I've debated the same issue, but choose to keep using Kill Command as a DPS boost. I got used to it after I first got my Beast Lord 4 set bonus, with the 6 sec/600 armor pen proc on any KC. When I lost the 4 set to upgrades I debated and theorycrafted whether it was worth continuing. While mana is a challenge for me, keeping Viper up and keeping up on pots I manage to get through 9 minute fights without going to a mana conservation shot rotation. With all the DPS structuring challenges that hunters face weaving shots and being slaves to the GCD, I am extremely hesitant to abandon dps that is off the GCD, regardless of how mana-inefficient it may be (and let there be no doubt that KC for MM hunters is not mana efficient). While Viper costs me 155 AP from Hawk, a conservative estimate of the DPS value of KC in my cirumstances is as follows:

I will rarely go 6 seconds without a crit. If I estimate that KC will proc no less frequently than every 10 seconds and never crits, I have an easy to calculate and very conservative estimate of its DPS value. KC with my cat, raid buffed, hits for about 400 non-crit. 6 procs/minute gives me 2400 DPM, or 40 DPS. A more realistic estimate of the DPS value would be more like 55-60 DPS, as KC is usually proccing more like every 7-8 seconds macroed into my specials and does crit (don't have any raid Recount data in front of me, but I'm going to hash this out this week). This makes me feel that overall dropping Hawk in favor of Viper/KC is a worthwhile choice.

As I said in my post above, my sustained DPS is floating between 750 on very unfriendly boss fights and about 900 tops right now, with 860 being a more realistic number. That puts the damage value of KC for me at a 4.5%-7% increase in overall DPS versus not using it, which I believe is worth the mana regardless of inefficiency...at least for me. Your mileage may vary.

O dont agree with that at all. yes my burst damage is alot more but as BM my "aggro" from damage is split between my pet and myself where as MM a much large part of the damage goes directly on me. We did some mixed guild BT saturday night with a guild that hasnt killed Supreme yet, we stopped at Teron for obvious reasons. On HL Naj i did 1250 DPS as MM but usually 1300 dps as a BM wihtout a SV hunter which we had this time. Of that my pet as a MM was 250ish and as BM my pet is in the 550ish range put my MM dps w/o pet at about 1K where BM is 750. To me that is alot more aggro on me as a MM vs BM. These numbers are right off the WWs becasue we didnt log do to mixed raid but from recount, the BM are off the top of my head from our normal kills.

It's definitely true that you will "feel" a lot more aggro as MM, since the aggro distribution between you and your pet is much more heavily slanted toward you. I usually feign when the tank hits about 20k aggro, again at 60k, and maybe once more. You'll feign earlier and more often as MM.

While I see your point, I personally won't bother with KC as a MM in most cases simply because of the mana cost. The 75 mana KC costs is 450 mana per minute. On an average fight of say 6 minutes that is 2700 mana on an ability that will do between 400-650~ damage. On the other hand, I could choose to use that 2700 mana towards other shots that will boost my longevity and not force me to use Viper instead of AoTH. I refuse to DPS with Viper on from 100% even without a Shadow Priest. Not sure if its the min-maxer in me or what... =) With AoTH on at all times I'm gaining that 144 RAP~ +/- on every single shot in-addition-to the benefit of Improved AoTH procs. That, to me, is a greater DPS boost than the use of Kill Command hands-down, (especially being MM build).

Valid point. It won't cost me anything to keep KC off and use Hawk to 50% for Gruul and VR next week, so I'm going to give it a run.

Awesome post, and for a beginner hunter (I'm lvl 42) it was very, very useful indeed as I will be able to take a lot of what I have read off of this post and adapt it to my play style, great post Howitzer thank god for knowledgeable players like yourself and others who have posted here

BTW this is my first post here on EJ, great site and lot's of useful info for all types of players.

btw Howitzer - You didn't include your WWS Log from that video, and I know the link is still available (I browsed through the hunter forums and your old video post with dps log is still there)

Also, the WWS log seems kind of wierd.

Wow Web Stats

You gave a rogue group6 all by himself? You also didn't recieve a SPriest yet your mana seemed fine throughout the video. Is this the benefit of using Fel Mana potions? (The mats are a bit expensive, yet I have loads of Super Mana Pots). Plus anything else you can explain while looking through that log would be great - things to look for, etc.

referring to your video as an example - it seems you get both trinket procs, then you FD, Blood Fury, then Rapid Fire and proceed with a 1:1 rotation. Your mana is fine and you seem to just blow it out with all the trinket procs and a 1:1 rotation. why?

And I'm just having a really hard time judging when to pop Rapid Fire. I think it'd be best for me to just save it when I convert to 1:1 rotations when I'm trying to conserve mana, yet you used it on both trinket procs? I'm confused

EDIT - the Rapid Fire proc I refer to is right at 8min into the video - forgot to mention that. You look like you're at 90% mana

Fel Mana pots are quite expensive here as well, but I've always felt that they're well worth it. When you're trying to deal with a long term DPS strategy for fights over 5 or 6 minutes I feel much more comfortable getting a guaranteed 3200 mana every time I pot instead of a random 1800-2500 with a chance of a crit.

I always buy mats and have one of our Potion Masters make them to get the extra procs. I've seen bonus proc rates up to 30% (i.e. I just bought mats for 60 and ended up with 80 from the bonus procs).

As an additional bit of strategy you can hit your first pot when you're at about 2500 Mana, thus starting your pot cooldown 15 seconds earlier in the fight. By the time the pot's proc completes you'll be at full mana with no waste of the pot due to your mana consumption during its duration. This is definitely min-maxing to a meticulous degree, but if you're already timing your first pot for when you're down 3200 mana it's not any more trouble and it's nice to have a fresh mana pool again a minute or so into a fight.

I see that Howitzer feels hit rating is perhaps the most important stat for a MM hunter. I have mine just about capped at 141, but I see that many MM hunters even in the highest ilvl gear do not have it capped. I was looking at Howitzer's armory and I saw a 90 hit rating, obviously I am not sure if it is his full raiding gear, or does he rely on other buffs in order to increase his hit rating?

The reason I ask this is because I have some of my gear socketed with +8 hit and +4hit/+4agi in order to make sure I am as close to capped as possible, but I am giving up a lot of ap with that set up.

Do you guys suggest socketing with +8 hit if you are not fully capped already? Or should you just stick with the standard +8 agility and fill in for meta requirements?

If you spec Surefooted in the Survival tree (which Howitzer has according to his current armory) you cap out at about 90 for hit rating, giving someone specced that deep into survival much more latitude with gear selection and gemming.

I'm at 90 right now because I am messing around with a full Survival spec in PVP. I get 48 hit rating from surefooted and I'm really at 138 at the moment. You don't "ALWAYS" have to have max hit rating on by the way. Its only needed for L73 boss mobs. You need 5% for players, 9% for raiding. If you do a lot of raiding and your hit rating is horrible, decreasing your chance to miss is a direct upgrade to your DPS. If you're at a deplorable % I wouldn't say drop the 8 agi gems but at least try to find gear that has hit on it and use the 8 hit gems as a last resort. The armory has been screwy lately, thats not even my current talent build. /boggle.

I do the same thing howitzer does, mostly because I don't have arcane or multi on macro or hot key (yes, I click). The issue occurs when you have a buff like rapid fire up, your attack speed goes through the roof. you might have the time between steady and the auto shot time to go off to throw in an arcane, but that is a TON of button mashing and hope that it goes off in time without clipping.

Beyond the haste procs, you've got the AP boosts that the other trinkets provide, so now only are you attacking faster, but hitting harder. With rapid fire being on a 3 min CD and trinkets, typically, on 2, it's pretty easy to blow all three twice in a few and get a pretty hefty chunk of burst DPS.

Also, if I know there are certain places where DPS is key, I try to time my CD blowing with those. Prince, phase 2 being a great example. We usually get Prince to phase two before my CD's are up, so I just save them instead for when phase two starts and just balls out to get him out of Phase 2 as fast as possible.

At least, that is my reasoning behind it. Not sure if his is much different.

One thing you might want to try is to use Kill Command only then when you know that between the next two auto shots both multi and arcane shot will be on cooldown. That's what I'm doing and it works pretty well. Of course you have to remove any KC-Macro that is bound to Steady Shot but in my opinion it is well worth it.

Especially since this gives you more control over your pet. As of now Kill Command will automatically send your pet towards the enemy if it's next to you - and this can be quite disastrous on certain bosses like Illidari Council when they decide to cast all their AoE spells on the same spot (and your pet runs happily through all of them).

Would you mind elaborating in more detail exactly what this does? Is it just the same as zooming your camera out to maximum distance? Maybe a comparison screenshot or two may help.

Also, where does it get stored? In the config file? The reason I ask is that if someone types it in but decides they dislike it, how can they remove it safely to go back to what they had originally?

On the subject of blessing of salvation - I´ve asked the very same question at the [Hunter]Help me please (post #1058) thread and the consensus seemed to be that it´s not necessary in most cases. Personally I´d say there´s no easy answer as in you need or you don´t need it. It really comes down to the duration of the fight or any possible aggro resets. On fights like Illidan or RoS that have lots of aggro resets and only short periods of tank & spank salvation is certainly better than any of the other blessings. On fights like Archimonde or the Council I´d take wisdom over salvation any day regardless of talent spec.

I also disagree that there´s such a huge gap between MM and BM hunters personal damage as people say. Cheekys spreadsheet as well as WWS observations seem to indicate that they´re actually quite close togather (assuming equal equipment and skill).

Great post howitzer, nice to see a thread talking about the viability of marks in a t6 environment.

First off just wanted to say that I think its important for people who really want to min-max to think about their gear choices. While its very close, from my general testing it seems like at any level of medium hit and onwards, agility is point for point a stronger stat, and as such using hit gems is only really an option for yellow sockets (and even then the orange hit/agi gem would outperform it by a very small degree). Also I was wondering why you favor the use of ravager dogs over warp burger / grilled mudfish (20 agility food). While i hold you in enough awe that i admit i could be wrong, using your gear and the recommended talent spec in the OP it seemed like again the agility food slightly out-performed the attack power food (using cheeky's).

Last of all what kind of damage difference do you expect / see between a flask of relentless assault and the double pot method of agi / mageblood elixirs? for a BM hunter atleast the straight damage difference is miniscule and it simply turns into an equation of ret pally being in the raid + was given illidari marks recently vs. needing that extra mana (say on a fight like shahraz or when our ret pally is raid rubbing). Given that a marksmans mana efficiency is alot lower than a bm hunter using bbotb using a steady+kc rotation i would have thought it generally better to double elixir. Thanks for reading!

It sets the maximum distance the camera can be from the character further away.

This is a shot with the highest distance you can set in-game:

http://n.ethz.ch/~dnovak/download/normal.jpg

And this one is with the console command:

http://n.ethz.ch/~dnovak/download/zoomdist4.jpg

If you don't like it, just set the game camera zoom lower and it'll reset it, otherwise it'll save it at logout.

This is what normal max zoom through the interface looks like:



This is what it looks like using the command: /console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 4



The zoom distance increases dramatically allowing you to see an entire battlefield, not to mention it just looks pretty damn cool when you're traveling in flight or riding around etc, (quite scenic). =)

I've been using this build 15/43/3 and would definitely recommend it if you want MM's range + damage while giving your pet Imp Res (which will be handy again once they let us feed in combat) plus 20% more damage to the pet.

Above poster's build it's just about the same spec i used to level up to 70 and in early TBC raid days.

It's a very good spec in my opinion, perfectly able to compete with other builds for top DPS spots. I would argue that humanoid slaying is better than 2 points in improved barrage and silencing shot, especially considering the amount of crit you get at t6 gear level.


Anyway i raid as survival now, as the problems of MM are still the same as they were at the start of BC raids:

-little to no group utility (i doubt that many guild have more than 1 spot for a MM hunter in raid)
-you NEED a shadowpriest AND a lot of mana/fel man pots each raid
-you have to multishot, something not always allowed


I really doubt the supposed better scaling/itemization of MM at very high gear level can outweight its disadvantages, but if your raid can afford a hunter focused group having 1 hunter spec MM is a valid option and the above poster build is the best one you can use for it imo.

I'm a big fan of just using Otweaks, rather than fiddling with the settings manually.

Ace2: http://files.wowace.com/Ace2/Ace2-r57245.zip
Otweaks: http://files.wowace.com/oTweaks/oTweaks.zip

Not only does it allow you to increase the camera zoom limit, it also allows you to tweak the camera zoom speed as well as adjust your tab-targetting distance and radius.

You definately don't need a shadow priest when using all the MP5 buffs available to you. A shaman with a mana spring totem is already enough to let you complete a fight without running dry (if you pot early). And even without any mana-donating class in your group it is still possible to complete fights with mana left (again - with MP5 buffs, a certain trinket or bow and of course early potting).