Shot Changes on the PTR

In the latest PTR build, cast times on Aimed, Steady and Cobra Shots have been reverted to their normal durations (they had previously been reduced by .5 seconds each).  Also, Zeherah reports that the Explosive Shot buff affects the full shot.

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Steady, Cobra and Aimed Shot Cast Times Reduced on the PTR

We’ve received conflicting reports from the PTR on Steady and Cobra Shot cast times.  Frostheim claims that our casted shots are “not changing at all” in the present PTR build; however, a thread over at the Arena Junkies forums asserts that cast times have been reduced by .5 seconds.  Who is right?  Well, according to my tests, the AJ thread is right.  See my numbers on Steadies, Cobras and Aimed Shots after the cut.

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Episode 101!

This episode, we get right back to your regular scheduled hunter programming. We barely have time to get over a third of the things that happened since our last real (non-drunken) show, and still managed to make a few factual errors. We talk about the 4t12 set bug, and it turns out that despite what we said on air, it actually allows hunters to fire more than one free shot. Also, despite Frostheim’s protests, the current cast time on aimed, steady, and cobra shots are indeed shortened by 0.5 seconds. In his defense, I made him turn off the PTR download during the podcast because it was making him sound worse than usual.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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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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Lock and Load- We’ve Been Doing it Wrong!

edit: I can’t believe I missed this post on the same subject. Lyraat used raid parses, which are more subject to RNG than simulationcraft’s batches of thousands of simulated fights, however it uses the actual game engine.

Well, apparently I’ve been doing it wrong since patch 3.1 or something. The common knowledge of how to handle explosive shots during a lock and load is outdated.

Always wrong method: fire explosive shots so fast that the last tick is overwritten.

Old, and now wrong method: fire three explosives in a row, taking care to wait exactly 2 seconds between them so you don’t clip the DoT.

Right method: weave anything but a steady shot between your explosive shots.

In conclusion, we found that the long accepted best-practice of delaying shots under Lock and Load no longer maximizes DPS. Instead, the common simplification of only delaying for Steady Shots is closer to optimal. The difference between both tactics is small in practice.

This was tested by Pherra (same dude who’s writing the hunter DPS addon) in response to a question I asked over at epicadvice.

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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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Hunters in Cataclysm!

According to the class Q&A on wow.com:

• They’re replacing mana with energy, like rogues. We’ll have a maximum of 100 focus, and it will regenerate 6/sec (a little slower than rogues’ 10 energy/sec), or a little faster (12/sec) if we use steady shot. No more mana regen, aspect of the viper, or int needed.
• There will be a complete wipe and overhaul of our talent trees. Again.
• They’re probably doing away with most talents that increase chance to hit.
• They’re doing away with armor penetration, and replacing it with “mastery”.
• Haste will now speed up focus regen
• Attack power is gone, replaced with agility.
• There’s a legendary 2h axe called “Shadowmourne”, that whether it’s appropriate or not, we’ll be rolling on :)
• In general, they’re getting rid of training every new rank of abilities- spells will scale with level, no need to drop by the trainer.
• Ammo will no longer be consumable, but be an item.

There will, I’m sure, be much chewing on this, but I’m gonna save it for this week’s podcast. Cheers!

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Taking Arcane Shot Out of your Rotation!

My paladin healers are busy guys. Between keeping my pet alive with splash heals from their holy light and actual heals that will bounce back to the tank through beacon of light, they’ve got a lot on their hands. That and I believe feign death is for pansies. Hunters were given a bubble for a reason!

All of this means that I’m lucky if they have time to judge the boss more than the strict minimum needed for their haste bonus, and that means judgment of wisdom‘s uptime can be fairly low.

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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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Marksman Specs and Glyphs!

Today I’m going to talk cookie cutter glyphs and specs for marksmanship hunters. That’s right, specs plural. There are a myriad of viable builds for marks, and I was rather overwhelmed when I made the switch.

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Agility vs. Armor Penetration!

[edit 25 Sept 2009: this was written before the last patch, and I have a new version that covers it after the update]

I’m sure you’ve read that all the cool hunters are gemming for armor pen, and seeing good results from it. The best possible DPS thread over at elitist jerks shows a very high setup using mostly armor penetration, however this information should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, agility will almost always get you more DPS, and today we’re going to figure out why.

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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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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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