This is still a work in progress, and a canon marks guide will be forthcoming. Some of the things I learned on my first raid as marks, however, are:
- MM at my gear level is a small step up on DPS for most encounters, and a large step up for AOE encounters. This does not factor in the fact that I still suck at MM and am fairly good at SV.
- Assuming you have specced into rapid killing and recuperation, rapid fire is an awesome mana regen mechanic.
- Try to save your first rapid fire for the first heroism, so you make the most of your fast auto-shots, and might not waste all the mana regen.
- If at all possible, have readiness available for the last 20% of the boss so you can get two back to back kill shots, and a rapid fire to boot.
- Multi-shot might not be worth it for only two mobs. Marked for death and piercing shots apply to aimed shot, but not multi.
Like I said, a definitive set of guides covering MM front to back will be posted once I get good enough. Please continue to help me suck less in the comments- you people have good advice!
I personally use three chances at the speed buff(heroism, RF). So basically since the heroism speed is already decent, i use that for dps of course!
But i have both my rapid fires on the ready for the continue of dps after heroism is gone, pop Readiness and then save the Rapid fire for later mana regen.
I find this better since if the fight is long, you get to pop another RF and readiness if you get the chance, since they both have a 3min CD if specced.
I’ve been seeing a minimum fight of 6 minutes, and an average of 7. This means I might be able to squeeze 6 rapid fires in with the last one also giving me a free kill shot, but it’s not always easy to call. I think cooldown management will be the hardest thing for me to get because it requires a really good sense of how long a fight will last.
When using readiness, I also like to keep an eye out for my big trinket pops, such as mirror or darkmoon card of greatness. As soon as my darkmoon card or mirror goes off i pop call of the wild, slam all my instants, pop readiness, slam them all again for a large amount of burst damage. In a six minute fight I can then do all of this again when the boss is under 20% so that i can throw in kill shots.
Almost any MM spec will include imp hawk, which has about a very good chance of procing during rapid fire or bloodlust so a a general rule you don’t want to rapid fire during a bloodlust.
assuming you have 10% haste on your gear, 15% from quiver your default steady speed will be
2 *.9 *.85 = 1.53
with bloodlust this becomes
1.53 * .7 = 1.07 (or 1.1 with rounding)
with imp hawk that would drop your steady under 1s, which your GCD cap.
Also even without imp hawk you will hit your GCD cap for instant with just bloodlust meaning you are already wasting some of the haste, but as soon as you start going under the 1s GCD with steady you really end up hurting your dps, and because your firing so fast under bloodlust imp hawk has a very high chance to proc.
My understanding is that, even under heroism/bloodlust, the global cooldown is 1.5 seconds. Raid buffed, my steady shots are already under that without any cooldowns or procs. I don’t see the extra DPS from haste coming from steady shot, but auto-shot.
No a hunter’s GCD is affected by haste similar to how a casters is. You can easily test this by just going to the target dummy hitting a haste pot/rapid fire macro. You will be able to fire a steady every 1s but because the GCD can only be lowered to 1s max if your steady drops below 1s you will end up losing a decent chunk of DPS.
That’s not even slightly true. Haste has absolutely no effect on the global cooldown for hunters at any time. As long as your steady shots are under 1.5 seconds, you’re haste “capped”.
Ah, your correct I did some testing and haste does not affect the global cooldown.
I tested with bloodlust as well and that did allow me to get more than 10 steady’s in during a 15s duration.
Bloodlust lowered your global cooldown? By how much? Can you email me a log? outdps@gmail.com.
*It only allowed me to get in 11 in a 15s duration or 9 in a 13s, which could be easily be lag or even the flight time of the arrow messing things up. Not really anything conclusive either way.
http://wowwebstats.com/tcbeb1rfe4gzq?a=x20000000086f0df
I agree that managing Rapid Fire and Readiness in relation to the length of the boss fights seems to be the most challening aspect of MM right now.
Depening on the encounter and the strength of our group the variance for the length of the fight can vary anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes.
I look forward to your MM guides :)