I'm a big fan of Cheeky's spreadsheet and was following its development pretty intensely for a while. However, I'm just coming back to my hunter (switched mains with BC) and haven't really been following the gear discussions very closely. Is there a good guide somewhere for pre-Kara and Kara gear? It's an alt, so I don't really see myself progressing much further than that barring a sudden plague dropping all our hunters.
From my testing I have found KC to be a waste of time in my rotation as it always seems to throw my auto back, anyone else share these sentiments?
I did as well until I dug around and experimented with KC macros. Although Kill is no longer on the GCD, it still delays your next action by an amount dependent on your latency. However, you can use a /stopcasting macro to get around it. This is the one I settled on:
Because of the /stopcasting line, you cannot mindlessly mash this macro like you can with your usual castsequence macro. You have to quickly mash this exactly twice whenever your Kill Command is up (in replace of pressing Steady). If you experiment with it, you should find it lets you get KC in there without delaying anything.
KC isn't part of a rotation. You use it immediately before a steady shot, after the autoshot fires or use it immediately after an arcane/multishot.
...because if you hit it at any other time (assuming you are BM) you run the risk of delaying or even entirely clipping your next Auto Shot. Because Auto Shot has a hidden 0.5 second cast time, and Kill Command can delay this cast time by as much as 0.5 seconds if it is cast before your Auto Shot would normally go off.
The key to using KC well isn't just the timing - although that's 75% of the battle. The trick to mastering the last 25% is mapping it to a key that is right next to all of your shot-spam keys. Instead of thinking about each button as a disparate act, you should think of them as part of a combination. For example, if you're a decent typist, when you type the word "read" you don't think of hitting R, then hitting E, then hitting A, then hitting D. You just hit the buttons in sequence as part of the word. (That the first two letters of that word are surprisingly close to where most people bind their shot keys is just an amazing coincidence. Really. /cough)
Once you used to the pattern of hitting your keys as short sequences like this, rather than thinking of Kill Command as a separate button you have to press, it is much easier to maintain the necessary rhythm to keep your 1:1 shot ratio in sync.
For simplicity, here's an example of the buttons I would hit if for some reason I didn't want to fire Multi-Shot but I wanted to make sure I hit Kill Command every time it is available:
3r-r4-r4-r4-3r-r4-r4-r4-3r-r4-r4-r4-3r-r4-r4-r4, etc.
Not too hard to figure out which buttons I have bound to which keys, now is it?
If you wanted to be really fancy, you could actually wait until KC came up to hit the pattern instead of the single button.
Anyway, this is generally how I treat Kill Command. YMMV. It might come more easily to me because I used to play the piano when I was a kid, but it's not rocket science either way.
"User is a tremendous douchenozzel"
-Actual EJ Forums feedback concerning Goreshot.
Jezele -- you're welcome to poke around with my spreadsheet. It's a lot simpler than Cheeky's, designed more around comparing gear choices based on your current stats / spec.
(I don't guarantee any of the math to be super accurate, I haven't had it critiqued. Should be solid enough though.)
I did as well until I dug around and experimented with KC macros. Although Kill is no longer on the GCD, it still delays your next action by an amount dependent on your latency. However, you can use a /stopcasting macro to get around it. This is the one I settled on:
Because of the /stopcasting line, you cannot mindlessly mash this macro like you can with your usual castsequence macro. You have to quickly mash this exactly twice whenever your Kill Command is up (in replace of pressing Steady). If you experiment with it, you should find it lets you get KC in there without delaying anything.
Cool tip. I will try this today. So far I have been alternating between two main macros, one which included KC and one which didn't. During rapid fires, or quickshots+meta hastes stacked, or bloodlust, I would just use auto+steady. When shot speed was 1.7s or slower, I would use the macro including KC.
I raided last night and my DPS was only 456 sustained. I don't understand why my dps is so low compared to similarly geared in my guild. I am throwing Auto, and Steady and a few arcanes out there but can't seem to crack 500. What am I doing wrong?
Well, gear wise you are further progressed than me, and on stand and nuke fights I usually sit between 750 and 900 dps, depending on groups composition. Your spec is very similar to mine, so I doubt that is a problem. Without a WWS log it's not possible to tell if you delay your autoshots in some way. The difference I can see is that you lose a lot of ap by dual wielding instead of going for the Sonic Spear or the Blackened spear, with savagery or + 35 agi.
You also have fairly low ap and in favour of high crit rating. However I'm not enough of a theorycrafter to know if that should mean a dps loss.
Maybe it's something simple though. Have you made sure to include your pet dps in your own? My ravager does between 150 and 300 dps, depending on how much I can use it. Simply forgetting to include it in the damage meter would account for a huge amount of what you feel is lacking dps wise.
The savings comes because the client doesn't wait for KC to finish to request steady shot(I think) It doesn't need server verification. So in theory you could hit the button twice instantaneously and get both off.
On the back end, the client won't cast KC until it's gotten confirmation that steadyshot finished (since it has a cast you can't interrupt), so you'll get an extra latency delay after steady completes before KC will fire, which pushes auto off.
Hm no the server does wait to confirm KC has gone off before you can start a steady shot. This is the 0.2s delay or so that you see when using KC, and the delay that this /stopcasting macro is trying to work around.
The reason you want to use Kill Command before the Steady Shot, is a combination of the GCD on steady shot and the cast time of autoshot.
Let's say you have a 1.7s weapon speed as BM with a 2.7 base speed weapon and quickshots up. We can just pretend there is zero lag and KC is truly instant.
KC before the Steady Shot looks like this:
0.00 - Auto Shot fires
0.00 - KC
0.00 - begin Steady Shot (0.95s cast time)
0.95 - Steady Shot fires
1.20 - begin Auto Shot
1.50 - GCD completes
1.70 - Auto Shot fires
Placing KC after Steady Shot changes things to this:
0.00 - Auto Shot fires
0.00 - begin Steady Shot (0.95s cast time)
0.95 - Steady Shot fires
1.50 - GCD completes, Kill Command
1.50 - begin Auto Shot
2.00 - Auto Shot fires
Now if you consider latency tossing in an extra 0.2s into both rotations, you can see that using KC before Steady Shot doesn't change anything really, except the margin for error decreases. Everything happens "on schedule" between the autoshots though.
If you add in a 0.2s delay though into the second rotation, then it pushes the Auto Shot off another 0.5s, and causes a full 0.5s delay of the shot.
I have a question though, involving macros most hunters are using.
/cast Kill Command
/castsequence Steady Shot, Auto Shot
Does this prevent casting Kill Command after a Steady Shot? Or will it always do KC, Steady, Auto...and just skip KC if it is unavailable?
I find that binding kill command to a button adjacent to my shot rotation binding works best for me as well. I just watch my shot bars and pop it right after Steady Shot fires and I usually get no delay on my autoshot. I think the only reason I run into any possible delay is because of my narrow margin of error (I have a 2.6 weapon so I end up with 1.76 average auto shot and 1.01 steady shot cast times). Even then, it is negligible.
Well I just recently rerolled to hunter which many say is an easy way out but ive noticed that with so many hunters alot of them dont know what the hell they are doing. Well Ive been reading non stop and trying to get down shot rotations and learn everything i can about hunters. Right now i am BM spec 41/20/0 with 1580 ap 25% crit and about 90 hit though i havent raided on my hunter at all ive done every heroic i can and crafted alot of my gear. All this being said ive been running shot instances i can not stand at all just trying to work on my shot rotation and with the pugs i run i know my dps should be alot higher than it is. How doi know if i am delaying shots? Also is there any other way towork on shot rotation i sat in ogrilla for the last 3 nights just killing stuff working on my rotation though most of the time i can even get a full cycle in. I dont like macros
My turn to be critiqued! My first time in SSC last night. Everything seemed pretty straight forward. We had healing problems on FLK so didn't get him down but going in again on Thursday.
I was a long time macro addict... I still have the wheel tied to the steady/auto/kill command for emergency beer drinking needs, but I did notice a significant increase in damage output manually weaving in shots. This seems mostly due to the ability to weave in kill commands where they do not interfere with the auto shot cycle.
I mucked around with various key binding load-outs but I got tired of having the arcane shot and multi-shot buttons idle during their cool-down... so, I made these three macros:
This lets me weave in Kill Commands after either an arcane or multi without affecting the auto cycle. NOTE: These are two command macros - so you can only use the Kill Command after shooting the special first and after either issuing the Kill Command or the cool down on the short has expired, the special is available again to be cast.
My turn to be critiqued! My first time in SSC last night. Everything seemed pretty straight forward. We had healing problems on FLK so didn't get him down but going in again on Thursday.
You didn't do too bad I suppose. You never used multi-shot and only 1 arcane shot on the MD pull (I'm guessing since it's your first shot but I can't find misdirection from you anywhere). You probably had mana problems without a shaman/spriest/JoW though. One thing to note for sure is that you only used T/BW 3 times and you could have 5 times in a 9m fight. You also only used rapid fire twice instead of 3 times. And this is all considering you never got watery graved. Only looked at morogrim sorry.
Hello all,
I am having a tough time figuring out shot rotations while Dragonspine is proc'd. I usually just use a steady shot/auto macro as my fps is sometimes as low as 15, it's super hard to time shots perfectly. I am using Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle with the Honored or Revered Consortium Ammo Pouch.
I am spec'd pretty much as far into survival as can be without giving up Scatter shot. Thrill of the Hunt is awesome for keeping up mana during long boss fights. I usually don't even need to drink a pot with Hawk on the whole time.
The latest WWS log can be found here: My char is Callisto on the public version. Loading...
Does anyone have a good macro for non haste while using the Wolfslayer SR?
According to the spreadsheet, it says for max dps unhasted: Max Specials Rotation (Total DPS 1222) would be Auto, Steady, Multi, Auto, Steady, Auto, Steady Arcane, Auto, Steady (repeat) - that's if my latency is .2 hmmmm
And with Dragonspine or other haste - just Auto, Steady rotation.
You didn't do too bad I suppose. You never used multi-shot and only 1 arcane shot on the MD pull (I'm guessing since it's your first shot but I can't find misdirection from you anywhere). You probably had mana problems without a shaman/spriest/JoW though. One thing to note for sure is that you only used T/BW 3 times and you could have 5 times in a 9m fight. You also only used rapid fire twice instead of 3 times. And this is all considering you never got watery graved. Only looked at morogrim sorry.
I didn't MD for Morogrim, I'm not sure what the one Arcane shot is from, I'll have to check.
I have no problems going OOM using just steady/auto/KC so I don't normally use Arcane or Multi. Especially in an extremely mana starved situation like last night. I started off with a regular mana pot and saw that just wasn't going to cut it so switched to fels.
You are right about my cools. I need to get better at using them. I have blood frenzy, TBW and my trinket all bound so sometimes I hesitate to use it when the -50% healing will be bad.
Looking for some help maxing dps. First, a few things I know I need to do gear wise are pickup (another) Sonic Spear or the Thrallamar rep one and swap Drake Fang Tallisman for something like the Bloodlust Broach. Patiently waiting for Hydross to cough up my chest. I'm currently using Sunfury though I do have the Merciless Gladiator XBow banked. Its just doesn't seem to work out to an upgrade with the +weapon skill on bows with trolls.
Here is a WWS of tonight's Magtheridon kill. I didn't flask for it, and I honestly forgot to pull out my pet. I was a cube clicker so I lost some dps there.
Shot wise, I used this macro when a haste proc was not up. This is the "max specials" rotation off of Cheeky's spreadsheet which seems to work well from the parsing Ive done:
/castsequence reset=10 Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot
And this macro when a haste effect was up:
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
I was previously using the macro below which is a bit more aggressive on the specials but after importing several log files into excel it seemed that I was actually delaying my whole rotation more and saccing dps at the expense of extra mana. I have an excel sheet of the logs if anyone cares there. This rotation is what motivated me to pick up 5/5 improved arcane as a talent. If the one I'm currently using really is best I suppose I can drop the points I have in it:
/castsequence reset=10 Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot
Here is a WWS from a few nights ago using this shot rotation. To be honest I was not switching rotations when haste was up on this one either and from the parsing Ive done that seems like a big deal by itself.
Looking for some help maxing dps. First, a few things I know I need to do gear wise are pickup (another) Sonic Spear or the Thrallamar rep one and swap Drake Fang Tallisman for something like the Bloodlust Broach. Patiently waiting for Hydross to cough up my chest. I'm currently using Sunfury though I do have the Merciless Gladiator XBow banked. Its just doesn't seem to work out to an upgrade with the +weapon skill on bows with trolls.
Here is a WWS of tonight's Magtheridon kill. I didn't flask for it, and I honestly forgot to pull out my pet. I was a cube clicker so I lost some dps there.
Shot wise, I used this macro when a haste proc was not up. This is the "max specials" rotation off of Cheeky's spreadsheet which seems to work well from the parsing Ive done:
/castsequence reset=10 Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot
And this macro when a haste effect was up:
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
I was previously using the macro below which is a bit more aggressive on the specials but after importing several log files into excel it seemed that I was actually delaying my whole rotation more and saccing dps at the expense of extra mana. I have an excel sheet of the logs if anyone cares there. This rotation is what motivated me to pick up 5/5 improved arcane as a talent. If the one I'm currently using really is best I suppose I can drop the points I have in it:
/castsequence reset=10 Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot
Here is a WWS from a few nights ago using this shot rotation. To be honest I was not switching rotations when haste was up on this one either and from the parsing Ive done that seems like a big deal by itself.
The problem with your rotation is that you *cannot* squeeze 2 shots in between two autoshots, twice in a row, without delaying your next autoshot severely.. The global cooldowns cause you to delay shots if you try this.
I have played my hunter quite some time and I have enjoyed playing her pre-TBC. I levelled her to 70 by sticking to quests and so the rep game haunts me still and it has put me off her for quite some time. I also must say that somehow the hunter class has lost its appeal, maybe due to the many changes, maybe just because I have played it so long.
I am now levelling my warlock and I am taking the smart route by maxing out on rep and levelling smarter. Aside from the fact that I enjoy the class immensely it also seems much more effective.
Having said that I am now coming to the point of my post. This is my Huntress and she has been more or less abandoned on Shadowsong. I tried halfheartedly to get her ready for raiding, but because of my "enthusiasm" and the enormous gap in Thrallmar rep I could never quite motivate myself. Oh, and the fact that she has LW as profession just added another hopeless task to it.
Okay, playing my lock gave me some incentive again and I want to retry getting my Huntress ready. What can I do so I can be seen as an asset to the raid?
The problem with your rotation is that you *cannot* squeeze 2 shots in between two autoshots, twice in a row, without delaying your next autoshot severely.. The global cooldowns cause you to delay shots if you try this.
Okay, playing my lock gave me some incentive again and I want to retry getting my Huntress ready. What can I do so I can be seen as an asset to the raid?
Well, judging by your gear you really need to start running some level 70 instances to replace all those leveling greens. Maybe run some heroics to get enough badges for the cloak/ring/necklace/trinket?
And farm Shadow Labyrinth for the Sonic Spear of course
Since you're Aldor, there's the Socrethar quest line in Netherstorm that gives a nice pair gauntlets. At revered with Sha'tar you can buy a nice belt from them.
If you finish leveling LW you could try making the Ebon Netherscale set, which is fairly decent. Or grind instances to get some Beast Lord set pieces. It'll take some effort but it shouldn't be too hard to get up to 1600-1700 AP and 18-19% crit before you step into KZ. You'll be less out of place that way if the rest of the raid is geared already.
My guild has recently had the great Ferocious Inspiration vs. Expose Weakness debate, with the BM hunters arguing that FI is a better raid buff and myself arguing that EW is. After pages of math and some pretty impressive trolls. Our top BM hunter has decided to go Surv.
I have two questions resulting of this change:
1. EW does not stack, right? So there is no point in having two Surv hunters in a raid.
2. Is there any real point in putting 5 points into Imp Arcane Shot with a 2.9 speed bow? Is it possible to get more than a 1:1.5 rotation in with the extra second off the cooldown?
2. Is there any real point in putting 5 points into Imp Arcane Shot with a 2.9 speed bow? Is it possible to get more than a 1:1.5 rotation in with the extra second off the cooldown?
According to what khel posted above and my own log file parsing, no you cant because the GCD will stack up from using two specials twice in a row.
e.g. auto, steady, multi, auto, steady, arcane, auto, steady, --> auto <--, steady, arcane
This would work from an ability cooldown perspective but the marked auto shot will be greatly delayed because of the GCD. The end result is actually less dps for more mana spent.
According to what khel posted above and my own log file parsing, no you cant because the GCD will stack up from using two specials twice in a row.
e.g. auto, steady, multi, auto, steady, arcane, auto, steady, --> auto <--, steady, arcane
This would work from an ability cooldown perspective but the marked auto shot will be greatly delayed because of the GCD. The end result is actually less dps for more mana spent.
I was pretty certain that was the case. I've attempted to explain why that is a waste of talent points, but there is no talking to these guys. Guess I can just sit back and laugh.
Imp. Arcane Shot can still be useful in a 1:1.5 rotation where you aren't always free to use Multi. From a boss perspective, Multishot is available to you in pretty much all T4/T5/T6 fights. However, multi is sometimes unavailable to you on trash, and that's where Imp. Arcane Shot shines as you can keep pretty close to a 1.5:1 rotation using just Arcane, Steady, and Auto.
Imp. Arcane Shot can still be useful in a 1:1.5 rotation where you aren't always free to use Multi. From a boss perspective, Multishot is available to you in pretty much all T4/T5/T6 fights. However, multi is sometimes unavailable to you on trash, and that's where Imp. Arcane Shot shines as you can keep pretty close to a 1.5:1 rotation using just Arcane, Steady, and Auto.
I don't know if it's ever worth investing talent points to increase your DPS on trash only. There has got to be a better place to put those resources.
09/04/07, 9:42 PM
