DPSCheck: 4.0.1 Shot Priorities

Hi folks, Pherra here. I just uploaded a new release of the DPSCheck addon to WoWInterface and Curse. This new version has the first pass at priority checks for Beast Mastery and Marksmanship builds, along with a new buff/debuff checking feature. The priority checks are designed to help your shot selection in any fight, while the buff/debuff checks are for maximizing your DPS over longer fights.

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End Game Marksmanship!

There’s no doubt about it, right now, the best hunter DPS in the game is done by marks hunters. Marksmanship is the end game raiding spec, if you have the gear.

There are presently two styles of marks hunters: agility and armor penetration.

ArP Marks Hunters

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Mana Saving Macros!

Mana management is not tricky. We all do it, and we’re all good at it. This post is going to go over a new macro that I believe could increase your damage throughput!

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Survival Spec and Glyphs for Patch 3.2!

**Note: much of this post is reused from the last version, but the comments there were left over several patches, so I’m updating it and reposting.

0/15/56 is the survival spec that gets me the most DPS. Lets go over the basics, and why I took (or didn’t take) things.

In general, you want to take things that increase your ability to DPS at range or with a pet, but not in melee. Also, each point should generate as much DPS as possible. Open up the wowhead talent calculator and follow along.

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What Patch 3.2 Means to Raiding Hunters!

You’ve all read the patch notes, here’s what’s important.

• [Edit 10 aug 2009:] Kill shot no longer has a minimum range! Use when applying melee tactics.
• All profession based PvE boosts get their performance increased for free, except blacksmithing and jewelcrafting. The extra gem slots and better JC only gems have to be bought somehow. Still, considering these are the top DPS of all the professions, it’s probably worth the cash.
• Hit rating increases our pets’ expertise. The Draenei hit aura does not. FA seems to be giving about half as much expertise as it should.
• Beast mastery got a free massive buff, but is still third behind MM and SV for non-gimmick raw DPS.
• All entry level raiding (including heroics) drops emblems that will buy you Ulduar 25 level gear.
• XT seems to be bugged and creating many more times the adds he normally does.
• Yogg’s crusher tentacles have been nerfed. Once we down him, I’ll write the guide.
• Survival hunters can lay a crowd control trap without losing black arrow now. This may lead to more lock and loads (assuming they’re triggered by adds)
• Lock and load has an internal 22 second cooldown. This may negate the bonus from the extra traps.

Add to these in the comments, and I’ll edit the post.

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Common Mistakes!

From Ahunkaluvin:

“I’d like a guide to what the common mistakes are. For instance, I have pretty fair gear and have tried to put most of your lessons to practice, but somehow I still get nowhere near the DPS(about 1600-1800) of my fellow hunters. OK, So I suck, but, WHY? (other than just general suckiness)”

I’m not the kind of guy to tell someone how bad they are- if they ask for help, that puts them ahead of 90% of the hunters who are (currently) surpassing them in DPS.

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Hunting General Vezax!

Today I’ll be going over General Vezax. This fight is easy for most appropriately geared raid groups, and aside from one twisted mechanic, is basically a low risk tank and spank.

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Marksman Rotation!

edit: This post is outdated- all the relevant and recent advice is here.

Here’s the first in a series of guides I’m planning on writing about marksmanship. Today, we go over the rotation. As always, it’s more of a priority list than a rotation, but it certainly feels simpler than survival did.

First thing you need to determine is whether you’re expected to provide silences. If you aren’t, go ahead and macro silencing shot into something like steady shot so it will fire about every 20 seconds (its cooldown). It’s a really weak shot though, doing half an auto-shot, so if you forget, you’re not losing too much performance. If you are expected to silence something, make sure you take it out of your macro and have it on a bar somewhere with a keybind. It’s off the global cooldown, so you can use it right when you need it.

Now for the rotation itself:

• Serpent sting: you always want to open with this, and never fire it again unless you’ve let the damage over time expire. If the sting is expired, this has priority over everything but kill shot. Without it, your largest shot is half useless.
• Chimera shot: this is the largest shot you have. If the serpent sting debuff is up, use this before anything. It hits hard, and when you hit a target with your serpent sting on it, it will instantly do 40% of the total serpent sting damage.
• Kill Shot: all other rotations (SV, and BM) should use this first if it’s available, but for Marks hunters (unless you’re in top end ArP gear), this actually does less damage than chimera shot.
• Aimed shot: less important than chimera shot, instant, has a healing debuff that’s almost never relevant for PvE. This shot triggers piercing shots (our bleed talent), but can’t be used if you use multi-shot as they share a cooldown.
• Arcane shot: this can be used while moving, deals arcane damage, and ignores armor. The fact that this is magic damage is important on some fights. As for whether to fire an aimed before arcane, it all depends on your stats. I would run both rotations through the DPS spreadsheet and see which gives you more DPS.
• Steady shot: Our weakest shot, but one of our only non-auto shots that is affected by armor penetration. You can’t cast this while running. It’s the lowest priority shot.

That’s the priority list. Now we get to the hard part- cooldowns. You have rapid fire on a 3 minute cooldown that will regenerate a bunch of mana (from the rapid recuperation talent), you’ve got readiness on a 3 minute cooldown, and you’ve got kill command on a 1 minute timer. Rapid fire will not trigger a global cooldown, but can’t be cast while you’re recovering from one.

Since you can always count on most bosses taking longer than 3 minutes to fall, you should try to use a rapid fire, readiness, and another rapid fire as soon as you’ve lost enough mana [edit: leaving a couple seconds in there for the kill command to get fully used by the pet]. If you have so much mana floating around in your raid composition that you never go OOM, then just use the first one either early, or during the heroism/bloodlust if it will be early enough for you to get a second readiness off at the end of the fight. Once your first one is gone, save the readiness until the boss is under 20% (unless you have reason to believe that you will have close to a 10 minute fight, allowing 3 readiness uses). You can use the rapid fire whenever you want, but the goal of saving rapid fire until you are under 20% is that you will be able to fire a kill shot and chimera shot, readiness, rapid fire, and then fire another kill shot and chimera shot.

As for kill command, I macro it to all of my shots. Some people like to save it for specific times, but I feel that the lost DPS from waiting until the “opportune moment” to use it is more than the DPS gained by using it when it will have the greatest effect. Also, since my pet is mostly around to give me furious howl, I don’t really worry much about min/maxing his puny attacks :)

Timing your cooldowns is the only challenge here that’s different than SV- other than that, I find the shot priority list to be easier (since there’s no random procs of lock and load)

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Shared topic: situational awareness!

This is brought to you by Blog Azeroth‘s shared topic. Every week they pick something to write about, and it’s a good source of inspiration. This week, it’s about tunnel vision and situational awareness.

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From Survival to Marksman!

Not going to go into much depth here because I haven’t done anything yet other than annoy a targeting dummy with my new MM rotation, but lets talk about the process of switching to MM.

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Hunting Auriaya!

Today I’m going to go over the Auriaya fight. She’s supposed to be some sort of librarian, and is affectionately known as the “crazy cat lady”. Your first responsibility is to create a macro that will /say “My cat’s breath smells like cat food” every time you feign death.

Now, once that’s ready, your goal here is to beat the rogues on DPS and not wipe the raid.

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Survival spec and glyphs, updated!

This post has been replaced by it’s updated version here.

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Survival UI!

Well, my old UI wasn’t cutting it any more. I’ve ignored it as long as possible, and when 3.1 hit, I could ignore it no longer. 6 abilities that need to be woven around each other does not lend itself well to my old 1-2-3-4 SV keybindings. I’m also not willing to install any new addons! What’s a hunter to do?

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Survival Macros!

I covered the shot priorities list. Now it’s time for macros. Some of you are thinking “Macros? I thought you said not to macro shots, just to weave them manually based on what’s available and highest priority?”. This is correct! However, and I went over this in the last patch, it’s fine to take all your instant non-global cooldown abilities that you want fired as often as possible and macro those into your shots. No /castsequences, though. Those cost you DPS, and every time you post one on the internet, Chuthlu kills a kitten.

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Survival Rotation!

3.2 edit: I’ve gone through this survival rotation guide and ensured that everything is accurate for patch 3.2.

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Survival in patch 3.1! Pun intended!

I was so excited about this post, I used two exclamation points in the title. That’s one over my budget, but I’ll just have to try and save one from another post sometime.

Well, the servers have been up and down like a toilet seat. I haven’t been able to play for long, and we couldn’t raid or anything, but I got my auctions up. Today I’m going to go over the raw changes to the hunter class and start laying the groundwork for how to hit top DPS in this patch.

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Shot macros!

Edit: the macros in this post are no longer valid- here‘s the post 3.1 version.

As a hunter, your job is to pump out as much hurt to your raid’s target as possible. You have a multitude of shots you can use to do this, but it’s not easy to watch so many damn cooldowns!

You think to yourself (quite reasonably) “Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could write a shot macro like I used in burning crusade to make sure I don’t screw up my rotation by manually shooting whatever happens to be closest to my mouse pointer?” Probably followed up by “Oh snap, I’m standing in a void zone- I’d better turn with my arrow keys and get the heck outta here!”, which then gives way to “Damn, I wonder if my class leader noticed I died in a void zone. If he says anything, I’ll ask for a battle res and use lag as an excuse”.

There’s a reason they call us huntards.

There is no way to make a shot macro that will do your work for you. Let’s go over the list of stuff a survival and BM hunter has to do, shall we? We’ll see how much of this can be done by the clever usage of the /m command.

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