sefren

My guild recently started on Anub hard mode in 25m. I was wondering if there was any benefit to dropping all of the armp gear I could and trying to pick up a ton of haste gear, even possibly going so far as to gem for haste in it. This all being based around that fact that the majority of my damage in that fight is coming from Volley. My guess is gemming AGI is still the way to go but will dropping arp and picking up haste show any real increase in damage?

 

Cerevantes

Without delving into this topic too much. I've personally found that every fight in TotGC either has enough movement to halt your autocasts or has mechanics that make full ArP gemming sub optimal.

Every phase of Beasts has movement. Fires, poison, massive crash, and the concept of other people moving without being bunched.
Jarraxus has fires as you mentioned, but also the infernal blanka-ball followed by hellfire is deadly. I'll admit 80% of the time I'm stationary on this fight, but full debuffs aren't always up on your targets, which is pivotal to an ArP setup.
Faction Champs is movement based inthat hunters are laying traps in the center, where melee are being kited across. Inherently we'll be moving often.
Twin Valks has two strats, soaking and not. With Soaking, Hunters are very likely to be soaking because they interfere with all the raid getting the same number of balls. With no soaking, you're avoiding balls on your own already, which is very movement based.
Anub is obviously very anti-ArP with at least 60% of your damage being Volley.

I used to love ArP setups in Ulduar and looked forward to ToTGC fights as ArP, but the more I played them I started realizing that Agi MM or Agi SV are simply better dps despite the Spreadsheet giving contradicting results.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...evantes323.png

 

Feanoro

You still want your arp gear as you do have to pour a significant amount of dps into Anub itself. Your strategy may differ, but for my raid, we found it better to allow casters to handle the AE, and hunters focus fire on Anub, substituting Multi for Aimed (if adds are correctly positioned, which our MDs help) while adds are up. If an entire wave of adds is within Volley range, that's different.

Absolutely don't seek haste though, it's still more or less useless for us.

 

Dispiosan

Not so much that it's intense as it's enough to punish ArP more than Agility.

 

alienangel

You can favour haste/AP/Crit gear for the fight, but I'd hold off on actually regemming your current gear till you're deeper into the attempts. We started with hunters spamming volley and doing pretty good DPS overall, after a night or so found it wasn't pushing Anub fast enough. Given that in my guild at least our hunters do very good single target DPS compared to our DKs and warriors, while those do even better AoE than the hunters, having the hunters spend the fight single-targetting Anub while the DKs and Mages and everyone else handle the AoE made getting anub's health down quick enough a lot easier while not really making a difference to the adds dying on time. I would have been rather sad if we made that strategy change after I'd regemmed my normal gear.

If you do persist with the hunters AoEing, you probably want to drop as much ArP as possible, and put on haste/crit pieces instead of arp/crit pieces, and do some math to figure out whether haste's effect on volley actually makes it good enough to gem over agi or AP. Also note that many of our talents don't proc on Volley (Gftt does at least), and no trinket I've found other than greatness procs on volley, so at the very least replacing things like runestone with mirror of truth or (even better) wrathstone would be good. I imagine that Death's Verdict does proc on volley though, since I think it uses the same wording as greatness ("every time you deal damage"?). All of this will nerf your DPS in P3 on Anub though, which may be where your DPS is needed the most.

 

Cerevantes

Death's Verdict does proc on Volley, as does the 4pc bonus. That being said, the timing of the 45 second internal cooldown almost flawlessly lines up with the solo-dps portions of Anub before adds come in both for the first and second waves.

The only change I make for Anub gearwise outside of gemming pure Agi, is sub [Pauldrons of the Devourer] for [Pauldrons of the Timeless Hunter], for the haste and Agi bonuse, while dropping Arp.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...evantes323.png

 

Lahiri

I'd just like to start out with saying that I gem agi myself, with that said:

Beasts: With poison you'd have to move, yes. With fire you won't have to move if the spacing between members is
good to begin with (unless you need to purge poison off the tank, but the chance of this happening is so very, very low)
Moving during massive crash is just because you're out of range, it doesn't penalize any setup more than the other.

Jaraxxus: I forgot the infernals true, I suspect that is because they tend to die so fast anyway.

Champions: I don't really know how most do this but when we do this I can just stand in the center the whole fight and
fire at our kill target. Melee targets are controlled very well, mostly I only move because I am out of range or possibly
because of hellfire.

Twins: I don't soak here, the other hunter does though. We use four soakers, along with our other hunter it's usually
druid healers and one of our arcane mages using resist talents.

Not really going to comment on Anub.

 

Norest

My guild is working on Tribute to Mad Skill at the moment, and this is my experience in ToTGC25 as an MM hunter with runestone trinket and gemming for ArP till I hit the softcap (~735):

Beasts : For P1 and P2, it's mostly single target DPS so all your essential debuffs should be on your target. But armor pen really shines in P3 during icehowl's crash, where you can see huge numbers (call of the wild should be up by now if you saved it) which translates into larger Piercing Shot ticks. I usually overtake most of our DPSers in this phase if I don't get consecutive ice breaths (which, if you react fast enough, can be FD'd and avoided completely - I did it once successfully by fluke)

Jaraxxus : I don't think you really have to move that much if the raid is positioned well enough, to justify an agi/arcane shot build over a standard ArP build. Only time I switch to arcane for this fight is if I'm on the move and when we're killing portals/volcanoes. Other than that, a good chunk of the fight is still single target DPS and that benefits armor pen build.

Champions : I don't do much CC'ing other than dropping frost traps in the middle (where I position myself) and even so I do that when chim/aimed is down, minimising DPS loss. I notice I hit alot harder against cloth targets as opposed to plate/mail targets and I think this fight definitely favours an armor pen build.

Twins : My role is a soaker on this fight and initially thought an agi/arcane shot build would be much more beneficial. However over the course of the past 3-4 weeks I've been pulling above 10k DPS for the whole duration of the fight as my current build and haven't looked back since. With empowered buff, I regularly see piercing shots tick for over 3k which is pretty ridiculous considering it ticks every second. As long as you focus on soaking orbs that will hit the raid and ignore those that doesn't, there's actually a decent period throughout the fight where you're able to steady/autoshot.

Anub : When we were learning this encounter I experimented with many different builds. BM with spirit beast/wolf/devilsaur +4pcT9 (gemmed agi) didn't seem to be doing more DPS than MM, to my surprise. More recently I switched to this particular spec for anub :

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

which is based on a volley-centric rotation. I took out wild quiver because it messed up MDs which were extremely crucial this fight, and I went for Hawk Eye because I was positioned somewhere further from the raid to kill orbs, and this allowed me to be in range of Volley and maximise DPS as well as having an easier time shooting down orbs. I wear 4pcT9 for this fight along with agi gear, swapping out runestone for greatness card, with Dark Matter as my trinkets.

I plan to try an armor pen build and just focus on anub this week, subbing in multishot with aimed shot. Only considerations I have is whether sunders/mangle will be up full-time on anub, as well as JoW.

 

Ardeaf

Something else you did not mention is that ArP really shines on this fight because bloodlust is usually used right at the start, allowing for a fully bloodlusted arp proc for everyone with runestone. I also strangely find that I am hardly ever moving, in spite of the implications of the fight being "pvp-centric".

 

Kelthuryon

I've been following the TSA Glyph discussion and the actual outcome is still unclear to me with so many reports contradicting each other.

Some people claim UR overrides TSA, other peope reports other hunters' TSA overrides their, and some report say it's working fine in all cases.

So, is there an accepted fact for the TSA glyph and how it works when around other 10%AP bonuses or is it still being evaluated?

 

Whitefyst

This post is in regards to MM gemming options and the comments these days that gemming ArP "makes you a one trick pony". The information below shows that gemming ArP. in at least my case, is indeed a DPS loss but not a considerable one where gemming for ArP makes your DPS really bad in situations that do not favor ArP (of course this is accounting for standard raid situations and not any special situations relative to special boss fights).

Here's my particular situation. I just finally got Mjolnir Runestone last night after weeks of farming. My optimal gear set for what I have been able to acquire has 522 ArP naturally with leaving me 213 ArP (about 11 +20 ArP gems) from the soft cap. My current gemming has a Nightmare's Tear in the blue socket that provides the best socket bonus, has +20 agi in my red sockets and other blue sockets (of which there are 4 total), and +10 agi/crit gems in all my yellow sockets (of which there are 7). Hence, I have exactly the 11 sockets needed to gem ArP to the soft cap.

Below is a table of some different gemming options with showing the DPS when fully buffed and on a target with full debuffs (on the left) and the DPS in the same situation but without the melee debuffs (on the right). That means that I am missing Sunders, JoW, Heart of the Crusader, Mangle/Trauma, and Blood Frenzy/Savage Combat but that I am on the same target as balance druid and warlocks to have the ranged debuffs including Faerie Fire. The values in the ()s are the differences from option 1).

The gemming options are the following:
1) My standard gemming as discussed above
2) Partial ArP gemming where I replace only the +20 agi gems in my red and blue sockets with +20 ArP gems, which results in no changes in socket bonuses
3) Full ArP gemming to get to the soft cap. This includes losing the 7 socket bonuses from my yellow sockets worth 12 agi and 36 AP which is estimated to be worth about 40 DPS.
4) Full agi gemming. This also results in losing the 7 socket bonuses from my yellow sockets

Option Full DPS No Melee Debuffs
1).........8896..............7663
2).........8890 (-6).......7654 (-9)
3).........8853 (-43).....7614 (-49)
4).........8866 (-30).....7638 (-25)

Observations:

Concerning losing the melee debuffs:
I lost a lot of DPS regardless of the gemming situation when losing the melee debuffs. However, losing the melee debuffs affected each gemming option about the same, with the option 4) for the full agi gemming seeing a slight decrease in its loss to the standard gemming option when losing the melee debuffs.

Concerning going from 1) to 2):
There is not much difference in DPS when replacing an ArP for Agi gem. There is a small loss for my situation in both debuff cases, but that is because these gems were swapped still 133 ArP short of the cap. I postulated that if I was closer to the ArP soft cap from my gear, then I could have actually seen an increase from just regemming those 4 red/blue sockets. However, when I checked this out, it was not the case, although it did close the gap. Adding in 100 ArP, 2) was still 1 DPS short of 1). Adding in 133 ArP so that the 4 ArP gems get me to exactly the softcap resulted in 1) and 2) being equal.

Concerning going from 1) to 3):
Much of the DPS difference here is due to the loss of the socket bonuses. If I hand coded the socket bonuses back in the DPS values were 8896 (0) and 7651 (-12) for accounting for just swapping the gems. This shows little to no difference once again between socketing for standard gems over ArP.

Concerning going from 1) to 4):
The DPS difference here is due to the loss of the socket bonuses. If I hand coded the socket bonuses back in the DPS values were 8909 (+13) and 7676 (+13) for accounting for just swapping the gems.

Conclusions(at least while you do not have enough passive ArP to be near the hard cap):
- As expected, agi gems are generally still the best gemming option and are superior when do not have melee debuffs and should usually be used in red sockets and blue sockets after that used for Nightmare's Tear
- As expected, deadlies are still the best gemming option in yellow sockets with good socket bonuses as discussed previously
- Going the ArP gemming route if one chooses to do so, is not as significant of a DPS decrease even when missing melee debuffs as folks would have you believe

Advice: Take the general advice to gem agi over ArP as just a general guideline and not necessarily a definitive rule. Always investigate all of your gemming options for your particular situation.

 

Masterdragon

The point where ArP gemming starts becoming more over Agi gemming now requires a much higher passive ArP value without using either of the trinkets. Most gemming options that I've tried shows that gemming for ArP doesnt become a DPS increase until you near 800 to 900 passive ArP (i.e majority in Heroic TotGC gear). Also you other stats have a slight impact where this point falls but just getting one of the trinkets now doesnt mean you can gem ArP anymore, even when trying to soft cap for the 10 seconds the trinket is active. Granted that Arcane Shot is still dropped pretty early in the ArP curve. When the nerf to ArP came out, it kind of split the Marks Hunters into 3 categories instead of 2.

For Hunters less then 350-400 passive ArP, using Arcane Shot along with it talent.
For Hunters between 350ish and 850ish ArP, dropping Arcane Shot and using the ArP spec while continuing to gem for Agility.
For Hunters above 850ish ArP switching Agility gems to ArP Gems.

Of course you would still need to check out the spreadsheet values to see what gems would be most beneficial to you at your current gear standings. A full ArP gemming now pretty much requires you to be clearing TotGC and picking up the heroic forms of the gear.

"The fun about this sentence is that by the time you realise it doesn't say anything, it's too late to stop reading it."

 

Whitefyst

Here is my current understanding from what I have read:

- UR and AM no longer overwrite our TSA is regards to the TSA glyph working or not. However, to be safe, it doesn't hurt to have your Aimed Shot in a macro that cancels the two auras. That's what I do, and the glyph seems to work fine for me since AiS routinely crits 85-90% of the time while my other shots are around 60-65% usually.

- Your TSA can be "overwritten" by another MM's hunters TSA; however, as long as you have the TSA talent and the TSA buff present (whether it is yours or someone elses), the TSA glyph should work. I have not been able to test this in raids myself since I have not raided with a second MM hunter recently.

 

Resuu

I tested the TSA glyph last week, and it does not seem to matter who has TSA up. I raid with a second MM hunter and with his TSA up I was still critting 8-11% more on a test dummy.

 

SpartanKillian

Other people have made this point in this thread, but it bears repeating. A lot of what Masterdragon says is correct, but keep in mind that crit% plays an important roll in determining when to drop Arcane Shot from your rotation; it's not just an ArP issue. That got a little conflated in the quoted post.

 

Sharpbeard

First of all sorry for my previous post for anyone that read it. Having read the discussions on ArP vs Agi and the varying scenarios in which ArP is more viable than others, my question is based off of my spreadsheet showing a dps upgrade of only 20 switching from the greatness card to the runestone. Being as I do not have the runestone I'm wondering if I would find that number to be greater than what the sheet says more often than not, and if getting it would be beneficial as I start to get into 25 Totgc?

 

Rhy

Going back to the discussion about Anub25 Heroic for a bit.

What my guild does works for us really well. Basically, when the first wave of adds comes, everyone starts to aoe. As soon as they die, the whole raid switches to Anub and just ignores the second wave of adds until he burrows. Then we aoe the adds down while kiting him to the ice patches. That gives us more than enough time to bring him down (around 70% health when he does the first burrow, below 45% when he burrows the second time).

When you enter P2, its back to everyone on the adds until they die, then everyone on the boss. Since we use the 1 add tank strategy, you can't risk it and have the adds up for too long in that phase. With a good raid dps, you can still be a good minute ahead of the enrage.

The only thing that I had to change for this fight is drop 2 points from SI and get Rapid Recup since the heavy Volley usage drains me dry really fast. Now, if you are having a full ArP gemming and trying to reach the hard cap, it will not be optimal here. However, with this way of handling adds, you have more than enough time to single target dps the boss, meaning that its probably good to stick to your normal gear instead of switching the arp/crit for crit/haste.

I hope this might help someone.

 

Gada

Hunter aoe on this fight will be pretty much strategy depending, sometimes you will be asked to be just single targeting and multishoting on CD , sometimes you will be volley-ing for as long adds are up. It really depends on your raid setup, when there is enough classes that provide superior aoe to ours, and adds are going down fast enough, hunters should really make use of their superior single target dps. As for the mana consumption you mentioned - Glyph of Volley - it really gets the job done.

 

Resuu

One thing I would like to add for people trying to maximize their dps on any fights, including ToC, is to try out Cat's Swiftness. Of course, in the Spreadsheet 16 agi is valued over all else do the the stagnant nature of the fight. However, if you spend, I believe, 2.6 seconds every 1 minute it's a dps increase to take the minor run speed. This assumption has led everyone to hop on Tuskarr's Vitality, however, Cat's Swiftness provides 6 Agi in place of the 15 stamina, and since this is a MM thread, I'm assuming there are no SV hunters using this because I didn't do the calculation for them. But as for MM I got about a 10.14 dps increase in an actual raid environment.

 

Lupius

If there is a situation where you're running instead of dpsing, you'd simply pop into aspect of the cheetah, which makes any speed boots enchant worthless. The only exception would be Twins, where you get dazed by the aoe effect.

 

Zeel

There are lots of situations in current raid enviroment where heavy movement is absolutely necessary.
Every encounter in TotGC requires us to move fast at some point.
Only situation in TotGC where we can use Aspect of Cheetah safely is right after Trample on Icehowl.
Every other boss / fight would get us dazed if we were to use Cheetah.

After listening Munken's podcast interview on outdps.com I tried speed enchantment on my boots too and while
it sure is a viable option I still chose not to use it.
Reasoning behind this was that the arena on Coliseum is ~80 yd wide. Tuskarr's Vitality gives you 8% movement increase.

So if you'd need to run from the other side of the arena to the shooting range when boss is on the opposing side,
you would "shorten" the distance for ~3 yards with Tuskarr's Vitality.

If you are raiding in a guild where that 3 yards make the cut, then it's surely a good enchantment for you.

 

Esoth

Run speed effectiveness is not limited to long stretches of ground to be covered. In fact it's much more likely that the effectiveness comes from covering ground in about 1 second where it would be completely impractical to swap aspects. Running out of fire bombs on Goramok, positioning readjustment on jormungars, moving from nearby infernals on Jaraxxus, the entirety of faction champions, all movement on twins, phase two of Anub (and phase 1 repositioning after an emerge). In other words, there is still movement to be done even in situations where you are currently in range of the target and cheetah is definitely not always the best solution there.

 

maurihb

I'm having a hard time understanding wich stat to choose in what situation.
Here is my armory link: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...an&n=Zoghunter
I have 633 arp, and no arp trinket, so my guess was to go with a AS build, but after running some tests with Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer I get that even in my case it's better to drop AS out of my rotation. Do you think this is a good choice?

Scince I don't have an arp trinket, I thought I should orient my stuff differently so I can include AS into my rotation. So I looked at replacing my shoulders and gloves for the T9 ones, change my chest for the Cuirass of Cruel Intent, and my algalon's ring for Band of Callous Aggression. But even then I get better results without AS.

What stat change is the one that will make AS more interesting? i tought haste, but i think i'm missing something....

In a not MM related question, is it a good idea to have a haste-crit-ap oriented stuff in MM and having SV as second spec?

Sorry for my bad english

 

Hellovalotofun

It has been shown that dropping AS out of your rotation is a dps increase, even at relatively low levels of Arp, with steady gaining more benefit from Arp, PS and ISS. Also not forgetting the 3 points you have by not taking IAS. Use AS for when you are moving and the other instant shots are on cd.

 

KraxisSingular

I would like to point out that dropping AS becomes viable when you either have loads of two of the three AP, Crit and ArP. So people like me sitting at a fair amount of AP and Crit, and around 400 ArP will see a fairly considerable increase.

The point is that dropping AS isn't 100% dependant on ArP, even if it is the most potent of the three stats to cause the changeover.