I have a question about stat comparisons. As it stands right now, I know how to compare agility, crit, hit and attack power to each other to determine what gear is an upgrade and what isn't. For example I use the 35-40ap=1% crit formula in terms of raw dps. With the release of Black Temple and Mt.Hyjal we have two new stats to deal with. Haste Rating and Ignore Armor. How do I quantify these two stats compared to the others because honestly I have no clue.

This is my armory:
Cranx
In particular I'm wondering about my belt Valestalker Girdle vs Belt of the Black Eagle. Also about my rings Band of Eternity vs Band of Devastation

I believe im using the better item in both cases (haste), but I dont know how to mathematically prove it. Any help here would be appreciated.

Thanks, I'll try some of those suggestions. Is Sonic Spear better than the Blackened Spear from Thrallmar? Because I had heard that Spear and the Bow from The Thrallmar rep are the best.

"Easily" attainable and what I did to get myself ready for Kara.

Spec 41/20/0 - It blows everything away at low levels of gear.

4 Peices of BL - (Hat, Shoulder, Legs, Gloves) It is an amazing DPS boost, I still do more damage in my BL than I do in my current epics but moving into harder content I've found I need the stamina.

3 Pieces of Ebon Netherscale - (Chest, Wrist, Waist) You will be wearing these peices for a long long time. The chest is extremely good, sockets are flexible enough to get good bonuses, some stamina and fulfill even the most difficult meta gem requirements.

Heroic Trinket/Hourglass of the Unraveler - (Trinkets) Again, these will be a staple for a long time. Future upgrades could be a Poison Vial (if you need hit) then over to DST/Tsunami (if you get lucky).

Sonic Spear - The thrallamar revered spear is slightly better DPS wise but the stamina on the spear is hard to pass up.

Kaylaan Signet / Slayer's Mark of Redemption - (Rings) These two rings are amazing and easy to get. They are both quest rewards and are nearly perfectly itemized.

Natasha's Choker - (Neck) Again, easy to get from a quest, amazingly itemized.

Cloak of the Inciter / Crystalweave Cape / Heroic badge cape - Any of these is a good choice. The crystalweave is probably the easiest to get and even after the haste nerf, matches the others. Right now it is slightly better.

Don Santo's Famous Hunting Rifle - Buy one of these, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You will dominate meters with a simple auto/steady/KC macro. It will also last you until they nerf the proc rate (if that ever happens).

Blue Gems / Meta gems - Socket everything with blue gems, don't be cheap. Get a Relentless or Thundering meta gem. You won't be replacing your hat till you are downing prince which is a while off.

Enchants - Again, don't be cheap, 35 Agi on your weapon, etc.

Get a cat, ravager or wind serpent - If you go with the later, include a /cast Lightning Breath line in your spam macro to avoid the stupid AI.

I ran this setup and was pushing 1000+ DPS the first day I set foot in kara.

Glaurong,

This is a great list, thanks. One question: what would you recommend in place of Ebon Netherscale for non-leatherworkers?

So, what is the optimal weapon speed for BM hunters now?

Is the Serpent Spine Longbow really "too slow"?

For that matter, is the Sunfury too slow?

If you are not a leatherworker and thus cannot get Ebon Netherscale:

Breastplate of Rapid Striking is an excellently itemized blue chest.

If you can get the Ogri'la Exalted Shard-bound Bracers, those are excellent. Otherwise, Bracers of the Hunt off heroic Sethekk are good. Barring that, do some battlegrounds and pick up pvp bracers.

For a belt, Telaari Hunting Girdle is pretty good and easy to get. The PvP belt is also decent.

My Armory: The Armory

Hey all I have a couple questons myself but first of all I'd like to thank you for helping not only me, but others as well. IMO this thread must-read for all hunters, there's some great stuff in here.

Some of the recent posts I have read on here suggest that macros which cast kill command right when it is readily available may interfere with the auto-shot cast time, therefore lowering overall dps and ruining the shot rotation. I believe that the macro I have been using for quite some time now is one of those:

/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command

many many macros have been suggested to me for use as a BM hunter, and it is simply confusing as hell to me because I truely know nothing about macros. My question is: What is the single best BM hunter macro? I would prefer if it didn't include kill command, since I would rather set that to a hotkey and time it manually.


As a side note (or rather question): At the moment, our guild does not have a "melee class attack power bot" specced hunter. Is having a hunter with this spec truely beneficial enough to help progress the guild?

I have tried calculating the AP bonus that the melee classes would recieve from just Expose Weakness alone, but am not sure if I did this right. Here's what I did:

My agility=641
with lightening reflexes (15%): 737
With agility elixir (+35): 772
With kings(i am not sure if the agility elixir raises the amount of agility recieved from kings or not, but i assume so...) : 849

.25*849= 212 AP gained from expose weakness, not to mention the AP gained from imp hunters mark (which no one in our guild has as well). This seems significant....

thanks a lot guys. =D

In short, thanks! Both the advice will get me started again.

There are a few more alternatives as well.

Thick Netherscale Breastplate - Items - World of Warcraft is pretty sweet, though it might be a bit expensive if you don't farm the mats yourself.

Felstalker Belt - Items - World of Warcraft The felstalker belt is pretty decent, even for non leatherworkers and it should be easily attainable and fairly cheap.

Blessed Scale Girdle - Items - World of Warcraft This belt from Sha'tar rep is also quite decent, and very easy to get hold of.

Okay, posting on my priest, but requesting info for my hunter.

I'm currently 41 point BM spec, armoroy profile is here

Our first Hydross kill wws data is available here (I'm Pharazon)

I'm currently using a SS/AS cycle, with trinkets and KC used on every cooldown.

I would like to know what gear I should consider aiming for. We're just starting in SSC and TK, and have Lurker, Hydross and Void Reaver down (Al'ar will be next).

I still have my faithful Broken Tooth as a pet, and spec him full NR/FR for SSC, and full AR/FR for TK, along with Avoidance, Cobra and Stamina. Would other pets benefit me more?

I feel like my DPS is acceptable, but I'd like to know the next steps to push the envelope somewhat.

Well I just recently respec'd survival but as a BM hunter up until a few days ago... the things that stood out to me from looking over your gear/stats on what you could work on is your hit rating. Too many people don't value this as much as they should IMHO. If you need to, sacrifice some of your dps gems for hit rating gems... or swap higher dps gear for slightly lower dps gear that has more hit on it. There is practically an infinite supply of hit rating items for almost every slot. Try to get close to 8%-9% increased chance to hit (9% is cap if memory serves correctly) and you'll see your dps fly through the roof on bosses- which is where dps matters most.

As far as a pet is concerned I'd say use a scorpid until the adjustment hits... then at that point re-evaluate the pets (incase any other adjustments get done) and go from there. Odds are good though that the cats and ravagers will be top of the food chain again after the scorpid gets fixed. Just as an FYI... Unless the boss is immune to poisons (i.e. void reaver) a scorpid will eat them alive- especially once you get the scorpid poison stacking trick down. If scorpid poison is maintained in it's buffed state you will see some completely disgusting damage for a pet (as in 1,000+ dmg per 2 sec... not including regular attacks).

Scorchshell Pincer (68-69, Shadowmoon Valley) from Petopia

Yep that works...I was just trying to help clarify why your old rotation was clipping your auto shots.

I'm 99% sure its fixed now on the test server and will go live with the next major patch.

FWIW I know several BM hunters that are switching back to MM. This is partially due to the perception that dmg is equaling out between the two builds, one wins on some fights, the other wins on other fights. Next patch BM wont be able to pull off silly numbers with a scorpid. The other part of it is, after a while, pet management really isnt a fun and exciting mini-game.

That's something i was wondering as well, but i am using the haste ring and gloves and my dps is still one of the best in the guild. Even before i got those items the SSP did a mighty fine job for me. However cheeky's spreadsheet indeed shows my biggest improvement would be to get legionkiller or any other 2.9 bow, But im not 100% sure it is.

Scorpids for non-BM spec:

I went through the logs of our last Gruul attempt (here) and noticed that my pet scorpid, Junkyard, was losing stacks of scorpid poison fairly often from misses and gruul's parries and dodges, etc. Scorpid poison is the only ability i have turned on for him.

So, since it is nearly impossible for me to keep the original stack up (due to misses, boss mitigation, and saving him from cave-ins, etc), would it increase my pet's damage if I turned on claw? He is sitting on loads of focus because I am survival spec with 2 points in GftT... or else would this make things worse because he might not have focus to re-apply a poison stack at times? If this is the case, how about adding a claw command into my shot rotation, say twice per 10 sec rotation?

thanks for any advice you may have!

There's not much to say about your hunter. You socket agi gems, have a 2.7 gun, and have good ap, crit, hit.

As I'm sure you know, the spreadsheet is theoretical. In practice you're not really going to see the massive (20-50) dps increase going from a 3.00 weapon speed to a 2.70. Sunfury, Serpent Spine, Legionkiller etc. are all good and I'm fairly confident in saying you won't see huge dps differences between them. Legionkiller will be better than Serpent Spine though.

Play to your own style. If all you want to do is spam a steady macro then go with a faster weapon. If you want to throw in lots of multis and arcanes you should probably go a little slower and manually time it. I really haven't seen anyone end game doing massive dps using a Don Santos or Barrel Blade long rifle or whatever else is 'the best speed' for BM. Feel free to point one/some out to me though.

I'm(Nyoron) about to enter Karazhan with a guild that's already semi-farming it. I'm getting Fel Leather Leggings once my slacker LW comes online. A few questions, if I may.

1) My health. Will I be able to survive everything or should I get a set for swapping in stuff? I'll be at about 5.7kish unbuffed once I get my fel leather leggings with a clefthide kit.
2) I'm using a boar currently. Would switching pet produce a massive DPS increase and if so what should I switch to?
3) Gear to farm that's not replaceable in Kara? I guess Hourglass of the Unraveller and Bloodlust Brooch, anything else?
4) Necklace of the Deep. Some people say it's the best hunter neck before BT or something, others switch to Worgen Claw Necklace or something immediately. Assuming I stay BM(standard raid 41/20/0), what's the bottom line on this very sexy neck? The reason I ask is because I don't really want to invest in rare gems in something I'll just replace in kara.
5) Glaring errors? Yell at me please.

Being a NE, I always wonder why I wasn't born with some bow/xbow skill. ;p That being the case, I'm searching for +skill item that would help me reduce the amount of +hit I need to make the 9% hit cap. So far, I've found [The Eye of Nerub], [Scaled Greaves of the Marksman] and some low level items.

Would using those worth it? Are there any other good alternatives? Getting people to go back and kill Gruul for DST is difficult enough, attempting DLK and Loatheb might be out of the question.

Hey Im a 0/31/30 NE Hunter. The Armory is a link to my character profile

Im looking for some things I can do to up my crit, hit raiting and so on. I respeced to this spec now and love it, my agil and crit went up big time from before being a stright Marks hunter.

Also if theres tips on dpsing in raiding. Thanks for any help

Popa

Hi all and i just wanted to take this oppurtunity to thank everyone here for their suggestions and research. Since i started reading these forums my dps has increased and also my love for the game. I usually read this when i am at work and i cant wait to go home and Log in to wow. Anyway this is our last try from Gruul Wow Web Stats. If you guys can make some comments on our hunters dps that would be great this was our best try ever Wow Web Stats.

Thank you all in advance.