While PW is a good measure of theoretical dps, what about your dps on heigan, or loatheb, or thaddius, or saphirion or maly or sarth? I would guess that the spec with 5/5 UF is lower on those fights than one that included aimed, and other personal hunter dps increases. I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong, only that PW is only one type of fight, and one situation. For every PW/Razuvious type fight, there is probably at least one heigan/loatheb/thaddius etc... type fight. In the past I've tried to chose a balance between these two extreme's in my spec. With dual spec, we may be able to tailor this more if there is a substantial difference between pet focused spec's and hunter focus spec's.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunt...0&version=9757

Using my current gear [fdas of darkspear US] and regular 25 man raid buffs this seemed like a good amount of damage. Of course this assumes that silencing is off the GCD. If it is, this would be an interesting way for blizzard to close the gap between MM and SV. I just wonder what it will do to our mana useage. The priority for this spec would be pretty simple, and it just includes using every shot you can basically whenever its up. very few steadies obviously, which would make the ISS talents even worse.

Do you replace aimed with multi in your rotation? Or are you just leaving it out and using more steadies?

Malygos isn't a fight I can compare easily unfortunately, since WWS seems to merge your drake's DPS in with yours. Patchwerk was the most easily comparable fight with the fewest variables, so it was the one I used.

And as to your question, no, I don't use multi at all. I use chimera/kill/arcane when they're up and weave steady shot in to fill time between cooldowns.

The proc rate on the 4p for T8 is 10%, as found on wowhead.com.

Any other opinions of haste here? In my own theorycrafting I think I can see the value of getting haste soft capped as I mentioned earlier. The haste discussion kind of died early on in Wrath and I'd love to get some people talking about it with the new numbers coming out.

I don't see much reason to bring it up in my opinion. Haste is only a major damage increase for Steady Shot, those faster auto shots are nicer too, though. Why discuss something that already has a conclusion?

Doesn't the inclusion of Glyph of Chimera Shot (making Chimera 9sec CD) increase the desire for MM hunters to consistently be at the soft Haste cap to really make the most of this glyph and eek out those extra chimeras?

/agree

Just wondering if there is a way to really test this outside of actual raids? It's one this to sit on a dummy auto-shotting to test crit returns but, without replenishment etc, you can't just run your rotation for 3 hours. Any ideas?

Except that, as was pointed out previously, you need zero lag and perfect execution to fit 5 SS inside the improved Chimera CD. Those conditions are not generally going to exist whereas 4 SS even completely unhasted will always fit.

And yes, I realise that some of those SS slots would actually be AS. That doesn't change the nature of the cycle.

[quote=Iru;1180090]Except that, as was pointed out previously, you need zero lag and perfect execution to fit 5 SS inside the improved Chimera CD. Those conditions are not generally going to exist whereas 4 SS even completely unhasted will always fit.

And yes, I realise that some of those SS slots would actually be AS. That doesn't change the nature of the cycle.[/QUOTE

So are you saying you'll shoot 4 and then wait and do nothing for that extra second? No, you'll end up shooting off another SS. Which (if you're closer to 2secs than 1.5) will delay that Chimera for almost a full second. So getting haste capped, though not making your rotation perfect because of lag and human error, will cut your entire rotation time by at LEAST a half (if not closer to a full) second. So every 9 or 10 rotations that equals another full rotations worth of DMG including another Chimera Shot. Over a 6min boss fight that adds up to a lot of extra damage (not to mention the increased auto-shots that are happening constantly and the increase damage from volley because it will do the same amount of damage over a shorter period of time.)

I'm contending that the value of Haste isn't just to increase Steady and Auto damage. Glyph of Chimera is designed for hunters at haste soft cap and a 9sec chimera makes haste a much more valuable stat than it was in the past.

I'd like to also throw in that because of the buff to Wild Quiver (it's 92% better), that this is a slight buff to Haste Rating since faster autoshots will increase Wild Quiver procs.

Something i haven`t seen mentioned before, is that we are able to dualspec 2 different MM-spec`s.
I noticed that there are some fights in Ulduar, where we really get no use out of our IT-talent, so maybe we can make more out of those 5, respectively 7 points, and do something different with them, cause most of us as far as i noticed, will take the 7/57/7 again.

Out of curiosity i am interested if anyone else had similar ideas about dualspec.

That brings up an interesting question. Assuming everyone is cost capped for respecs, do you all feel you'll be respeccing that much in 3.1, even without dual spec? In other words, is that 1000g really worth it at the end of the day? I know everyone is a bit different in how they handle their respecs and talent tweaking, but I tend to run a long time between respecs. After I stopped Arena in S4, I've respecced maybe a total of 4-5 times. I just don't see the cost return for me, at least on the surface. It'd take me 20 respecs to break even.


I know this may not be directly MM-related, but even if you swapped from a UF-friendly fight to an IT-friendly one, for example, I think it would take a while to recoup that extra gold. Especially considering you still have to pay to respec your "off-spec" if you decide to change it later on, you're not really saving that much money in the end.


More interesting, is the current incarnation of dual spec automatically resets Call Stabled Pet; which could be useful if you're going from a high raid damage fight to a high DPS fight (sub out a Ferocity for a Tenacity pet; or a different Ferocity pet with a "survivability" spec).


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Oh, this debate came up in another forum. Are any of you PTR people noticing any changes to mana regen for us? I'm not sure how many of you have gotten to play in instances but I'd love to hear what you're experiencing. The current debate is that mana will become a precious resource again, but the only mana changes I can find/see are more related to pulling healers out of the 5SR than nerfing DPS caster mana.

Considering MM is the most mana hungry spec, if we need to make any changes to stay viable DPS (more Viper on 5 min fights?), the sooner we know the better. I have noticed more Int on T8 and off-set pieces, so I wonder if this was part of the way Blizz is making up for the change.

Mugsley, you're ignoring the time factor. Dual spec is an investment in time and encourages better optimization in raids where you might otherwise not bother to hearth, respec, reglyph, and get a warlock to summon you back while the rest of the raid is twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to get back so they can pull the boss.

I agree. I think, for the pure DPS classes anyway, the Dual Spec feature will not really make my life less complicated; but it will encourage me to choose the correct spec for the fight at hand.

e.g. I generally respec to SV for my Sarth 3D kills as MM doesn't do nearly as well on that fight.

With the inclusion of mechanical bosses, I think the respec is worth it. 5% dmg is not an insignificant amount when we're looking at DPS numbers of 5k+ (and higher once 3.1 hits) For me, the dual spec won't "...pay for itself" for a LONG LONG time. It just opens up a lot of new options.

When I spend gold in WoW, I never expect them to "pay for themselves" - if they make the game more enjoyable, reduce wasted time or improve stats then it's worth it. I paid 5k gold (+ winter flying) just to get a swift mount - that won't pay for itself, it just saves time like dual speccing does (but it a lot more expensive). I wish Dual Speccing was account-wide though.

I guess a lot of MM Hunters are going to be trying Surv as the off-spec in 3.1, I know I am. I feel a bit like it's "selling out" though as the only real reason for using it is because the DPS is higher. Is Surv's DPS better than MM in all boss fights in 3.1 PLUS it has replensihment?

Have any of you MM's gone survival? Is the gear needs the same and just swapping gems/enchants around enough to make them comparable on test dummies?

I only hit the 50g respec value for the first time a month or so ago, and I've been playing the same character since Feb '05 - before Wrath I'd never even hit 30g. I don't expect to be respeccing too much.

I'll still get dual spec though, since 1000g is fairly easy to get, and I'd like to do silly things like soloing ZG or MC bosses for mounts/legendaries without having to do them with a raid spec.

I'll be picking up dual spec, though I haven't decided what I want to do yet. I could have a Surv spec for fights where we really need Replenishment (as we don't generally have another source with our core, main group), or a BM spec for soloing old world stuff, or a secondary Marks spec for different fights. Or even if I feel like dabbling in arena again, maybe picking up a PvP spec. All I know is I definitely think it's worth it, even for pure DPS classes.

Well yes and no, I would like to know how they compare now AND post-patch so please do come back and tell me how it went!

It just seems a bit bizarre in my mind that MM does less DPS than Surv, I can't see any arguement against them being equal really.

MM dropped below SV after the great hunter nerf of '08 (specifically 3.0.8...I know, bad pun). The massive damage buff on Explo shot + the Steady Shot nerf gimped MM. 3.1 has made significant inroads to keeping MM/SV damage much closer to equal. Though SV seems to be beating MM by a small amount currently on PTR, a lot of this is anecdotal and could be caused by the large percentage of raiding hunters that were already SV before PTR so they spend more time working on that spec. I also believe the the T8 2p bonus (10% increased SS damage)+Glyph of Chimera+a haste capped MM hunter might push MM over SV in T8 content eventually.

For most raiding guilds, it will probably come down to a raid composition issue (10%AP vs Replenishment).
Either way, we're probably going to start seeing more MM hunters raiding endgame.

I doubt tier 8 bonuses will work much in favour of MM. 10% SrS dmg increase is below 1.5% total dps increase for MM and it is around 0.5% increase for SV and BM. This means there is less than 1% difference between value of the tier bonus between specs, which translates to 50-60 dps.
At the moment there are a few bugs with Black Arrow, and if those are fixed difference will be quite big in favour of SV. It is hard to believe that t8 bonus will fix that, specially considering MM's dps is highly sensitive to target changes.

I'm having this debate on another forum but need to pull some personal numbers to see the effect. My current thought process was that Chimera, Kill Shot, and Serpent would be the stings for MM in 3.1. However, another hunter is suggesting we will get more of a DPS increase from Aimed glyph over Kill Shot.

That actually seems viable on the surface since although KS is our highest damaging shot, it's not useful for most of a fight. I know raid DPS is all over the place, but the KS glyph can probably account for 2-3 additional Kill Shots depending on the boss fight and raid; whereas the Aimed glyph would give an extra Aimed every 40 seconds. Which, depending on fight and priority, can equate to about 7-8 extra Aimed shots for a 5 min fight.

I won't know until live for sure, but I think Glyph of Chimera Shot reducing CD of chimera to 9 secs will, on long fights, end up being a significant DPS boost as long as the hunter is haste capped.