Good evening guys, first time poster, would just like to say a brief thankyou to all of you who have put together some of the fantastic information on here (and of course a thankyou to cheeky for that incredible piece of excel loveliness ^)
I have just started raiding (so far encounters with attumen,moroes,maiden curator and wiz oz)
What I'm looking for is help with the natural progression of my gear, along with another couple of tit bits of info.
As it stands my gear is predominately blue, I try to enchant everything with the best available ( i don't like the thought of turning upto a run unprepared)
Looking at my equipment, can you guys see any glaring deficiencies/poor socketing?
(At the time of writing this the head piece isn't showing. its a Earthwarden's Coif sock'd with 12ap (which i will get round to changing to 8 agi) Relentless Earthstone diamond (12 agi 3%crit dam) and with the 34AP/16hi 'chant. Weapon is Hellforged Halberd with 35 agi)
The Weapon took me from my 140 Hit rating, to 159, so i have room to drop some +hit items.
(*edit - I just noticed in another thread that as I am a dwarf wielding a gun, I only need 95hit for cap against boss mobs? is this true? if this is the case My 159 seems ever so slightly OTT :P )
Shot rotation i hadn't even heard of before I visited this sight :-) Now as a 41/20 BM hunter i keep the 1:1 rotation throwing in arcane/multi when situation requires it.
My pet is a Tiger that I've had from low level, a guildie told me the other day that I should replace it with a lvl 69/70 outland one. Does this make any difference? to me I thought once a pet was 70, it was 70, didn't matter how long you had levelled it?
I'm also not very happy with the pet dps I seem to be kicking out, sadly i don't have any solid figures to give you, but i'd suggest its about 200. One thing i tried was a macro to automatically initiate K/C. I picked it up off of these forums and it goes like;
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/stopcasting
/cast random [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
However i find particularly when hasted the command doesn't go through, and i get a interrupt which stops the steady shot, which gimps me. As a consequence i fear using KC for the fact it may gimp my dps, which seems ridiculous. (my latency is 200ms)
I do try to read up on what has been posted, however there is so much info on these forums you will have to forgive me if i have missed answers to anything above.
Hi Fleabit, I'm a second time poster but i can you you a few pointers atleast.
First of all, the stuff about needing less crit as you are a dwarf using a gun is soon to be irrelevant as in patch 2.3, weapon skill rating is being replaced by expertise, This is great, apart from the fact that expertise will only apply to melee weapons. So, what happens to this +5 Gun skill you wee 'ol dwarves have? It gets turned into a big fat 1% to crit if i have read correctly, so in terms of dropping ur +hit gear, dont(atleast not a great deal of it anyway).
As for the pet, the pet may be great, but as you have levelled it from azeroth, the chances are it wont have the higher skill level moves (claw, bite, dash). To obtain these you must train a higher level pet which knows the greater ranks of them, these pets can only be found in outland, you must tame it and fight with it for a short while, untill you get a yellow text pop up in the chat, confirming you have learnt the new rank. At this point you can abandon it, get your old cat out of the stable and teach it the higher ranks. What your friend said is correct to an extent. You can keep the old pet, once yuo teach it these higher ranks.
Your gear and talents look fine so dont worry there, the only trhing i disagree with is the 1 point in Spirit Bond, that does so little for you, i think you would benefit more from 1 point in Imp. Mend Pet, but that is down to personal preferance.
Your macro is just a little bit wrong, not surew why it sometimes doesnt work but you should be fine with the following(i use it, works great, just spam like you have never spammed before);
As for the pet, the pet may be great, but as you have levelled it from azeroth, the chances are it wont have the higher skill level moves (claw, bite, dash). To obtain these you must train a higher level pet which knows the greater ranks of them, these pets can only be found in outland, you must tame it and fight with it for a short while, untill you get a yellow text pop up in the chat, confirming you have learnt the new rank. At this point you can abandon it, get your old cat out of the stable and teach it the higher ranks. What your friend said is correct to an extent. You can keep the old pet, once yuo teach it these higher ranks.
On the other hand, if you have "kept up" your Azeroth pet - ie. tamed 'trash' pets just for their higher ranks of abilities and then taught those abilities to your regular pet - you most certainly do not have to tame a level 70 one.
For example, I tamed King Bangalash at level 43. He came to me knowing Dash 2 and Claw 6. I had to tame a wolf from Feralas and fight with him for a few minutes to learn Bite 6 and then teach it to King Bang. If you keep doing this until your pet has the highest level of skills for a level 70, then you're fine.
I don't think that any level pet you would tame at level 70 comes fully equipped with EVERYTHING it needs in order to be a good pet. I think you always have to tame at least one 'trash' pet to learn a skill.
I'm posting here because i have real problems for my DPS in raid.
For me i'm not doing all the dps i should do for my gear and spec.
Here my armory.
I find i have pretty nice stats for a BM and at the lvl of PVE we are (trys on KT and SSC and other TK bosses farmed exept vashj).
The problem maybe comes from the fact i have a very high latency (500-600 and more sometimes) and my way of dpsing.
I know all the stuff about dps cycles, i tryed the macro or doing my cycles "by hand" but i don't see much difference. My way of dpsing is steady spam and sometime an arcane shot or a multi between steady and auto.
Maybe my stats and my place in the recount is normal but i find it odd.
Hey, first time poster and a relatively new hunter. I just recently got 70, however I'm no stranger to raiding having done TK and SSC. Therefore I understand near everything there is to know about raiding, but being new to the hunter I do naturally have some questions in order to be as good at a hunter as I can be. Anyways...
My first question is regarding pets. I have heard about the Scorpid nerf, and how that pet isn't as good as it used to be.. so I'm assuming it wouldn't be a good choice for a pet. I'm not exactly positive what I should be going for. I am currently using a Ravager, and he's doing fairly well dps wise. Is there a pet that is almost a must (i.e. wind serpent) or is sticking with the Ravager not that big of a deal?
My second question has to deal with stats. I am currently 41/20(BM). I am fairly certain that my ideal stat would be Agi, and having a high amount of crit would certainly help in regards to KC. Just want to clarify if this is correct? Another thing, how important is hit. I know it's always important for near all classes, however, is it something I should be going for straight away (getting the hit cap), or is it something I can achieve as I pick up random upgrades of agi and crit?
You will be fine with Ravager. Other good pets would be Cats and Wind Serpents (it seems that Raptors are fine too).
About gear - yeah, You're right. Even if some calculations show that at certain (low) level of gear AP/crit should be a bit better, agil imo is still the best choice, esp when You have BoK. For hit/hit rating - reach hit cap first, then think about other stats - so go for 146HR.
For the first question, a cat, a ravager or a wind serpent perform quite good, with a small lead for the ravager. As long as it has Avoidance rank 2 and Cobra Reflexes, and Claw/Lightning Breath, either should work.
As for stats, let's start with hit rating. The only ways to get the hit cap needed (9% hit chance or 146 hit rating) are via + hit rating gear, or the surefooted talent in the Survival tree. However, for the standard 41/20/0 build, it's not worth moving any points in survival, so you're left with gear alone. And capping the hit rating should usually be your first priority, since it's probably the cheapest way to increase dps.
Originally Posted by XI-
In summary, TBC raiding is easy. 9/10 encounters can be summarized with 1 phrase. Stay out of the fucking fire. If this is too difficult BWL was still there last I checked, so go have at it for some practice.
What kind of DPS should I be seeing with my current gear? I got around ~800 average DPS last night on Kael and was just wondering if it should be any higher. I basically just mash the fuck out of my steady/kc macro and pop all my shit whenever it's up.
Any general gear advice would be welcome too.
fake edit: oh damnit, logged out in the wrong set. With my PvE set on I have around ~1600 RATP and ~25% crit. Capped hit.
Hey, first time poster and a relatively new hunter. I just recently got 70, however I'm no stranger to raiding having done TK and SSC. Therefore I understand near everything there is to know about raiding, but being new to the hunter I do naturally have some questions in order to be as good at a hunter as I can be. Anyways...
My first question is regarding pets. I have heard about the Scorpid nerf, and how that pet isn't as good as it used to be.. so I'm assuming it wouldn't be a good choice for a pet. I'm not exactly positive what I should be going for. I am currently using a Ravager, and he's doing fairly well dps wise. Is there a pet that is almost a must (i.e. wind serpent) or is sticking with the Ravager not that big of a deal?
My second question has to deal with stats. I am currently 41/20(BM). I am fairly certain that my ideal stat would be Agi, and having a high amount of crit would certainly help in regards to KC. Just want to clarify if this is correct? Another thing, how important is hit. I know it's always important for near all classes, however, is it something I should be going for straight away (getting the hit cap), or is it something I can achieve as I pick up random upgrades of agi and crit?
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
-Akroed
Your questions has been answered and in short, ravager is fine, wont find higher dps pet, only other thing that you might consider, is an owl that has screech that reduces melee dmg the boss does when there is still AP to take off, bit of a dps loss for BM hunter, about nothing for Survival hunter, but always nice to have an owl as backup for a very hard hitting boss and learning him/her/it, cause the added dmg from CoReck and you using an owl is way more than not getting CoReck and having a cat/ravager/raptor.
Been shown agi is overall the best stat to get for hunters due to it stacking with BoK and it is a nice balance between crit/ap, but there is many occasions when this or that is more favourable, all comes down to taste even. For examlpe say your hit rating is 136, to gain 10 more hit you need to sack like 20 AGI for example, which I can tell you will yield less dps. For this, there is a spreadsheet made by Cheeky, Hunter Spreadsheets -- In development, play with it, is really nice to see some gear alternatives and plan for what you want in further raiding dungeons or check which of 2 possible items will benefit you the most. It will answer all your questions actually as you can play with diffrent pets in it aswell.
My guild finally started truly trying to kill things in Hyjal this week. Obviously, that means kiting the trash for me. I've got my route down, which is one that allows me, being the only hunter in both nights so far, to aggro Jaina, the "calvary" up and to her left, and then the riflemen and footmen near the tent to her far left.
So far for our Hyjal stuff, I've been fully flasked, well fed, etc. I do the trash in gear that gives me 3010 RAP and ~32% crit. My hit is low, but it's trash. I haven't missed anything on it yet.
The big problem I'm having is pulling a mob away in a situation in which something else interferes, be it a tank, Frost Nova, or NPC aggro. I don't have Salv, and I'm sitting there pummeling away, even blowing trinkets and hoping for a massive Aimed crit to let me pull aggro back and take the mob away. I am using Dis shot everytime the CD is up also. I've tried switching to other targets as well, but it's just as futile as the first ended up being. My raid leader is telling me that it means I'm not kiting properly. In my mind, it has nothing to do with kiting and everything to do with aggro. And making our raid leader understand that is like talking to a brick wall.
He is a mage, and while I respect him and the work he's done to get the guild's progress so far, I'm getting to the point of frustration with his lack of understanding and continual calling out of myself that it's effecting my performance in raids and making me want to /gquit regardless of the fact that I love everything else in the guild. So any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Hello, all. I have a question regarding the interpretation of the infamous auto/steady/KC Hunter macro. Recently (as of the last patch 2.2) I have been running into the problem of Kill Command delaying my auto-shot cast enough such that the steady shot in my macro pre-empts the auto-shot resulting in an elimination of a full auto-shot.
My macro is pretty standard:
/cast [target=pettarget] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
I manually weave in my multi-shots and arcane shots using LittleTrouble combined with the cast bar (a setup I'm sure we all use).
What happens is that when I cast KC after any type of critical hit (but before my auto timer cools down) and I continue to spam my macro button, the auto-shot that I was expecting to come next is pre-empted by a steady shot cast.
What I've tried to do to compensate for this is to listen for the KC "growl" and then stop spamming the macro until I see the next auto-shot cast and my LittleTrouble cooldown bar appear.
I never had to do this before 2.2 as I could spam happily away and not worry about KC, so I am wondering if with 2.2 there was some change to the macro commands that would affect me in this way and also an explanation as to why my auto-shot is being pre-empted by the steady shot in the situation I described above.
Trying to kite both halves of the human camp is going to be difficult. The footmen typically are quite good at stealing your aggro. As for player interference, make sure to get a raid assistant & mark your targets with a lucky charm. There's a lot going on during the trash waves, having specific targets marked by the people in charge of them helps to control some of the chaos. That all being said, while having the NPC's help with the trash is definitely advisable; I wouldn't really consider them make or break critical.
Some things I try to do to get my kites better off:
Try to peel one out after it has hit one of the front line NPC's. By bringing one of the front NPC's back to the back, even if the back NPC's stop your kite & kill it there, the front one seems to help convince the back NPC's to run up to the front afterwards.
Distracting shot & arcane are your bread & butter shots, I only mention this because I've run into a few hunters that underestimate the value of distracting.
Avoid using snares around Footmen, especially earlier on; at the start it's more important getting more threat, rather than getting distance.
When you get to the Horde camp, you'll realize kiting in the human camp is a treat compared to dealing with the Tauren Warriors. With the stuns they're exceptionally hard to get a mob out of.
Thanks. I've been using Dis whenever the CD's up and Arcane, doing Silencing since it's instant also. On snares though, my raid leader is having me plant one right in the middle of the 6 footmen on the frontlines. Is it possible that that's causing more problems for me?
My guild finally started truly trying to kill things in Hyjal this week. Obviously, that means kiting the trash for me. I've got my route down, which is one that allows me, being the only hunter in both nights so far, to aggro Jaina, the "calvary" up and to her left, and then the riflemen and footmen near the tent to her far left.
So far for our Hyjal stuff, I've been fully flasked, well fed, etc. I do the trash in gear that gives me 3010 RAP and ~32% crit. My hit is low, but it's trash. I haven't missed anything on it yet.
The big problem I'm having is pulling a mob away in a situation in which something else interferes, be it a tank, Frost Nova, or NPC aggro. I don't have Salv, and I'm sitting there pummeling away, even blowing trinkets and hoping for a massive Aimed crit to let me pull aggro back and take the mob away. I am using Dis shot everytime the CD is up also. I've tried switching to other targets as well, but it's just as futile as the first ended up being. My raid leader is telling me that it means I'm not kiting properly. In my mind, it has nothing to do with kiting and everything to do with aggro. And making our raid leader understand that is like talking to a brick wall.
He is a mage, and while I respect him and the work he's done to get the guild's progress so far, I'm getting to the point of frustration with his lack of understanding and continual calling out of myself that it's effecting my performance in raids and making me want to /gquit regardless of the fact that I love everything else in the guild. So any help here would be greatly appreciated.
My own personal strategy for kiting in the human camp is as follows
Have your raid leader give you assist, and try and mark one of the targets in the back of the incoming mob, ghouls are great at this, but in the absence of ghouls among the back of the pack, aboms work fine, and crypt fiends are a distant third, you just won't be able to use cheetah due to their weak ranged attack.
Before the wave comes in, set a frost trap in front of you, site in on that one target, mark him with the agreed upon mark. distracting, arcane, auto, fit in a steady shot if you have time. strafe towards the dwarf ranged guys, hitting arcane whenever it's up, distracting, pop a concussive shot, then pop a steady,auto. at this point head over towards the tree that's in front of the stables, if the mob is getting close to you, pop a SS if you have it, if not, throw your trap up in the beginning of the pull sooner, so the cooldown will be up while you make a beeline for jaina. continue to hit arcane, distracting, stop for a quick auto. after running past jaina(Her aggro range is pretty decent) make a beeline for the AoE killzone, run through if there's no aboms, if there are, border along the outside of said killzone, wait until your particular mob is within the AoE, FD then focus on the single target kills (necromancers) or assist off your particular kill target tank.
Edit: In my experience, it's a necessity to have frost trap for the kiting, tell your raid leader that you won't be able to kite nearly as effectively without it.
if youre having really hard time with npcs stealing your aggro, the idea is to let one of the tank get some aggro on marked mobs and then nuke it off. FD after getting to npc camp and mob runs back to the tank pulling whole bunch of npc as well. Ussually work for me nicely. We actually use Hunters Mark to mark kitted mob, no need to assign any raid icons ;p
We use HM as well. Though I've gotten ten times better at getting a target before it gets through the gates, so I actually have time to put a raid mark on it before they get to us. Of course, I need to have an Assist to be able to do that first.
The advice definitly helped at least a bit. I only had problems with NPC aggro once last night. However, on our last string of attempts I think I got maybe one good kite off. Regardless of how many times I marked or said it over vent, the tanks, on in particular, kept ignoring the mark, though even he repeatedly said "mark it if you're pulling it away". Well, there's only so much you can do if it's ignored.
ive been gone for a pretty long time (around 6 months) and i was wondering how things had changed for hunters in terms of best pet in relation to spec(for raid). I have pretty great micromanagement when it comes to pets, and all things wow for that matter (a lot less to do when compared to wc3).
Before i left it was my basic understanding that..ravagers/cats were best for BM, and Wind serpents were better for Marks. However i am seeing random tid bits of , scorpids are best for survival? Can someone explain why that is? (extremely dummied down, but
Also, what % of damage do scorpions get added to their poison from our rap? Is a scorpid a ballin BM pet now? Or should i stick with ravager spamming gore?
<3
EDIT: ALSO can someone show me where this spread sheet is that calculates my DPS? Ive looked through 22 pages>.>
ive been gone for a pretty long time (around 6 months) and i was wondering how things had changed for hunters in terms of best pet in relation to spec(for raid). I have pretty great micromanagement when it comes to pets, and all things wow for that matter (a lot less to do when compared to wc3).
Before i left it was my basic understanding that..ravagers/cats were best for BM, and Wind serpents were better for Marks. However i am seeing random tid bits of , scorpids are best for survival? Can someone explain why that is? (extremely dummied down, but
Also, what % of damage do scorpions get added to their poison from our rap? Is a scorpid a ballin BM pet now? Or should i stick with ravager spamming gore?
EDIT: ALSO can someone show me where this spread sheet is that calculates my DPS? Ive looked through 22 pages>.>
Ravagers have a slight dps advantage (~5 dps) over Cats/Raptors. Those are the 3 highest damage pets. If you are Survival Build with high levels of crit, a Windserpent can possibly be a good alternative, since it can dump up to 50 focus per cooldown, whereas a Ravager/Cat/Raptor can only dump 25 per cooldown.
Scorpid Poison's scaling was nerfed in 2.2. Scorpions are now terrible as a PvE pet. (They are still good in PvP for stacking debuffs on casters so they can't dispell Viper String.)
Ravagers & Cats are generally going to be the highest dps pets. Wind Serpents will eventually perform as well, if not a little better, as your crit rate gets higher if you've got Go For the Throat.
Spec really doesn't play too much into pet choice, although a BM hunter may see a wind serpent pass up the other dps pets a little sooner due to Unleashed Fury, Ferocity & Beastial Discipline. But then again a survival hunter may see it a bit sooner due to a higher crit rate. Hard to say really, best bet is to play around with various what-if's with the spreadsheet. There's just way too many extra factors to make a good generalized statement.
I haven't really looked at a scorpid since the fix/nerf. Although the general feeling seems to be their only real shining point now is for PVP to mask your stings, making them harder to dispell.
Ravagers & Cats are generally going to be the highest dps pets. Wind Serpents will eventually perform as well, if not a little better, as your crit rate gets higher if you've got Go For the Throat.
Spec really doesn't play too much into pet choice, although a BM hunter may see a wind serpent pass up the other dps pets a little sooner due to Unleashed Fury, Ferocity & Beastial Discipline. But then again a survival hunter may see it a bit sooner due to a higher crit rate. Hard to say really, best bet is to play around with various what-if's with the spreadsheet. There's just way too many extra factors to make a good generalized statement.
I haven't really looked at a scorpid since the fix/nerf. Although the general feeling seems to be their only real shining point now is for PVP to mask your stings, making them harder to dispell.
Also, what should i be training my pet in for Raids as far as that goes. Just go full armor/HP? (obviously maxing like gore/bite on a ravager, and giving it dash that i will manually cast for it to run out i guess?) Or should i pay attention to resistances over armor? (ill be in SSC/TK)
Also, what should i be training my pet in for Raids as far as that goes. Just go full armor/HP? (obviously maxing like gore/bite on a ravager, and giving it dash that i will manually cast for it to run out i guess?) Or should i pay attention to resistances over armor? (ill be in SSC/TK)
I train my pets with Highest rank avoidance, Cobra reflexes, Gore/Claw, Bite. I'd also recommend training it with the max resistances for the instance you will be in:
Frost/Nature for SSC
Fire/Arcane for TK
Then put the rest of the points in stamina. You shouldn't need armour as your pet should rarely be getting hit in melee.
Firstly, you'll want your pet to have Avoidance rank 2, for survivability, and Cobra Reflexes for faster attacks. Then Claw/Gore/Bite, as focus dump. Usually, stamina light years is better than armor, so spend points there first.
EDIT: since i couldn't post the whole thing in one go due to a shabby connection and a lack of time to actually type the whole thing at the college computers, i'll continue my explanations now.
So with stamina sorted, physical damage should be close to zero on pets, except for whirlwinds and cleaves, that can mostly be either soaked by stamina, or avoided all together via positioning or pulling the pet. However, there are spells (Flame Buffet on Al'ar, Pounding on Void Reaver, etc) that are either impossible or simply counterproductive to avoid, so you'll want to have resistances for those.
As someone already posted, you're better off getting 2 pets (or if you think you won't forget to respec the same one before every raid) with 2 different sets of resistances (Arcane+Fire for TK; Nature + Frost for SSC, Fire + Shadow, etc), depending on the likely elements you're going to encounter during the whole raid night, neglecting armor all together. The reason for this is that you're better off investing in 2 schools of resistance rather than 3 or 4, for lesser amounts.
Last edited by Enova : 10/23/07 at 6:14 PM.
Originally Posted by XI-
In summary, TBC raiding is easy. 9/10 encounters can be summarized with 1 phrase. Stay out of the fucking fire. If this is too difficult BWL was still there last I checked, so go have at it for some practice.
I'm a first time poster with a couple questions about useful macros, be it BM/MM. I've been searching through the site for a while now and was unable to locate anything besides the KC/SS macro that I just started using.
First I'd like to take the time to thank all of the dedicated members of EJ who devote so much of their time and intelligence to helping the rest of us maximize our raid potential, in my case raid dps.
Anyhow, as I was saying. I just caught wind of EJ a few days ago and have spent a lot of my what would normally be farming time reading here. A friend of mine introduced me to this site and this one to basically learn how to create macros and find effective pre-existing ones. TKA Something - A World of Warcraft Hunter's Resource Like I was saying, I have searched through EJ quite extensively and come across the other [Hunter] threads here in Class Mechanics and haven't found quite what I'm looking for. The TKASomething site seemed a little too intense for someone like me who is just learning about useful macros, let alone how to create them.
Basically I was wondering if there were any other useful macros for a BM hunter besides the one I posted above that would maximize my dps? Perhaps including an arcane shot or a multi-shot? I am currently using a cat as my pet making use of Dash Rank 3, Bite/Claw Rank 9. I've read many posts and heard many people tell me that using an effective macro while BM spec with a cat using those skills is the best dps a hunter can possibly get. Maybe I've heard wrong? So if there are any better macros than the KC/SS one, or if MM has a better macro for dps could somebody please let me know?
Thanks in advance and I apologize if this is considered a useless post.
Most people manually weave in Multi/Arcane instead of macroing them. This keeps you flexible to deal with mana usage and haste effects. It's very easy to trip yourself up if your macro is too complex.
This may have already been addressed here or in another part of the forums, so I apologize if this is the wrong place. Do you know how the "attacks ignore XX of opponent's armor" ability on items compares to things like crit rating or hit rating? I know that 1% crit or hit increase raises your overall damage by roughly 1% (right?). So how will armor reduction compare?
10/21/07, 3:50 PM
