It's hard to tell exactly because your account links to a priest, but...

For pvp, you're over the hit cap (it's a flat 5% in pvp), for pve, you're only 20 points away, so I think gemming and enchants would be the way to go...an 8 agi/8hit gem and icewalker (if you don't have ice walker) or 2 16 hit gems and replacing icewalker with +16 agil will put you at 261, which is over the hit cap.

This assumes you have 0 points in FA. If you have 1 point in FA, you're 10 points over hit cap, if you have 2 your 41ish points, if 3 you're 72ish points over (I forget the exact numbers)

My problem is that I need to choose a belt that I'll be using during our guild's Ulduar progress.
The candidates are:
[Death-warmed Belt] - hit rating, lots of agi, NO haste (What's with the lack of haste in Ulduar gear? I was entering UL with 15%, now I'm at 13% and it seems I'm going to lose even more) (Spreadsheet shows that this belt is the best in terms of DPS)
[Belt of Dragons] - less agi, no hit rating, haste (yay). Looks Marksmanish to me due to large amounts of AP
Eventually,
[Belt of the Ardent Marksman] - no sockets, hit rating, some agi, some haste, no crit (oh noes)

At this moment I'm hanging around with [Depraved Linked Belt] (also [Belt of the Blood Pit] in bag).

Why do I bother so much? I really want to use non-hit rating trinkets like [Wrathstone] in the future, without worrying about my hit, along with my [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]

@dexwest
Someone's partly answered your "how much +hit for pvp" question but you can find a more complete answer if you look at EJ PVP Miss %. Basically, it lists all the different class specs as well as racials that incorporate spell/ranged miss chances. Several class/race combinations have significantly increased miss chance all of which are outlined in that post.

Icewalker is superior to 16 agi boots enchant if you can use all the hit (24 stat points versus 16 if you enchant agility), so don't use gems if you can.

The only real way to tell you which is the best belt for you to use is for you to plug your gear and usual raid buffs into the spreadsheet and test them out there.

Glyph of Arcane Shot- Does it work on General Vezax fight also?

There's the Best possible DPS which provides a list of gear used to attain the DPS. Could use that as a BiS list.

Best Possible DPS in Shandaras WotLK Spreadsheet

If you go to the Best possible DPS in Spreadsheet thread , people are often coming up with new/different BiS set ups.

But now I have a question.

For Marksman, when choosing a weapon what exactly am I looking for? I have the choice between [Siren's Cry] (which is the obvious choice for Survival) and [Furious Gladiator's Longbow], I don't particularly trust spreadsheets, and on multiple Target Dummy tests the damage is relatively close so it's hard to make a choice here when I am not sure what to look for. Furious Glad has the better Min/Max damage, but Siren's Cry has the better speed and stats (since little is wasted on Resil and Stam).

How useful are scorpid stings in reducing damage taken by tank? I've read posts in '07, '08 that they are useful, but i would like to know if they are still viable today in Ulduar? Do some guilds request for scorpid sting to be up 100% of the time?

I don't know of anyone that asks for Scorpid Sting to be up. Insect Swarm (moonkin) has the same effect but also provides DPS for moonkin and is part of their standard rotation.

This is my first post so dont rip me to shreds. as im ssure you know the Grim Toll trinket is one of the best ways to lose any hit gems you may have. but now i have almost 1% over hit capped without grim toll so i went back to using mt mirror of truth, but is the extra 84 crit rating and the 1k Ap proc from mirror oftruth better than the 614 armor penatration that grim toll provides (when it procs my the tool tip on my armor pen tell me targets armor reduced by 52% (not sure if that works with raid bosses) So if any of you could help me with this i wodl be very gratful

characters name is archermit on dragonmaw if you need to see armory and see if my stats are wrong (all critism is welcome)


personally i removed scorppid from my hot bar cause i thought it was a waste of time, sonce you can ony have 1 sting on a target your DPS drops (providing your SV spec) because you miss out on L&L procs

While I agree that Scorpid Sting does not seem to be needed or used in current raid encounters, for clarity I think it's important to point out that Glyph of Insect Swarm (which any Boomkin worth having in your raid should be using) removes the hit debuff from the ability. So if there did arise a situation where the hit debuff was needed on a boss, we shouldn't rely on moonkin to provide it, though a Tree specced for it would work as they would not be using the glyph.

The reason Scorpid Sting used to be very worth it in BC is that at T6+ level, tanks were getting to extremely high levels of avoidance. In wrath, they added diminishing returns on avoidance stats, so aside from a few outliers (blood DKs most recently), tanks generally have much lower levels of avoidance. The attack speed of the boss doesn't matter for this: it's all about the total avoidance% of the tank.

Here's an illustration to help you visualize what made scorpid sting good. Imagine we have a boss who attacks 1000 times during a fight.

A tank with 50% avoidance will get hit, on average, 500 times. A tank with 53% avoidance will get hit 470 times. This reduces the damage the tank takes by 6% (1 - 470/500).

A tank with 90% avoidance will get hit, on average, 100 times. A tank with 93% avoidance will get hit 70 times. This reduces the damage the tank takes by 30% (1 - 70/100).

The extreme case is to imagine a tank with 97% avoidance. He'll get hit just 30 times. However, if you scorpid sting, he now has 100% avoidance and will never ever get hit -- reducing the damage he takes by 100%. Clearly, avoidance scales exponentially with itself.

There were also some considerations about preventing two or three consecutive shots from all hitting after a long avoidance streak, which are basically this same argument but compounded, so I won't work out that math here.

I tend to use Scorpid Sting on a couple of fights, where the damage input on the tank can be very spiky. Such as Council Hardmode and Thorim HM towards the end - this is all in 10Man.

It seems to make some difference for us, atleast it shows in the avg. damage taken by our tanks. I'll see if I can't post some various WWS/WoWMETER parses when we do Council HM this week compared with last week when I wasn't there.

Point is, though, that I really can't see it hurting. The DPS loss isn't a concern if you are survival specced, and it does diminish the damage that the tanks take. Why NOT use it?

Most Survival builds include 3/3 Noxious Stings, so not having Serpent Sting on the target is a ~3% DPS loss, plus the lost damage from the Sting itself, which for me is another 3-4% of damage. I wouldn't say that Scorpid Sting is not a DPS loss for Survival spec. If there is a compelling reason to use it on a particular hardmode fight, then by all means use it, but it will be a DPS loss whether you are Marks or Survival.

Hello, my first time posting here, so, please, don't be too harsh on me.

My question is rather stupid, yet simple.

Foreword:
Since my main char is a resto druid, DPS and such is a little bit messy for me, leveled a hunter and picked MM spec, the 7/57/7 with TSA.

question1:
Which gems should i pick for a marksman hunter? As for a Survival hunter, i know, you should stack agility in every single slot because of the talents, but i have read somewhere, that Marksman builds are more pure AP requiring. Is that true, and should i gem all my available slots (keeping in mind the meta and hitrating req) with pure +32 AP gems, not +16agi? According to wowwiki, 1agi gives 1AP, so, the AP gems give a bigger overall result?

Asking this question because i have had a discussion with a few of my guild mates and everybody believes in something different. One of the main reasons to stack agility in front of AP, was because of blessing of Kings, which affects Agility, not pure AP.

Of course, i understand, that the next attribute to stack is Agility and crit, but i have not been able to find anywhere the priorities of stats in any build.

question2:
Could maybe somebody direct me in the way of prioritizing attributes? I have been reading EJ for a while, checked the spreadsheed thread and my overall dps is really good, and i am impressed, but funny enough, i really am not able to solve these little and stupid things.

Thank you in advance

The right answer to these sorts of questions in general is "use the spreadsheet". As another poster pointed out, you'll get a set of relative stat values on the overview page which should answer your question adequately.

Having said that, let me see if I can provide a better framework for understanding AP, crit, and agility:

* AP is the primary tool for scaling your damage. Most hunter shots scale with AP (the more you have, the more base damage the shot will do). Pets inherit a part of your AP, and their attacks also scale with AP.

* Crit provides a number of different benefits. It's primary benefit (of course), is to increase the chance that any of your shots will result in a critical strike, adding a multiplier to the damage. But it also triggers a number of additional abilities including such things as pet focus regeneration, replenishment, trinket procs, etc.

Both AP and crit are desirable and they operate in synergy (AP becomes more valuable as crit increases, for example).

Agility gives you both AP and crit and scales with Kings. On the surface, that alone would nominate it as the primary stat to "stack" (once you reach hit cap and sufficiently-sized mana pool). But there are several factors that might make one more valuable than the other:

* While AP transfers (in part) to pets, crit% does not. So the higher percentage of your damage that comes from pets, the more valuable AP will be relative to Agi. This is the reason that BM hunters tend to stack AP rather than Agi.

* SV hunters have considerable additional Agi scaling, which makes it particularly attractive to them. They also have more abilities that proc from crits. So for an SV hunter, Agi is almost always preferable to AP.

* MM hunters gain some additional Agi scaling, but they have less synergy with Agi than SV hunters (though more than BM hunters). In most cases, Agi will probably be a better choice, but it really depends upon your existing gear (hence the spreadsheet).

Crit alone is generally never as good as Agi for scaling. However, as a "yellow" stat, you won't generally be making a crit vs. agi trade-off. Instead, you'll be comparing it to hit, haste, or intellect. If you aren't capped, hit will almost always be a better choice than crit. Intellect gives both AP and mana and is more valuable than crit until you reach an adequate sized mana pool, at which point crit becomes more valuable. If you stick to hunter mail (instead of rogue leather), crit will probably always be better than intellect. So the remaining choice is between crit and haste. Given that haste only really affects auto attacks and steady shots, crit is generally better than haste as well.

2 quick questions:

1) Does anyone know how much of a baseline crit damage multiplier we (hunters) have? Is it 150% or 200%?

2) When comparing Nelf to Dwarf in terms of agility, their starting stats has Nelfs with 9 higher agility. Is this the same at Lv80 or is the gap larger/smaller?

1) It is 200% (the highest of any class i believe), Mortal Shots 5/5 makes that 230%, the meta gems make that 236.9%

2) Gap is the same at lvl 80 (on that note: wtb 5% agility racial bonus to night elves! gnomes get int, humans spirit, tauren stamina, orcs strength - not sure on the latter one)

All physical damage regardless of class has a 200% crit multiplier, not sure why you think Hunters are special in that regard...

Well, i was more thinking of caster classes which have a 150% crit multiplier, and they need to spec to get 100% extra relative crit bringing it to 200%. Hunters don't need to spec to get the 200% crit multiplier which has caused some arguments in the past. (Warlock has to spend 5 points in Destr tree to get the crit multiplier.)

As I said, it's "not a concern". That doesn't mean it isn't a DPS loss, but the DPS loss isn't as substantial in Survival spec as it is in MM spec.