The days where hunters were just the last ones to fill an empty spot are now gone. Now, some if it happened because of the transition to 25 man raids, that forced everybody to play at its peak or be replaced. However, there's a general sense that hunters are now a lot more viable for raiding, and same as any class a good played hunter is an asset to the raid. And, to be fair, we now have three perfectly viable and somewhat different raid specs...

EDIT: Meh, I need to read more carefully... not that much has changed in 3-4 months, just a scorpid poison nerf on the PVE scene, and some odd buffs for PVP. And no more deadzone.

Well lemme ask this, aside from me being a good player that allowed me to be in the top 5 due to sheer attention paid to playing, my theoretical top end was MUCH lower then rogues. Due to things like windfury and such.

No matter how good I was at playing my hunter, I would've been better playing a rogue.

Is that still the case?

Last I saw fights were getting to the point where they were making it so being a ranged class with an agro wipe wasn't very important.

Well, from what you're saying, I'm guessing you haven't been raiding much after the Hunter's mark got buffed. It seems insignificant, yes, but that change makes a great difference, and is almost as good as Windfury for hunters.

Now, I can't quite give you an honest answer about competing with rogues or such, because I'm quite new in the guild I'm in, and the rogues have clearly a gear advantage over me. I don't have access to any recent WWS reports, but in most fights where I can use my pet, I can put out 900-1100 dps. On fights like Lurker Below or Void Reaver, I'm in between the rogues, and, if i get lucky, even ahead; on fights like Solarian and Morogrim, both hunters and rogues get owned by the casters.

But it generally depends on the fight... some places, rogues have it hard, some places, hunters have it hard...

Okay I need someone else to answer my questions. If you think the new hunters mark is as good as windfury for rogues you don't know what you are talking about.

Hunters can provide acceptable DPS in a raid situation, provided the person playing is compitent with the class. Hunters also bring group buffs in the form of Ferocious Inspiration, Trueshot aura and Expose weakness depending on spec so other classes welcome those buffs to their own DPS. Theres also the utility of misdirects and there will always be some fights with aggro issues where Feign Death is very useful.

The quick change Blizzard implemented to the Feign Death + drink combo midfight might hurt long term DPS for marks and survival hunters if they go all out for an extended period of time, but from personal experience, hunters are pretty desirable to have in a raid.

You just have to push for some group buffs that improve your own DPS like Leader of the pack and grace of air totem some of the time [grace of air, not gift of air, sorry]

So basically, the answer is "No, hunters aren't doing anything special still at this point".

I've done the whole expose weakness and fero inspiration thing. And while it was good, it was amazingly hard to quantify and most times even in the perfect scenario, the DPS I added via the buff plus my own was still not outdamaging rogues, or even really good DPS wars.

And I'm sorry, but I'm sure as hell not going to put a shaman in my group to do GOA.

In T6 gear, I would expect an EW hunter to have a damage contribution on par with rogues (when EW is considered). Hunter scaling isn't that great (never was, really). EW is the only thing that scales decently. However, at the current gear level we're on par with non-rogue DPS classes, so the scaling hasn't become a huge problem yet.

Then there are the intangibles like Scorpid Sting and Misdirection which contribute a lot to the raid in a way that's hard(er) to measure. Hunters provide some very useful raid functions and as such usually see 2-3 raid spots in our 25-man raids. Are they outpacing other classes? Definitely not. There are improvements that can be made, but they definitely warrant a raid spot in T5/T6 content.

Scaling has always worried me, so you can understand why I ask this line of questions. I hate feeling like I'm horribly limited by the class I play, instead of my skills as a player.

It sounds like the new changes haven't really fixed anything in regard to us raiding then.

It sounds about on par with where I was before hand, I can keep up with mages/locks in non-AOE situations but get thoroughly trashed by rogues due to windfury and good group stacking.

Blech, I wish I could just pay 50 bucks and change classes with comparable gear sometimes.

To clarify, the majority of encounters you will be ahead of mages and locks (group config notwithstanding) and behind rogues. Considering rogues don't bring a lot of "utility" to the raid, this seems like a fair deal.

Eh, our utility is annoying too me. Misdirect is okay, but kiting and stuff is blech. And traps are underwhelming. But I see what you are saying.

Question moved to WoW General forums.

How much haste rating would it take to make a 2.9 speed weapon (ie Arcantie steam pistol) act similarly to a 2.7 (wolfslayer sniper rifle) for a BM hunter?

Also, Is said speed optimal for a normal auto/steady/auto/steady rotation?

(I sometimes add an arcane shot to the mix and weave in KCs but that's the vast majority of my rotation.

2.9/(1.15*1.20*x) = 2.7/(1.15*1.20)
Solving for x
x = 2.9/2.7
x = 1.07
With 15.77 Haste Rating per 1% Haste, you need 117 Haste Rating in total for a 2.9 speed weapon to perform as a 2.7 speed weapon.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t15179-h...35/#post510811

Not even in a different thread...

During the raid last night in SSC i noticed this annoying bug people have mentioned with my target automatically switching to a CCed target when the current one was dead.

We were clearing down to Leotheras, there were 4 sheeps wandering around and I was nuking the current MA. When the mob died, I noticed that my target had switched to the polymorphed mob as I was casting my next steady shot, this is without any Tab-targetting or any targetting at all. This happened four times in a row, I had to keep on my toes to cancel the steady shot before it broke the sheeps.

Has anyone else observed this behaviour and/or has a solution to it? I'm using the standard BM Steady/Auto/KC macro, and it was definitely my steady shot which was about to break the CC, not an auto-shot or my pet.

Thanks, wanted to be sure I was doing my math correctly. (And sorry I missed the other post, I must have typed my search in wrong...serves me right for posting late at night)

I've read several posts which seem to indicate that a 2.7 speed is the optimal for BM, which was the source of my question. If I upgrade the Wolfslayer(79.1 dps 2.7 speed) to the Arcanite steam pistol (87.2 dps 2.9 speed) am I losing more than I gain? Will I gain it back if I grab the haste rating to drop down near my old speed, or am I wasting too much itemization getting there?
(also, any items you'd recommend to get there? The ZA chestpiece seems a likely starting point)

I've got about 150 ms latency normally, I'm hopeing to do some Dr. Boom work later, though don't have haste gear to test with.

I too am having this issue. The target switches to another mob (often times a CCed one) somewhere in front of me as the main target goes down. Of course, my auto shots are also being delayed by the newly buggy macro. Does anyone have a solution, or better yet, a newly devised macro that they can paste that can address either or both of these issues?

Also, does anyone have some thoughts about why these issues are happening? What I mean is, are these problems bugs and we can expect a fix at some point, or are these intended alterations to macro functioning?

I had this issue too, but after unchecking the "Auto attack/Auto shot" setting under interface options it stopped.

You are seeing the targetting issue because the 2.3 patch reset some of the interface options back to defaults, including auto-attack. Just turn it back off.

So, messing around with Cheeky's spreadsheet, I almost cried when it told me that "upgrading" from the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle to the Serpent Spine Longbow decreased my DPS by a pretty decent amount.

As a BM hunter, is that really true? Are the mechanics so effing broken that speed is much, MUCH more critical than actual DPS, such that the Wolfslayer is considerably better than a weapon that ought to be a significant upgrade? 11 more DPS, and 25 higher iLevel?

^Yes

I have searched the forums and toyed around with the spreadsheet and cant find a solid number when a wind serpent starts to overcome a cat/ravenger in dps. I have been raiding with one for the past week and sometimes it seems better sometimes it seems worse looking at WWS logs and Recount stats. So I have a few questions...

What crit rating does the wind serpent overcome the cat/ravenger dps? (Gftt returning focus)

I heard they fixed auto lightning breath in 2.3, I tried it and it didn’t seem fixed so i turned it off and put the command back in my macro. What is other hunters experience with this post 2.3?

Looking at recount stats after a few boss fights bite has significantly low damage. Should I just untrain this? Is it just wasting my focus I should be using on lightning breath?