In progression mode, I can see running 2 very similar PvE specs with different glyphs, or maybe hawk eye and no hawk eye. Right now though it doesn't seem from the results above that the optimal glyphs are all that dependent on fight - even the KS one seems to be about even with the alternative on a short fight. And that's assuming of course that BM doesn't get buffed ridiculously, in which case we'd all be running a BM spec and a non-BM spec to switch between fights.

Non-progression mode I'd just have a raid spec and a "solo farming ZG and MC for raptor and bindings" spec.

How the heck are you guys able to attain 5K + DPS now as survival?

The best I've been able to get is around 4900 on Patchwerk. I've yet to be able to sustain anything over 4900 since the nerfs, and yet I see hunters with the same gear as me on WWS posting 5700 DPS on fights.

I've got the rotation down, lock and load procs, making sure to give it enough time to tick off between hitting ES again. I've got the gear and spec. Weaving in all shots I can. Not hitting one button macros, Kill shot and Kill command in one macro that I hit between ES's and marking and stings always on target.

Unless it is the duration of our fights, I cannot see how you guys are hitting close to the theoretical numbers of the sheet.

Can someone that is hitting in the mid 5K dps explain to me how they are achieving this? I can't figure out if it is raid buffs and the length of our fights or if I'm just doing something wrong.

How long are your fights? Positioning? In range of all buffs? Last night I managed to hit near 5.2k on patch in a 2m50s kill with no flasks or elixirs. My gear is fairly comparable to yours, except I am still using Arrowsong. I just respecced from 2/18/51 out of Aimed Shot to a spec identical to yours yesterday and didn't even include Multi-Shot into the rotation. Just ES/Serpent/Steady, using cooldowns as they came active. And no, I did not trap dance either. I figure once I get the spec down (and with the new gear I got last night -helm,neck, gloves) that it will only increase. Not to mention flasking for it as well.

Either your raid dps was low and the fight drug out, reducing your burstiness or you had latency affecting your rotation performance perhaps. Or you just didn't get in range of the key buffs.

Length of the fight definitely comes into play. How long are your fights?

There are a few other things I can think of that you didn't mention. What pet are you using? Are you using sniper training or are you trying to trap dance? Are you timing your rapid fire and call of the wild cooldowns with Heroism? Are you using the best ammo? Are you using personal consumables such as flasks/elixirs and food? Normally that would go without saying, but you should be over 5k DPS on Patchwerk with that gear.

You also said that you have a Kill Shot/Kill Command macro that you hit between ES. I have both Kill Shot and Kill Command macroed into all of my shots so that I don't have to think about them. You might want to consider also doing that to improve your efficiency. Of course, the Kill Shot part will become obsolete in 3.1.

Our overall raid dps is usually pretty high. Have our locks and mages and DPS warrios all hitting close to 6K for Patch.

Just over 3 mins. We've not hit under 3 mins yet, closest is like 3 mins 3 sec. Usually because our raid leader lets a couple undergeard members come in each raid to get them geared. I never have latency issues. 95 to 100 Ms all the time.

Pet is a Cat, spec'd for straight DPS. spec is 6/14/51, with sniper training.

Just outside of 30 yards for the entire fight for sniper training , but within range of buffs, I believe. ALways stand near totems and no trap dancing either. Always raid buffed, and flasked and food, still not able to hit over 5K.

Just so I know I'm not doing something wrong, what is your rotation like?

That sounds odd because I was tops on our Patch kill last night at 5160, and our kill was under 3 mins. I guess raid setup plays a factor, if you run with excess healers/tanks. Like I said before my rotation was very basic. I kept sting on the mob and just used Explosive on cooldown and fired Steady Shot the rest of the time. That was it.

This might be a place you can improve on. You should be at the soft Haste cap with Bloodlust active. Save Rapid Fire for when it wears off so you aren't "wasting" the extra Haste. Yes, your Autoshots are getting the benefit, but it should work better for you to stagger the on-demand Haste to keep your Steady Shots even.

On Patch try holding off Rapid for when Lust fades and when not under the Improved Hawk buff. Same goes for Potions of Speed.

It's worth confirming that you're getting raid buffs. I use Power Auras for this, but it's pretty simple to set it to display which buffs your getting--I was worried about Sniper Training myself. I have it set so little dots appear at the bottom of my screen, covering LotP, TSA/AM, Retribution Aura, and Horn of Winter/Totem. If there aren't 4 dots, something's wrong with my positioning.

Link a WWS. To be honest, Im not sure I see the problem with 4900 dps. Sounds right. Here is my latest Pachy WWS for you to compare with. You can PM me if you like and go over the details.

wowwebstats.com/x3zsiuqnruzec?s=53978-95636

To pile on here, getting sniper training's benefit on Patch is frequently a net dps loss due to loss of melee buffs. Patch has a big hit box. If the melee is on the opposite side of patch from you, and you're 30 yards out, you're almost certainly missing buffs. Myself and our other raid hunter tested this; one week, I stood at 30 and he was in close. I posted 4900, he posted 5300. The next week we swapped, and he posted 4800 and I posted 5500. We now both stand closer on patch (I actually trap dance in a desperate attempt to keep up with the felguard locks and FFB mages). DPS is now in the 5800 range and life is good.

Sniper training's benefit is the KS crit chance. The range-based benefit is almost never worth what you give up.

I use the 30 yard benefit on Sniper Training, and have yet to lose out on any buffs because of it. Yes, Patchwerk has a large hit box, but if you stand right at 30-31 yards, you should still easily be within Unleashed Rage range (45 yards), and you can have either your DK use Horn of Winter on the pull before he goes in, or have the Shaman drop Strength of Earth closer to the middle of the raid instead of where the melee stand.

Whether or not this is a DPS gain over trap dancing at 5-10 yards is another topic, and I really have no experience nor any desire to trap dance under any normal circumstances.

All potentially true. However, I found our case to be in line with that stated earlier in this thread here, only worse, because for some reason we weren't getting abomination's might a fair amount of the time.

So, while I'm happy that your buffers are flexible enough to provide you with all of their benefits at range, I've sadly found the case stated in Rivkah's post to be more common, and a possible answer to Eraist's question. A review of buffs recieved and their uptime couldn't hurt.

I agree with you there. I recently changed my UI and added things like recount, and other new mods onto my system. As a result in the last two weeks since I have had the UI my DPS has dropped by about 800 dps. Instead of being in the top 5 dps I've drop to near the bottom 15.

It's pretty distressing to see such a huge difference with no change in gear or rotation.

As an example

Patchwerk two weeks ago WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
Patchwerk this week. WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

The odd thing. Looking at them. My explosive shot damage dropped a lot this week.

4.8k crits vs 4.2k crits with the same gear.

This beats the hell of out me.

A few things that might explain the dip:

Your dps time (%) is lower.
Unleashed Rage has a lower uptime.
Expose Weakness has a lower uptime.
Retribution Aura has a lower uptime (8% vs 0%, but still)
1 fewer LnL proc.

It's probably not worth shifting through everything, but if you're really curious, take a look when your crits occur. Did more take place under UR and/or EW in the first attempt? I'd guess yes, since they were active for more of the fight. That might explain the difference in your damage ceiling.

EDIT: Wow, talk about not seeing the forest from the trees--I missed something fairly obvious at first glance. I'm going out on a limb (ha!) here and guessing you did, in fact, cast Steady Shot at least once during the second attempt. None are recorded and your other damage sources add up to 100%, so I'm betting there's a pretty significant error at work there.

You know, that brings up a good point. I am using a new UI in the last month or so. I've always used recount and omen and Big wigs, and Bartender, but this new UI is called Spartan UI and I love it, but maybe it's causing some issues.

Maybe I'll try not standing so far away on Patch and disabling the UI for tonight and see if it gets better. The length of the fight I have no control over. If my Raid leader insists on bringin undergeared people that slow us down, well not my decision I guess.

Small world. SpartanUI is the brainchild of one of my guild's founders. Ansu doesn't really play that much anymore, but I think he still works on the UI project, which has its own team. If it turns out to be an issue, let me know. A lot of us (Spartans) use it.

You sir are a genius. As part of changing my UI I messed up the steady shot macro. So Steady Shot was not firing even though I was pressing the button. Wow, I feel stupid.

However, it still doesn't account for the huge loss in explosive damage, that's a loss of 1.8k damage per explosive. I can't work out where that would come from.

I know this has probably been ask before about the stat per point of arm pen. But in the 2 most recent naxx clears I've done i have noticed a huge difference in my Explosive Shot/Steady Shot/Auto Shot damage ratio compared to theirs.

I am using almost best in slot/ Other hunter is using mix and match right now working towards BiS has grim toll and some ArmPen/ Last hunter uses 4/5 T7.5 and mix and match off pieces.

Explosive shot - There about a 200-300k Difference here as I'm always ahead but the weird thing is based on wws the amount of hits done i could range anywhere from 40-80 less shot of ES and still have a huge margin of damage lead.

Auto shot/Steadyshot- this is where i am failing a bit my im usually anywhere from 20-50 shot behind, but their average damage lead from here is 350-500k for autoshot and 100-200k for Steady Shot. Most of the time their AVG autoshot/steadyshot damage is a bit higher than what i am able to maintain.

Rotation - Rapid->KS->ES->MS->SpS->Steady
LnL- Currently testing out ES->MS if its up or SpS if it needs refreshing->ES->wait 1.5->ES

Based on the information I have is armor pen being a very very valuable stat point or is their something wrong with either my rotation or FPS/Lag issues.

I'm actually having a hard time understanding your question, but will try to answer it anyway.
First, it's hard to tell where things are happening without the actual WWS report. Also, what are these differences you are mentioning? Since they are in hundred thousand range, I'm assuming it's either from a boss kill or the collection of boss kills. Having a WWS report to look at would help.
From your explanation, it seems like you have better gear than the other two hunters, which would explain why your explosive shots hit harder. As for auto shot and steady shot number difference, I'm guessing that the other two hunters aren't using multi shot and/or have more haste than you. Since BiS gears don't really have much haste compared to others, it would change the number of auto shots made. Also, your rotation has you waiting only 1.5 sec, not 2sec, between the ES. This will clip last tick of explosive shot and may be one of the reasons why you have far less explosive shots recorded on WWS.
I'm confused about your question regarding armor pen. How can armor pen be valuable when you do better without them? It has been discussed in many threads that Armor Pen is a bad stat in terms of item budgeting and next patch only makes it just not as bad, but still not very good.

I will PM you a WWS since the guild doesn't want it to be tossed around.

waiting 1.5 Second to fire the ES should be fine because of travel time the shot should land in perfect syn and not clip the last tick. If it does I'll go back to using ES/Multi/ES/Steady

So I looked at your WWS. If you just look at all bosses, the numbers are pretty much the same for all shots. You also critted more than the other people on Explosive Shot, which explains why your damage from Explosive Shot is higher than the other two. Humera has the most haste, so that explains why he has more auto shot, but other shots occur in similar numbers. Also, your dps numbers are pretty close to each other.
If you look at say the whole WWS report, of course numbers will be off a lot since you cast volley, move around and do other stuff as well. Just looking at the boss kills, I really don't see anything wrong with it, considering how your gears are pretty close to each other.
As for waiting 1.5sec, if time between 2 explosive shot is 1.5 sec (i.e. spam ES), it'll definitely clip the last tick. Both shots have the same travel time, so if you fire them every 1.5 sec, they will land with 1.5sec difference. I didn't look at your combat log to see if clipping actually happens and it might not because of latency and such (.5 sec isn't all that long).

It's not just more auto shots. I think he only about 25 more? not sure since im not lookking at the wws right now but he is about 400k ahead in autoshot damage so that average to about 16k shots?