When you have more than one shot on cooldown, it's not just a matter of which one gives the most damage per GCD... you also have to bear in mind that there's an opportunity cost you pay for deferring the other shots.

For instance, say you had only three abilities, X does 5400 damage, with a 4.5 second cooldown, and Y does 4050 damage with a 3 second cooldown, and Z does 1350 damage with a 1.5 second cooldown. Prioritizing X > Y > Z leads to a XYZ rotation, which gives 2400 DPS. However, prioritising Y > X > Z leads to a YXYZ rotation, which gives 2475 DPS.

I've been doing ES-Steady-ES-Steady-ES when Lock&Load procs, its been working well for me. Any problems with this?

Not a problem per se, it is obviously a lot easier to manage, and that is no small thing. But timed Explosives are better, in that they provide better DPS while you do it, and they lower the time to the next ES cooldown is up again by up to 2 seconds (more if your Steadies aren't haste capped for the proc duration). And the better geared you are, the more pronounced the benefits are due to ES scaling vastly better than Steady.

I have no idea what was up with my performance tonight... the entire raid was really on the low side and I wasn't even pushing 5k DPS most of the time. Raid was missing 10% AP buff as well as 20% melee haste which explains some of it, and Naxx was lagged to hell which basically pooched any rotation I could have used. Most of the time was only able to get off 2 instants between ES cooldowns.

Just felt shitty though, my Hunter is pretty decked at this point... seeing numbers like 4.6k DPS, while still the highest in the raid, was just depressing.

According to my calculations earlier in this thread you have to hit a timing window that is smaller than 1/4 second to actually gain dps by timing instead of interleaving. That is quite hard to do right, especially if you are still new to survival and the DoT timers most people use are not a good tool to hit such a small timing window.
So currently I recommend interleaving over timing.

Think you answered your own question. Going BM-->survival isn't a easy swap. Mix this with lag and you are losing a lot of DPS. After a while you get the feeling for it and start using ES to it's full potential.

Besides, 4.6k DPS is pretty damn good on most bosses but on a boss like Patch Survival has more potential. Think i pulled of 5k DPS in the 10 man yesterday being sloppy on some ES and not perfect synchrony. If i had lag i doubt i would have passed 4,5k.

On the contrary, GCD is what matters. Because of travel time you want to shoot second Explosive Shot exactly 2 seconds after the first.

You're correct, sorry, got myself confused. So long as the next Explosive is fired 2.0 seconds after the first one is, the respective first and third ticks will line up properly regardless of travel time.

I wonder, then, if it's possible to create a timer mod of some sort (perhaps a custom Quartz timer?) that would help weave Explosives?

I created a 2 second dot timer with classtimer. For me, SCT shows the third tick of ES ~0.5s after this timer runs out.

With your Hit Rating at 126 (3.93%), I am surprised you were hitting those numbers in DPS. With 3 points in Focused Aim, you only neeed to come up with 1.2% more. Then I think you will see your DPS increase to what you are used to.

As I've stated before, I use the AddOn NeedToKnow (Link), you can set it to watch your Explosive Shot ticks, and it gives a 3 second long bar. I will usually watch it, and as soon as it has 1 second left (aka 1 tick left) I cast my next Explosive shot. It really is a great addon and I highly suggest using it for not just that, but also for LnL procs, as well as Hunter's Mark (it shows how long other hunter's mark has as well as your own, so you know if you want to refresh it because another hunter is slacking), Serpent Sting, etc. You can set it to watch pretty much anything.

I'm using this addon too after people on this forum recommended it. My only peeve about it is that you can only track 3 cooldowns/debuffs, or am I mistaken and this is configurable? I'm currently using it to track: Serpent Sting, Hunter's Mark, and Lock and Load.

And btw, as of last night, frost trap was still bugged... I took full advantage of it.

Power Auras has helped my survival rotation more than any mod I've tried. It can be configured to LnL, Exp. shot, Sting and Sting duration. I thought about starting a new thread on Hunter mods based on the amount of mod discussion lately.

My rotation:
Serpent, Immolation Trap, Explosive, Multi Shot, Explosive, (Steady Untill Explosive is up).
This is ran with keeping Serpent up and trapdancing (running in, putting up a new trap when the other one runs out and disengage out.)

But i'm wondering, apart from Serpent and Steady glyphs, which one should be your third 'survivalist' glyph?

As the first page is suggesting, Glyph of Aspect of the Hawk gives a pretty good return.

I have done that. A few pages back I asked the same question and I got this answer. It is absolutely perfect.

I can line up my Explosives with what amounts to no downtime (bear with me here). I have tested and tested again on dummies and looked up the number of Explosive Shots on bosses and so far I have only clipped one tick... And I'm not even certain I clipped it, the boss did seem to die in the middle of a LnL proc. At the same time my debuff/DoT timer has shown an almost constant reapplication of the DoT. So I don't think I wait too long either.

The thing is on bosses like Heigan that moves relative to your position, when he gets closer you have to wait slightly more than 2 seconds (if he is standing still no issue of course), so then the timer isn't working perfectly. But then you can watch any debuff/DoT timer and do it like that. But that's just one boss of many. Otherwise this little macro/addon combo is just perfect.

I use NeedToKnow for all my toons. It is configurable, but you use the normal wow interface to access the options. When you type /ntk all that does is lock or unlock it. Hit ESC, click Interface, click the Add-Ons tab, and viola, you'll see the options screen for NeedToKnow (along with any other add-ons that also use that).

There aren't a ton of options. Basically you have 6 (or maybe 5) sheets that you can activate. Also, you can set the number of timers for each sheet from 1 to 6. So that's a total of 36 possible things you could be tracking.

I personally have never needed more than one sheet at a time. I have a different sheet for each spec, so that when I respec I can just activate the one I need and hide all the others.

3.93% hit. Add a Draenei's 1%. Add 3% from talents. Brings me to 7.93% hit or 0.07% off the hit cap.

Ideally I just replace a 16agi with 8/8 agi/hit. But I'm not really sweating the 0.07% for now.

I used to play as Marks which doesn't get as affected by lag as SV does. You have some leeway in time between your final Steady Shot and your Chimera Shot...around 1s of dead time.

Anyway I'll chalk it up to lag and missing 10% AP (upwards of 750 AP fully buffed and close to 850 with a trinket proc).

We finally got Abomination's Might on Thaddius, but it was one of the worst players in the guild and he died on the first polarity shift (I let out a big fucking sigh IRL).

Gaj,

Can you give a quick overview of setting up PowA to track sting and the duration. I have long used it for my own buffs (and use for LnL on my alt hunter), but when I tried to set it up for SrS, I wasn't able to get it going. Although a lot of times, you need to close out of the mod and re-enter it to get changes to actually work, and that may have been my issue.

EDIT: It def. was me not exiting the add-on that was causing it not to work. But one thing I don't see is how to track a timer on it through PowA. Also, is there a way to track only your debuffs?

EDIT2: Ok, so after playing around, I see the timer portion now. For some reason, I had never seen it before, because i only used PowerAura's character specific section. ONce I clicked on the global one, and added a new ability, it gave acces to the timer tab.

So I have it setup and it's really nice -- but one question, is it possible to only track your debuffs? It's really good at overwriting another hunters debuffs for mine, but I would like to only see SrS if I have it up. I don't see an option for that however.

I'm not sure. I don't think my other hunter's sting was activating it. There is an option for 'cast by me', so maybe that is enough to track your own sting.

I took the configuration for PowA from a good surv thread on the official boards here at Section 4.

Sorry, but that (a /cast and a show timer in macro) would display the timer whenever you hit the macro, regardless of whether you actually fired the shot, correct? Or would the failed cast prevent the timer from being requested as well?

I have a bad habit of pressing my button while still on gcd from something else, and I also have the gcd-less Kill Shot macroed into the same button as Explosive, so I do end up hitting the button for it more often than the spell can actually be fired.

Yes this is some kind of handicap when using this method. Everytime you hit the ES button, the timer would start from 2 seconds again and again. So you should avoid smashing the button once your ES went off. ES and KS should both fire by pressing your button once.