A rough estimate would be to take the DPS value of 1 AP from the Overview tab and multiply by 500. If you are interested in raid DPS, multiply it by the number of hunters in the raid. My AP DPS value is somewhere around 0.6 DPS/AP (I forget exactly how much offhand) so that puts HM at around 300 DPS. Per hunter. Even if you are the only hunter in the raid, it is worth it to replace a Steady Shot with HM as long as the boss will be up for another 10-15 seconds.

Note that this estimate is probably slightly high for several reasons (e.g. I don't think the HM AP scales with TSA, etc as AP from gear would; we are actually removing the 500 AP, not adding it so the AP itself won't be worth as much; etc), but even so, it is generally worth it to put up the mark in place of a SS as long as the mob isn't about to die.

Being the one who skilled/sometimes glyphed HM in our raid i'm putting it up _always_. No calculations though - i just feel responsible to do so since we have 3 to 4 hunters every night.

When to apply HM or is a judgement call only on targets that die quickly. I have not done any analysis to determine the exact cutoff point in seconds since the value depends on several factors.

But here are some of the benefits of HM:
- +500/650/750 AP depending on whether you are talented/glyphed to all hunters attacking that target
- 5% damage boost for your shots and 5% damage boost for your pet's specials

The general rules I follow for HM are the following:
- Always HM a target I will be attacking for at least about 15s if I am the only hunter on it. If I am attacking it for less than 15s then it's a judgement call.
- Always HM a target I will be attacking if other hunters are on it too (sacrifice a GCD for the good of the raid) unless it will die too quickly to matter
- Always HM a target where the GCD to apply it is a "free" GCD (i.e., one that I wouldn't be using to attack with anyway)

For example, I only do a few shots on the adds in phase 1 Yogg before they are pulled off to be destroyed near Sara, but I usually have time to HM it with a "free" GCD before it is in attack range.

For Kologarn after the right arm dies, I usually mark Kologarn and start attacking him before starting to AoE the adds while the add tank is corraling them. That way my pet and my autoattacks on Kologarn will benefit from the mark and it will be up already when I switch to him after the adds are dead.

For Auriaya, I will mark the first of the cat adds before the pull to get the benefit while killing it, but usually do not mark the other cat adds since they die quickly especially considering that they have already taken some damage before I get to them.

Part of this philosophy was from the good old days when HM buffed the melee too.

Using version 89g of spreadsheet to model performance.

According to spreadsheet, in raid environment damage split between shots is around 28% Auto, 24% Chimera, 17% steady.

However, when looking at WoL on recent night (Kologarn) the split shown is 33% Auto, 11% Chimera (can add 3% for Ch-Serp), with SS and AS at 10%.

Other fights show similar percentages. What am I missing? I feel I am somehow missing a lot of my Chimera damage.

I find that 24% Chimera is really hard to believe. My numbers never came close to it.

If they mean 24% from Chimera and Chimera-Serpent combined, thats entirely believeable.

A quick glance at your dmg breakdown suggests you arent consistantly applying serpent sting before you Chimera a target. 14 uses and only 6 chimera serpents. This is also backed up by the low serpent sting uptime (50.8%)

If this is because your changing targets alot, then of course the spreadsheet will show differently. The Spreadsheet models a simple tank and spank fight that you sustain dps on a single target.

If the spreadsheet says it's worth it, then it's worth it. The proc uptime on an ideal stationary fight is whatever the spreadsheet says it is. If the fight isn't ideal and stationary, the uptime is generally less, but the only estimate we have for you is "look at your WWS for the uptime".

Thank you, when you look at the data carefully at 4 different fights, you see:

SS uptime	%AS	%CS	%CS+Serpent
89.9	26.3	11.7	18.7
87.2	30.4	10.9	18.1
59.5	30.5	11.2	17.9
50.8	34.6	10.9	13.5

and best performance correlates with highest SS uptime. Interestingly, it showed consistent rotation, but lousy sting management.

As far as I can tell, you are sometimes forgetting to reapply SrS (or fire a CS if soon enough) when switching back to the boss from adds. Or at least that's what your SrS downtime pattern seems to indicate.

Unless you want to go full hardcode MM only, I would suggest sticking with agi gems. With the ArP on BiS gear and one of the ArP trinkets, you can still peform very high DPS as an MM as long as you follow the ArP shot rotation once your stats are good enough. What I mean by that, is that eventually due to ArP and crit, your Steady Shot will out perform your Arcane Shot by a good amount when factoring in the bleed from Piercing Shots. At this point, it is good to switch from the whack-a-mole rotation with Arcane at higher priority than Aimed and totally drop Arcane Shot in the standard rotation with just doing CS->AiS->SS->SS->SS->SS, with dropping the Chimera glyph for the Hawk glyph.

Of course you should still use Arcane Shot on fights where it is relatively buffed like Hodir and Vezax, when on the move where casting SS is not possible, or when bursting down an add or trash where any bleed from that additional SS will not be able to run its full course before the target dies.

*AND when you have neither sunders nor a good ArP proc up

Fortunately that is often the same situation in which piercing shots won't run to completion, because your target is dying too quickly to bother sundering.

Well after reading that all things about arp being a superior stat to MM hunter i finally decided to do an experiment.
Late at night i regemmed all my items from agi to arp.

As a result i got 555 arp rating (including food buff). I can get 16 more if i replace 20 agi gem, that i still have in my chest. With a arp elixir i got a 600 arp rating, but there is one major problem - i still have no trinket form Thorim 10 man ( we got this boss on farm, so i hope for trinket).

This means that i got around 50% arp w/o trinket. I hope to do some tests tonight, but i am still not sure if my new setup is going to work. Need some advice. Too bad i dont have enough time to do some calculations in spreadsheet. What do you guys think, is it worth to go arp w/o trinket?

My personal calculations show that even with the optimal spec and execution via maximising Steady Shots, ArPen does not outperform Agility in theory until around the 650 ArPen mark without an ArPen trinket. This threshold is a bit lower at 550 or so when an ArPen trinket is thrown into the mix.

Unfortunately, even at the 650 ArPen threshold you may see yourself peform lower than a full agility build due because of the following 2 points:
1) At the thresholds, ArPen and Agility are still neck and neck and differences in theoretical damage might not be as noticeable as actual RNG.
2) The Chimera, Aimed, 3x (or 4x) Steady Shot rotation might not be executed perfectly and would, therefore, underperform compared to the normal MM priority which includes Arcane Shot. Remember, you will still be shooting Arcane during times of movement when your Chimera and Aimed are on cooldown.

So Tulkass, while still under the threshold where ArPen outperforms Agility I would advise against gemming for ArPen. Even at the threshold, RNG may skew results in favor of Agility.

Here's my take on HM:
If your guild runs more than one hunter (ours runs 3-4 fairly often), then really each hunter should be marking targets anyhow. I usually take "X", which is my silent reminder to the rest of the team to put their marks up. Nothing irritates me more than 4 hunters in a raid, and only 1 marked trash mob.

For bosses, you can work it out in advance as well (phases, adds, etc). I find it's one of those abilities that a lot of hunters just spam each time they re-target, which gets sloppy. Wasted GCD's are wasted

I really do not understand the problem with the bolded statement in general. If you are focus firing down adds, there is little benefit to having all the other adds (up to the number of hunters) with HM on before the pull since no hunter or pet is attacking them yet. The only savings is the 1 GCD from one hunter to mark the target when that one becomes the new focus. The only time where I find this to be a benefit is the case when all the hunters have the same strength HM where it doesn't really matter who is marking the targets. But if you have one hunter with the higher strength HM, then it really doesn't buy much to have the other hunters marking targets unless you have split DPS. Sure it costs that one hunter a GCD each time you switch targets, but 1 GCD shouldn't make or break anything. Plus, if the other hunters know who the marking hunter is, they know not to waste any of their GCDs on marking.

The only other case where I can see this strat being beneficial is the case where the adds die so fast that its a waste to HM them during combat, so you just mark them all with whatever strength HM before the start. However, if the adds are dieing so fast, I really do not see this buying anything either.

Yes, I spent about one full reset after each boss saying in the Hunterchannel "and remember, I have IHM and the glyph, so don't use yours", now they don't mess up so much. But it still happens, and I need to waste another GCD. I just hope Blizzard will make it so the lesser HMs don't override the greater. It is a loss of 250 AP in my case.

Oh, and I keep a stack each of Kill Shot and Hunter's Mark glyphs in my bags for the cases where I raid with only one other Hunter (or is alone but Replenishment is covered).

Right - The difference is between these two scenarios:

4 hunters marking their targets before the pull = 4 GCD's out of combat
4 hunters overwriting each other's marks on 4 different mobs during a pull = 16 in-combat GCD's

Yes, it's minor, but this game is all about a bunch of little details adding up to bigger details.

It can translate to some boss fights:
Kologarn :: Hunter#1 keeps mark up on boss while Hunter#2 marks arm respawns
Auriaya :: Hunters pre-mark Sentries // Hunter#1 then keeps HM on boss while Hunter#2 marks Defender spawns

I'm sure you get the idea. Just saying why waste GCD's if all you have to do is communicate.

I mostly agree with your hit-capped MM build, but instead of the two points in Survival Instincts, which I'm sure has the greatest impact on the end-tree SV Explosive Shot talent, I'd put points in Barrage. I have 3/3 there, and given that many of the in-between boss fight encounters are AoE heavy, with much of the damage coming from volley (jormungar in Hodir, mini-cats in Freya, trash in Razorscale, side pulls and bots in XT, trash in Thorim, etc etc...I think you'd see a bigger dps increase by increasing your #1 damage dealer by 12% (3/3) for those situations than by increasing your crit by 4% for those two shots (since we don't get the third). I haven't done the math but my instinct tells me that, over the course of a raid:

DPS[(Volley)*1.12 + (Multi)*1.12] > DPS[(SteadyCrit)*1.04 + (ArcaneCrit)*1.04]

Excuse the clumsy articulation but I'm sure you get what I'm driving at. I'm sure it's easy enough to test this out by saving a recount, plugging the numbers into Excel, then tweaking the numbers above for a "what if" analysis.

Your comparing is a bit off. Since we only put two points in Survival Instincts we cannot compare it with three points in Barrage. So, actually it would be:
DPS[Volley*1.08 + Aimed*1.08] >< DPS[SteadyCrit*1.04 + ArcaneCrit*1.04]

And the spreadsheet tells us that SI provides more DPS during a static boss fight. Of course, this has to be adapted to reality, where the result might be different. It basically comes down to personal preference. If we assume that the DPS difference between Barrage and SI is tiny, it is more damage on Volley, vs 4% less damage taken.

Also, lastly, don't you mean Improved Barrage?

I agree that the second scenario is true waste. If that is happening then that is definitely a case of poor coordination. The case I was referring to for the alternate is:

1 designated hunter (with IHM and/or the glyph) marking each of the 4 different mobs as it becomes the focus = 1 GCD out of combat and 3 in-combat GCDs

I do see VRs point that by premarking all four you still get the 500 AP immediately on the subsequent target until the designated hunter refreshes the HM to the higher value AP mark if the target is one worthwhile HMing in combat, which if it isn't then you still have 500 AP mark on it instead of no mark.

In addition to what Khorgal stated, I have a few points.

First, I do hope that you were referring to IB since the current MM build should have both 2/2 SI and 3/3 Barrage already.

Second, the degree of the answers depends on your gear and you rotation, but let's talk end-game here. Regardless of whether you are going the gemming agility or ArP route, end game MM hunters are in the situation where with Piercing Shots and ArP, their Steady Shot way out damages their Arcane Shot, resulting with Steady Shot replacing Arcane SHot in their standard rotation (although Arcane Shot is still used situationally). With that said, 2/2 SI is mainly meant to buff your Steady Shot crit by 4%.

So the trade off in single target DPS per rotation cycle is:

DPS[+8% crit on 1 Aimed Shot] vs. DPS[+4% crit on 4 Steady Shots]

Its quite clear to me that 2/2 SI wins out here. The spreadsheet validates this in that each SI point is worth 35 DPS while each IB point is worth 27 DPS.

The next question is whether the AoE benefit of the +8% crit to Volley/Multi counteracts the difference between the single target DPS per the ratio of single target/AoE time that you do on boss fights. I would say that it does not, at least per how much I AoE on boss fights per our raid's strats. On bosses, I do so much more single target attacks than I do AoE. For those whose strats involve for AoE, it could possibly work out better.

With regards to the stacking Arpen to the point where it outweighs agility. Accepting that point is reachable, realistically are the potential gains beyond that point really worth the fact that you are effectively losing dps by having arpen sockets over agility to get tot he point where more arpen is better than agility? Certainly messing around with the spread sheet I was able to see arpen getting significantly stronger but my estimated dps had dropped alot from where it was with all agil sockets

I have been reading this thread and it got me thinking. Is it EVER worth it to drop the 4pc T8 bonus in order to get to ~700 ArP. Currently I would have 642 ArP with out a trinket and having 4pc T8. If I were to only go with 2pc T8, I could get to 783 ArP.

According to the spreadsheet, both setups are worse then a pure agi surv setup. So my question is this. All I have been hearing is that ArP is king for MM but at what cost? Is it worth it to go that high in ArP and ignore the 4pc set bonus or should you acquire the 4pc and then stack ArP for marks.