Agreed, if you want to see gear that would be available to you then do some research on what is accessible.

Correct, this isn't the "Best possible DPS with reasonably accessible gear" - however I'm sure Midnight didn't consider all the implications of what the initial goal statement of the thread would mean for all eternity. Don't you think it'd be reasonable to have this discussion instead of trying to assume ownership of the thread on behalf of the community? You could be spot on with regards to what the thread is for, but I think it is a valid point to bring up and it'd probably be better if we heard the community on this rather than just you.

My observation is simply that by allowing all the kinds of hard mode loot that Ulduar has to offer, the usefulness for the broader public of the spreadsheet could be diminished significantly. The task of choosing the optimal gear-set is almost equally complex at all item levels and as such it is not reasonable to simply dismiss people without access to the most desirable and hardest to get gear, by simply saying "use the spreadsheet yourself for items you personally are likely to get". People that can not access the best of the best in the near future will have very little use for a spreadsheet that is the equivalent of "What those 24/7 (literally) raiding hunters should be wearing". Yes, you may find what the theoretical maximum but ultimately it isn't a very useful piece of knowledge unless you are within reach of it.

I'm not saying it's impossible to keep the little niche the spreadsheet would be burrowing itself into, just that for the broader public it's not very useful. Personally I've been following the thread with interest, but lately it has become more and more esoteric. Try not to find offense in the attitude of my response, I was just slightly peeved by the assumed unreasonable assertive nature of your reply.

6/14/51 is the best Specc in Spreadsheet. So why does nobody skill like that?

The value of individual talents can fluctuate with gear level, talents can scale based upon different stats such as AP/Crit/ArP/Haste. Because of this it is possible that at extreme gear levels, such as here, that the best spec for that set of gear will differ from what most people have now.

@ Sarpens

6/14/51 is very dependant on mana regen buffs and debuffs. It's fine for fights where you dps the boss and only the boss. But usually when you're dpsing adds you wont have judgment of wisdom up and you'll be oom very fast.

Try weekender's setup with different latency. 0.2 -> 0.1 sec will give about 2~300 dps increase. I only have open office at home, so can't test it.

Aimed shot is essential for Ulduar. Most of the encounters require either a significant amount of movement and/or cc'd mobs. Having that extra shot while moving, as well as a shot in rotation that won't pop cc'd mobs is essential to raid dps.

I'm having some problems using the spreadsheet, trying to determine what gear will be best for me (that is also accessible). When I look in the gearplanner and see an item listed as dps upgrade and I go back in the gear tab and put it on, it sometimes show as a downgrade instead on my dps. So there's not always consistency between the gear planner and then the gear tab when equipping the item. Hence I'm very confused and can't really figure out what items are upgrades and what not.
Shall i trust the gearplanner or the result from gear tab when equipping an item?

I dunno if it's just me doing something wrong or if the rest of you have similar problems.

i personally have both specs as dual spec, my decision which one to use is based on most of the criteria described above.

biggest criteria is mana and you will go oom very fast if you dps mobs without JoW on them, but also if those fights have a lot of movement you can easily pop viper while moving and no instant shot is up. then before shotting ms and es again, just go to dragonhawk. also ms isnt a big isssue with movement fights, yes it got a short cast time, but i ll just say a skilled player can stand still for 0.5 secs, pop the shot and move on. i estimate the mana consumption with this spec to be a little more than double what you have with the 0/15/56, and thats not cos of ms, but rather due to missing TotH.

there are very little fights that require cc imo, at least boss fights, one of them is thorim in the tunnel, ms is a killer there.
an really think of any else, razorscale has a lot of adds and if you dps right you will not pull aggro on any of them.

it can be a massive dps boost on fights where you dps multiple mobs, e.g mimiron, last phase (i hope i dont spoil stuff here for ppl) but basically you dps all 3 parts with your ms every time you use it, great dps boost. also freya, great dps boost. ofc only if you can manage to keep your mana at a decent level, which quite often requires aspect weaving.

btw, you have sniper training with all specs, so even if it is a movement fight you wanna try to plan your movement that you get 6 secs of standing still at some place to get sniper training back up...

@Luk
Your template uses Brann's Signet Ring which is nyi into the spreadsheet. Replacing it with the next best option lowers the dps below what is currently saved as BiS template.

@Whitemane and Aieda
I see your point and understand that the distance between "normal" raiders and those that can do all the hardmodes has increased significantly with Ulduar but as you´ve said yourself the original intent of the thread was to find the highest theoretically attainable dps via spreadsheet.
Of course I could include a second, more realistic attainable spec but that would raise some other issues. For one it´d roughly double the work to maintain the sheet from 3 to 6 specs. Also it would split the focus to impove said specs even more. It´s already visible with how much attention the SV versus the BM template gets. Than there´s the question about where to draw the line - Would you exclude all hard modes or leave some of the easier ones in? And if you start there how realistic is it to expect everyone to use JC/BS and play Dwarves/Orcs?
In the end it comes down to that you shouldn´t use the template as a 1:1 carbon copy for your char but extrapolate from it to your own. You can use it as a starting point to model your own template.

It might double the work in maintaining the spreadsheet, but it would exponentially increase its usefulness. The line is neatly drawn, I don't see where all your concerns come from. The hardmode version of encounters are so significantly tough that there's a wide chasm between the guilds that will be able to do them and the guilds that won't. They are also not so significantly far apart that you will be able to do some, but not others. What professions you have ultimately doesn't have a large enough impact that it is going to change your spec or gear layout and people are certainly not going to reroll to another race just because it is slightly better.

It's perfectly acceptable that you don't want to detract from the extreme min/max'ing, it's your thread and work so that's where it ends unless someone else takes it upon themselves to do that. It's disappointing that you bring arguments into the discussion that you should know have absolutely no bearing on it.

I don't see how someone responding to "Why not do this?" with "This is why:" can be accused of "bringing arguments into the discussion that have absolutely no bearing on it" - her reasons for not making the thread vastly more complicated than it is *are* her reasons, hence they're absolutely relevant to the discussion. The fact that the thread parameters give free reign to racial and profession changes are also very relevant to point out, since assuming either or both of those completely changes many of the gear choices in the thread.

The problem is that the thread is about solving an optimization problem. You can't solve it for N arbitrary gear constraints simultaneously, so the best you could do would be solve with no constraints and also solve with a "no hard mode at all" constraint. The latter seems less than ideal too, since some of the hard modes definitely are significantly easier than others.

Once the thread has converged on a solution for the no-gear-constraints problem, there'll be room to solve the problem again with a "no-hard-mode-gear-all" constraint, and maybe to solve for "no-hard-mode-gear-that's-actually-hard" too. In the meantime trying to solve all 3 at once just makes for a lot of posts that still need to be individually reviewed by one person to see if they're valid solutions at all.

At that, I don't really see what you mean about exponentially increasing the thread's usefulness - the thread is useful for seeing what the highest attainable DPS is, it shouldn't really even track this separately for BM/MM/SVif that were becoming too burdensome - the output of the thread is a single number, not a gearlist+spec, those are technically just there to validate the number. If someone is looking for information on how to gear their own character, the spreadsheet already has a gear planner intended for that, so any shortcomings in that tool should really be brought up in the spreadsheet thread, not IMO this one.

I don't get why you don't get my point about bringing those arguments into the discussion, I think it's fairly straight forward. Professions do not alter the gear/talent setup you would use, so why bring it up? Only in very rare cases where the profession would allow you to stack more +hit than would otherwise be possible could it be a case, but I've never seen anyone do that so far in any BiS list. Race? Extremely few people would ever consider rolling another race simply to get a slight edge, so it's an unreasonable argument to bring to the discussion. Pick one that represents the general audience. In short, I think some of the arguments brought forth were not brought forth to argue against it but to try and hide the needle a bit deeper in the haystack.

This thread may have one purpose, but that purpose and the way the game was ultimately designed pre-Ulduar meant that this thread really had two purposes. Right now it is going back to one of those, which is fine, but what I was trying to do was point out that I thought one of those purposes is a bit useless and the other one was quite useful. Maybe I don't get what this thread is really about.

If you can't see why the gear planner is just not quite adequate for figuring out how to gear your own character, you can not possibly have been following this thread before Ulduar came out. The entire thread was a testament to the fact that the spreadsheet does not have a Rawr-style optimizer. You can not use the spreadsheet by simply loading in your gear then start picking out items that are better and then assume when there are no more upgrades that you have the best set of gear. That was proven in this very thread.

This thread uncovered what should be considered the true BiS for pre-Ulduar gear, but with the way the thread is going it is going to find the exact same for a gear level that is unreasonable for quite a lot of raiders and thus lose a significant portion of its usefulness. Back in Naxx I'd follow this thread to keep up with the BiS, but as is I figure I'll just check back in in 3 months when my guild has downed Algalon.

I wasn't looking for brilliant arguments for why it should go this or that way, I was mostly looking for Midnight to come and say partially what he did. Fair enough, it's too much work and he feels splitting the focus in the thread would dilute the effort too much. I tried to point out the fact that the spreadsheet served more than one purpose, but apparently people generally aren't interested in that aspect of it and to my surprise quite a few seem to simply ignore it.

Make another thread for best damage with no hardmode loot?

Back when the original "best possible DPS in Cheeky's Spreadsheet' thread was created, it certainly featured BT/Sunwell loot that most people couldn't obtain, that was sort of the whole point. The situation where the majority of raiders are walking around in full BiS setups is something that was new with WotLK, and probably won't be seen again for a long time.

I've followed every iteration of this thread Whitemane. I've just never used it for gearing decisions, since it doesn't make sense to do so. I'm not going to loot items based on whether they're BiS or not, I'm looting them based on whether wearing them is or will soon be a DPS gain. Even excluding all hardmode loot, there's so much loot in ulduar that using a BiS gearlist to make decisions just means you'll miss a ton of items that are still upgrades even if not BiS.

@ Whitmane:

I think you are being rather obtuse about this. How is the gear planner not adequate for planning your next move with your character? It allows you to preemptively select gear/enchant/gem choices that are constantly being updated. Everything switches around with a new piece of gear depending on what stats it might have and what potentials it can create.

Last I recall you can cut out hard mode loot in the spreadsheet, so what's with all the fuss? Put some effort in figuring out what is going to be upgrades for you, we don't all jump straight to BiS items.

This thread has always had the sole purpose of finding out what is the absolutely optimum set up for DPS available for a hunter in ideal conditions. If you want to find out the best set up available for a character that does not have the optimal gear, race, professions, or raid constitution you'll have to use the spreadsheet that Shandara has kindly provided to find it yourself.

I believe this is actually an error in the race setting in the spreadsheet's best dps setup. It is set as orc where it should be dwarf.

Speaking of weapons, has anyone tried Magnetized Projectile Emitter. Does the extra agility and AP you gain from the socket make it equal or even superior to Giant's Bane? Especially for survival.

It's far less dps than [Giant's Bane] and hit is very abundant in other slots. Even with the hit accounted for, lower dps makes it worse weap (at least according the spreadsheet)

Also, is it possible to add a link to the specific gear setup post on the front page?

While we're talking about weapons, wouldn't the arena ranged weapons be better with their ~170 DPS? Or are they not implemented into the spreadsheet yet?

The best spec 6/14/51 is best spec in perfect circumstances, but realistically, 14/57 or 15/56 are considered better mainly due to the spreadsheet are based on perfect world situation where u can stand still and pew pew and not worry about mana. However, in reality you gotta move, u need mana and your gonna get better dps out of 14/57 or 15/56.