Okay so I've been spot reading this thread for quite some time and there is alot of speculations on MM and Arp vs Agil and what is best.
A lot of it is leveraged by theory/Spreadsheet simulations and not real boss encounters.
I would like to ask the question of what is the dps you're pulling on a particular boss encounter with 25 man raid buffs. Obviously this greatly varies on the boss, but I'm curious what a MM hunter speced into Agi pullls on 25man toc bosses vs a Arp stacked hunter.
I also would like to see the glyph and shot rotations used.
I'm not too convinced that the Spreadsheets are a direct reflection of what is achieved given that these simulations don't put into effect movement/duration you're on the target etc..
What I'm looking for is how to improove my dps/damage done on toc encounters, right now I'm stacking a lot of passive arm pen which I'm able to hit 63% arp passive and no I don't have runestone or grim toll
Okay so I've been spot reading this thread for quite some time and there is alot of speculations on MM and Arp vs Agil and what is best.
I would like to ask the question of what is the dps you're pulling on a particular boss encounter with 25 man raid buffs. Obviously this greatly varies on the boss, but I'm curious what a MM hunter speced into Agi pullls on 25man toc bosses vs a Arp stacked hunter.
I also would like to see the glyph and shot rotations used.
I'm not too convinced that the Spreadsheets are a direct reflection of what is achieved given that these simulations don't put into effect movement/duration you're on the target etc..
What I'm looking for is how to improove my dps/damage done on toc encounters, right now I'm stacking a lot of passive arm pen which I'm able to hit 63% arp passive and no I don't have runestone or grim toll
The information for which you have asked will not necessarily provide you the right answers for your situation since the correct answer varies on gear, raid buffs/target debuffs available, player execution, RNG effects of both attacks and negative affects on you, etc. Furthermore, what is the correct answer for one character may not be the best for yours.
In general, for MM it is best to gem agi and agi/crit gems for maximum DPS until you get to some threshold, which values depends on the given situation, where ArP becomes more effective than agility. This is usually as you near the passive softcap if you have an ArP trinket or hard cap values since the benefit of ArP increases exponentially. This is because the benefit of ArP is the inverse of the benefit of armor, which has diminishing returns for each unit of armor added.
Some reasons that give more weight to agi gemming include:
- If your guild's strategy often has you attacking targets that do not have full melee debuffs where your physical attacks, especially your ArP is not as beneficial. This includes fights like Northrend Beasts and Jaraxxus where you may be asked as range to take out the Snobolds and Mistress of Pains/Infernals instead of staying on the boss with the melee the whole time.
- Fights with a lot of movement. The standard standstill MM rotation of CS->AiS->SSx4 or SSx3 depending on glyphs (with a variation with AiS before CS) has a high ratio of physical attacks to non-physical attacks at 5 or 4 to 1. Hence, the standstill fights provide a lot of weight to the benefits of ArP. If you are moving a lot, the benefit of ArP is decreased in that a smaller portion of your shots, especially if you sub in a ArS, and your damage are physical attacks.
Looking at your gear (with assuming you have the Greatness Card in the first trinket slot instead of the medallion of the horde), I would first suggest changing the agi/crit gem in you ranged weapon to a agi/hit to get over the hit cap for a 4.3 DPS gain. Then I would suggest moving the Nightmare's Tear from the yellow socket in your ring to the blue socket in your legs to pick up the 6 agi socket bonus for a net of 2 agi. Then I would suggest replacing all ArP gems in blue, red, and belt buckle sockets plus the yellow socket in your chest with agi gems and all other yellow sockets with agi/crit gems to pick up socket bonuses. Doing so provides a net gain of 85 DPS in the spreadsheet's ideal situation of no movement and all melee debuffs and a net gain of 92 DPS in the ideal fight situation but where lacking melee debuffs on your target. It would also provide a relative net benefit on movement fights as well.
Thanks for the prompt reply, yes I have both the greatness card as well as death's verdict unfortunatly I logged out in not my standard raid gear. Thanks for the gemming tips, I wil try that out. Though I would like to know more about the glyph and rotations, more or less how much viable the Steady shot glyph would be in my position.
The bolded parts are the AiS and TSA glyphs effect on the damage output of Aimed Shot.
I didn't add in ISS because I dont know how to model it, but even without ISS, if you are glyphed for AiS and TSA then your AiS will do more damage than MS in the Twins fight.
Originally Posted by Lupius
Let us now add in the AiS glyph which reduces the cd on AiS by 20%. That's a theoretical damage increase of 25% (1/0.8 = 1.25), but the cd now overlaps with CS, so let's just settle for 20%. This gives
A = d * (1 + c * (1.9214)) * 1.25 * 1.2
The bolded statement here is wrong, because when you use aimed shot glyph you give priority to aimed shot, so the CDs actually never overlap. Even then, it has a small effect on the outcome.
Last edited by Ardeaf : 10/22/09 at 7:45 PM.
Reason: new post
The information for which you have asked will not necessarily provide you the right answers for your situation since the correct answer varies on gear, raid buffs/target debuffs available, player execution, RNG effects of both attacks and negative affects on you, etc. Furthermore, what is the correct answer for one character may not be the best for yours.
In general, for MM it is best to gem agi and agi/crit gems for maximum DPS until you get to some threshold, which values depends on the given situation, where ArP becomes more effective than agility. This is usually as you near the passive softcap if you have an ArP trinket or hard cap values since the benefit of ArP increases exponentially. This is because the benefit of ArP is the inverse of the benefit of armor, which has diminishing returns for each unit of armor added.
Some reasons that give more weight to agi gemming include:
- If your guild's strategy often has you attacking targets that do not have full melee debuffs where your physical attacks, especially your ArP is not as beneficial. This includes fights like Northrend Beasts and Jaraxxus where you may be asked as range to take out the Snobolds and Mistress of Pains/Infernals instead of staying on the boss with the melee the whole time.
- Fights with a lot of movement. The standard standstill MM rotation of CS->AiS->SSx4 or SSx3 depending on glyphs (with a variation with AiS before CS) has a high ratio of physical attacks to non-physical attacks at 5 or 4 to 1. Hence, the standstill fights provide a lot of weight to the benefits of ArP. If you are moving a lot, the benefit of ArP is decreased in that a smaller portion of your shots, especially if you sub in a ArS, and your damage are physical attacks.
Looking at your gear (with assuming you have the Greatness Card in the first trinket slot instead of the medallion of the horde), I would first suggest changing the agi/crit gem in you ranged weapon to a agi/hit to get over the hit cap for a 4.3 DPS gain. Then I would suggest moving the Nightmare's Tear from the yellow socket in your ring to the blue socket in your legs to pick up the 6 agi socket bonus for a net of 2 agi. Then I would suggest replacing all ArP gems in blue, red, and belt buckle sockets plus the yellow socket in your chest with agi gems and all other yellow sockets with agi/crit gems to pick up socket bonuses. Doing so provides a net gain of 85 DPS in the spreadsheet's ideal situation of no movement and all melee debuffs and a net gain of 92 DPS in the ideal fight situation but where lacking melee debuffs on your target. It would also provide a relative net benefit on movement fights as well.
I regemed Agi and will see how this works out, im at 31% arm pen down from 62% at this point and 53% passive crit which is a boost from 43% .
I have some questions about gems. In the spreadsheet i keep getting different results wether or not to use 10ag/10crit or 20ag in yellow sockets where the socket bonus gives 4agility. Its the shoulder's, Gloves and planestalker band(ring), that has theese sockets, and im currently running 20agility gems in those. Should i swap out my 20ag, with 10ag/10crit?
The spreadsheet is a good predictor here, and it has consistently shown the deadly gems to be better than delicates in most yellow sockets when you can also get a good socket bonus. But let's look at the the 4 agi socket bonus case:
Thus, the trade off is 7.55 AP (~ 3.78 ilevel) vs. 0.14% crit (~6.43 ilevel). Considering that for most MMs that +1 ilevel crit is usually valued a little higher than +1 ilevel AP, it is clear that using the deadly gem is superior in this case.
For illustrative purposes, look at the situation where there is no socket bonus applicable:
The trade off here is 12.59 AP (~6.295 ilevel) vs. 0.09% crit (~4.131 ilevel). Hence, with no socket bonus available and assuming the ilevel value of crit and AP are roughly equal (as they have been for me for a while), then the delicate gem is about 2.164 ilevel better.
Therefore, anytime that you would place a deadly instead of a delicate into a yellow socket that would result into getting a socket bonus worth greater than 2.164 ilevel, then deadly will generally be better. This equates to socket bonuses of roughly:
>= 3 agi
>= 5 AP
>= 3 crit rating
>= 3 ArP
any hit if more than one under the cap
Considering that most socket bonuses for the above stats are greater than the cutoff value listed, using a deadly is generally better than using a delicate in a yellow socket with one of these bonuses.
Originally Posted by bule
I would go with the 20AGI because 14agi + 10crit i dont think is worth as much as 20agi off the bat that scales with buffs. It may only look like 6agi lost but it is more then you think when it comes to getting buffs like Kings etc.
Generally bad advice as shown above, although the difference is not enough to really hurt you.
It is true that it is a loss of more than 6 agi since you lose 6.82 agi but you gain 10 crit. For the deadly to be a loss over the delicate, then agility would have to be valued at 1.47 times greater than crit. For me the ratio is currently 1.19, and I would say that any MM hunter wearing well-balanced gear that maximizes DPS that the ratio of agi benefit to crit would be under 1.47.
For instance, I currently use 5 deadlies getting socket bonuses worth 28 (16 +12) AP and 12 (4+4+4) agi. which the spreadsheet indicates as a 26 DPS upgrade.
And to be honest, against popular belief, a deadly gem can be better than a delicate in a yellow socket even for an SV hunter as long as the socket has a good enough bonus, which are roughly:
>= 4 agi
>= 11 AP
>= 6 crit rating
>= 7 ArP
any hit if more than one under the cap
For instance, in my SV friends gear:
- Swapping in his T9 hands, Greaves of Ruthless Judgement, or Planestalker Band for 4 agi socket bonus is a 0.34 DPS boost (not enough to be worth it)
- Swapping in T9 helm for 16 AP socket bonus is a 4.99 DPS increase (worth it)
- Swapping in T9 chest for 12 AP socket bonus is a 0.84 DPS increase
- Swapping in Waistguard of Deathly Dominion for 6 agi socket bonus is a 3.46 DPS gain
Thanks mate, that was a very(!) good answer. I was using the deadly gems before, until a highend classleader told me to change. The fact that even the 4agility bonuses makes it better is convincing. Im gonna re-gem then. Thanks for your help. Again, very good answer mate. Much appreciated.
Just testing it myself...i gain minimal dps. I gain both SV and MM less then 5 dps gain. That is not raid buffed, and when i set it to a normal raid buffed situation its even less then having all 20AGI gems. It could be dependent on gear but from what i see its not worth it to regem.
Just testing it myself...i gain minimal dps. I gain both SV and MM less then 5 dps gain. That is not raid buffed, and when i set it to a normal raid buffed situation its even less then having all 20AGI gems. It could be dependent on gear but from what i see its not worth it to regem.
I will not disagree that the DPS gain of using Deadly gems over Delicates is significant. I said so myself in my previous post.
For instance, in your gear with 5 yellow sockets, if I replace Deadlies for Delicates in the 4 without the Nightmare Tear in it, I see only a 13.4 DPS gain. If I also move the Nightmare Tear to the blue socket in your legs (best place for a tear is always in the blue socket with the best socket bonus) and make that yellow socket a deadly, that is another 7.7 DPS for a total 21.1 DPS gain.
I will readily admit that 21.1 DPS is insignificant when doing 5-10K DPS, and not worth regemming if you have already gemmed the gear.
The question and the point is which is better in yellow sockets, and the answer is generally Deadlies for MMs and even in some cases for SVs. So if you are going to gem a new piece of gear, why wouldn't you do it the way that provides the best DPS even if the difference is small, especially considering that orange gems are often cheaper to acquire that red gems.
When you say that delicates are better than deadlies for your normal raid buff situation, what buffs are you leaving out?
Concerning your SV spec, 4 of your yellow socket bonuses are +4 agi which I showed earlier as being an insignifcant gain for SV and not worth using a Deadly. For you, each change was only 0.02 DPS gain. However, your helm has a +16 AP bonus, where the change is worth +2.6 DPS for a deadly over a delicate. Once again, that is not a significant amount to regem for or maybe even to worry about when intially gemming, but it is still better regardless.
Yup, its not alot of dps gain, but now i know im gonna buy deadly ones when i collect new pieces of gear. And the Deadly are 10 emblems of Conquest, rather than the Delicate's who are 20. For those who buy this way, gets 2 for 1 AND better dps. Truly amazing.
I think Hunters do not put enough value into the way Agility does more than improve there single target stand still nuke DPS.
The more an encounter requires you to move, the more your instant casts and pet become a greater % of your overall DPS. Meaning the value of Agi over Arp increases. (Reasons: Pets will DPS while you run, movement negate Auto and SSs the 2 primary benefactors of ArP, but not your instants)
While is some situations getting a slim DPS boost from gemming ArP may occur, it adversely effects your hunters versatility and mobile DPS. Which is very very important in end game encounters.
Examples;
H-25 Jarraxus: has a decent amount of movement.
H-25 Twins: If you're soaking, you're gonna find your DPS taking higher overall %'s from CS, AS, and ArS. You're gonna want that Agi to buff what little you're getting from your pet and ArS that ArP will not give you.
H-25 Anub: Probably the most notable encounter of all. You're gonna AoE alot. I mean ALOT. 60-70% of your total dmg is going to come from Volley. You are definately going to want to sit on Agi here. It's drastically superior to Arp.
Someone said it best a few pages ago. Something along the lines of "Arp makes you a one trick pony" or something like that.
Ultimately, you want to gear, gem and spec yourself for what is "probably" going to happen. Not what is "ideally" going happen. You're not going too see too many Patchwerks in end game content. Quite frankly, only a Patchwerk fight would ever merit such the small DPS increase ArP would give someone in the grand over all scheme.
I was the one who said ArP makes your a one trick pony, but it's been beaten to death by now. Everything you said is true of course. Everyone else can just use the BiS ArP set as an example...You lose less than 200 DPS out of 10K by swapping to agility derivative gems and the spreadsheet models a standstill encounter. Next topic IMO.
I have some questions about gems. In the spreadsheet i keep getting different results wether or not to use 10ag/10crit or 20ag in yellow sockets where the socket bonus gives 4agility. Its the shoulder's, Gloves and planestalker band(ring), that has theese sockets, and im currently running 20agility gems in those. Should i swap out my 20ag, with 10ag/10crit?
I will not disagree that the DPS gain of using Deadly gems over Delicates is significant. I said so myself in my previous post.
For instance, in your gear with 5 yellow sockets, if I replace Deadlies for Delicates in the 4 without the Nightmare Tear in it, I see only a 13.4 DPS gain. If I also move the Nightmare Tear to the blue socket in your legs (best place for a tear is always in the blue socket with the best socket bonus) and make that yellow socket a deadly, that is another 7.7 DPS for a total 21.1 DPS gain.
I will readily admit that 21.1 DPS is insignificant when doing 5-10K DPS, and not worth regemming if you have already gemmed the gear.
The question and the point is which is better in yellow sockets, and the answer is generally Deadlies for MMs and even in some cases for SVs. So if you are going to gem a new piece of gear, why wouldn't you do it the way that provides the best DPS even if the difference is small, especially considering that orange gems are often cheaper to acquire that red gems.
When you say that delicates are better than deadlies for your normal raid buff situation, what buffs are you leaving out?
Concerning your SV spec, 4 of your yellow socket bonuses are +4 agi which I showed earlier as being an insignifcant gain for SV and not worth using a Deadly. For you, each change was only 0.02 DPS gain. However, your helm has a +16 AP bonus, where the change is worth +2.6 DPS for a deadly over a delicate. Once again, that is not a significant amount to regem for or maybe even to worry about when intially gemming, but it is still better regardless.
Interestingly I came to the same conclusions some time ago when I gained a fair few yellow sockets, was hitcapped and a little stressed for gold. So I went for deadlies (when I got upgrades) and surprisingly found my DPS to increase in most cases, and in hte case of one or two weak bonusses it fell, but only mildly (as in 0-3 DPS). This has made me much more attentive to the bonusses themselves. I previously knew that agi bonusses were good, but even AP could provide a minor boost. Now I carry a fairly healthy amount of orange gems.
And it is pretty nice that orange gems are somewhat cheaper to obtain (gold or emblems).
So I'm having somewhat of a problem. I've read this thread, I've used the spreadsheet, and I'm just still completely lost.
My problem is I'm not sure whether or not to use MM or Surv as my main spec. According to the spreadsheet, I would be losing ~157 dps speccing MM rather than Surv. Which is rather disappointing to me, considering I prefer MM to Surv, simply for the fun factor.
Now, on a Target Dummy I pull about 3.5k dps as survival. As marksman I'll pull anywhere from 3.4-3.6k (and this is without cooldowns, i.e. rapidfire, readiness, kill command, etc.)
The constant variation in my MM dps is due to my "rotation" being... not right? My current glyphs are CS, SerS and Hawk. At first my "rotation" was SerS, CS, AS, ArS, SteadyShotx3, repeat. I was maintaining 3.4k and a few 3.6k dps spikes.
At one point I decided to just use a priority list of CS, AS, ArS and then Steady shot as a filler... And my DPS shot up to 3.7-3.8k. Obviously mana was somewhat of an issue at that point...
I don't know, throughout all my testing it seems I do roughly the same amount of DPS either spec... But I want a sort of, confirmation if you will for whether or not I can put out more dps as Marks.
So, regarding Armor Pen. I actually never figured much about armor pen until I read around on these forums.
I'm a huge MM fan; Not really into Survival, especially with their being so many of them; I read the post about armor pen and how mid 300s I stop using Arcane Shot, and how at 760ish I hit the soft cap, 1400 for the hard cap, and how ArPen would raise our DPS by quite a lot, so what I'm wondering is, should I focus on ArPen, such as straight out gemming for it? A lot of the gear isn't itemized for it (not to hit 1400 anyway) so I'm debating gemming for it. Would it be wise to pass on agi gems for this?
Thanks for your reply/suggestions if any are given. First time posting here.
Gemming ArP is out unless you can hit the hardcap, which you're not doing unless you're in near full Heroic ToC gear (it's possible with BS and JC professions, but hard). Until you can get above 1250 passive arp (without trinket procs) you want to gem Deadly and Delicate gems, since that's when ArP becomes more valuable per point than Agil.
Gemming ArP is out unless you can hit the hardcap, which you're not doing unless you're in near full Heroic ToC gear (it's possible with BS and JC professions, but hard). Until you can get above 1250 passive arp (without trinket procs) you want to gem Deadly and Delicate gems, since that's when ArP becomes more valuable per point than Agil.
That depends on your gear, glyphs, spec and shot rotation. For me, ArP starts to outweigh Agility around 800 passive ArP. To say Agil is always better than ArP is way oversimplifying the matter.
I think Hunters do not put enough value into the way Agility does more than improve there single target stand still nuke DPS.
The more an encounter requires you to move, the more your instant casts and pet become a greater % of your overall DPS. Meaning the value of Agi over Arp increases. (Reasons: Pets will DPS while you run, movement negate Auto and SSs the 2 primary benefactors of ArP, but not your instants)
While is some situations getting a slim DPS boost from gemming ArP may occur, it adversely effects your hunters versatility and mobile DPS. Which is very very important in end game encounters.
Examples;
H-25 Jarraxus: has a decent amount of movement.
H-25 Twins: If you're soaking, you're gonna find your DPS taking higher overall %'s from CS, AS, and ArS. You're gonna want that Agi to buff what little you're getting from your pet and ArS that ArP will not give you.
H-25 Anub: Probably the most notable encounter of all. You're gonna AoE alot. I mean ALOT. 60-70% of your total dmg is going to come from Volley. You are definately going to want to sit on Agi here. It's drastically superior to Arp.
Someone said it best a few pages ago. Something along the lines of "Arp makes you a one trick pony" or something like that.
Ultimately, you want to gear, gem and spec yourself for what is "probably" going to happen. Not what is "ideally" going happen. You're not going too see too many Patchwerks in end game content. Quite frankly, only a Patchwerk fight would ever merit such the small DPS increase ArP would give someone in the grand over all scheme.
/2cents
Well, the movement is relative of what your raid strategy is and how your tanks/person with snobolds, etc are placed.
For Lord jarraxus I normally don't move to much since OT always move the mistress next to Lord Jarraxus and portals on hard mode are normally not far from Lord and volcanos go down according to who is closest since their aggro and movement is annoying and with good range dps they will die really fast. As for twins I realized i lose a lot dps going for the orbs i rather place next to opposite portal with all range dps and we take the orbs that pass by, and I normally get soaked once or twice if I am lucky, and doing so I am still doing high dps, and more dps than most people running for orbs. Unless your rotation is not right i dont see how volley can do more dmg on Anub...., it may be our raid but I am normally on perma frost duty where i just run around doing Serpent sting to each sphere and then focus on first add and then anub and even when i am not on perma frost duties my volley don't get even near my total dmg and movement only come to account on phase two where on phase one and three there is no movement.
My point is the movement is relative of how your raids set up is and unless it is a fight like hodir, freya, yogg, wehre movement is a must range dps in general shouldn't have to move that much
Unless your rotation is not right i dont see how volley can do more dmg on Anub...., it may be our raid but I am normally on perma frost duty where i just run around doing Serpent sting to each sphere and then focus on first add and then anub and even when i am not on perma frost duties my volley don't get even near my total dmg and movement only come to account on phase two where on phase one and three there is no movement.
Note that the post you are referring to is in regard to TotGC 25 Anub'arak, which you haven't done. The entire fight is aoe'ing where ArP is terrible.
On the topic of Agi versus ArP gemming, while I was originally ecstatic about gemming a hardcapped ArP MM build, the incredible movement requirements and Anub'arak's Volley requirement mean that the 200 stationary dps loss you get from gemming Agi results in a huge dps gain with movement and AoE damage far larger than 200 dps.
I'm somewhat lost on the arp v.s agi, at the moment, the spreadsheet says replacing runestone with darkmatter is a 50 dps increase if I also go back to full agi gems.If I currently have 739 arp and 100% arp with proc, is agi still better....sorry for the newb question, but I would like to make sure.
I don't really agree with totgc being movement intense.
Aside from paralytic poison/trample rushes on bests, being personally targeted by legion flame and in the case of being a soaker on twins you can more or less stand still like carrot for the rest of the fights (not really considering anub p2 because it's not a dps phase anyway). Paralytic poison will rarely affect you with proper raid spacing, legion flame seems to not hit me more often than not as well.
I know that ArP is crappy for anub regardless, just wanted to add my view of the movement argument.
10/22/09, 4:22 PM
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