Don't become overly reliant on topping the meters. Casting Sting on each scarab will probably increase your dps, but it won't actually help your raid. The scarabs become dangerous in numbers, so burning them down quickly (ie focus your efforts on one, kill it, then move on) is probably the best way of going about things. It's unrealistic to expect consistent performance from fight to fight in ToC hard modes. Some of them are hunter-friendly, some aren't. Anub is great for cleaving melee classes and Unholy DKs, but less good for Hunters. Assuming you're doing the single burrow strat, just keep boring a hole in Anub and snipe the scarabs off your healers.

Like what was already mentioned, you shouldn't be overly concerned about topping the meters, you should be concerned about what is best for your raid.

Focus the adds down quickly and make a habit of tranq'ing adds, it helps keep the stacks down.

Another very handy thing is to put tranq shot on a mouseover macro. It allows you to quickly tranq enraged adds without having to swap off the target you're burning down. Again the idea being by keeping focus on a single add you can limit the total number up at any given time.

You should have designated assist trains for scarabs. We assist off one person for each side and mow scarabs down ASAP because if they become enrage they heal to full, which is pretty annoying.

You should have a mouse over macro and tranq as soon as you can. I personally tranq then concussive so the person can get away and prevent as many stacks as possible.

I've been trying several build with femaledwarf.com, but i can't get to point where i can shot AiS before CS, what glyphes our templates do you use?

Havent extensively tested it my self, but there is some scenarios where AiS is > Chimera :

a) Imp. Steady Shot proc + Runestone or Grim Toll Proc
b) A high passive arp gear ( i believe in BiS t9 ) AiS over Chimera came out at 20sh dps higher.

both the above include Glyph of TSA .

Because the ISS proc doesn't affect the serpent bonus damage to Chimera Shot, so you could very well end up benefiting more from ISS going to aimed than to chimera, even if your overall chimera damage ends up being more.

That's actually the only time I see AiS being preferred over Chimera. At least with the gear sets I've spreadsheeted, even at 1400 ArP, I still see it as either a slot loss or break even compared to preferring Chimera with 0/3 ISS.

Well, another situation in which Aimed is a higher priority is for gear configurations in which glyphing Aimed and Chimera is a DPS gain - In such a case, aimed usually needs to be a higher priority than chimera to realize the gain, since Glyphed Aimed is a shorter cooldown than Glyphed Chimera.

I was in this state until recently, until I noticed Glyph of Kill Shot again being better for me than Aimed (particular on Anub), so I dropped back to Chimera being a higher priority than Aimed.

Forgive me, since I haven't looked at marksman in quite some time, being the survival guy that I am. However, since MM is putting out some very, very impressive numbers in T9, I'm thinking of switching over, at least for a try.

One thing I remember from when I dabbled in it before that was shunned but seems to be accepted now was Improved Arcane Shot. I seem to remember that it only provided a 15% damage increase to the small base amount of Arcane Shot and not to the actual scalar part of the damage. Did that change, making it good now?

I only ask because I'm not too set on regemming ArP, and will most likely end up using it in the rotation, but still don't want to take a sub-par, non-scalar talent if it can be avoided.

Also, if I'm on the fence between using my third glyph slot (assuming my first two are serpent sting and chimaera), I can't decide between glyph of trueshot aura and glyph of kill shot. Any advice there would help too.

The steady shot bug is fixed in the 3.3 patch and it looks extremely likely to hit on Tuesday. So I wouldn't spend too much time obsessing over a 3rd glyph becasue when the bug is fixed I'm pretty sure all the MM hunters will be going back to the steady shot glyph (at least for me when I tested it the glyph was worth a substantial amount of dps). I wouldn't assume that chimera is the best 2nd glyph though, it's very dependent on latency. You probably want to check in the spreadsheet or dps analyzer to see what glyph actually works best for your gear and situation. If you do use trueshot glyph be sure to use a macro to get around the non-stacking buffs issue.

With regards to arcane shot, the point at which you drop it from your shot priority is generally a factor of ArPen and crit, but is not dependent on gemming for ArPen. It's generally a good idea at a much lower ArPen level than the level at which you gem for ArPen, again this is something you should check with your gear in the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet the damage modifier is applied to the entire arcane shot so I can only assume that problem has been resolved.

I thought the TSA glyph was fixed so that you don't need the macro? I remember someone mentioning about that in this thread.

You got a source for that or did you test it yourself?

According to this post it was still bugged halfway into November on the PTR: Hunter: Simple Questions/Simple Answers

I tested the steady shot bug myself a few days ago on PTR. It's definitely fixed.

I saw your tests in World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> I should have asked for a Pony..... Rivkah, thanks. Do you happen to remember what rank of hunter's mark you were using for those tests? I suppose max rank on Boss level target dummies? Just trying to double check that the 5% damage from MFD is functioning correctly in conjuction with the 10% from the glyph, which is annoying to work out since a full rank HM ups the StS damage quite a bit from the extra AP - the OP of that thread was insisting that the 5% doesn't currently work on live, which I haven't seen any data for.

Yes I was using max rank hunter's mark and I didn't have the glyph for it. This was on a boss level target dummy. I suppose I should have tested with a lower rank but at the time I was just trying to see if the steady shot glyph as having an effect.

i use powerauras for the selfbuffed buffs of most of my characters. and i have one entry for tsa.
sometimes while raiding i get the message, that my tsa is missing and i have one of the other ap buffs. so as of today, still not fixed.

something weird is, that sometimes i don't lose my tsa, despite having an enhancer in the group, for the whole time of the raid and sometimes i lose it every 10 seconds or so.

From looking at the test, I do believe it is fixed, but I could be looking at the data wrong, but it seems to be, not sure on live results but if the PTR test are accurate then it should be.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - hunters/missing bug fix in patch notes?

According to Blizzard Steady shot glyph is now working with Marked for Death!

Forgot to test it yesterday during the runs on the new dungeons, altough the server was crashing every 30 minutes.
I'll have some tests in a few hours when I get home, but anyone else already confirmed it? Did Blizzard acctually fixed the 'problem'? If so i'll have to take a look at my glyphs again and each ICC fights closer.

[Glyph of Steady Shot] (along with MFD talents) is fixed yes, as already confirmed by Rivkah using ptr, results below to confirm it is working like that on live.

Test 1 = No Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, no Steady Shot glyph
hit 809 crit 2009
Test 2 = No Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, Steady Shot glyph
hit 890 crit 2210
Test 3 = Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, no Steady Shot glyph
hit 891 crit 2214
Test 4 = Hunter's Mark, Serpent Sting, Steady Shot glyph
hit 980 crit 2435

Used [Screeching Bow], pet dismissed and on proc items removed, (5/5 MFD used)

Did you run this test with MfD both talented and untalented? The bug isn't actually in the glyph itself, it's that having a single talent point in MfD mimics the glyph.

Can anyone confirm with Gutchewa?