Zulas

Is using your own Serpent Sting required to make use of the Steady Shot glyph that increases the damage done to steady shot while under the affect of Serpent Sting. The writing on the tool tip does not suggest this. It just states the target needs to be inflicted with Serpent Sting. I don't plan on using Serpent Sting in my rotation as a BM hunter and will more than likely be doing 25 mans with an MM hunter who would be keeping Serpent Sting up on his own.

 

eviln1

I guess you are asking about DPS pets, since you are mentioning raptors.

Scorpids and Cats had the best dps at lvl 70 (even in 3.0.3), respectivly; (dots dots dots !) The 1 min cooldown on Savage Rend is way too long to compete with the poison and rake.

At 80, gained pet talent points should tip the balance toward Cats, as they get Call of the Wild and more points in spider's bite.

 

Proudmoone

Quick question in regards to weapon speed while leveling. Through the recruit a friend I was able to run up a new hunter into the mid 50s really rapidly and am now stuck 5 levels higher than my buddies and am going to PVP until they catch up with me. My question is, I am going to have enough honor and tokens to get my choice of the Grand Marshall bow, crossbow, and gun as soon as i ding 60.

Will taking the 1.8 speed bow over the other slower weapons. Consider I am full BM up until this point and I'm fairly sure I'm going to stay that way until 70 when I am probably going to respec to pick up Go for the throat.

 

Rathenel

What are the implications of the 3.0.x change to spell cost (for all mana users) for Hunters? Because all abilities now cost a fixed percentage of base mana, I'm having significant issues with mana efficiency at level 80, to the point that it seems 5/5 Efficiency might be mandatory talent investment for all specs. I've tried invigoration, but Blue Itemization is insufficient at the moment. Should we prioritize Intellect over Crit Rating and Haste?

 

Mattaos

It may still be a little early to claim "best of" for pets, but even as of the last reports coming from beta the Scorpid and Cat were still performing extremely well despite their nerf. The Raptor's longer CD on its special doesn't match-up well against the rapid stacking/refreshing of the DoTs from Rake and Scorpid Poison.

The Rhino's Stampede should prove to be a solid BG pet, but the special attack is not very useful in PvE/raiding situations.

The Scorpid is a good choice for raiding based on the last bit of information we had from beta and I am curious to see WWS reports from live server raids soon also. The survivability factor is nice with a Tenacity pet, but the Scorpid is really the only exception coming from that group of pets for high DPS. I have already noticed just from running 5 mans over the weekend that the Ferocity tree has some nice survivability talents too. Bloodthirty and Improved Cower. These talents along with Spirit Bond kept my level 76 cat alive very nicely in level 80 instances.

 

• Alwayz

It really depends on how much haste you have. A lot of the new Northrend blues have haste, so if you get too much you will end up clipping your own Steady Shot on the GCD. While this won't really hurt you while you are soloing, it may hurt you while running instances. For instances I would stick with a bow or gun around 2.7 or 2.8.

 

AJAlkaline

Unfortunately, I haven't really been keeping up with developments in the hunter class at all. I was wondering, can anyone give me a quick rundown of what the preferred shot rotations are for each spec?

Is it still preferable to just spam steady shot as BM or is it worthwhile to rotate in arcane and multi? What about killshot?

For marksman, is it best to just do chimera, then aimed, then steady until those two are off cooldown, or should you also use arcane shot? Is aimed shot really worth it?

 

McInaction

I'll try to answer this.

For BM little has changed, you want to pretty much just spam steady shot. If you don't have a MM hunter in the raid keeping serpent sting up for your glyph you'll need to rotate that in.

I have a bit more experience with MM, having just killed KT25 last night I can say pretty confidently that for max dps you want to ditch arcane and aimed shot all together and just steady shot and chimera every time its up. When I rotated aimed/arc in I just went oom and into viper way too fast; even with aspect mastery the additional shots didn't outweigh the dps loss of so much time spent in viper.

Which is alot of time if you're MM. Part of it was we didn't have a ret pally last night (go figure..) and nobody kept up JoW but I pissed away my 10k mana pool like it was nothing. Still, I was only 50 or so dps behind my comparably geared BM buddy.

I ended up saving my aimed/arcane shots for burst, and it performed really well on Maexenna's webs, frigid skellies on KT, ect.. it was very nice.

As for kill shot you should use it every single time you possibly can. I was getting 10-12k crits with it easy. I was able to get off a few on KT for a nice 40k damage boost. It greatly helps if your MM to stagger your readiness CD so that it's up when you hit 20%, double rapid fire and double kill shot does wonders.

I can't comment much on survival as I have no experience with it.


Also, has anyone found multishot next to useless? I use to use it for multiple mob MD's but volley works just as well and hits more mobs.. I'm tempted to take it off my bars and use the keybind for something better.

 

Bere

What is the hit cap for BM hunters at lvl 80 against bosses?

 

Aerynlore

Volley: 17% (13.6% glyphed) mana - AP*.1 + 505 Arcane per tick (6 ticks)
Mult-shot: 9% mana - NWD + 408 Physical

Overall damage, against three targets, Volley is going to win, including the Damage Per Mana ratio. However, the first hit (the one that is getting the MD threat transfer), Multi-shot is going to do more damage and thus more threat. Also, and the more practical reason, multi-shot will build any threat on the three you hit. MD + Volley on more than three targets, and the extras come for you.
And adding more to that, assuming the targets in your Volley don't have someone else building threat on them... by the third tick of volley (maybe the fourth) those mobs are coming for your face as the follow-up ticks will out threat the very first tick that got Misdirected.

In the end... they are both still on my bar, and I've yet to see a reason to pull them off my bar. However, to reduce buttons on the bar, here are some abilities I tie together.

It was a page back

 

orinaccio

Any thoughts on the viability of a MM hunter speccing to get Lock and Load in the Survival Tree? What about putting points in Imp. Arcane Shot to get some extra oomph for the Lock and Load proc?

Thanks

 

Mrjack17

Hi, I am new here, I was told from another board that people here were very helpful in that they know thier classes well.

Perhaps its my comprehgension, but after reading the hunter topics, I still have a few questions.

By the way I am a 73 beast specced orc hunter

Now, my question is, I am in pvp gear, merc with some pieces of blue items from northrend.

Are hunters high pve dpsers in the sence that I am able to out dps many other classes that are in pve gear?

I heard if playedright, BM hunters are top notch, ut I'm am not sure if that is entirelly true.

 

Thobe

"hay gusy lol! "

i've got a big problem with my cat and the new expansion. I've done a couple of instances the last days and sometimes my kitty got aggro from these nasty mobs. first happened at 74 with the result of an flaming tank. yesterday on violet hold heroic again. she got aggro against the tanking dk, whou hardly believed me Growl was turned of.

I have Growl on my petbar - turned off.
Cower is used everytime it's up

the funny think, while farming with growl up and cower turned off, my pet can't hold the aggro...

what do i wrong? everytime i enter a instance, the first sing i say is that Growl is turned off...

/sad

 

Kujis

Hi,

what profession are most useful for raiding hunter? I'm thinking about engineer/skinner, but i'm not sure.

 

Lohegrin

Are you sure it actually works like this? earlier testing showed that it had to be your own serpent sting but I suppose that might have changed.

 

Enking

Hello!
Hunter help threads are closed :S, now goes my question.

Im at lvl 71 and this is my build Hunter lvl 71 PVP Build

Whit these taltents, what whould be the bigger DAMAGE BURST rotation, including readiness, rapid fire, trinkets and /spit =) for a MM in PVP?
Is supposed that the hunter will be on movement all the time and the steady shot will be unable to use..

THANKS!!!

 

Suspiria

So, even for BM spec with exotic pet, Cat > Devilsaur?

 

Razzmatazz

There are several problems with this which, at least in my eyes, don't make it worth it. I think the general consensus is using Arcane Shot under any circumstances as an MM hunter just doesn't contribute to your dps enough to justify it. I'll not give a definite "yes" or "no" because I'm not entirely sure about the numbers. One of the main problems is that L&L's Arcane Shots still activate the Global Cooldown, so you'll be limited to one Arcane Shot per 1.5 seconds either way. Now, my understanding is that an Arcane Shot generally doesn't do substantially more damage than a Steady Shot (on the contrary, due to its limited scaling with AP it might end up doing less).

Of course you could argue that, as an MM hunter, you already need quite a bit of haste (602 haste rating I think was mentioned) to get Steady Shot down to that 1.5 second cast time, meaning you'd get more out of an Arcane Shot. There is, however, the additional problem of the extra mana cost on Arcane Shot compared to Steady Shot (augmented by the Marked Marksman talent, which only affects Steady Shot) and the fact that you have to make sure to use Chimera Shot whenever the cooldown's up. Aside from that there's the fact that you'll probably have to spend 5+ talent points (Imp Arcane Shot + L&L) to make it worth it, which may be better spent elsewhere (such as in the BM tree to reach Aspect Mastery). What I'm wondering, as a kind of followup question, is if an L&L-infuenced Arcane Shot activates any kind of cooldown on Chimera Shot. Because if it does, this'd seriously mess up your rotation and complicate keeping Serpent Sting up. I'll probably test this myself when I get home.

If you mean PvE-equipped classes in a raid setting, I'm pretty sure numbers indicated that MM and BM hunters (with BM being a smidge ahead because of MM's mana issues, and consequently the higher need to switch to Aspect of the Viper) were up there with the best of them on beta. Survival kind of lagged behind due to the multiple nerfs to Explosive Shot. I haven't actually seen any numbers of live raid settings, and with the recent changes to Windfury (hunters are no longer affected by the haste) and boss armor (a 10% increase, obviously affecting only melee classes and hunters), we may have taken a small blow on the meters. Still, a well-played hunter who knows what he's doing should and most likely can be right on top there with classes like rogues and warlocks. Blizzard has stated numerous times it's their intention for the "pure" dps classes to be slightly outdpsing hybrid dpsers, but obviously this isn't exactly easy to balance perfectly, especially this early in WotLK's release.

 

ElginRoko

Even with imp arcane shot LnL appears to be very weak for MM, I'm seeing a 0.7% increase in simulation from 3/3 LnL, which is awful. The problem is you'd only expect 1.2 procs per minute, and each proc replaces 2 steadies with free arcane shots, but arcane only does a few hundred damage more than steady even improved, and your mana saving is pretty small since the free shots are replacing steady shots, which are dirt cheap anyway as MM. LnL really does rely on explosive shot to be viable in PvE.

Engineering really doesn't look very strong atm. The PvE perks are Goggles, which at present are only the same iLvL as NAX10 epics, and the 340 haste for 8s every 2 minutes glove enchant, which I wouldn't take ahead of 44AP or 20Agi.

Currently I'd say LW (114AP bracer enchant, vs 50 from enchanting, so 64 AP) and Inscription (104AP + 15 Crit shoulder enchant vs 40 + 15 from the rep vendor, so again, 64AP). Wowhead is currently listing 5 WotLK BoP crafted epics, that's slightly out of date, since it's missing some of the engineering goggles being BoP now, but it demonstrates nicely what blizzard have tried to do with profs this time, which is avoid making any of them superior by a large margin.

Edit: Actually, blacksmithing seems to be the best endgame raid prof, with 2 extra sockets being worth 80 AP with epic gems.
Edit2: Enchanting sits dead level with LW and inscription, with double 32AP ring enchants being 64AP again. It does have an advantage over LW in that it's not hogging a slot which could otherwise carry a different enchant, specifically I'm thinking that 16 Int is actually quite an attractive option for bracers. On the other hand, the 90 stam lining compares very favourably to anything you might compare that with, so if you care a lot about stamina LW's perks look very nice.

For insurance reasons. Yes. That, and for freedom.

 

Enova

Not strictly, no. The devilsaur has a different skill than the standard raptor, and cats and devilsaurs come in pretty close. Some opinions put the devilsaur on top, others, the cat, so just go for what you like. The strength of the 51 point talent, however, isn't the exotic pets themselves, but rather the extra talent points your pet gets.

 

Razzmatazz

On the profession question: For min-maxers Alchemy might actually turn out to be one of the more interesting ones, and not just for hunters. Mixology, while seemingly not that powerful at first sight, can really prove incredibly useful if you look at the numbers. The current flask of choice would be Flask of Endless Rage. Mixology increases the flask's effect by 50%, and its duration by 100%. Suppose you always have a flask up while raiding (and there's the difference with other professions, more on that below), you're looking at an extra 90 AP versus Inscription's (for example) 64 AP.

The problem, of course, is that this isn't a flat increase that's always up, like Inscription or LW's 64 AP. But if you ARE a min-maxer and really want to get the most out of your professions, Alchemy seems to be an excellent choice if you're willing to craft flasks every raid (and if you're a min-maxer, chances are you already do that or have people craft them for you anyway). And with the 4 instead of 2 hour duration, you've got the added benefit of having to craft far less. But, as ElginRoko has mentioned, the in TBC huge difference between professions (every Sunwell raider and their guild going for LW and Enchanting) has been evened out almost entirely, and you can't really go wrong with any profession. All of them provide some sort of significant benefit for raiding (bracer enchants for LW, ring enchants for Enchanting, improved gems for JC, crit for Skinning, extra sockets for BS, shoulder enchants for Inscription, cloak (?) enchants for Tailoring, improved elixirs and flasks for Alchemy - it seems only Herbalism and Engineering are a bit left behind on the raiding front).

 

Fimbo

[Edit: Question answered in post above.]

 

Suspiria

I'm thinking about Loque'nahak, (Devilsaur is really boring cause "stomp" sound when walk), but I've not yet see any viable DPS stats about the exotic cat vs Devilsaur.

 

kernall

I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere, but with the unlinking of Steady Shot and Auto-Shot, what should I be looking for in a bow... As it stands right now, I'm a BM hunter, and I'm using the Badge Crossbow from SSO and I've got just enough haste that my SS is 1.4 second cast. I'm obviously wasting time and haste due to the GCD.

Is a bow/gun with a slower speed, but higher range preferable now? Or is there a reason to stick to the 2.8/2.9 weapons?

 

ElginRoko

I just want to make this clear, since I'm getting the impression that there are people who aren't getting it, I'm not sure whether you're one of them or not:
Steady shot and weapon speed have absolutely zero interaction
Steady won't delay your autos if they're out of sync, steady normalises weapon dps in its damage calculations

Given two weapons with the same dps but different speeds:

• The faster weapon will give a slightly higher uptime from buffs which proc on auto shots, such as IAotH and Master Tactician, and more DPS gain from the likes of GftT
• The slower weapon will deal more damage on AP-Normalised instants, that's aimed, chimera, multi and probably kill shot (untested)
• Steady shot, and any AP + fixed amount damage abilities like serpent sting and arcane shot will do the same damage
• Your white dps will be the same

As BM or SV, your weapon speed will have a negligible effect on your dps, and I couldn't possibly tell you which is favourable, it's just too close, fractionally more proc uptime/less focus starvation or slightly more damage on a shot you use probably no more than twice an encounter, they're both very very small gains, too tough to call.

For insurance reasons. Yes. That, and for freedom.