Hello, I've been lurking EJ forums for a while, but just registered because I have some questions to ask:
1. What is the easiest method to determine if I am clipping my shots? I use a 1:1 rotation, and after testing it on Dr. Boom I can see that I am maintaining the ratio fine, but I'm not sure if I am clipping my autos or not.
2. What is the best way to spec a Ravager for raiding? I have looked everywhere for answers to this, but couldn't find anything. I assumed just take Cobra Reflexes, max Avoidaince, get rank 9 Gore and Bite, get Dash 3, then rank 11 Stam and put the rest into Armor, but I am wondering if the resistances are worth losing either Stam or Armor for.
3. As far as a BM spec for raiding goes, how useful is Imp. Mend Pet for you guys? I can't seem to think of any fights the cleanse would be good for, save like Maiden, but I may be wrong.
4. Is there a list of pre-early raiding gear compiled somewhere that I magically missed?
5. How the hell do I convince a guild to invite me? I'm sure I can't be the only one with the Hunter blues. EVERY guild is 'full on hunters' when I ask, then I armory their raiding hunters and see they are not exactly great hunters (Ex: One guild had 2 raiding hunters, one specced 0/31/30 that used crit/stam gems, and the other was 5/47/9 with better gear than me and I outDPSed him in a heroic while he was making me chaintrap casters and giving himself easy-to-trap mobs, giving him more time to DPS than I had). Do I ask them to try me in a raid or something? I just made my hunter my main, coming from a shadow priest in a guild that was learning Rage Winterchill, and not being able to find a Kara group is very frustrating.
1) From my limited experience, i guess you could count your autoshots (either by manual counting or using Recap i guess). Remove all your haste proc items if you have any and then do a test for 1-2-3 minutes. See how many autoshots you shot and then calculate how much autoshots you should have in that time span.
2) I can't comment on the ravager but my windserpent has LB, and 60 to all resistances as his primary skills. I rate Stamina lower then Resistances.
1. What is the easiest method to determine if I am clipping my shots? I use a 1:1 rotation, and after testing it on Dr. Boom I can see that I am maintaining the ratio fine, but I'm not sure if I am clipping my autos or not.
I think most people use Quartz or Sorren's Timers to provide a visual representation of the shot timers. Generally speaking though, unless you have a 2.6-2.7 speed weapon and some Haste gear you should not be clipping in a 1:1 rotation.
2. What is the best way to spec a Ravager for raiding? I have looked everywhere for answers to this, but couldn't find anything. I assumed just take Cobra Reflexes, max Avoidaince, get rank 9 Gore and Bite, get Dash 3, then rank 11 Stam and put the rest into Armor, but I am wondering if the resistances are worth losing either Stam or Armor for.
Resistances are very much specific to the instance and fight, the fully hardcore Hunters likely have multiple pets specced for different instances. (Hyjal = Fire, BT = Shadow, etc).
Personally I stuck with Stamina just to give that littel bit of survivability (and because I wanted to keep my showpiece pets instead of resistance based pets!).
3. As far as a BM spec for raiding goes, how useful is Imp. Mend Pet for you guys? I can't seem to think of any fights the cleanse would be good for, save like Maiden, but I may be wrong.
For me personally, it's a god-send. Whether its a poison, or a crazy disease that reduces his hit they are inevitably there to hinder my DPS so I use Imp. Mend.
4. Is there a list of pre-early raiding gear compiled somewhere that I magically missed?
Just use Wowhead: You'll be back. and apply some decent filters then sort by iLVL. You will see a clear increase in iLVL as you get into the more progressed content and therefore loot.
our raid has a strong melee group setup
i usually don't even have a sp
just want some critzism on the log and some advice for performing better
(p.s. i've no idea where the 7% auto miss came from)
thanks
About to leave for the day so cannot comment extensively, but from personal experience I find it easier to switch to a 1:1.5 rotation on Essence of Anger. The constant ticking damage knocks back the cast time and your steady shot which causes a lot of clipping. You can usually up your DPS by rotating Arcane / Multi and Steady when you have both on CD.
It varies a little based on gear and haste procs, but it worked for me.
Given you are posted 2k+ DPS on the fight you are not doing all that badly though to be honest.
About to leave for the day so cannot comment extensively, but from personal experience I find it easier to switch to a 1:1.5 rotation on Essence of Anger. The constant ticking damage knocks back the cast time and your steady shot which causes a lot of clipping. You can usually up your DPS by rotating Arcane / Multi and Steady when you have both on CD.
It varies a little based on gear and haste procs, but it worked for me.
Given you are posted 2k+ DPS on the fight you are not doing all that badly though to be honest.
I'm in agreeance here. While my guild has only gotten RoS to ~15% on Essence of Desire, I was still experiencing knock-back troubles with Steady just on phase 2. Going to the rotation Thelegend recommended, or something similar, really helped me out.
I can tell you that on a weapon you'll be using awhile, investing in the [Stabilized Eternium Scope] is the best way to go about things. However, I can't point you in the direction of a discussion of the effects on your DPS that the various scopes will have, as I think that's what you're after.
I can tell you that on a weapon you'll be using awhile, investing in the [Stabilized Eternium Scope] is the best way to go about things. However, I can't point you in the direction of a discussion of the effects on your DPS that the various scopes will have, as I think that's what you're after.
I wouldn't discount [Schematic: Biznicks 247x128 Accurascope] either, depending on your gear level and item choices it's an excellent alternative to socketing hit rating gems if you're lacking in that department.
The downside being it's an absolute pain to find these days, the pattern/mats are drops from MC.
Hello. I understand that having more than one survival hunter in a raid isn't a great idea, but I'd like to know how expose weakness is 'refreshed' in that particular situation. Does the most powerful EW simply override the other ones?
Sorry for the rather noobish question, but I can't find this info anywhere and it's been bugging me for a while.
No idea if its still in effect, but when my old guild merged and brought in a few new members to TK the Co-hunter lead was getting really pissed off that an under geared SV hunter was getting the first crits in and not allowing the better geared SV hunter throw up his EW.
Now that I can actually access the "Your attacks ignore xxx of your opponent's armor" -items, I started wondering if they're any good for hunters in general. Does the armor ignore -effect apply both to the hunter and the pet, and does one spec benefit more than another one? If it does apply to the pet too, BM would be a clear winner, wouldn't it, since MM/surv has arcane shot (magic) in their rotations?
In short, armor penetration: Any use for hunters, or shall I let the rogues/warriors get it first? Thanks in advance.
Armor pen does not affect your pets' attacks, unfortunately. All specs have use for the stat, though, and it's not a stat to be ignored by Hunters. An especially fun characteristic of armor pen is its effectiveness actually increases as you stack more of it -- as it reduces your target's armor closer to zero -- so it, in fact, does not have diminishing returns until the mob's armor reaches zero. Fortunately, reducing a boss's armor to 0 is not especially practical without stacking loads of armor pen, so it's definitely a worthwhile stat to incorporate into your gear setup.
No idea if its still in effect, but when my old guild merged and brought in a few new members to TK the Co-hunter lead was getting really pissed off that an under geared SV hunter was getting the first crits in and not allowing the better geared SV hunter throw up his EW.
This is untrue from what I have seen and heard from other hunters. The more powerful EW will always take precedence, it may be the case where the hunter kept refreshing the EW and it didn't show as his own, but everything I have seen dictates that the more powerful one will always overwrite.
About two months ago, I switched to raiding on a mage. It was an enjoyable reprieve, but I'm ready/excited to get back onto my hunter. A couple of quick, "help me catch up on recent hunter TC" kind of questions. When I left, 2.7 speed weapons (Don Santos, Wolfslayer) were all the rage for BM. That seems to still be the case from the lurking I've done. However, how does the availability of haste from badges/ZA change this? Could enough haste knock, say, Sunfury down to 2.7 and make it a superior choice, or would the difference not be dramatic enough until using something like Vashj's bow? Heck, is it even possible to collect that much haste at those gear levels? It sounds like with IAotH 136 haste rating is the effective cap?
On that note, what are the opinions of IAotH? I see so much variance when I troll the boards that its hard to tell if its good or bad. I get a lot of "random haste procs are not good for BM" and a lot of, "if your using a 2.7 speed weapon and it procs it can only be good with a 1:1 rotation." Thoughts? I'm currently using Wolfslayer, and if I recall correctly when I spec'd IAotH in the past it never caused a clipping problem, and was especially useful when I was throwing arcane/multi shots in place of steady.
On the rotation note, what kind of macros are people using these days? I'm assuming 2.3 stopcasting changes had an affect, or maybe not at all?I generally prefer to manually time, but if I'm getting a lack spike or just really need to pay attention to something else, it is nice to have a spammable solution to fall back on. To that end, I had 3 macros made:
one for a MM/Surv rotation (auto, steady, multi, auto, steady, auto, steady, arcane, auto, steady)
one for BM doing straight auto, steady
and one for BM when Kill Command was up, but that was written in such a way that Kill Command would be used after an auto and before the next steady to avoid clipping auto shots.
Being a hack, I've never been able to figure out macros myself, but found a working solution for the first and have tried
#Showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast Auto shot
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/cast [exists,target=pettarget] Lightning Breath
/cast [exists,target=pettarget] Kill Command
for the second too. Is that sort of the standard (sans Lightning Breath if using a Ravager)?
Finally, a quick "gearing up" question. I'm under the assumption that 4/5 t5 is worth snagging, and replacing 1 piece iwth a superior off set piece. I'll have to check this on Cheeky's spreadsheet I'm sure, but is there a preferred four pieces? I only ask because mages had the easy, "get the off set helm" rule =P.
Many thanks, and sorry to be so wordy without having a whole lot by way of contribution. Hopefully when I lurk for a bit and catch up I can offer something useful.
I was just wondering what a good balance of AP/crit to aim for with a BM spec once I'm hit capped?
With my karazhan ring I'm over the hit cap so I'm trying to decide what crit to aim for before focusing on AP. When S3 comes out I should be sitting at 27% crit and 1800 ish AP.
Armor pen does not affect your pets' attacks, unfortunately. All specs have use for the stat, though, and it's not a stat to be ignored by Hunters. An especially fun characteristic of armor pen is its effectiveness actually increases as you stack more of it -- as it reduces your target's armor closer to zero -- so it, in fact, does not have diminishing returns until the mob's armor reaches zero. Fortunately, reducing a boss's armor to 0 is not especially practical without stacking loads of armor pen, so it's definitely a worthwhile stat to incorporate into your gear setup.
This is an excellent lead-in to my question regarding armor penetration and PvP. When gearing for PvP, I've read that hunters want 12k+ HP and 350+ resilience to be competitive in the arena. Currently, I run with 11.5k HP and 215 resilience (2-piece HWL, 2-piece S2, and S2 bracers), and I'm trying to figure out how to most effectively spend my stash of honor and arena points when S3 hits. I play primarily on 2v2 outlast teams with either a priest or druid partner.
As I compare the S2 and S3 sets, I notice that they have the same amount of resilience, with S3 sporting marginally higher other stats and also a small amount of armor penetration. That extra bit of damage from armor penetration would be nice, but since we secure most of our victories from drain/outlasting, it doesn't seem as important as the increase in survivability from more resilience. My question is, should I spring for the S3 gear to get the latest and greatest (but not do as well early on since I can't afford as many pieces), or should I scrimp and buy the discounted S2 pieces to reach the resilience cap more quickly (and end up replacing pieces later on)?
I was just wondering what a good balance of AP/crit to aim for with a BM spec once I'm hit capped?
With my karazhan ring I'm over the hit cap so I'm trying to decide what crit to aim for before focusing on AP. When S3 comes out I should be sitting at 27% crit and 1800 ish AP.
Should I be focusing more on AP?
Anyway, great thread
Naela
There isn't really a point you can look at and say "ah! I've hit x AP, time to stack crit!" Improving hunter dps tends to require both. That said, your pet will (probably) gain more from you getting an additional point of ranged AP than it would from a point of crit rating.
Might be a stupid question to ask but I would like the opinion of the hunter crew here on Aspect of the Viper. Is it good to use, if yes, when would you use it, at what point does it bring a dps loss and those shit about it.. =S
It´s quite simple with AotV in my opinion: If you would go oom otherwise, you should use it. But do not switch it in before you´re down to about 50 % of mana, where it reaches it´s maximum-effect. Having a SP in your group (though this may be unlikely in most raids) makes AotH useables all of the fight normally (unless you have to chain-rezz your pet) with proper potting. Same goes for a jugded SoW on the mob, which might be the easiest way for most hunters out there to provide the ability to be able to maintain AotH the whole fight long. There are few fights, where a pally won´t be able to judge one seal every thirty seconds (or refresh it), it just takes about 2 - 3 seconds. I just pick my best pally-mate in the raid and ask him via ts-whisper to judge a seal (they keep forgetting it^^). Any mana-dps-class will be glad to have it on the boss.
@Naela: I basically tend to socket 8 Agi in reds, 8 Crit in yellows (8 Hit if you´re still lacking Hit is equivalent), 8AP 2mp5 in blues. For most PvE-items it is true that getting the socket-bonuses is better than just stacking 8 Agi/16 AP in everything. Also, you will at least need 2 of each colour to maintain the meta-gem.
Our guild is just getting to the third stage of vashj.
Being a hunter I was assigned to down the initial spore bats, but was having problems. Is it worth giving up 3 pts in Mortal Shots for the increased range for spore bat duty (will it even help), or should I just learn to cope with my usual 41/20 spec?
Any hints on the best way to down them also gratefully received.
11/23/07, 7:37 AM
cheers
