I'm confused as to what rotation MM would want to use other than "sting, chimera, steady until chimera cools down, then chimera, steady, repeat steady until chimera cools down."

I suppose a LnL build could go for using Arcane when it procs, but isn't Arcane still less damage than Steady Shot even talented?

On spreadsheets and max buffs, Arcane can just pip Steady Shot but the margin is so small and the opportunity costs so great, it ain't worth it. You'll gain more DPS by sinking the talent points elsewhere like the BM tree.

Well, as far as Shandara spreadsheet is correct (I know its not perfect as WotLK is beta yet), but looks like haste is not that bad as people are saying.



That's for my gear with a BM spec.

I've seen people claiming that 1 crit = 3 haste rating. Looks like haste only loses to agi, hit (if you're not capped) and ArP. Again, that's for my gear. Still a better stat than Int, AP and Stam (even if you're survival).

Also the spreadsheet says that my DST is better than most TBC trinkets (I'm hit capped so MotB and TT are half useless). So, the spreadsheet is far off or haste is not a really bad stat as people claim. As far as my understanding goes haste is a good (read not awesome, but stills good) stat as it improves our DPS (autoshot only, yes) indefinitely.

As far as it's correct people should ask devs to rip crit, AP, stam(?) and int off mail gear and not haste.

I hope that's usefull in some way.


(Sorry by my bad english, I hope you guys can understand it. )

Edit: spelling.

Make sure you're taking the right talents in marks (Int to AP), and click the Calc Attributes button before checking that list. Should put you in line with what we're seeing (i.e. haste only worth 3/5 Int, and less than half of Agility).

So far the standard rotation seems to be serpent sting, then chimera shot, steady shot and repeat. Would multi-shot and the new aimed shot be worth using in a MM rotation? Especially aimed shot, since it only takes 1 talent point and has lots of synergies.

I brought this up a few pages back. It is a DPS gain, but it's a huge mana hole. Ultimately, probably never worth the mana investment in PvE, but it will do more damage per shot than Steady and fits into a MM rotation right behind Chim shot as to not leech an imp. SS proc if you happen to get one.

The problem is that both Multi-shot and Aimed Shot use the same damage formula and mana costs. While it does use RAP normalised damage instead of fully normalised damage, which will mean a very slow weapon will make both shots more powerful than Steady Shot eventually, they both have to compete against Steady which has a 10% damage bonus due to that glyph.

Because of that, it's very difficult for those two shots to compete. Even if you spec the full Barrage line, you've bought yourself very little DPS for 6 talent points and that won't transfer to Aimed Shot (yet).

After unloading about 15 minutes worth of testing, I personally find Aimed Shot to be rather underwhelming. Sure, it's a damage boost if you have mana to burn but cycling in Aimed Shot removes a steady shot from your cycle which reduces the effectiveness of Improved Steady Shot. Just a weird case of attempting to diversify your shot selection which can end up hurting your DPS in the long run.

Someone might want to poke Blizzard about that.

Actually, that makes a huge difference. Switching to level 70 talents, buffs, and skills increases the value of haste. By a lot.

I'm not sure why... but that's why you're seeing what you're seeing.

What thee? I have screenshots of being nr 1 in dps in molten core/bwl/aq40 without pet, and that was the perfect times of hunter actually. But at late aq40/naxx times we started to suffer in damage for reasons I can't remember

Well anyways looking at the stuff MM is getting, I'm quite sure it will be one of the top dps', and for that I'm glad.

Despite aimed shot not being worth using in a standard rotation (at this point), it's still useful for firing on the run.

Hunters still did good damage back then, true, but I personally hated the Aimed/Multi rotation. I did manage to use my wolf for a while after they gave it Furious Howl though, for however much almost-insignificant DPS it would provide.

I am much happier now that the PET CLASS gets to use their pet effectively. In my opinion, what they've done for pets in the WotLK is long overdue (yeah, I know BM was big in TBC as well, but pets still weren't very unique or interesting then).

It sure is great that they finally put some work into the pet aspect of the class... though I really hope they do another pass on pet abilities before the WotLK release (it's already too late for the 3.02 patch I guess).

Some abilities are just plain broken, in the useless (Wind Serpent's Lightning Breath) as well as the 'what the hell were they thinking' overpowered variety (Scorpid Poison). For the record, I had a level 74 scorpid put out ~800 DPS without any outside buffs besides activating BW once in a while and providing him with enough focus to keep a 5 stack going. Considering the scaling of pets with raid buffs we saw earlier, I'd really like to see someone try a scorpid in Naxx25...

The Serpent's Poison Spit is also very strong and blows the similar Core Hound ability Lava Breath out of the water, it's almost doing as much damage per tick as the Core Hound's instant damage.
Meanwhile, Chimeras and Wind Serpents are just plain horrible (Chimeras at least have the snare going for them...), and Birds of Prey seemingly got overlooked when they adjusted the focus costs, as Snatch still costs 40 focus.

Yeah I agree the rotations are better now after we got steady etc. But the pet aspect of the hunter has always been lacking, it has pretty much been just our DOT. That is the thing I didn't really like about them, I'd rather have an Archer type class than a pet class with meaningless pet(except the dot). Well I really hope that the improvements to our pets in WotLK are a success and that our class gets more interesting because of those.

Looking back at page 113 of this thread you'll find this:


This is for a level 80 Naxx geared Survival hunter. But for BM haste is even worse. As you can see haste rating at level 80 is really by far the worst stat we can get.

Noone is arguing that you should avoid all haste at all cost. But in order to make the right gear choice you need to take into account the dps per statvalue for it, which is about 1/2 of our other "main" dps stat values (AP, crit, hit, agi, arp).

Let me make a small theoretical example:

Helm of Pure Pwnage:
80 Agi
80 Crit
160 AP

Helm of the Fast Shooter:
80 Agi
80 Haste
160 AP

Taking very roughly that 40 crit == 1% dps increase the difference between the 2 items is about 1% dps because haste only gives about 1/2 the dps per stat point as crit does.

Now one might argue that this never happens (it does for our T7 gear though, so that point is already moot) and that we won't get a haste only gear. So lets have a mixed piece:

Helm of the Pure Shooter:
80 Agi
53 Haste
53 Crit
160 AP

(this isn't 100% precise but is as close to the item budget formula as possible)

As AP and Agi stay the same we can ignore them for now. So lets take a look at the Haste and Criti:

53 haste == 26.5 crit
53 + 26.5 == 79.5 crit overall = 1.9875 % dps increase

compared to 2% for the Help of Pure Pwnage.

So even with perfectly split up stats we're still below the item with crit only for the same item budget. And i certainly don't have to show how good that item would be if haste would be replaced by hit or arp then.

It basically boils now down to the fact that for items with the same item level and the same number of dps stats on them we can safely assume that any piece without haste will always be better at the moment. In case the haste gear has 1 more dps stat a closer look would be necessary, but as i've just shown even for a perfect stat split we'd still loose dps if the rest of the item stats would be identical, so even then it will more often be likely that the non-haste item will still be better.

In the end of course it's always up to the player which piece of gear he takes, but those of us who want to absolutely maximize their DPS (which is one of my personal goals in our guild) will leave Naxx in WotLK without any tier piece and go like that into the next instance, probably doing approx 5% more DPS than their counterparts that run around in full T7. This is of course all assuming that nothing will change from now till we raid Naxx. In case Blizzards decides to reevaluate our T7 gear or that haste will affect our pet by 50% or reduce the GCD of our Steady shot (like it does for all casters, which we are officially being viewed as by Blizzard) things will drastically change.

On a personal note i've not jumped onto the insane haste train for TBC and still did respectable DPS (nearly 3.4k on Brutallus 2 days ago in a suboptimal group with only 3 drummers), so haste even in TBC is generally overvalued by a lot of hunters (especially BM hunters) in my very personal opinion, but your mileage may vary.

That is not true, Hunters get AP + crit + dodge from agility while warrs only get AP + more block value (irelevant for a dps warr) so only rogues and druids scale better than hunters because they actualy need the dodge more than we do.

edit: agility also afects armor...

But they get 2AP per str. We get 1AP per agi.

You are wrong here, it was 20% for each of 3 ticks, that made it 60% of RAP in total. (1/4 was for AoE effect)


On Haste

I personally don't want haste on my gear if it has same cost per item budget as crit or intellect. It has minor effect on dps and minor effect in mana regeneration, while it is ammo eating stat.
But lets face it Blizz makes out of set piece better optimized than set pieces, if a margin is that big for set bonuses to cover we will go for other gear pieces.

But isn't that a failure? Aren't sets supposed to be something we should want? If not, then why spend time on designing them and giving them a bonus or two?

In TBC sets were easy to get, sooner or later everyone would have it. Getting non-set parts depended on luck.
Look at T6 each piece except SWP parts (bracers, belt, boots) had better counter-part, and we were taking set because of 4 set bonus. I suspect this is what they are doing in LK as well, only question is if set bonuses are good enough to overweight better non-set pieces.

2-piece T7 (+5% pet damage) is something you'll be wearing for a long time. Truth to tell, the Beast-tamer Shoulderpads from MH are still quite good at level 80 too for BM-spec hunters.

I agree on that.
I was just trying to explain what Blizz is actually doing, and they have been doing that for quite some time. Set pieces are worse than non-set pieces while set bonuses are that good to make players collect sets.

From what I've been reading the way of the shot macro is gone? Because auto-shot goes whenever it possibly can regardless of what you are doing, correct?

I am sick of spamming a macro to top dps regardless of spec, especially when its just steady shot as BM.


Nevermind, found some older posts lol search button FTW