Hi all. This is regarding the OP's post.

Under rotation you say Serpent Sting, then Kill Shot.... Ive been reading and looking but cant get a straight answer. Do you have that rotation like that in regards to Shandara's spreadsheet, or is Kill Shot now on the global cooldown? Recently I haven't noticed it proc before 20%, but maybe im wrong or missed something.

Thanks in advance.

Muss

It's a priority rotation. What this means is you use the ability at the top of the list IF you can use it. Kill shot is only available when the target is at <20% so this is why you can only use it then.

My list of shots goes something like this:- at the start of the fight I Hunter's Mark, then Serpent Sting, then Chimera Shot into Aimed Shot into Arcane shot (which is also macro'd to Silencing Shot. i prefer it macro'd to just 1 shot to give me better control over it). After my main shots have been fired i will spam Steady Shot till Chimera is off CD or the mob is <20% of HP then i'll Kill shot.

To put that in list form it would look something like this:-

mob <20% - Kill Shot
Hunter's Mark
Serpent Sting
Chimera Shot
Aimed Shot
Arcane Shot + Silencing Shot
Rapid Fire
Readiness
Steady Shot

I hope that explains the list a little clearer for you.

Like Hagen, I understand your point as well, but the question you replied to was:

"Do you consider a prot warrior with sunders as indispensable for a MM arp hunter?"

The answer to that is a definite yes, although it does not necessarily need to be a prot warrior, just anyone that can apply the boss debuff. It's true that armor reduction and penetration are two different mechanics, but it is also true that armor reduction makes whatever percent of armor penetration that we have below 100% more effective.

For my character (only 315 ArP currently), having sunders or not on the target is a difference in about 450 DPS since I am attacking against 6100 armor (for the standard Wrath boss) instead of 7950. In fact, of all possible standard buffs and debuffs, it is by far the one with the largest impact to my DPS.

Additionally, not having sunders or not can change what your ideal rotation is in some cases. When I have sunders, then the ArP rotation with no Arcane Shot is the best for me, but when there are no sunders, then a rotation with Arcane Shot is better for me with my amount of ArP. Because of this, targets like adds that either the sunderer is not on or which dies too fast to bother with sunders, I try to use arcane shot in my rotation.

Out of curiosity, after this discussion, I looked at the current "Best DPS in Shandaras Worksheet" and took out buffs 1 by 1. None of this is news to anyone, but considering last night I had to fight to get my arms warrs to apply sunder, it's amazing to see how buff dependent hunters are.

Survival:
Without Sunder: -518 dps
Without TSA: -728 dps
Without Kings: -611 dps
Without Might: -608 dps

MM (1230 ArP)
Without Sunder: -685 dps
Without TSA: -652 dps
Without Kings: -454 dps
Without Might: -693 dps

Not essential, no, but still a fairly hefty buff.

For algalon we had a fairly bad comp, and I had to spreadsheet out whether it was worthwhile for our rogue to be doing expose armor - for me at least in an arcane-free rotation, MM without any major armor debuff was still ahead of survival by a lot with only 10 man buffs - surprisingly enough a 13% magical damage debuff (CoE etc) was worth almost as much dps as full sunders. Other buffs like TSA/BoM were bigger damage buffs than Sunders.

This was before the increase in LnL procrates in 3.2 though, so right now without sunders SV might pull ahead.

Seemed to crit inline with my ranged crit chance. tests were in the 40-50% range and my tooltip crit is 46.5% and my spell crit is 23%

A another hunter and I were discussing the roation for mm.


He suggested arcane, then aimed, serpent, chimera, rapid fire then spam steady shot. Which is practically the opposite you have here, yet he gets 3k dps even without his pet.

I was curious if this roation was better then the one suggested here or is it the same?

DId some more testing on the 2pc T9 bonus, it looks like it's definitely basing off a 50% dmg bonus rather than 100%. Additionally mortal shots is not applying the damage bonus to it. The meta gem bonus is being applied. So basically the crit is doing 154.5% damage versus the 267.8% dmg it would be expected to do if it was setup to work with mortal shots and as a physical crit. It is definitely working off of physical crit rates at least.

Running the new numbers without mortal shots brings the damage bonus from the 2pc bonus down to 95.76 dps in my gear.

I've updated the dps analyzer to reflect the latest testing.

That's... rather depressing :/ Hopefully it's just a bug and can be changed.

Wasn't the rogue "your rupture can now crit" bonus worth around 350 dps?

I believe it was up to ~500 dps for mutilate.

Can someone give me some sort of rationale for picking up Survival Instincts btw? It just seems pretty horrible dps talent; having checked some top web stats for tank&spank bosses (like Archavon, Emalon and Ignis), Steady Shot rarely seems to do more than 15%. 4% crit of that is a rather paltry investment for 2 points even with the added passive damage reduction. I am of course speaking from the ArP perspective where Arcane Shot isn't used.

I myself am currently "sacrificing" TSA and 1 points from Rapid Recuperation to pick up Survival Instincts and just on my way to remedy that fact.

Yeah sorry about that I actually did a name change recently and forgot to update my forum profile; it's fixed now.

Secondly, I'm not quite convinced that Imp Barrage and ISS are worse than Survival Instincts (though admittely it seems a pretty close call). I'm aware of the pitfalls of putting too much weight on combat parses, but having reviewed my last few Ignis/Archavon/Emalon kills, Steady Shot damage seems to vacillate somewhere between 13 and 16% damage and Aimed between 8 and 10%. Chimera seems to be anything between 12 and 18% :/

Anyway, a very simplified and a rough-estimate comparison of Survival Instincts and Improved Barrage follows:

SI: 4%*(0.13 <-> 0.16) = 0.52% <-> 0.64% = 0.26% <-> 0.32% per talent point

IBRG: 12%*(0.08 <-> 0.10) = 0.96% <-> 1.2% = 0.32% <-> 0.40% per talent point.

1% added crit isn't 1% added damage in actuality of course but the ratio should be quite valid since it's a fairly apples-to-apples comparison after all.

ISS on the other hand should theoretically be up (1-0.85^4) ~= 0.48% of the time. Again, having gone through my recent tank&spank parses it usually sits a bit above 40%: 7/16, 6/14 (procs/shots) seem fairly typical numbers. Going with 40% we get:

0.4*15%*(0.12 <-> 0.18) = 0.72% <-> 1.08% = 0.24% <-> 36% per talent point.


Okay so due to the small sample size etc my numbers probably aren't quite justified but they do seem to imply that the three talents are in the same neighborhood when it comes to damage-per-point, with Improved Barrage maybe pulling ahead a bit (one thing that could derail my comparison pretty badly is if ISS doesn't affect the -Serpent portion of CS). Then again the passive bonus from Imp Barrage is probably the weakest (though uninterruptable Volleys are very nice in some situtations), whereas ISS saves you some mana (reason why I wanted to max out Rapid Recuperation also) and SI provides some damage reduction.

Someone might have (and probably has) done the comparison with far more rigor but I'm still fairly content with the choice I made (dropping Survival Instincts).

I tend to agree with you. I didn't like the idea of boosting the crit chance of steady shot, especially since it's value diminishes even further on fights that require more movement (IE, less steady shots). Of course, ISS runs in to the same diminishing effects whereas Aimed Shot is never delayed (not for me anyway).

After checking your armory, it seems our specs are identical except you picked up TSA and I decided to toss that talent point in to SI since the only time TSA has any value for me is in 5-mans.

Can anyone verify that the T9 2 piece is only approx 100dps increase w/o Mortal Shots??

If it is then that's a fully disappointing set bonus yet again :s

Presumably no one has anywhere close to the required badges yet so is this just Spreadsheet theory or are these based on real numbers?

Were you able to test if the 2pc bonus affected the Chimera - Serpent damage at all?

I had just finished a 10-Ulduar Hard Mode run with my old spec and not having TSA kinda sucked with no blood DK/enh Shaman; also on Yogg for example I had to switch to Surv just because of mana problems (even though we had paladin tank and 2 other replenishers).

In 25-mans I generally have no mana problems and no need for TSA either but it just felt too damn gimped in a 10-man.

Did you add them together? You will never have 100% uptime on any of the three. They will continue to overwrite each other. Sometimes you'll have TSA, sometimes you'll get DK, sometimes you'll get shaman. You really need to add them up and see if the combined time between the 3 gives you 95-100% or not.

As soon as I hit 60 badges I ran out and brought the two crappy 30 badge pieces and started testing the 2p. I can confirm everything Rivkah has stated, and furthermore there seems to be no effect on the chimera - serpent portion of chimera shot.

Prior to testing I fired off a few hundred chimeras, and noticed non crits ranging from 1929-2043 with crits going from 4586-4724. With the un-enchanted, un-gemmed two piece t9 equipped I noticed obviously lower numbers, 1916-1973 and 4362-4537 respectively. Had the crit actually affected chimera - serpent I would of expected far more variation in the numbers and higher results in general.

Edit: Geatano, may I suggest a cunning pet for yog? During my 0 light attempts I have noticed significantly higher dps when using a cunning to supplement my mana supply with 3-4 roars of recovery per fight it's quite alot of mana. When staggered with rapid fires I never have to viper the entire time. Also, feeding frenzy is up for the entire duration of p3 so the damage loss compared to a wolf isn't great.

I really don't get what your saying here. TSA is up 100% of the time, which is why I took it. If it is not up, then another guy has overwritten it for a short duration, however, the buff is still up.

When I looked at our WWS reports, our shaman had something like 67% uptime, and there was no DK overwriting it. At that point I decided that I would rather spend the talent point to ensure that a) I had 100% uptime; b) the raid around me had 100% uptime.

What is your shaman's gear level? If he is sitting at roughly 30% crit chance prior to raid buffs UR should also be up between 90-100% of the time. 67% of the time seems to be a really low uptime for the gear at this point in the game. Anyways, what the previous poster was saying about the uptime, *I think*, was that if you are noticing that your shaman's UR uptime was sitting at 67%, but your DK's AM uptime was around 30%, those two combined (67% + ~30% = 95-100% which is roughly equivalent to TSA's 100% uptime.

=)

What I meant was that looking at WWS, you won't have 100% uptime on one single buff if multiple are present. Having a combined 100% is perfectly acceptable though. What fight were you looking at? Not every fight allows shaman or DK's full dps time to keep it up. A few months back I was looking at our stats and noticed that our shaman had something like a 35% uptime on UR, and failed to notice our DK having a 62% uptime on his.

e: Could you possibly link said WWS?

I see.

I looked for the wws, but it looks like it expired a while back. It was probably a mimiron firefighter fight though.