A generally question..
I often read about the enchant Tuskar's Vitality and that it can be very useful especially in Ulduar.
But isn't the BC enchant Cat's Swiftness 6 Agi better or is there any difference in the movement speed increase?
Well 12 Stam are ~4 AP as SV but 6 Agi would be a little bit better and ofc the enchant is cheaper. :s
Help me out.
A generally question..
I often read about the enchant Tuskar's Vitality and that it can be very useful especially in Ulduar.
But isn't the BC enchant Cat's Swiftness 6 Agi better or is there any difference in the movement speed increase?
Well 12 Stam are ~4 AP as SV but 6 Agi would be a little bit better and ofc the enchant is cheaper. :s
Help me out.
From a purely dps standpoint, yes the cat's swiftness would be better. Since you're picking up the enchant for survivability (the main reason the movement speed increase is valuable) the stam is a more attractive choice from where I stand. A lot of the hardmodes in Ulduar are rather rough on healers and one of blizzard's favorite ways of making things hard is including large amounts of raid damage, so having that extra bit of stam as a buffer helps quite a bit. I personally prefer going with a dps enchant and just using disengage to get around, its been a very rare occasion when I had to move a long way very quickly and I didn't have disengage up, so you might just wanna try that.
How is Noxious Sting works exactly ? should be SrS --> WS or SrS --> WS or it doesn't matter which is first ?
also another question if SrS wears off and i didn't chain it with another SrS shot to keep gaining this buff i need to shoot another WS and repeat ?
Checking out the hunter Nunken of Ensidia (World's first Algalon kill) and his spec is 5/15/51. Anyone know the viability of this spec? I know what the spreadsheet says, but this guy either knows something the spreadsheet doesn't or he's not even using this spec and it's just for farming or something. I don't even know if he used this or his MM spec for the kill, but I am curious what people think about this or if anyone has tried it out. I know I too could use the haste from Imp AotH, but he seems to be giving up a lot in the SV tree to get it.
Checking out the hunter Nunken of Ensidia (World's first Algalon kill) and his spec is 5/15/51.
That is very near to the spec used in the Best possible DPS in Shandara's Spreadsheet with the exception being that he's taken Aimed instead of putting that point in Focused Fire in the BM tree. (Most likely for the added mobility from Aimed since it's a fairly small DPS loss to take Aimed instead of FF)
Personally the spreadsheet says that for my gear 6/14/51 (or 5/15/51) is a significant DPS increase from the 0/15/56 that I normally run. (I believe it was in the area of ~30 DPS increase)
There's definitely nothing new about the spec. The question really is a) does your raid need your replenishment and b) can you sustain mana without thrill of the hunt well enough that you don't gimp your dps by vipering too much. It's clearly very dependent on your individual raid situation- nobody can just copy the "best in the world" specs without taking into account how well those specs will apply to their raid.
Also keep in mind that the value of the imp hawk talent is dependent on how much haste you have on your gear- the hunter in question has quite low haste.
In regards to the focused fire question- in my gear on the sheet it comes out at about a 34dps difference from aimed, but given that aimed is more mana efficient than multishot and the larger flexibility of aimed I can certainly see why a spec that already sacrifices a large amount of mana regen for dps might not want to go a bit further.
I Agree. Tbh the difference tween 2 spec is the mana menagement, with 6/14/51 or 5/15/51 you'll gotta oom very faster then 15/56. They have an high amount of dps both, but theorically the first is the "best" raidin atm, instead the second one have a nice compromise fo the hard mode. Just my opinion but see my pov.
I really can't see him putting out more dps by running 5/15/51 or MM spec for Algalon kill. I don't know how Algalon works, but both spec makes you go oom pretty quickly and on top of that it is a 10man. As of now, I still go oom every now and then even with JoW and mana spring totem up as 0/15/56.
Don't forget that another benefit from Aimed Shot is the debuff itself. A few bosses in Ulduar have the potential to heal themselves, and so far, I've personally seen Aimed Shot make a difference in Hard-Mode Iron Council.
The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.
Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.
We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)
As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.
The go for the throat fix is very welcome. I had changed my spec a bit to get around that bug right before they announced they were fixing it, so I can fix it back now.
Another interesting implication of this patch is that the warlock changes are going to make the warlock replenishment spec very popular. This has big implications for raid groups like mine which barely scrape by with enough replenishment since it opens the door to non-replenishment survival specs that previously weren't really worth considering.
In regards to the weapon damage buff, I attempted to simulate the change in the spreadsheet by adding 88 dmg to the min and max dmg on the Giant's Bane (which based on my math should be about a 30dps change on that weapon) and the spreadsheet reported it as a total 103dps increase for me.
That seems to fall neatly into the "few percent" range. Assuming of course we talk about 5k being the normal DPS. If we are talking about stylized spreadsheet gains, then it is quite a bit less than a couple percent. But I suppose that MM will get a bit more DPS out of it.
Last edited by KraxisSingular : 05/19/09 at 6:59 PM.
Thank you so much for your analysis Salty. This kind of data is extremely useful to me as I don't have excel so have to run the spreadsheet in OO, thus not being able to do these sort of calcs myself. Awesome.
EDIT: loling at my own sig, it's a bit old... :P
I posted something confirming this maybe 3 weeks ago on the US WoW forums using several hours of in-game testing rather than excel. Glad to see excel is backing me up on it.
That seems to fall neatly into the "few percent" range. Assuming of course we talk about 5k being the normal DPS. If we are talking about stylized spreadsheet gains, then it is quite a bit less than a couple percent. But I suppose that MM will get a bit more DPS out of it.
TBH, I wasn't expecting Blizzard to just hand us a flat DPS buff at all... so a 'small' one is a pleasant surprise. Still, it seems like a (comparatively) large amount of effort for something which really doesn't address our core issues regarding Ulduar DPS. For me, the DPS increase is a footnote to the important part of the announcement, which is that we're getting another tweak "in the next few weeks"... such specificity is extremely unusual for Blizzard
It is a fast change to show that they are on top of our issues.
It isn't as if the change doesn't hold water given their issues regarding the ammochange. But as has been mentioned more than a few times on he official boards, what about the immense costs of ammo as it is, and the fact that Ulduar-25 raiders with bad luck just get the middle finger so to speak, they get neither any new ammo (which the buff was suppose to 'replace') nor this boost. It is an inelegant buff, but a welcome one for me since I have Giant's Bane.
I guess this change will sort of fade at some point soon so that we don't get a crazy jump in DPS from non 25-KT loot to Ulduar 25 loot. As a guy pointed out, there is a greater jump from the Nessy to the Ulduar 25 weapons than down to the S2 crossbow.
And I agree, it doesn't actually change anything like mobility DPS losses and the untrackable issues on three bosses, of which two are maybe in the top three in terms of difficulty. In fact this change hardly impacts that as only Aimed, Chimera and Kill Shot are affected when on the move.
What it has done is lower the crosspoint where MM overtakes Survival.
I was actually figuring that they'd go in this direction. The idea was sound with the legendary bow so baking in the DPS with weapons was the logical choice. The down side to this, as Kraxis stated, was that only a few of our abilities are affected by weapon damage. So while Aimed Shot, Auto Shot, Chimera Shot, and Multi-Shot get stronger, and MM gets stronger through this change, nothing else is affected. The only drawback to this is that they are, for now, only partially baking in added DPS. I wonder how long it'll take them to go the full distance.
What it has done is lower the crosspoint where MM overtakes Survival.
This has been done much earlier, when Armor Penetration was introduced as a valuable stat, unlike pre-3.1.
In the long run, both the change to ammo, and the value of armor penetration will result in MM being favorable over Survival, due to the sole reason that the top-damage dealer of Survival does not benefit from armor penetration, while nearly all MM shots do.
This has been done much earlier, when Armor Penetration was introduced as a valuable stat, unlike pre-3.1.
In the long run, both the change to ammo, and the value of armor penetration will result in MM being favorable over Survival, due to the sole reason that the top-damage dealer of Survival does not benefit from armor penetration, while nearly all MM shots do.
How do you figure? MM Hunters use Steady, Aimed/Multi, Arcane, Serpent Sting, and Chimera Shot. SV Hunters use Steady, Aimed/Multi, Explosive Shot, Serpent Sting, and Black Arrow. The only difference between MM and SV is that MM talents directly boost their ranged attacks where as SV Hunters boost theirs through a higher RAP and a few talents benefiting Explosive Shot. If you want to argue why MM is probably going to rival, if not overtake SV dps, it will be because of the direct impact of the 2 piece T8 bonus (combined with Improved Stings and Chimera Shot getting bumped up from the DPS change) and that a MM Hunter can fully spec into 5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk and 2/2 Focused Fire without losing anything where as an SV Hunter has to sacrifice a great deal to go 6 points deep in BM.
How do you figure? MM Hunters use Steady, Aimed/Multi, Arcane, Serpent Sting, and Chimera Shot. SV Hunters use Steady, Aimed/Multi, Explosive Shot, Serpent Sting, and Black Arrow. The only difference between MM and SV is that MM talents directly boost their ranged attacks where as SV Hunters boost theirs through a higher RAP and a few talents benefiting Explosive Shot. If you want to argue why MM is probably going to rival, if not overtake SV dps, it will be because of the direct impact of the 2 piece T8 bonus (combined with Improved Stings and Chimera Shot getting bumped up from the DPS change) and that a MM Hunter can fully spec into 5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk and 2/2 Focused Fire without losing anything where as an SV Hunter has to sacrifice a great deal to go 6 points deep in BM.
The difference is mainly in the core abilities. Chimera Shot is based on a % of weapon damage, unlike Explosive. Aimed Shot and Silencing Shot are both based off weapon damage as well. Piercing Shots benefits greatly from ArP applied to Aimed Shot and Steady Shot.
These buffs are very have great synergy inside MM tree, and frankly makes MM scale better than Surv does at this time.
My point was that before the change the crosspoint was near the end of Ulduar gearing. That would mean Survival would be more than just viable in Icecrown Citadel. Now the crosspoint is near the beginning of Ulduar. Unless gear get a whole lot more Agi and less of other stats MM will just wave and fly off into the sunset. Especially if fights continue to deprive Survival of two of it's few nicely scaling talents, Imp Tracking and Sniper Training. Sure MM is affected by the loss of Imp Tracking too, but not to the same extent.
Personally I think the change was merely a bandaid to patch things up until the true ammochange goes through. Obviously it will mean a total revamp of ammo, hence no new ammo. And I think they didn't want to murder Engineering any more than they absolutely had to by including some new 'Ulduar' raid ammo, at least not yet.
, it will be because of the direct impact of the 2 piece T8 bonus (combined with Improved Stings and Chimera Shot getting bumped up from the DPS change)
Originally Posted by KraxisSingular
Especially if fights continue to deprive Survival of two of it's few nicely scaling talents, Imp Tracking and Sniper Training. Sure MM is affected by the loss of Imp Tracking too, but not to the same extent.
At the moment 2pc T8 does not affect Chimera Shot, so it's a mostly irrelevant factor in MM "vs" SV dps. It's not clear whether this is a bug or an intended method of operation.
How do non-Imp Tracking fights affect survival any more than marks? It's a straight 5% loss on all damage either way. The only argument I could see is if you are dual-speccing out of IT on fights where it doesn't work, but wish you could stay some non-IT survival variant.
On the topic of 4pc T8: I ran my first raid since picking my 4pc up tonight, and looking over the logs it seems pretty mediocre. On Ignis I had 13.3% uptime over 3:45. That's ~79 AP averaged out. I didn't get slag potted so I sat there for those four minutes and just fired away. So under the most ideal boss conditions in the current zone, it seems like a reasonable bonus (I fully admit not knowing the value of other classes 4pc, but 80 ap for a set bonus seems in the realm of ok-but-not-amazing). The problem is that most of the fights in the zone are less than the ideal, so the bonus is going to lose some value. I'd have to sit down and look over a lot more logs to see just how much it's affected, and compare different specs as well, so I'm just going to leave it up to conjecture at the moment. It would have been nice if they had made it a proc chance on something other than steady though. Chim/arc/aimed/expl would probably get the job done, with an adjusted chance to proc and an ICD to keep it proc'ing relatively evenly between specs.
Stasis log of the Ignis fight I'm talking about: Ignis the Furnace Master : Preliator (please note that I was marks for Ignis, which changes the ratio of steady usage somewhat, but they weren't talking about 4pc t8 in the marks thread, so whatever).
05/16/09, 7:19 PM
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