getting rather tired of doing 1000dps and finishing 3-4th on a boss then the next week (with the same raid/group makeup) doing 1400dps and smashing the hell out of everyone, its just leaving me frustrated...




edit: the more i look through other peoples results the more it starts to disturb me... while i might feature rather high in most raids there seem to be a pile of hunters out there with gear thats the same as mine (or worse) who are doing 500+ dps more than i am with much more consistency, living in aus cant be gimping me that much which only leads me to believe its my fault...

I just simply use /equip and the weapon i'm using. It works perfectly fine if i'm using a 2hander and go to the dual wield for viper, but I havent been able to get it right if i'm dual wielding already adn go to the dual viper weapons. Even if I put the macro to equip the weapon in the slot number (17 and 18 I think). The macro just wants to swap out my main hand weapons and not the offhand. Has been suggested to me to get an outfitter add-on. I just haven't tried that out yet.

So for now since I'm using [Shivering Felspine], the macro:
/equip [Claw of Molten Fury]
/equip [Netherbane]

works for me. When i'm dual wielding, I have just been manually switching.

What's your latency like? And what kind of macro are you using?

Are you maybe letting your pet die by accident on some nights, and then comparing it to nights it lived for full fights?

Are you running your own wws/recount, or are you having (multiple?) guild members link you damage meters in game? If it's multiple different people, I would guess some do not merge pet data while others do.