I do have BA in my rotation, when i put Resourcefullness into the build with Shandara's 1/15/55 I lose 125.87 dps.

As part of Kraxis' crusade against people overlooking the kill shot glyph, I thought I'd compile a list of DPS values for each glyph. No glyph can be tested completely in a vacuum, we can't really say that glyph X is 50 DPS and glyph Y is 30 DPS - it's all relative. I'll be using BiS gear with version 85h of the spreadsheet and this talent build as a rough template.

Unglyphed DPS: 6638.87

• Glyph of Kill Shot: 6730.06 (delta: 91.19)
• Glyph of Explosive Shot: 6722.55 (delta: 83.68)
• Glyph of Steady Shot: 6696.14 (delta: 57.27)
• Glyph of Serpent Sting: 6693.89 (delta: 55.02)
• Glyph of the Hawk (with 1 point moved to IAotH from Mortal Shots): 6688.33 (delta: 49.46)
• Glyph of Multi-Shot: 6656.92 (delta: 18.05)
• Glyph of Rapid Fire: 6646.18 (delta: 7.31)

Again, considering a glyph from an isolated point of view isn't completely accurate, so treat these as rough values. Putting Kill/Explosive/Steady in there together gives the highest DPS at 6868.86. Kill Shot and Explosive Shot are way at the top, with Serpent Sting and Steady Shot each being a valid choice for a third glyph. I just can't imagine 1/5 IAotH+glyph being viable in 3.1 anymore. The difference between even Kill/Explosive/Steady and Kill/Explosive/Hawk (with the 1 talent point change) is still about 30 DPS, and even more if you try to replace kill or explosive.

I'm surprised that just doubling the number of kill shots available in a fight (for me this would mean going from 2-3 KS per fight to 4-6 would have nearly a hundred DPS increase attached.

In your modelling, how long a fight are you assuming, and how long are you spending in execute range? 3 Extra KSs are at best 45k extra damage (and that's at the expense of some other shot since KS is on GCD now). Granted I'm not BiS, so maybe 50k extra for better geared people?

I was modeling a 6 minute fight with the default 1.2 setting for kill shot range. The numbers for the dps loss were derived from running the rotation test for a 10000 shot parse. I tried explosive glyph with kill and swap serpent and steady and I lose dps there too. Not sure what is going on there as I get the highest numbers with Kill, serpent, steady. I have to guess it is gear based, I will run a parse with BiS and see if it changes the glyph preference. Using 85h also for reference.

Is 1.2 minutes a realistic setting for KS range though :/? Bosses always seem to drop disproportionately fast once they hit 30% due to heroism, people blowing cooldowns and then mages/locks/hunters/warriors all gaining DPS below 35/20%.

Also the glyph becomes dramatically less impressive on shorter fights (2-3 minute fight with 20-30s execute range is what we mostly have for farmable content, but I imagine ulduar will feature longer fights atleast for a while).

Even as BM I generally find that Kill Shot accounts for 3% of my total raid damage, despite the low number of shots -- doubling this would seem to be a good thing. I would think it would be even more effective for MM and SV with their harder-hitting shots.

I tend to not move the times as I mainly pug content since I am not on the main raid force for my guild. Shortest Patch fight I have been in was 3:30 with most of them hitting about 5:30, but I do agree that a 1.2 is probably unreasonable depending on raid makeup. Last 25 Naxx I did I don't recall there being any warriors in the raid and we had 4 hunters. 4 Kill shots though should probably drastically reduce the 20-0% range even with 0 warriors. That's what is fun to me about the spreadsheet though, everything is so situational it's hard to say x y z is always the best option.

Well on Patch it won't be all that good.
But it is exactly on the progression fights that it becomes effective it seems.

Anyway, I changed the fight to last 4 minutes and Kill Shot range was 0.7 minutes (to account for higher DPS at that range). Kill Shot was still vastly outdoing both Steady Shot/Serpent Sting and leaving Glyph of the Hawk desperately in the dust. The difference was lower though. And I estimate for my gear a rough even level around 2.5 minutes. That's short enough for me to consider this glyph superior in most cases. Any fight that requires mobility, this glyph looks better for me. As we know the more mobile we have to be, the longer the fight generally is, and Kill Shot is instant as well. Think a fight like Gobbulus where DPS actually tends to go down/stay even in the sub-20% range due to his increased injections. That's a type of fight where this glyph will really shine.

Now this is for my non-BiS gear, so I wouldn't presume to think this is true for everyone. But the relatively short duration for it to be even should make it worthy of testing for everyone.

[EDIT]
For the fun of it, I tried to plug in 2.5 minutes, but apparently it only takes full minutes, so I changed to 2. The Kill Shot range was set to 0.3 (20 seconds). This time Steady and Kill Shot were even (minuscule advantage for Kill Shot), and Glyph of the Hawk was still nowhere near.

For me it's 100% settled, I'll grab it. For the supershort fights it is 'merely' as good, while the longer the fight the more of an advantage it has for me.

Hm, fair enough, I guess it does amount to quite a bit of damage compared to everything else.

Regardless, it's a more entertaining glyph than any of the others Pity about the new GCD on it (wish they'd find a way to prevent people macroing abilities without actually making them incur a GCD, since I think their primary motivation for this was to stop people macroing it to every shot).

Agreed on that. It is supposed to be an execute we need to fire here and now in PvP, which was what it was meant for. The GCD thing will not be fun, but then again, it is too good to be true like it is now. It's basically just free DPS.

Oh, and forgot a situation where it's great too. Adds and trash (that isn't big waves of stuff). Kill Shotting two adds is definately going to be advantageous, and from what I have seen of the bosses in Ulduar, there are a good number of boss adds.

Have been wondering about that, is anyone familiar with mods like Aloft? Would it be possible to make a nameplate mod highlight in some way (flash say) when a target is in execute range? Would like to do a mouseover killshot without switching targets (I am *really* bad at switching targets).

No no, I want it showing on the nameplates (i.e. the ctrl+v things) of mobs I don't have targetted, I know how to notice when my current target can be kill shotted or not - some mods already show a lot of info on those, so a basic health-based indicator should be simple enough do.

But yes, addon thread, sorry.

Just a quick clarification here. I'm not sure where you are pulling the fact that raids will be using heroism/bloodlust in the later phases of a fight unless there is a conclusive mechanic which would make it benefical. For hunters heroism/bloodlust is doing nothing but improving pet damage and increasing autoshots. Ideally you would probably use heroism earlier in the fight to get "bosses" into execute range faster.

This link might help explain [Math] Bloodlust/Heroism timing


Anyway back to the topic of glyphs. I will probably go with explosive, kill shot, and serpent. Only because if a fight requires movement, which a vast majority do. This limits the number of steady shots I will be using, which diminishes the value of the steady shot glyph.

I hadn't read that thread no, thanks. However I think the point still stands that execute range isn't going to be 1.2 minutes (i.e. 20%) of a 6 minute fight, simply because things like execute/KS will shorten it to be less. Heroism earlier may reduce non-execute duration and bring execute duration back to around 20%, but given that using the heroism earlier on a uniform fight doesn't gain you any dps either according to that thread, I don't see why you'd bother - at the least the warriors are getting bigger executes from faster rage gen due to hasted swings, which I believe is something they couldn't capitalize on as much from heroism when not spamming execute (n.b. I have no idea if current warrior DPS recommends spamming executes sub 20% or not).

As for SV hunters, we neither gain nor lose from heroism timing, since on a sub 5 minute fight we lose nothing by waiting till whenever the heroism is to use Call of the Wild (and if it's sub 20% we benefit from having CotW up for our Kill Shots), and if it's longer than 5 minutes we can CotW off the bat and have if up again for when heroism is used if heroism is being used at the end of the fight.

This is all for uniform fights of course, if there's a secondary reason to use heroism at some particular time (double sparks, tenebron landing, darkness of a thousand souls inc) then the raid would obviously plan heroisms accordingly.

Just been trying some builds on ptr quick question does [Improved Stings] and [Noxious Stings] stack

build im trying atm is 0/18/53 with KS SS and ES glyphs

You could just turn on the 'Reactive spells and abilities' option in the Floating Combat Text options tab in the default UI. It will float <Kill Shot> whenever it can be fired.

I think he wants a warning when another mob -- that he does not currently have targeted -- is below 20% health, so he can switch to it and use Kill Shot. I am not sure how this could be done, however.

EDIT: Too slow

As far as I could tell, it also works for /focus targets. Don't get to use it all that much, though, since we're in the habit of Volleying down most stuff.

I'll just post explaining more clearly in the other thread. I'm pretty sure it could be easily done at minimal performance cost by whoever wrote Aloft, except he quit playing a year or so back.

Basically nameplates already show HP of all mobs near you, and they highlight according to things like threat. It probably wouldn't be hard to make them also flash in some particular way when they drop below 20%, since that's always the trigger for KS. At which point mouseover KS macros start becoming useful.

Now I get why you would want it. I hadn't really understood it properly.
Basically you want to 'ninja' a few Kill Shots off on big trash etc? To gain the most benefit from the glyph as possible. Basically my premise for the advantage was sort of like the Stitched Collosus encounters in Naxx, big enough for focus fire, but weak enough to be killed within time of a Kill Shot. Now we can begin to do that on lesser mobs too.

So with the calculations on the differnet glyph dps increases compared to boss fight timers, it might be profitable to make 2 identical specs, with different glyphs, once we know the lengths of the ulduar fights, to make the most versatile raid dps?
This is of course taking into account that you don't pvp and will actually spend 2 templates on PvE.
Or would it actually be more profitable making an entirely different spec for the 2nd one?

i think we need a closer look at all ulduar fights. i can't answer this question yet. maybe there will be fights were a totally different spec increases dps