JSorrentino

As a Marks hunter in our raids, I'm using a simple Hunter Mark/Serpent Sting, then rotating Chimera (priority) and steady.

Are any other MM hunters adding in Aimed as the second instant over Steady? (ie: Chimera->Aimed->Steady, steady till cooldowns up, repeat) ?

I'm topping damage meters in most cases (pre-nerf today).

Thanks for the input.

 

Exidous

If you are hit capped I would probably spec like this:

Requires hit cap and I suggest imp feign. Nothings gimps dps more than resisted feigns! (or death:-p)

Working it into the rotation is quite easy by manually weaving and making sure you use ES as a priority over AS.

4 pts in wyvern and noxious just to get 3% increase in serpent is just bad...

Also keep in mind about hunting party...

you do 100 shots. Lets say you have 55% crit raid buffed
55 crits. 40% of 55 is 22.

So out of 100 shots only 22 are going to proc HP.

IF 2/5 is indeed enough for 100% uptime or REALLY close too then imp stings could be a go assuming you are hit capped.

 

Exidous

I suppose my biggest reason for using Aimed was due to its buff in barrage and planning ahead :-p It hits about the same as Steady BUT with the added crit from imp barrage that should place it ahead of steady making it worth while.

 

Rivkah

Some comments about your spec:
- One point in go for the throat is probably enough- with as much crit as I had at level 80 in survival I didn't see any significant gain from the 2nd point invested, especially given that there are no high focus dump pets anymore like the windserpent was
- One point in expose weakness is also probably enough, two at the most- now that you are no longer keeping up the buff for the entire raid there is no compelling reason to invest 3 points in the talent since the uptime gained with good crit is pretty minimal
- I agree that you shouldn't need more than 2 points in hunting party, three at the absolute most but only if your replenishment isn't being refreshed enough for the raid's tastes
- I wouldn't bother with aimed shot - I haven't run test dummy tests recently, but I can't imagine the damage gain is really enough to justify wasting a talent point on it when you could just as easily use multishot
- Improved stings seems pretty worthwhile- as survival you'll be keeping up serpent sting, it seemed to be 8-10% of my damage so at 10% bonus to stings per talent point it's pretty close to the 1% dmg bonus per talent point that we strive for
- Imp hawk may be a good place to put your leftovers (you should be able to easily scavenge another 2 pts from survival), I was getting good results with it in Naxx although I haven't checked the spreadsheet lately, focused aim is also a possibility depending on whether you are having to socket for hit- if you socket for hit you may be able to get better dps gain for your talent buck by going straight agility and putting spare points in there
- I don't find rapid killing to be terribly attractive. The average boss fight in Naxx seems to be about 4 minutes long. If you pop rapid fire immediately you could potentially fit another rapid fire in, but if you have to delay for any reason then a lot of times you wouldn't even see the benefit. Plus since survival uses a lot of instants, it provides less benefit than it would to other specs

 

Grigori

Try this instead:

 

Rivkah

Imp feign seems rather pointless these days- tank threat is hugely improved, hunters now live with the equivalent of salvation at all times since it's baked into tank threat, so compared to most classes our threat isn't as bad as it used to be. The fact that all our hit rating also counts as spell hit means a large percentage of our feign death resists are removed. I rarely even needed to feign in Naxx 25, and when I did I almost never got resists. This may change with more gear scaling but at the moment imp feign death seems to be a pretty useless talent.

As I mentioned earlier you can safely scavenge points from expose weakness.

In terms of hunting party, you have to remember that the replenishment buff is up for a good long time anytime it procs. In a 10 man raid where you're the only person providing it, there might be some argument for a 3rd point, but I wouldn't even go that route until you see if 2 points is causing problems. In a 25 man raid you will most likely have 2 people providing it, the uptime gap won't be as big a deal because the people lowest on mana will get priority on the replenishment, and it's rare that everyone in the raid will be having mana issues.

There's not a compelling reason not to take noxious stings because there aren't really better places to put those points. 4 point investment for 3% damage is not spectacular but it's not bad and it's still better than the alternatives.

 

JSorrentino

- Are you talking about aimed or multi?


Are you taking into account Mana? I know with the current state it's not a real issue. I can see adding aimed to the mix at 80, but until then I have better uses for my talent points. As of now (for raids) I don't even spec in Aimed.

 

Zeuxis

This is an interesting point, and I'm positive I don't have my brain wrapped around it fully yet, but it certainly points out that there's more to haste interaction with SV than my original position. This is good. Oh, as an aside, Rivkah, is this your web page? If so, hats off to you, sir, it was the best TBC SV reference I ever came across.

None taken. If there's something I'm specifically doing wrong to invalidate my results, that's actually a GOOD thing. I don't *want* one of our specs to be that gimped. (See below for more.)

Play-style wise, the biggest human errors would be explosive shot slippage and failure to maintain stings. I'd think the errors would have to be massive indeed to induce (in my case) a 1.3k dps difference. Admittedly, there are some external factors: scorpid in the high dps scenario vs cat in the low dps; no TSA in the low dps scenario (and unleashed rage was apparently out of range). The low dps scenario was actually ideal in terms of fight factors for me; pet did not bug, no burn. On the high dps scenario, I had burn twice. On the high dps scenario, the MM hunter's pet DID bug, yet he did more dps than he did as sv the next week when the pet did not bug. (I apologize for quoting him at 3100 dps. That was wrong, he did 2200 with no pet as MM, then did 1750 with pet as SV. I have no idea where 3100 came from.)

Anyhow, I'd defend my statement about hunters as far as our raid goes. Our sp and ret pally provide replenishment without dps loss; the hunters clearly do not, at least for we two as individuals. I spec'd back to BM for Mu'ru and Kil'jaeden and experienced much better results- certainly a net gain for our raid (high dps on M'uru, 2nd to our double-warglaive warrior on KJ). I of course only apply this to level 70 raiding.

At any rate, here are the parses (1) (2) if you're interested in identifying sources of dps loss. If you want to look at me specifically, I don't know if you can see my name, I think it's aliased under private reports- I'm the high hunter in both cases. If it's something specific to me and my empirical results are invalid, I'm perfectly ok with that, so feel free to cut me to ribbons if I so deserve it. If you choose to armory me to check gear, please don't laugh too hard- hunter-related drops are not a common thing for our guild (3 warglaives, but no ranged weapon since TK, no felspines, no dsts among the hunters, etc.) Current setup is BM; substitute Berzerker's call for PvP trinket (both specs), and put on t6 shoulders and forest prowler's helm in place of beast tamer's shoulders and gronnstalker helm when considering SV results.

 

Exidous

Aimed.... The imp barrage is changed to increase multi and aimed crit by 12% at 3/3 in 3.0.3 of course

 

Mattaos

Correct me if I am wrong, but how exactly is this macro eliminating the auto targeting bug? Hitting the macro would toggle your search distance to 1 yard (?) to fire a Steady Shot and then simply toggle your search distance for another target back out to 41 yards. So if when you kill the first target and auto search for the next closest target (as per the bug) you would still fire your Auto Shot at that newly acquired target regardless of activating the macro again or distance. Even if the newly acquired target is more than 1 yard away when the auto-target occurs; using the macro would toggle the reduced distance, but still fire the Steady Shot at your target regardless how far away it is.

 

mako

Those parses help quite a bit.

The biggest difference in damage comes from your pet. Your cat was doing a massive 354 DPS, while the scorpid was at 1365. A cat is definitely not the way to go without gftt. If you had a cunning pet instead (30% clearcast) it would probably have made up a bit more dps, although even the scorpid might have been adequate. 134.7k damage from scorpid poison vs 15.8k from rake is huge.

Pet differences aside, when you were BM you had 158 auto shots, while as SV you had a mere 102. Even at 20% faster attack speed plus imp hawk procs, it doesn't match up too well. Perhaps you were out of WF range on the MM parse too?

Your autos were hitting harder on the BM parse than the MM parse, and steady was roughly the same. Missing the 10% AP buff would probably be the cause.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Rivkah

Yes that's my site. I'm glad you found it useful. Sadly all that data is pretty useless now.

 

Rast11

I have recently done testing concerning using Chimera > Aimed > Steady x4 VS Chimera > Steady x5 and thinking about a spec at 80. Currently in 4/8 not including Aimed shot is a slight increase in DPS for me after doing 4 tests. Each test lasted about 10 minutes where I did 500,000 damage with aspect of the viper active and use no gear with a proc ability on it to keep as much constant as possible. I then did my second 2 tests with another hunter applying hunters mark because of the talent marked for death.

While the tests could be performed longer to average out crit chances even better I felt 40 minutes of shooting a dummy was good enough for me.

Another question then comes up. Your spec. Looking at the spec I am looking at for 80, am I willing to give up 350+ AP(Careful Aim), 4% armor pen on steady shots (Piercing Shots), and 2/3 in Wild quiver for 12% increased damage and crit chance on a shot that is only fired once every 10 seconds. Really Reducing all damage slightly and reducing steady even more to use Aimed.

I'm very open to others response because I am wondering what others have tried and discovered for themselves.

 

daemitus

My understanding, is that its the spamming of the next cast that autotargets, auto shot on its own doesnt force a target nearest. So by limiting your steadyshot to anything within 1 yard, you eliminate the bug entirely.

 

Berfert

This isn't, strictly speaking, true. Even with something in the macro to stop it before actually casting the Steady Shot, you'll pick up a new target. It's like the client/server is realizing that you might want to cast something (by your button press) and retargeting for you, regardless of the fact that you have something in the macro to prevent you from actually performing the cast. If that wasn't the case, then the other macros (the one that uses the focus and the one that stops the macro if you have no/dead target) would work.

 

Kanandi

I admit I read about 10 of the more recent pages, plus page1&2 of this post. Didn't have the stamina for all 150+ (especially as the earlier info is outdated serverely)


Is there any chance of making a "[Hunter] Survivalist Bible" thread, similar to the BeastMastery 3.0 one, (I also saw a Marksman one with some older info).

I did read much of http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t12346-h...raiding_2_1_a/ but it seems to be a mish-mash of older info and more questioning-type replies. I'd love to see a proper "bible" thread or at least a breakdown specifically geared to the current Live builds, and how Survival has changed (Readiness gone, Explosive Shot, Lock&Load, etc)

I've played around with survival, and respecced to BM/MM to test out those changes with the new live patch.
However, Those specs seem odd, and a completely different playstyle than the much slower and methodical "DoT+CritNuke" I had been using as Survival. BM, even with a Steady/Auto rotation seems to run OOM too fast, and I miss the extra health and trap cooldowns. Chimera is fun to refresh stings with, but I can't seem to grok it.

I was hoping to find a good up-to-date Survival guide from the brilliant minds here, but have not found a concise thread for it yet.
Thanks in advance!

 

Zeuxis

It appears your surmize is correct, and I wasn't getting WF on the Brut fight. Autoshot times jitter between 2.3 and 2.5 during non-drums, non-heroism periods. 2.43 is my quiver hasted attack speed. On the Twins fight, when I'm certain I had WF, auto shot times during non-drum, non-heroism periods jitter between 1.9 and 2.1; my attack speed with WF is 2.02. It admittedly never occured to me that we might be so poorly positioned that I would not receive WF from any source, but that appears to be the case. So indeed, my experience needs to be thrown out on the grounds that WF wasn't provided. The two fights aren't even remotely similar, seeing as one had WF and TSA, and the other had neither.

...on the other hand, it might be a sobering harbinger of the dps shock we're going to experience when WF stops impacting ranged attacks...

 

Grigori

The problem with /stopmacro and macro conditionals is that they are interpreted client-side and executed off (potentially outdated) client-side data. Otherwise, you could just do something like:

Basically what's happening with the other macro is something like this:

0:00 Activate macro [Client(target: exists,nodead) Server(target: ?)] /stopmacro fails, "/use Steady Shot" command sent to server.
0:04 Client receives "target is dead" update from server [Client (target: dead) Server(target: ?)]
0:09 Server receives "/use Steady Shot" command from client, proceeds to target nearest and cast Steady Shot

 

Berfert

That explains the behavior perfectly. I'm guessing the nearest distance thing is server-side, so avoids the problem? If so, and steady shot fails for some reason, does the nearest distance still get reset to the larger value afterwords?

My thanks for coming up with a rational explanation of why the various macros aren't working. Not sure I ever would have thought of that.

 

Midnight

Yesterday I got the chance to attend to yet another Naxx 10 Raid on beta to see how we´re doing after the latest nerfs.
Here´s the WWS parse. Mikari joined us after Gothic. She´s BM speced, the other hunter and me were MM.

Some observations:
- Even with nerfed wf our dps seemed to be more than adequate compared to the rest of the group although I think the other damage dealers might just have performed a little poor and below their possibilities.
- I didn´t have big mana problems. I did have to watch my mana and use a potion at fights lasting longer than about 3 1/2 minutes and I had to use AotV only once in the Kel'thuzad fight with more 5 minutes duration. Also, even though the new AotV is regenerating mana slower than the old one it´s nice that you can potentially use it in small breaks between certain phases (Gothic when he´s at the other side, Sapphiron when behind the ice block etc) and passively regain mana.
- Even though Mikaris DPS would´ve been a bit better with 2pcT7 bonus it looks like both MM and BM are reasonable close togather. Unfortunatly we didn´t have a SV hunter for comparison.

FaceShooter - a hunter shot recommendation AddOn
The optimism of action is better than the pessimism of thought.
- Greenpeace UK

 

Dinkadoo

Unfortunately the changing of the targetNearestDistance lines in the macro appear to do nothing to solve the problem unless i am doing something wrong.

This is what i was using for a macro while testing it out at Firewing. Standard pet skills allocated to another macro in the multi bar click slot.

/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/console targetNearestDistance 1.000000
/use [harm,nodead]Steady Shot
/console targetNearestDistanc 41.000000
/click [target=pettarget,exists] MultiBarBottomLeftButton12
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Using this my character would still target the next closest thing to him after my current target died. Though, like the other ones, he would not do anything if i was out of combat with no target and tried to use the macro as he is supposed to.

The quandary of the latest auto shot bug continues.

 

baldeagle

What is the most practical way to still use our macro and yet avoid auto attacking the next group of mobs? Do you stop spamming the macro button as the mob's health gets low? I mean, can we switch to just hitting the steady shot action bar icon once while waiting to see if it dies? I hate to nerf my dps like that, but I am not sure what other options there are. Any ideas?

 

Doncabesa

"Our macro" implies you're still using the 3:2 steady macro, or am I mis-reading? If you are then I'd have to suggest you stop using it, and instead just use the actual steady shot button instead as the 3:2 steady macro is unnecessary with the changes to auto shot.

 

◊ Lactose

I don't think this would alleviate the problem? It wouldn't allow you to target something out of range (i.e. 1 yard), but the rest of the macro would still be fired, and it has the same problems with relying on client-side information. I looked through some posts and PMs on various boards, and I can't really think of anything that'd work better than

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/stopmacro [noexists] [noharm]
/cast !Auto Shot (optional)
/cast Steady Shot
/other stuff

I think that's the correct syntax, can't log in to test right now.
While still not perfect (due to the client-server issue), it at least reduces the problem greatly.

A fix from Blizzard regarding the whole Auto Attack/Auto Shot flag would remove the need for any of this, of course.
There have been some scattered reports of it being fixed. Has there been any substantial testing? A quick search didn't produce any results other than what I mentioned.


Yeah, that's what I was trying to describe here as well. You put it 'slightly' better than me, though.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

Difool

Doncabesa, this is potentially misleading advice. While it is certainly true that they have unlinked auto shot, as mentioned extensively in this thread, you seem to be implying that (a) there is a disadvantage to using the old 3:2 macro, and fail to mention the possible advantages of using a shot macro. The 3:2 macro is no longer required, but it isn't without merit.

1) I've done side-by-side testing and leaving "/cast !auto shot" in the macro does not affect the shot rotations or sustained dps. It is effectively the same as using steady shot, but with one major difference. At the start of combat it will open with an instant, rather than a 2s shot. This sends defensive pets in sooner, and gets in an extra auto. There are other ways to achieve this of course, but for some play styles it is desirable.

2) If you use a ferocity pet () in 3.0.2 the Rabid attack will not self proc as often as it should, especially if the pet does not have aggro. The temporary fix is to include the pet ability in your shot macro. In this particular case just hitting steady shot will cost you about 100 dps (if in T5/ZA gear and attacking the lvl70 target dummy).

=============================================================

Lactose, This doesn't square with the testing I've done on live. Can you answer a few questions?
a) do you have Auto Attack/Auto Shot enabled or disabled?
b) can you do a simple control test? Please aggro two mobs with your pet (say, outside shatt) and spam your macro. If you have Auto Attack/Auto Shot enabled, is it not true that you automatically switch to the second mob?

I think there are, or where, TWO issues with Auto Attack/Auto Shot. The first was that by disabling it you also somehow break the unlinked auto shot. The second is that when enabling Auto Attack/Auto Shot, you automatically change targets with special attacks when your primary target is dead, regardless of the option to stop attacking when you change targets.

My feeling, is that the first issues has been resolved. The second certainly has not been. But to my understanding, and testing, no level of macro manipulation will change the fact that with Auto Attack/Auto Shot enabled any use of special attacks (ranged or combat) will select a target for you. Period.

So if you don't want to change targets, just disable Auto Attack/ Auto Shot. You should still have unlinked autos. The only thing you will lose is not doing auto attacks if the target gets within combat range. If you don't trust this, or believe it, then try it and post back the evidence

It would be best if Blizzard fixed things so that either shots didn't inherit the targeting attributes of combat abilities with the Auto Attack/Auto Shot ability, OR that the "stop attack on target change" ability would properly override the targeting of special attacks, but I don't think macros have any effect, and on top if it they aren't needed if all you want is the ability to stop ranged attacks when your target dies.