The spreadsheet shows agi way ahead of crit for me - especially with kings and TSA taken into account. The only question would be the meta requirements - wherein the relentless seems easier to achieve while allowing you to stack more red.


More on hit:
Vivid gems are a very nice addition that fill a yellow or blue socket. This makes it much easier to be near the hit cap while still using as many red gems as possible. Accuracy, for one handed weapons, appears to be the ideal enchant if you can make it work. With both 25 crit and hit to each weapon, it's a total of 100 itemization points whereas agility to 1h is a total of 52 and massacre (2h) is 55.

More on haste:
Weapon speed actually does matter, albeit in a very obscure and almost moot way. In order for haste to make a difference, you need to get an extra auto shot (at least). If you are talking about hasting 2.1s to 2.0s this could happen at 20 seconds. Or at 2.05 seconds. This goes for every portion of combat before you have to move, or otherwise stop attacking. The value of haste is thus probabilistic in nature. This is never going to show up in a spreadsheet which is most likely to simply show 1% haste as a 1% increase in auto shot damage. It seems to me that the faster your weapon, or the more haste you have, the more likely it is that you will get the benefit of your haste. This kind of scaling is almost impossible to work with and I don't know if we even should, other than acknowledging it. As someone else pointed out, the current ranged weapons in the game that have the same dps will be more distinctive based on their stats.

On haste vs. pen:
For BM, I've tried putting several different sets of gear into the spreadsheet and still see stats falling into the same places. Hit > AP > Agi > Crit > Int > Pen > Haste. Some stats are closer than others, but pen/haste are always at the bottom (yes, even below int) and haste below pen. Ideally we just wouldn't bother with either pen or haste at all. However I haven't been able to find any gear, except for some trinkets, that doesn't have either hit, crit, pen, or haste on it - or some of two or more. Hit is ideal since it's our best stat, but since it has a cap it will only take us so far. Crit is the next best, especially considering our low crit % at this gear level, but I simply have not seen it on much high level gear; or if it is, it is accompanied by other secondary stats. So we're going to end up with pen and/or haste on gear anyway. Assuming all other stats are equal, we'd go for the pen gear - even though we aren't really gearing FOR pen.

It takes approx. 45 crit rating to gain 1% critical strike chance. It takes approx. 83 agility to achieve 1% critical strike chance. Comparing the 2 gems the stats technically are equal, but the Orange gem gives more flexibility for socketing. I will admit that I was a bit overvaluing the 16Ap/8crit gem over a flat 16 agility, but considering they both offer basically the same DPS value it is not necessary to break a socket bonus on an item for the sake of gemming agility currently.

EDIT: deleted my original comment

Agility is probably the way to go for Red sockets since we can basically double-dip AP from a agility % increase from Kings and then the 10% AP increase from TSA, Abom's Might or Endless Rage.

Someone had asked me a few pages back about why I used AP gems over straight agility. One main reason was the AP gems were much less expensive with pretty much the same DPS value. I will be converting to agility gems once I begin to upgrade gear with items that will last longer than a few days.

Wouldn't you only need one green for Relentless as it counts as a yellow and a blue?

Wow, I made the dumb assumption that the requirements were the same as relentless earthstorm. Thanks for the catch!

This was brought up in another thread on this forum - I think it was the talent discussion. The spreadsheet still shows AP about 10% or so ahead of agility even with kings and TSA/equiv taken into account. This is with several different gear combinations entered. Apart from just dissecting each calculation individually, I have a couple ideas on why this is now the case.

• Pet damage is much higher and it scales with AP but not crit (as far as I know)
• Mortal shots does not benefit auto shots anymore. This devalues crit and thus agility. For BM, I'm not maxing this talent anyway, unless I go with a readiness build.
• TSA scales AP, which includes the AP part of agility, but straight AP scales even higher.
• We still have quite a bit of crit from our gear (gems really only make up a small portion) and crit buffs/debuffs are much easier to get now that they are raid wide. So procs that rely on crit, such as go for the throat, tend to be fairly well covered already.

If you are still finding agility to be better than AP I would love to hear an explanation and what talents and gear you are using to see this.

Looking for a little help creating a macro that casts a random serpent sting for Glyph of Steady shot to be effective.

Pets getting focus starved will push Agi ahead of AP, probably on account of increased GffT procs. 1 Disc, 1 Gfft, and kings and Agi is on top. Course this is solved on the spreadsheet by putting one point in either, but hey.

2nd quick question:

Do the t7 2piece and the orc racial stack?

Oh, I completely forgot about socket-bonuses since the new meta-gems have very low gem-requirements (one from each color).

So, for good socket-bonuses it is absolutely worth to take 16 AP / 8 crit in a yellow gem. If the socket-bonus is just stamina I guess I will prefer the 16 agi-gem.
When the point of no focus starved pet is reached (enough crit raid-buffed) I probably will change my primary stat to AP. Do we already know a (gu)esstimated point of enough crit-chance (with 1/2 and 2/2 GffT)?

I haven't heard of any testing done, but I don't see why they wouldn't.

Questions:

1. How much of a dps gain (if any) is 4pc t7?
2. What is the usefulness of armor penetration and is there a cap?
3. I'm assuming for a BM hunter hit --> ap/crit --> armor pen --> haste?

Looking at the Spreadsheet, Im showing this as my dps per attribute data:

Agility + 1 0.465
AP + 1 0.283
Crit + 1 0.331
0 Hit + 1 0.731
Int + 1 0.697
ArP Rating+1 0.374
Haste + 1 0.207
Stamina+1 0.000
Mp5 0.339

This contradicts with a lot of what Ive read about Armor Penetration not being useful -- as the sheet is rating it above AP and Crit. Shandara's default profile on the sheet has a similar scoring.

So the question is this, do many people think the sheet is wrong in portraying Armor Penetration or are most of us just undervaluing it?

Int comes out pretty surprisingly high.... That seems to indicate to me that you haven't applied buffs and debuffs.

Put up Major and Minor armor debuffs and you will see a significant reduction of ArP value.

Interesting ly AP comes out very very high too. Not just better than Agi, but a lot better, 0.101 DPS per 2 AP.

Int will show up high when the fight length is long and you spend a long time in Viper.

Remember also that increased int will also increase the mana regen from replenisment.

Int will show up high because it's a 1:1 AP increase with Careful Aim. This makes it much better than +ap (which already scores high), since there's the obvious mana pool increase which helps with replenish effects etc.

I'm just not sure if +int gems would outweigh +crit gems for yellow slots in some scenarios, or if +crit is always the way to go. +Int benefits from Kings, which then translates to more AP for you pet etc. I may play around with it some in raids and see if I notice a difference in viper-time.

Keep a few things in mind. With the advent of the Careful Aim change for 3.0 mail DPS items have gained a re-newed value over supplemented leather like we saw in TBC. With that being said, Int is pretty well represented on most mail items we see now giving us more options and stats combos to play around with as gear changes. Also, remember that crit is a key component for procing many hunter abilities (especially for BM). Example, achieving the "sweet spot" for crit (TBD) that will consistently proc Cobra Strikes and provide a solid surplus of focus from GFTT frees up talent points by reducing Frenzy to 3/5 comfortably, as well as, 1/2 GFTT. Not to mention the DPS increase from a steady string of Cobra Strikes procs (2 special crits). Honestly, using the budgeted stats from mail items and gemming for hit/crit/ap is probably a better option.

Side note: Something I was reading this morning on the new Hit Rating thread is that the 9% hit rule might be an overkill in WotLK. A few hunters on the thread have already stated they experienced 0 misses having well under the 9% "suggested" cap. If this turns out to be a reality our gemming and talent options could prove to be a huge advantage by stacking more AP/Crit.

I've added the following bit to the original post, as a caveat until the other thread gets completed:

I run under the hit cap (99%) and HAVE missed. It's rare but i did see a miss in recount. If i ever see it again, ill make sure to screen shot it.

Although this ground is covered well by the DPS spreadsheet, I think it would be nice to have some information up front on melee weapon choices and corresponding enchants.

The options so far seem to be:

1. Two-hander with 110 AP (Massacre).
2. Dual wield with some combination of 50 AP, 26 AGI, or 25 crit/25 hit (Accuracy) per weapon. I know the INT enchant has been mentioned as being in Beta, but I've seen no sight of it in live thus far.

The latter seems to me, in almost all cases, the best option, because the Accuracy enchant looks so far over budget compared to everything else. I'm planning on gemming and gearing around the 50 hit/50 crit once I have two suitable weapons.

Planning ahead for dual wield + Accuracy is a nice thing to have in mind - I know I passed on a few daggers and swords in the past two weeks that I'm kicking myself over now.

There has also been some discussion about ranged weapon speeds, which would be nice to capture in the first post as well.

There's also a 65 AP to one-hand enchant, but I agree it seems unlikely anything will beat double Accuracy if you're not hit capped.

The discussion is 8% vs 9%, and so far it looks like it is indeed going in the direction of 8%. If you have faced any bosslevel mob or a 3 level advanced mob with between 8 and 9% hit then you should add some comments.