alarge

Hmmm. Are you really sure about these statements? Based on various write-ups (and formulas) I've read, I've been led to believe that:

* Major armor debuffs (e.g., sunder, expose armor, worm spit)

* Minor armor debuffs (e.g., FF, wasp sting, CoR)

* Armor penetration

... always "stack" (if not strictly linearly). Specifically, you'll always get a benefit from sunders no matter what your ArP level. This is because the amount of armor your ArP can remove will always be less than 100% of the raw value. In fact, I was under the impression that to get 100% armor removal you needed all 3 sources of armor reduction at 100% (e.g., a full stack of sunders *and* a FF *and* 100% ArP).

 

Stealthsnake

Hey guys.

Im trying to know what gloves enchant is the best one for pve. (Mostly Totc, togc)

The hard-mounted pyro rocket, or the hyperspeed accelerators.


Also, is the 4 piece really worth it or should i use offpieces if they have better stats for 1 or 2 pieces ( shoulders since i dont need more hit)



Edit: Been using Hyperspeed accelerators forever, gonna try hardmounted pyro rocket for a bit now until u get some answers O_O. i guess haste is pretty terrible for hunters and im close to soft cap anyways ( im like 14.38%)

 

nedm

I dont use kill command in that way anymore, since the change i use the first one a few seconds after i use my pet cooldowns, so that my pet has time to get a couple rabid charges and has furious howl up when he's using kill command. The rest of the time, sure, just macro it but try to save one of them for your pet cds.

 

IceyDevil

Pyro-rocket is by far the best choice.
(1654 + 2020)/2/45= 40.82> DPS (even more since it can crit). This is by far better than a small haste proc that is, as you said, terrible for hunters, and far beyond the benefit of typical glove enchants.

 

KraxisSingular

Just to support this notion.
It is easily handled by assigning Kill Command to Steady Shot. It is our lowest priority for all three specs, hence the pet should have lpenty things going for it when you pop it. For Survival it will likely take 5-6 GCDs before steady comes in, for MM it will take 3-5 depending on the usage of Arcane Shot and for BM it takes also around 4-5 GCDs. That is short enough to not impact the overall cooldown usage badly, but long enough to stack the various buffs to reasonable levels.

 

IceyDevil

Wouldn't it still be better to use kill command before the fight starts and then time it around any available pet buffs when it comes off cooldown? Since it causes no GCD, it would seem best to merely use it yourself, and not rely on steady shot to time it around the use of rabid, etc, especially if you use it before a fight starts to get an extra use out of it.

 

KraxisSingular

Kill Command is by itself not a lot of DPS, so going to expend time and focus to use it specifically at certain points is unlikely to provide you with anything tangible, for a rather big investment. Much like the Enhancement Shamans are currently debating the use of Flame Shock.

Anyway, if you use Kill Command proactively before the fight you can bite off a chunk of the cooldown. However if you want to time it with Rabid (and you really want to time it for a 'late' Rabid) then the cooldown gain will be lost. If you use it ahead of pull then I would suggest still just popping it on cooldown.

 

Ardeaf

Yes they do all stack. My previous assumption about armor penetration was incorrect. Refer to this post for an in depth analysis on armor penetration and how it is calculated.

 

Beizun

I've seen a lot of MM hunters (both the ones who stack agility and the ones who stack armor pen) lately switching from agility gems to attack power gems. They insist to me that it is the way to go. Is there any data to back that up, or is this just the latest gem trend?

 

Eillis

Hey MM hunter here Gok of altar of storms i wanted to know if there was any rng factor to arp, since my dps is diffrent depending on the night and the fight (yes i know diffrent fights diffrent dps) but i mean same fights diffrent nights.

99% of the time same buffs same rotation everything can it be a 1- 1.5K dps diffrent if my runestone procts diffrently, or is there some rng i am missing.

 

Ardeaf

The only reason I can see them switching to AP gems is if they are crit capped. Other than that, it sounds pretty stupid.

 

Iru

There is no such thing as a crit cap - other than the obvious 100% - for hunter ranged damage as hunter ranged attacks do not experience glancing blows.

 

alienangel

Well, talents and procs can actually push your crit rate on certain abilities (primarily kill shot and aimed shot) above 100%, so it's feasible to hit a soft-cap on crit where the next point of crit is affecting fewer abilities than the previous point of crit.

I have no idea whether that merits switching gems to AP though, certainly not all your gems since you don't reach that much crit without gemming agi in the first place.

 

Whiterabbit

I've been leveling a hunter in all of the BoA heirloom items along with a ret paladin in all of his BoA gear. We kill everything so fast and he keeps such good agro that I'm thinking the typical BM leveling spec is being wasted. For the most part, we just mow down 5-8 mobs our level or higher with AoE without any worries and my pet almost never gets hit. I'm currently BM spec'd with a bear pet for the AoE swipe.

Any suggestions for which spec would be better going forward? We're 45, but easily getting 4-5 levels a day at this point.

 

Dafeaz

I'd recommend just sticking with BM at this point. You might come up against an elite mob that you can't AoE down, in which case you'll need a fuzzytank.

Otherwise, the benefit you would get from respeccing would be minimal at best.

Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe.

Maybe.

I've yet to meet one who can outsmart bullet.

 

KraxisSingular

Ret and BM aren't the best combo due to the conflicting buffs. But there is a truth to the point about elites, however I believe the Ret can survive long enough for you to burn a hard target down, if he uses his cooldowns.

My suggestion is going for MM for TSA which compliments the Ret aura nicely. Also, while you don't exactly gest the best benefit of the spec (which comes in latter parts of the tree) you gain limited manasavings leading to a better run. It can be nice to treat that Ret as a pet.
But don't forget that if you move from BM soloquesting suddenly becomes a lot more troublesome.

 

alarge

I remembered reading at least once that this was *not* the case, so I decided to try and dig out the info I could find.

Here is my understanding:

(1) The formula for ArPen cap (how much armor is ignored at 100% ArP) against a level 83 is MIN(ARMOR, (ARMOR + 16635)/3).

(2) Sunder Armor provides a 20% reduction and Faerie Fire provides a 5% reduction. These reductions are applied *before* ArP (so "ARMOR" in the ArP calculation refers to the sundered/FF'd armor).

(3) Boss armor in LK has been standardized to 13083.

Given these factors, I get that:

(a) Sunder+FF removes 3270.25 armor (leaving 9812.25 armor)

(b) 100% ArP _alone_ removes 9906 armor (leaving 3177 armor)

(c) Sunder+FF+100% ArP removes 12086 armor (leaving 997 armor)

I remember reading that some folks have shown that GC's ArP formula was provably incorrect, but I can't find the reference. In any case, however, it would have to be *very* wrong before capping ArP made Sunder+FF useless.

It looks like Ardeaf is enjoying a ban right now, but could someone please confirm or deny these findings?

 

Whitefyst

In this post and several of the replies, it is evident that there is some misunderstanding of how armor penetration and armor reduction first. So to make things clear:

- Armor reduction (ArR) and armor penetration (ArP) are two separate entities that have a synergy with each other

- Armor Reduction abilities come in two types
1) Sunders/Expose Armor/Acid Spit (up to 20%)
2) Faerie Fire/Curse of Weakness/Sting (5%)

Within each type, the effects do not stack but are redundant versions to allow raid composition flexibility. The two types do stack together, but not necessarily as how most folks think. Their stacking is not additive (i.e, 20% + 5% = 25%) or multiplicative (i.e., 1.2 * 1.05 = 1.26 or 26%). Their stacking is calculated by:

1 - ( (1 - type 1 value) * (1 - type 2 value) ) * 100

Hence, a fully sundered, faerie fired target has 24% armor reduction.

- ArR effects are accounted for first to determine the base armor from which armor pentration is calculated. Armor pentration then removes a percentage of that base armor.

- 100% armor penetration does not always ignore 100% armor. This is because there is a cap to the effect of armor penetration to keep armor penetration from being too overpowered on high armor targets. This cap is derived from the level based armor constant C with their being some disagrement on whether the value of C to be used for the ArP cap is for the target level (16635 for level 83) or the attacker level (15232.5 at 80). The spreadsheet uses the 15232.5 since it is believed that the attacker's level limits the maximum amount of armor that can be ignored. The armor cap can then be determined for the target as, where base armor is the amount after armor reduction:

min( (base armor + C)/3, base armor)

The result is that 100% ArP will ignore 100% armor for targets with base armor less than 7616.15 but not ignore 100% armor for targets with base armor above 7616.15. Since there are rarely any level 83 bosses with less than 7616.15 armor, armor reduction effects are required to give us a chance to ignore 100% armor on low armor bosses and to reduce the amount of armor not ignored for higher armored targets.

Here are some examples to illustrate:

Example 1:
- Let’s use the simple case where the boss has 10K armor, which means that our physical attacks usually do about 62.5% of their damage against it.
- If the boss has both Sunders and FF on it, its base armor is reduced by 24%. Hence, it effectively only has 7.6K armor to our attacks so they do 68.6% damage. So the ArR alone increased physical damage by 6.1%.
- Since 7.6K is less than 7616.25, the full amount can be affected by ArP.
- Now let’s assume that you have 700 ArP rating or 50% ArP. This reduces the target’s armor to 3.8K, so our attacks do about 81.50% damage.
- If we assume that you had 100% ArP, the target’s effective armor would be 0 and you would do 100% damage.

Example 2:
- Same scenario as Example 1 but without Sunders and FF:
- The target’s base armor is 10K. Since that is above 7616.25, the effect ArP cap due to target level is about 8411. Hence, there is about 1589 armor that the target would still effectively have at 100% ArP.
- 50% ArP would reduce the 8411 armor to 4206 armor. Thus, the total effective armor of the boss would be 4206 + 1589 = 5795 armor, resulting in about 74% damage.
- 100% ArP would reduce the armor to 1589 or about 91.5% damage.

Example 3:
- For an average level 83 boss with 13083 armor that the spreadsheet uses by default, our attacks do 56.13% damage with 0 ArR and ArP.
- Sunders and FF reduces the base armor to 10550, which is above the ArP cap. Damage % is now about 61%.
- The base armor for ArP calculations is 8594 due to the cap.
- With 50% ArP, the effective armor of the target is 10550 – (8594 * 0.5) = 6253 armor for about 72.7% damage.
- With 100% ArP, the effective armor of the target is 10550 – 8594 = 1956 for about 89.3% damage.

 

Cranch

Feigns don't protect you from AOE's, which I thought cone attacks are equivalent to. I believe that if you are the one targeted by Icehowl for the Arctic Breath and you feign, you can effectively interrupt its cast and prevent the cone attack on everyone. But I wasn't aware that you could avoid it if you weren't the targeted one.

Can you actually use feign in this way?

 

MizarAlcor

Would deterrence actually work better for this? Haven't tried it myself to the extent of a reliable result (due to the CD and randomness on how Deterrence works with other boss abilities)

 

TFD

I'm currently running 2pc t8 + tpc t9 as a survival hunter, i have a wolf 'roar' pet and have maxxed agility which is as far as i can see the best current way to gear/set.

I have maxxed my glyphs to get best damage as i can see it, and due to the many increases on serpent sting, i rotate thusly.

Serpent sting, Black Arrow, Aimed Shot - these 3 increase damage done by me / taken from me,
Then explosive shot, and steady shot until another one is off cooldown or lock and load procs.
I also pump (the pet critical increase), Rapid fire and my Wrathstone trinket at the start of a fight and recast whenever cooldown is off.

For my gear level i should be doing much... much more damage and the plethora of changes ive made seem to only make it worse.

'What am i doing wrong here'

 

Zeel

You are 1% below the hit cap even with Draenai in your group. 2% without one.
Without any combatlogs its hard to tell anything else.
If I were to guess I'd say that you probably override your 2nd Explosive Shot tick with another
ES during Lock'n Load proc. Or maybe you move a bit too much and lose some autoshots and
Sniper Training.

 

MizarAlcor

This is a very common misconception. Aimed Shot does not apply a damage-increase debuff whatsoever to target. The only debuff it applied is the healing reduction (mortal-strike) effect. The misconception comes from the wording of Aimed Shot : "An aimed shot that increases ranged damage by X and reduces healing done to that target by 50%. Lasts 10 sec." It only increases the ranged damage for that one shot (i.e. the Aimed Shot). As such, Aimed Shot should be the lowest in priority among all instant-cast shots (for Surv at least).

 

sonofgloin

I need some tips for improving my DPS.

Here is a H NRB25 from last night:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

My armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm not sure how I ended up #1 for total damage for the whole night, but for each fight, like this fight, I was #5, kinda low, hoping to improve.

Any tips?

 

Caph

It amazes me that people will crank their crit up to 50% and not even bother to be hit capped. You're 1% under hit cap dude, that's just negligent...