Mostly 25-mans, I haven't been able to do a 10man in this spec yet. I'm thinking of snatching up Arinnah's spec to give that a shot. I would go Survival, but having to change my gear up just seems a bit much for me at the moment.

You're missing Combat Experience, which is a loss of like 80-100 AP, a modest amount of critical strike rating, and lowers your mana pool (which is also an eventual viper loss). Efficiency isn't really a worthwhile talent. It doesn't really reduce mana costs an effective amount. You'll still go on Viper if you don't have replenishment in the raid, it'll just delay it which is not necessarily great unless you manage to go OOM just barely twice during boss fights.

As for Kel'Thuzad, he is not a friendly fight to hunter DPS early FYI. It depends on how the fight progresses but usually we are bursting skeletons while melee DPS and locks get to burn tougher mobs. Tougher mobs = consistent DPS. It's easy to go OOM that fight as well so spending time in Viper during skeleton kills is advisable if you're on skeletons.

Other than that, if you're going to use Aimed, you need to get barrage and improved barrage. Otherwise don't get it at all.

Someone on an earlier page wanted to see WWS parses, so I have one from Naxx post 3.0.8

Wow Web Stats

I'm the only hunter in our raids (our guild only does 10mans) so I don't have a whole lot to compare myself to. I surpass our DK on some fights, but not on Patchwerk (I can't beat Army of the Dead, it seems), and the main thing is that I just keep running out of mana. I've been contemplating maybe swapping points out of Wild Quiver in to Efficiency (so I'd be 3/5 Eff), but I'm honestly not sure if it's worth it. Wild Quiver is a low amount of damage, but 3/5 Eff isn't all that stunning either. I have the 4pc T7 set bonus (20% haste while in Viper), plus the Viper glyph, but we don't normally have replenishment (we do in the above kill, however), so I still notice mana issues (but nowhere near as bad as it used to be).

I'm pretty content with my DPS but I'm always looking at my spec and trying to improve/tighten up where I can. Is this WQ vs Eff thing pretty much six of one, half dozen of another, or would it be worth moving the points?

My armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

And thank you to the person who mentioned turning Growl on for Heigan, I'm going to try that in our Naxx run tonight.

Is there a reason you have the Improved Viper glyph? That's one of the least valuable glyphs in the game, even if you're having mana issues, which just sounds like a replenishment issue. If you dont' have replenishment in your 10 man, you'll go in viper. Hell, sometimes you'll go in viper on 25 man with replenishment if you're not running a good guild run. Avoiding Viper completely all the time just doesn't occur for hunters, especially Marks hunters.

First, with running 10-mans, mana is usually going to be a lot more of a problem; however, I would not spec into Eff since it does not usually help enough. Especially not at the cost of Wild Quiver. WQ consistently accounts for 2% of my DPS, and from your WWS, that seems to be the case as well. Not using Aimed Shot is a good decision in 10-mans to assist with the mana problems.

I would keep your spec as is, with only the following possible options to consider:
- If you have pet management problems, you may want to drop points in UF to top off Improved Tracking, get Survival Instincts, and to top off ISS (since you are not using Aimed Shot, you are doing 3-4 steadies per Chimera cycle and ISS proc uses not only result in more damage but a mana savings too). The choice here is preferrential depending on which you prefer per your playing style.

My only other suggestion is to drop the Viper glyph. It doesn't seem worth it to me, even for 10-mans. With not doing Aimed Shot at all, having Aspect Mastery, and having the T7 4-set bonus, I would think that your mana regen during Viper is sufficient and your DPS loss is not that much that you do not really need teh additional 10% mana gain from it. I would suggest using Steady Shot, Serpent Sting, and IAotH glyphs.

In addition, you didn't say what elixers/flasks you are using. If you are having mana problems and am not dieing a lot, I would not suggest using a flask. Instead, I would use two elixers with my choices being Mighty Agility and Mighty Thoughts. This combination has almost equivalent DPS to the Endless Rage flask but also increases your mana pool by about 700-775 depending on whether you have BoK (assuming you had both BoM and BoK since two pallies) and increases your mana regen while in Viper. Mighty Mageblood is another option for the guardian elixer, but I prefer Mighty Thoughts due to the DPS boost.

I dropped the Imp AotH glyph for the Viper glyph since my mana issues were insane (and this was before I got 4pc T7). With haste not anywhere near as valuable as it used to be, I saw it as a worthwhile tradeoff.

I know that I can't completely avoid Viper, but I'm doing anything I can to lessen the amount of time I have to spend in it. And we pretty much don't ever have replenishment - I'm the only hunter, we VERY rarely have a ret paladin, and no shadow priest.

I understand. When I run 10-mans, I rarely have replenishment or am even lucky enough to have a 2nd pally buff.

Regardless, I still feel no need to use the Viper glyph over the IAotH. The Viper glyph does not provide 10% more mana return while Viper is up. The 10% more mana returned only applies to the attack component and not the constant component. Hence, it is really providing somewhere less than 10% benefit, with the exact amount dependent on the shots taken, your int, and other factors.

The benefit of the IAotH glyph is pretty much the same for you now as it was before the patch. Despite what you think, its benefit really hasn't changed. Considering that you have well over the little bit of additional haste rating for the 15% unglyphed QS proc to get to the Steady Shot softcap, before the patch and now, the benefit of the IAotH glyph is totally independent of Steady Shot. It only affected your autoshots then, and it still only affects them now. It is still very useful to you in 10-mans since it increases your average autoattack speed, which has at least the following benefits:
1) More autoshots over a boss fight. Using rough calculations with assuming a 50% QS uptime, that is about 3% more autoshots, which is a significant amount of damage.
2) More chances over a boss fight for WQ to proc with the additional extra damage. Roughly about 0.3% more WQ procs.
3) Your range weapon speed is increased, which I believe results in shorter duration between the ticks of the shot-independent portion of the regen while under Viper. Thus, it does provide some regen benefit as well as DPS
4) More autoshots during Viper resulting in more mana as well

Even in the spreadsheet, IAotH glyph provides me with more DPS than the Viper glyph over the default 6 min fight. For my gear, it is not until the fight lasts about 20 mins that the 2 glyphs become equal.

You also do not need to use Viper all the way to full mana, you can pretty quickly use it to get up to half mana and then switch back.

This is just some suggestions though. If you feel you are doing better with the Viper glyph, then feel free to keep on using it since your DPS is not going to be that much different either way, you just probably are not maximizing it though.

Another suggestion looking more closely at your character is to regem your belt. The 2 crit gems are not good options, especially considering that you are giving up the 8 AP socket bonus to have them. To illustrate, according to the spreadsheet, you have the following +1 stat benefits per gem itemization:

Int + 1 0.921 0.921
AP + 1 0.401 0.802
Agility + 1 0.736 0.736
Crit + 1 0.556 0.556
ArP +1 0.426 0.426
Haste + 1 0.322 0.322
Mp5 0.441 0.176

Int is so high because of the mana problems.

My suggestion though would be to fill the original blue socket with an Infused gem like you have in other places. That will be a total of 24 AP and 3 mp5 over 16 crit. This results in both slightly more DPS and time to OOM. If you really want to help your mana problems, you could use a Brilliant gem in the bonus socket. I wouldn't suggest it for someone usually running with 3 pally buffs for BoW and/or replenishment, but for your situation it provides the maximum DPS and time to OOM benefits over all the other gem options.

Thanks for the response - I appreciate people here taking the time to help out.

I think I'm going to stick with the glyph for now, but switch up my elixirs and gems and see how tonight goes. Also probably gonna respec and move points out of UF.

I have read up about aimed shot and how marksman hunters find using it in their rotation a good idea. I was not having mana problems, so I decided to try it out using this spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The Wow Web Stats for our Patchwerk kill with aimed shot spec is:

Wow Web Stats

The problem is that I did a considerably less amount of dps with this spec compared to the week before with the following spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The Wow Web Stats for a Patchwerk kill with the spec without aimed shot was:

Wow Web Stats

So I had a 600 dps decrease with aimed shot in my rotation. I wondered if this was because I am firing less steady shots, so I get less procs for Improved Steady Shot. Improved Steady shot would not cause that great a decrease in dps, so it could have been a combination of RNG or a certain buff that we missed this week. Has anyone else noticed a big change from switching to an aimed shot build that provided less dps. Also, I am open to any suggestions to change current specs, as I came up with these specs through playing with Shandra's spreadsheet and looking on these forums for information.

I'm still investigating your reports in more detail Enishi, but a preliminary analysis shows me that you had your pet's Claw off auto-cast in the first report. That alone caused a 448dps difference.

By the way 5441 dps is an awesome result for a MM hunter and makes me very hopeful for our scalability - thank you for posting those reports.

Wow that is rather embarrassing that I had claw off auto cast, but everyone is human. I did not see that initially and I might have accidentally took claw off auto cast. I also still have quite a few upgrades to get, so I am hoping that that number will be higher in the future as I still have two items from 5 mans. I will try aimed shot again, and hopefully I will see much better results with this minor, but important correction.

I also saw a huge decrease in mana efficiency for that fight compared to a fortnight ago when I did not have aimed shot in my rotation. I was at 85% at the end of the fight for my second dps parse (No Aim Shot) and I was forced to revert to viper at 22% of Patchwerk's health on the first parse (with aimed). I might be suspecting that adding aimed shot in my rotation might not be the best solution to looking for a gain in DPS. I do not have four piece tier seven because I normally do not go in viper, with the exception of Normal Sartharion with three drakes up and Malygos.

I was using aimed on every cd, but since that was the first time I used that rotation, I seemed to be using an extra GCD before Chimera sometimes rather than waiting the extra second to hit cihmera. I will have to give a shout out to our pallies about the mana from Judgment of Wisdom difference and what might have happened differently on this fight.

Would Rapid Recuperation have anything to do with the large increase in mana, because for a good amount of the fight the cost of shots would be reduced.

Also, as far as I can tell, it feels odd to use Improved Steady shot with aimed shot in your rotation. You use less steady shots, thus have less procs due to using aimed on cd. I wonder if there is a better way to spec in order to incorporate aimed shot into my rotation. It may be something that I could have overlooked when checking Shandra's spreadsheet for spec dps. Although I will be able to not speculate tomorrow, as it is getting late, and look further into the WWS parses as well. (Although the variable of not having claw could throw a monkey wrench in how helpful the first WWS is for comparison).

What I recognized so far is the gain of Leader of the Pack/Rampage in your second try.

Wild Quiver..... I've been trying to justify the 1-3 talent points here but cannot really see how it's points well spent so think I need some enlightenment.

Essentially as I see it, WQ gives 4, 7 or 10% chance to proc per autoshot with a 50% damage shot. This is where I start to question it's value.

Lets look at it in best case scenario, where with a 10% proc chance and 50% of autoshot damage it seems to me to be entirely a simple +5% damage to autoshot buff when you do the maths. Lets take this into context during a raid where at best Autoshot accounts for ~20% of my total DPS output. This means 3 points in WQ will add a total of 1% DPS output, can I really justify this?

So my question is am I missing something. Does WQ scale in some way that makes the 50% damage increase beyond this value when linked to autoshots? Have people seen better than the approximate 1% DPS gain by using this talent? Is a 1% boost to DPS actually a good tradeoff for 3 talent points? Or would I be better spending the points elsewhere, for example in boosting my pets DPS more?

Wild Quiver accounts for roughly 2-2.5% damage gain. It's not that good of a talent but it's better than all other options.

Since it does nature damage, it will effectively hit for more than 50% of your standard auto shot due to both ignoring armor and being affected by 13% magical damage debuffs.

It's simply a "free damage" talent.

Foolishly I hadn't thought about it in the context of it being a spell rather than a physical damage so of course the actual damage from the talent will be higher. I'll prepare a new MM build to make use of it and see what happens.

Whytefist is quite right and that is the optimum strategy to use from 20% down on mana.
I wait til Improved Hawk procs in that last 20 (it almost always does) then I flip over to Viper. This will build your mana up incredibly fast as this reduces your ranged attack speed.

At the same time, however, I'm still determining if that is actually true or if Viper bases it off the base weapon stat which would suck.

Also, I find on mana using bosses, if you time a quick viper sting with a chimera shot, while you certainly lose 1 damage coefficient and a GCD worth of Serpent, you can get a lot of mana back.

Whether to use Aimed Shot or not depends a lot on several personal and raid factors. Obviously, your amount of intellect and its affect on both your maximum mana pool size and your mana regen has impacts. Your gear as well as what consumables you use affect this. In raids, whether you have Blessing of Wisdom, Judgement of Wisdom, Replenishment, Mana Tide/Spring Totems, etc, effect your mana situation. If you have more of these affects, you can use Aimed Shot effectively to increase DPS, but if you have less, you are better off avoiding Aimed Shot.

On the pro Aimed Shot side, let me use evidence from my guilds full Naxx clear last night. Over the 15 raids bosses, I used Aimed Shot pretty much everytime it was off CD. I used it 226 times while using Chimera 252 times. The difference between the two numbers has to do with how I start the fights. During the night, I only used 2 mana potions, These were on fights where it looked like I was going to run OOM near the end but where I didn't want to bother going to Viper for just a little mana. For the rest of the night, I only went to Viper sparsely with regening about 24.4 K mana. With 713 intellect fully raid buffed with Mighty Thoughts for Guardian elixer, the spreadsheet estimates that I regen 713 mana per second with my rotation. Hence, I estimate that I was only in Viper for about 34 seconds of a total of 3176 seconds of boss fights, which is about 1.07% of the time. I can live with that, and probably could have reduced it more with the decision to use more mana pots instead of haste pots or saving my pots in case I needed to use a health pot.

Concerning ISS, let me provide some evidence for that still being a viable (although preferential) option. Even with using Aimed Shot and Arcane Shot, I am still using 2-3 Steady Shots per Chimera Shot cycle and did 675 total for the boss fights (the number will be smaller or larger depending on your guilds speed at killing bosses) compared to 252 Chimera Shots for a 2.68 to 1 ratio. ISS was my number 1 proc on boss fights at 105 (not including reprocs), that's at least proccing 15.6% percent of my total Steady Shots (maybe higher with reprocs), which is a little higher than the 15% expected. The next closest was QS at 83 with my next hunter one being Kill Command at 53, Reflection of Torment at 36, Rapid Fire at 34, etc to put things into perspective. This is an average of one proc about every 30.28 s, which would have been better/lower except for Steady Shot downtime in some fights (such as when dancing on Heigan and when Gothik is on the other side of the gate).

Assuming that 100% of these charges were used on my Chimera Shots (which is not a true since a a portion were used up on my Arcane Shots when its cycle was not after Chimeras), that means that ISS affected 41.7% of my Chimera Shots, which is considerable. The number would be higher if you do not include the Chimera Shots on pulls or during other situations like dancing on Heigan where no ISS proc would be available. This is a best case scenario. It is more likely though that with how my rotation (appears I am not doing enough Arcane Shots) is that an estimated 30% of the ISS procs were used by Arcane Shot instead of Chimera Shot. But even then that still means that even with only 70% of the procs affecting Chimera Shot that 29.2% of my Chimera Shots and 11.5% of my Arcane Shots were affected by ISS. This is a considerable impact to both DPS and mana consumption.

As an aside, my rotation usually does Aimed Shot immediately after Chimera Shot since they both have the same 10s CD and I prefer for Chimera Shot to use up any ISS procs. I use Arcane Shot anytime it is off CD, but I hold off using it until after the Chimera Shot/Aimed Shot combination if it is coming off CD at the same time as Chimera Shot. This may not be the most effective rotation since it results in a little less Arcane Shots than ideal, but it seems to work fine for me.

To provide additional information to dssurge's reply, I have also consistently been seeing WQ accounting for 2-3% of my total damage done in my WWSs. Obviously, the more that you are hasted, resulting in more autoshots from which WQ may proc, the more effective WQ will be for you. But for the amount of haste that our gear naturally has on it plus the haste effects from QS, good use of RF with Readiness, Bloodlust, haste/speed potions, etc. our average autoshot speed is enough to make WQ quite benficial.

Glyph of Serpent Sting no longer influences the damage of MM. It only saves the two other specs a few cd`s.

As someone stated before in this thread there might still be a bug with double dipping Hunters Mark, through improved and glyphed Hunters Mark and after that applying a normal HM with a Survival or BM. But still nobody has proven, if this is still working or a graphical bug. I use the glyph, and hope for a new and better scaling one with patch 3.1.

If I'm in a mana pinch [which in most fights with good buffs/replenishment is rare] I tend to burn a rapid fire to help me get in and out of viper quick.

Relying on the IAotH/4pc T7 bonus seems to be a solid fallback too though, but I find rapid fire is the best way to fill the mana pool up short of bloodlust, but I'd much rather be doing full damage potential during bloodlust.

Going to be trying a spec like this tonight [Glyphs: Steady/Serpent/IHM] to see how it works.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I'm a fan of Aimed Shot but I'm starting to wonder if it really is going to push us into an optimal set of numbers vs a spec that just abuses Chim/Arcane/Steady spam.

I'm going to respectfully call shenanigans on this until you provide some evidence to the contrary - all my experiences so far show that Serpent glyph is still very integral to giving Chimera Shot's sting bloom more punch.

It was discussed and brought up a lot in the "3.0.8 PTR Changes" thread.
This change was made at the same time, as they changed Serpent Sting to no longer save your ap-amount on your sting.
If they changed it back now, this would be new to me.

As stated in the 3.0.8 PTR Changes thread, the serpent sting glyph not affecting the chimera shot portion of the sting was a change implemented on PTR only. On live it works as it always has, giving the serpent sting portion of chimera shot the extra damage from having two additional ticks.