10 or 25s? I'm assuming 25s.

It makes sense to have a shadow priest get bitten first since the buff increases their damage by 200% which in turn, with VE up, will heal for a crap ton in a fight where there is a lot of AOE raid damage. However, for us we just went with highest DPS first (me), then the mage because he had a lower healthpool, but did decent damage. The theory behind him getting bitten second was to make him self sustaining with healing so he would get killed. Lo and behold, the first attempt we tried it that way we killed her.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

All things being equal ranged bite ranged, melee bite melee, highest DPS is bitten first (taking into account pet damage). I take the first bite and then bite a rogue, its very easy to setup the order from there, shadow priests tend to get the last bite as they arn't top half of the guild's DPS.

Hmmm now do the nuclei have a threat table or does it go as you stated above and simply target whoever hit it last...

Ill just try and move myself a bit further back so hopefully anything the melee are doing wont hit nuclei on our next attempt.

Thinking about it, anything that will gen more threat will probably create more damage which in turn will cause the nuclei to decay quicker which I do not want...

Time to play with some of the ranks and work on a bit better placement it seems.

I don't see it being based primarily on threat, because in that case healers would have the nuclei on them much more frequently that I've experienced. It *may* choose it's initial target based on some combination of proximity and threat, but simply hitting a dark nucleus once should put it on you until it dies or is attacked by another player.

What you *may* be experiencing is that some of the orbs you distracting shot are not being hit by any other attack of yours, and as such they change targets based on whatever other mechanism is used for selecting a target. Dealing damage seems to be the best way to get them to stick to you, and it doesn't need to be a lot.

For the Blood Queen's fight, is popping Deterrence about a second before the fear going be useful? If it does, which part of the air phase does it stop? The fear, the individual bloodbolt damage, the AOE part of the bloodbolts, or all of them?

I pop it after I come out of the fear and IT WILL deflect the bloodbolt whirl, I dont think it will stop dmg that is chained to you by others near you though as I died to it once with deterence up. Best thing to do is wait for the DBM warning about 2-3 seconds after you come out of the fear.

I recommend using Serpent Sting in combination with a mouse-over macro (I believe there are some in the hunter macro thread) to gain and keep aggro on the nuclei. That way if by some chance someone tags one of your nuclei, the DoT effect will bring it back to you. The mouse-over macro will allow you to continue to auto shot Keleseth (there by continuing to generate threat on him) even if 100% of your attention is on gathering the orbs. It also helps that SS doesn't have a CD.

I personally wouldn't recommend bothering to downgrade either, as it takes SS a little while to do as much dmg as even 1 auto shot, and with a mouse-over macro, you won't be auto shot'ing the nuclei. I haven't had any problems keeping 5 or 6 nuclei alive and aggro'd to me during the empowered phases.

This is a good decision, as is silencing shot if it's off cooldown, you can use it between casts of other shots and it has low damage, making it a great shot to use when you need an orb in a hurry. I feel it can't be too much to ask of people to not hit the orbs, the only problem I run into is when the mages who bring me the *very* far away orbs get a little over zealous and take it away from me, thinking someone else grabbed it off them.

Next week i have to tank Keleseth in our 10 man grp and i thought abount using the Raptor Strike glyph for the fight in combination with a fast one hand weapon, so that i can spam raptor strike on the nuclei while hitting the boss with kill shot. so i would get 20% dmg less, because of the glyph.
has anyone tested this before?

I applaud the innovation, but only 50% uptime of a 20% dmg reduction seems weak, especially considering that you are actively shortening the lifespan of the Dark Nuculei by beating on them. Doing the fight normally yields an overwhelmingly secure safety net solong as the Keleseth tank gets early cooldowns when sans-nuculei and runs around like a freak picking up orbs.

Despite the fact that I love me some Hunter tanking, Warlocks and Shadow Priests are far better suited for this job, with better damage reduction and much higher healing recieved.


Hunter Tips for ICC though! back to topic


Trash: A pre-emptive Explosive Trap & Misdirection for the Trap-packs in Plague wing is handy, but will save the lives of the afk folk from the miniboss dogs everyone wanted to kill. Disarming blood knights saves lives. Trapping Crimson Hall mobs saves lives, especially pulls with Tacticians.

Morrowgar: Multi off Morrowgar will hit bone spikes in melee Range (where everyone should be). This nets a decent dps gain and means you help out!. Disengage is the biggest dps increase of any of your abilities on this fight.

Deathwhisper: Chimera Disarming Deformeds saves lives. Another Disengage-off-GCD abusing fight.

Gunship: If you're ArP Marks, killing Axethrower/Alliance-ranged-unit from your boat is higher dps than Volleying! Also, Marking & Shooting the Mage mid-flight while rocketing across is incredible damage and makes you feel like Chuck Norris.

Saurfang: With proper management of damage on beasts, frost traps are not necessary on this fight. 10k dps is easily achievable with pinpoint damage. Yet again another Disengage-wins-on-damage fight. Sensing a trend?

Festergut: If you can't convince your raiders that Hunters should get central locations for range, coordinate your runins with autoshot timers and Disengage back to your location.

Rotface: Don't rush to get into position, move with your autoshot. Frost trap once you've been cleansed of an injection will gain you dps time. Another Disengage on Explosion and keep hefty dps rolling fight.

Prof Putricide: Our three hunters play "who's the better killer" on Putricide by seeing who can get more Immolation traps ontop of the spawn of the Unstable experiments without losing dps time on putricide. My best sofar is 6 out of 8. Also Disengage > Running in phase 3.

Blood Princes: Coordinating hunters to keep pets on orbs is much higher dps for them. Unfortunately, this fight is 100% not a dps check in normal mode. We assign one hunter to juggle balls permanently. Despite the large amount of movement in this fight, disengage is not as incredible as it is the rest of the dungeon. Proper positioning far trumps it in efficiency.

BQL: Deterrence doesn't stop the fear, but does stop the bloodbolt whirl and aoe shadow aura damage. Regardless though, since our hunters will all have the Essence by her first Phase 2, dpsing her will heal you via the buff for as much as your deterrence would mitigate, but you're actually helping. For assuring Hunters get bit, we each (three of us) give half a Misdirection to the Main tank and dump in. She always has choosen one of the top two threat'd hunters.

7/9 Fight damage optimizations are dominated by Disengage. learn it, love it, use it.

I think you're overvaluing Disengage. In most situations it is simply optimal and more practical to move manually, in my opinion. There is some cost attached to those little jump-spins that Disengage often requires. I agree that it is semi-powerful on Lord Marrowgar, but on the other encounters I'd say it varies from weak to decent in usefulness. Some of this is strategy dependent, so I'll go through the encounters.

Lord Marrow: In Juggernaut I have our hunters sit outside the main pile(where the rest of the raid is) and off to the side right at the edge of the hunter dead-zone. Whenever Marrowgar starts to cast Bone Spike Graveyard, the hunters start moving towards the main pile. The reason for this is Bone Spikes outside of the melee pile are pretty terrible. They're going to die much slower than they would have otherwise, and it's going to cost you, and whoever has to kill your Spike, a lot of dps on Marrowgar. Anyway, the jousting process is pretty simple. I move in, hit my Raptor Strike + Mongoose Bite macro, and cast Explosive Trap. As soon as the Spikes spawn I Disengage out, and it should land me perfectly right at the edge of the dead-zone. The only problem is Disengage is only up for every other Bone Spike Graveyard, so you're going to have to run out manually for half of them.

At first I thought this encounter was going to be pretty awful for hunters, but it's actually not that bad. During hard mode testing on the PTR he was actually casting Bone Spike Graveyard during Bone Storm, resulting in your Bone Spikes potentially ending up in pretty random locations and thus not as easy to just AE down. I think if this remains the case on live servers, it could result in hunters being even better for this encounter as we're pretty good at switching to a single Spike and bursting it down.

Lady Deathwhisper: At least on normal mode, I don't think hunter disarm on Deformed mobs is really necessary or optimal. I'm pretty sure you're basically always better off just using your normal rotation and killing the mob faster, or at the very most just casting Distracting Shot. Those things have basically no health at all and I'm pretty sure every other disarm ability is less clunky than ours is.

On hard mode, who knows. Maybe disarm will end up being more important. However, even if it is, I'm pretty sure I'd just have a warrior or rogue do it regardless.

Gunship: This fight is basically just a complete joke on normal mode right now so it's hard to even begin to optimize a strategy. I basically sit on the edge shooting mobs on the enemy ship for the entire encounter. Right now there's no point in even moving to avoid rocket damage because it doesn't do enough to matter.

Deathbringer Saurfang: At least until hard modes, I've pulled our hunters off of beast killing duties and I just have the casters handle it. There are a few reasons for this. Most importantly, hunters do a huge portion of their total dps through physical damage. If you pull them off of Saurfang to kill beasts, they're going to be losing a lot of their beneficial debuffs, like Sunder Armor, Mangle, etc. The same is not true for any other range dps class, because all of the other range dps classes are casters and their debuffs go up very easily.

This same idea applies to a lot of different encounters with target-switching actually. In general, if you have any choice in the matter, it's usually best to keep all of your physical dps attacking the same target, and all of your casters attacking the same target. Now whether or not this will be possible on hard mode, I don't know. But on normal mode I just have our hunters stand about 10 yards in front of Saurfang and dps trance for the entire encounter. We do have one hunter drop a Frost Trap for each add wave, however.

Festergut: In my opinion hunters should definitely get central locations on this encounter because warlocks and mages can both teleport/Blink back to their spots with less hassle than a hunter has to go through to Disengage back. There is an argument to be made that shadow priests, elemental shaman, and/or balance druids should get the centralized locations, however. This probably comes down to whatever your specific raid composition happens to be on a given week.

Rotface: I don't find Disengage useful on this encounter at all really. With an optimal strategy and decent raid dps, you're not going to be dealing with any ooze explosions. In Juggernaut we just start using a 2nd kiter as soon as the first ooze is at the point where another merge would cause it to explode. I basically just stand at the edge of the dead-zone and dps like normal other than the occasional movement to avoid the spray ability.

Professor Putricide: I noticed you mentioned you use Immolation Trap on this encounter. As I very recently discovered(and mentioned in another thread here), Immolation Trap is actually really awful for some reason. I don't know why, but yeah. It actually does only a fraction of the damage Explosive Trap does even on a single target. So yeah, if you're going to use a trap on the ooze adds, I would suggest using Explosive Trap.

Blood Princes: I actually think this is one of the better encounters for Disengage. I use it as Empowered Shock Vortex is being cast. In 25-man it's pretty difficult to mitigate this ability unless everyone moves outward from the boss. There simply isn't enough room to avoid it on everyone otherwise, which might not be a game breaker right now, but I expect it probably will be on hard mode.

I agree with those who mentioned that hunter tanking isn't going to be a very good idea on this encounter unless your non-hunter options are all significantly worse players. There are probably at least 4 or 5 classes better suited to this role if skill level isn't a factor for you. Warlock, shadow priest, feral druid, etc. are all better choices. I'd probably say warlock is the best choice of the bunch if I had to pick one.

Blood Queen: Disengage is decent on this encounter if you're running to a centralized location to remove Pact of the Darkfallen. As far as the flight stage, I'll generally Deterrence to mitigate the damage unless I'm already a vampire. If you're a vampire during any flight stage I think it's generally better to attack through the damage.