I’d imagine a combination of AoPack and Disengage would make this fight more interesting and challenging for hunters.

It’s kind of like making fun of Belgians or Newfies- nobody actually means what they say about them, but the jokes are funny.

One thing to make note of as well, the daze component of Aspect of the Pack does not trigger from any of the relevant damage on this fight, and the 30% run speed is great for avoiding crashes, letting your boomkin and spriests get out just a bit quicker. This is not an ideal fight for hunters by any stretch of the imagination, they gain less from the haste and magical damage buff than any other class, droping dragonhawk for pack does provide a nice bit of raid utility at a bit of a sacrifice.

This has probably been said before, but I would have to reconsider your comment on staying out of the puddles.

What if you’re BM? SV and MM have recoup but BM Hunters are more reliant on their party. I’ll have to reconsider this maybe, but it’s just a thought.

Great job again! OH! And gratz on the WoW.com linkage.

This fight is designed to *require* the use of the black pools that boost haste and magical damage to down the boss.

As one of the healers on that fight – and therefore one of the people actually paying attention to the positions of the other characters on the field – that simply isn’t true. We had three or four people at most in a Shadow Crash puddle, and generally they only stayed there for four or five ticks. In addition, although nobody’s posted a WOL/WMO for that fight yet, I don’t remember Recount being substantially different from other fights.

While I agree that it’s easier to avoid damage by spreading out, the disadvantage is that the ranged DPS lose just that – DPS. But, that’s the whole challenge conceptualized when Blizzard created this fight… how will a team work together vs. work apart. Oh yeah, and let’s make ‘em manage mana.

I’ve used disengage to escape Shadow Crash, but the cool down isn’t really practical for this (and you don’t want to risk it not being available for Mark of the Faceless.)

Second, to maximize DPS, it is best to bunch up the raid at all times. This ensures there is a Shadow Crash down almost anytime. It took us several attempts to get used to moving more often, but once we did, the take kill was way ahead of the enrage timer. (This is also the hard mode strat, BTW.) Breaking into two groups seems to have a similar effect.

By the way, the trash here is really fun. One of a few opportunities for some hunter crowd control depending on your raid configuration.

I’m fairly sure it amplifies all magic damage because that’s what the debuff description says. Additionally I checked my logs for Monday’s Vezax, and I have many crits like:
Zeherah Explosive Shot General Vezax *12053*
That’s about double what I normally see on explosive shot crits.

Looking at that particular fight, I did about 1.9 million damage to him. The total healing on the boss from 11 marks of the faceless between all our people on that fight was 1.58 million, so an average of 144k per debuff, although I can’t say how many of those people got out as quickly as they should (warlocks, hunters and mages have tools to get out fast, boomkins not so much). I was in shadow crash 32% of the fight, and I had viper up 11.2% of it. Magical damage accounted for 940k of the damage I did (close to half).

Not sure of exactly the formula to apply to it, but I think it’s fairly reasonable by those numbers to assume that the raid gained more damage from the small percentage of boss healing I added to the fight compared to the damage loss in viper and magical shot damage from staying out of the crashes just in case I got a mark. But when you’re learning the fight people are slower at getting out and then staying out of the crashes would make more sense, it’s an individual decision really.

Another consideration is that if you stay too far from the group and you get a crash, they have to move a lot to get into it (and most casters are told not to cast unless they’re standing in a crash). If you’re close to the group but not in the crash and someone else gets the mark, they may move in your direction to get away from the group and cause extra healing anyhow. So staying out isn’t completely safe either.

Still, if you can always mitigate the damage to one tick, all you need to do to determine whether you should use it or not is figure out statistically how many ticks you will have to disengage away from over one encounter and figure out how much more damage you can do by standing in a crash. If you net a positive, then it’s worth it.

I generally try to time my vipering mostly during the time I’m not in a crash, and ideally right after I’ve fired my most damaging shot so I flutter in and out of viper a lot during the fight. When I’m in the crash I only viper if I’m really low. I never use the mana regen pools, but the crashes will increase magic damage by 100% as well as reducing mana consumption (which will allow you to spend less time in viper, contributing more to the fight).

For marks the magic damage component is lower so it’s less of a dent perhaps, but as survival, explosive shot is a large chunk of my damage output and the crashes amplify that so it’s generally worth using it when I can. I would probably say though that marks hunters who normally forego arcane shot from their rotation may want to include it when standing in a crash.

I’d only go in there if it’s completely unused, and can not be used by a caster.