“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.
Let’s look at where Hunter DPS is determined. How you play your character in a boss fight, and how you set him up before you walk into the instance.
First, we’ll talk about how you play. If you’re survival, your rotation should look like this:
Rapid fire > kill shot > explosive shot > black arrow > serpent sting > aimed shot or multi shot > steady shot
Now lets go over the simple mistakes people make here.
- Take arcane shot off your rotation (and out of your spec). It shares a cooldown with explosive shot.
- Train all levels of explosive shot.
- When you get a lock and load, don’t clip your shots.
- Don’t drop traps unless it’s worth losing a black arrow.
- Stand still for as much as possible to ensure that you are getting the sniper training buff, firing auto shots, and firing steady shots.
Now, I notice you have marks as a second spec. I’m not going to focus too much on it because in your gear, SV is considerably better. Your rotation for marks should be:
Kill shot > serpent sting > chimera shot > aimed shot > arcane shot >steady shot
Some simple gotchyas here:
- Rapid fire is mana back- blow it during heroism or when you won’t waste the mana regen.
- Use readiness right after rapid fire so you can get two rapid fires off in a row, and assuming about a 5 minute fight, save your last readiness for a double kill shot when the boss is in execute range
- Never ever reapply serpent sting unless it’s expired, chimera shot refreshed it for you.
- Your chimera shot does the same damage whether you fire it immediately after a serpent sting, or right before it expires.
- Standing still is even more important for MM because a massive chunk of our DPS is auto-shot and steady shot.
Now, let’s talk about setup. I see from your armory that you’re currently logged out in survival spec. Your spec is almost textbook for the replenishment build, however you elected to put your last point into improved arcane shot, which does absolutely nothing for you. Arcane shots are fired at the expense of explosive shots, and explosive shots are better in every regard. Take arcane shot out of your rotation (see above) and off your toolbar.
Your pet is also not optimally set up. Following my guide, you’ll see a build like this.
Your setup has a few small details that won’t change your maximum output by much, but let’s go over them. I imported your character into the online version of the DPS Spreadsheet (www.femaledwarf.com)
- SV setup now (5578 DPS)
Here‘s your new profile after regemming and re-enchanting: 5948 DPS, a 6.5% increase. I assumed you could get to honored with the sons of hodir to get at least the lesser inscription of the axe, which is not one of the options on the site, however I picked a TBC enchant with the same stats for DPS calculations. If not, find some way to get your shoulders enchanted somehow.
Basically, what you have is a hodge-podge of PvP and PvE gear, way over hit cap, with some gems and enchants of questionable value. Since agility and hit give you the most DPS, what I did was go through everything, and take agility. This put you below the hit cap, so I enchanted both your weapons to 25 crit and 25 hit.
From this point, you can look to replace your PvP gear (starting with the trinket). This will let you transfer some of the large amounts of resilience you have into something that will increase your DPS.
Now I know that 6.5% is not a massive increase, but combined with the tips in the first section of the post, it will be significant. As you raid more, you’ll learn the fights and figure out the best place to stand where you won’t have to move as much. As well as get some upgrades.
Rapid fire > kill shot > explosive shot > black arrow > serpent sting > aimed shot or multi shot > steady shot
Black Arrow, after Kill shot and Explosive shot, that MUST be a mistake? I would say its better to get the 6% damage increase, before you start firing of your main damage abilities.
The question of black arrow before or after explosive shot as been argued about since 3.0.8 released. The answer is that in practical experience, it may seem to be more DPS to increase it’s priority, but when you model hunter performance (with a spreadsheet or with an actual statistical modeler), it’s just about equal. Delaying an available explosive shot or kill shot costs the DPS of that shot times the length of time delayed, and only gives you a 6% boost plus the DPS from the black arrow.
I’ve seen a very small difference favoring ES>BA when changing the priorities in the DPS spreadsheet, and I imagine that’s probably accurate. I stand by my rotation :)
Guess that is just a matter of taste then, as I prefer to get my black arrow up first, to increase the upcomming Explosive shot, and Auto shot.
Rapid fire > kill shot > explosive shot(LNL) > black arrow > explosive shot > serpent sting > aimed shot or multi shot > steady shot
I would most likely make that my rotation, only to value the LNL Explosive shot higher then the actual Explosive shot, and black arrow. And I have also felt a slight different by prioritatin it that way, but then again it is, as you say, such a small different its just a matter of taste.
Nice post, but I was hoping this would be more of a “things all hunters do sometime in there life that makes them blush” but now I see this is more of a “fix me!” response in disguise. Now I have no complains about this post, but really? Soon you’ll have a mass of huntards emailing you asking you to fix them. And no offense Ahunkaluvin but your a total huntard to say that you put “most” of Rip’s guides to use and your still only pushing 2k dps. I hope this helped you and the rest of the masses of huntards solely for the sake of Rip not pulling out his hair at having 2048 pieces of mail in his inbox saying “FIX ME!”
Here’s a question that might deem worthy; I try to refresh serpent sting when I’m in SV right at the end of a BA duration. The reason for doing this is that I’ve heard from Wow.com (as well from additional places) that when a buff/debuffed is applied, it is applied with the benefits of all buffs/debuffs on you or the target that is available when applied. Now my BA and SrptS priority is BA first, then SrptS. But I refresh SrptS when BA has only one sec left on its duration which will last me until the next BA cooldown (with SrptS glyph and resourcefulness)and (if my theory is right) my Serpent Sting will do 6% more damage. Not a lot, but seems worthy for one GCD and since SrptS will be up 100% of the time anyhow, so why not buff it a bit. Now, my question is, is this a good idea, or is SrptS not affected by BA? Or am I just wasting a GCD?
Thanks and keep up the good work Rip. :D And sorry if I came off as a jerk…long day :\
The thing is, many of the points I touched on are indeed very common mistakes. I’ll have to test your serpent sting thing- I used to believe that all changes to AP were reflected immediately on the damage of our stings, however I have been told recently that that’s apparently not true.
Idk, I guess our ideas of common mistakes differ. To me, pulling through md with your pet on defensive is a common mistake. While something like getting pvp gear for pve purposes in wrath, is more like being stuck in the past noobrish. But to each his own. :P
Still very helpful either way, the kinda point to one person’s problems kinda threw me off though, but like I said, still very helpful.
Maybe I should have named the post differently. I believe that going over an example of a setup which has been build with some common mistakes is a good way of highlighting common mistakes. Stuff like forgetting to put your pet on passive is probably just as common, but I didn’t think of it.
No worries. :) Still a good post :P
Great article, what you say about rapid fire and marksmanship was particularly helpful. I’ve gone marks and I’m still trying to shake off survival habits. One thing I will say about your marksmanship rotation suggestion is that assuming you have more than 25% armor pen, you can actually take arcane out of your rotations for a small dps improvement (assuming you don’t have improved arcane shot).
This is not to say you can’t keep it around or use it during movement, just that in a boss fight you can streamline your rotations a bit and squeeze a little more dps out of your build.
Clete, Khaz Modan (US)
I also see that I made a mistake in stating my DPS. I didn’t have any buff but food clicked on. Again, not too many raids under my belt yet.
The PVP gear is better than what I had as PVE gear. I don’t mean to make excuses just the way it is.
I guess I did kinda come off as “fix me”, but I really just figured that my mistakes would be fairly common. Sorry if you do get lit up with tons of “fix me” posts.
Thanks for all the help and posts.
Hey, we all start somewhere :) And I don’t mind the occasional “help please” post- it’s hard to think of a guide every day!
I took that 5948 DPS setup and imported my own gear into the spreadsheet (not changing anything else) and it said 7156 (6010+1146), with the same gear in my MM spec it says 3844 (3482+362).
Now, I’d believe a minor DPS upgrade, but somehow 3312 sounds like a waaaay too big difference between MM and SV to not have every single hunter being specced SV, isn’t it? I already am set steadily in the top 3 DPS in Ulduar 25 runs, if the sheet is telling the truth then hunters would be way too overpowered, not?
*ponders* Hmmm… Maybe I should respec, I would if I wouldn’t trip over all the new buttons to smash.
Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. The shot rotation needs to change, and you need to verify the same raid buffs and debuffs.
Both shot rotations were spec-oriented, but you got me on the raidbuffs. Now the difference is 7156 (6010+1146) vs 5314 (4539+775). Still quite a big gap.
Think I’ll be off to a training dummy.
Was asked to do a PUG VOA 25 raid. Went from near bottom of DPS in a NAXX25 raid to middle, right behind the other Hunters. I was 11 they were 8, 9 and 10. I would have been ontop if not beating them if I had remebered to use saronite arrowheads and didn’t clip Serpent Sting so much.
Thanks for the tips. Since checking out this site I have gone from doing about 800 DPS in Heroics to at least 1800DPS in same instances. For the first raid I did I was like 2200 and am now closer to 3k. May not seem like much to some but to me it is HUGE.
Lesson learned is to keep watch on the rotation and don’t clip shot durations. Less spazzing, more killing! To me, that is probably where most people fail. So easy to say, not so easy to do when you want to do good in the raid.
Better gear is on the horizon and soon I may even force myself to learn how to kite properly! Thanks again.