Hi folks, today you’re going to get a primer on how a hit capped raiding hunter can rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic and get DPS increases on gear with hit while hit capped!
I was in Dalaran admiring the new gear I paid through the nose for, and glanced down at my hit rating. 300!? What in tarnation…? What do you do in a situation like that? I’m wasting 70 itemization points (as a Draenei, my hit cap is 230). That new T8.5 chest added a buttload of hit, and while the DPS calculator says it’s still an upgrade (probably because it gave me my 4 piece bonus), I feel dirty running over hit cap! What to do?
Well, I started off by analyzing where all my hit was coming from. Top of my list is my trinket and weapon. Now I stole that staff fair and square from a feral druid, and there’s no way I’m not going to wear it. Nothing says “this thing looks so silly that I would never bother hitting anything with it” like tassels on a stat stick, and the groans in vent from the (regrettably still untamable) cat druid in our guild every time he sees it make me happy. So happy that I let another hunter in the guild get the rune edge first. Well, that and he asked nice.
So, short of getting rid of a tier piece with hit and losing my set bonus, I am looking at a trinket replacement. I sat down with wowhead and looked at my options. There are some nice drops in Ulduar I will probably be unable to afford, as well as some T7 trinkets that would serve to reduce my hit, but I don’t have any of them and I’m really not interested in running OS25 pugs again to lose rolls on the fury of the five flights. Wait a sec, what about the first epic trinket I ever got? That’s right, the badge trinket I bought with badges earned mostly in heroics, the very basic yet fairly decent mirror of truth!
Having gotten rid of all that hit, I was actually below cap. Now, I checked the math and I can gain a very small amount of DPS by removing arcane shot from my rotation (because of all the armor pen I have) except when Im moving and need another instant, or fighting a boss with a magic damage accellerator. I can take three talent points out of improved arcane shot, however I need to put one of them somewhere in the first 5 tiers or else I can’t get to the 6th. Well, I can avoid gemming for hit (which allows me to gem for agility) by taking a single point in focused aim. Since this was fixed, the hit will now be passed down to my pet.
Where to put the last two points? There’s nothing in tier two of the beast mastery or survival trees that would increase my DPS, and while I would like the extra range allowed by hawk eye, I put the points into mana talents. The raid comp we run is mana-regen light, and I find I have to go into viper right about when we hit the execute range of a boss. So I took another point in rapid recuperation, and a point in efficiency.
Now all that remain is for me to test this out. I’m leaving arcane shot keybound and on my bars, but ideally I’ll get more steady shots. I’m also going to invest in a belt of dragons.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
Shadowstreak
I dont understand why you put a pt in FA. If you want some extra hit, use the Tier 8 chest and leg socket bonuses. Put the extra talent pt elsewhere, like TSA (dont be a selfish hunter, you might find yourself out of range of the one hunter in the group with TSA and then youve screwed yourself :D) or another in Efficiency (Vezax, that’s all Im saying). MM has so many damage-boosting talents that it’s folly to waste a pt on FA. And you really screw yourself if you go SV: either you’re a full 1% below the cap or you have to move precious talent pts out of the few damage-boosting SV talents.
3 gems–Glinting MT, Vivid FE, and Shifting TO–plus socket bonuses gives 28 hit, which puts you 4 hit over the cap. Done :D
TSA would be redundant- we have another marks hunter with it, as well as multiple shaman and DK buffs that it doesn’t stack with. The point in FA allows me to gem agility instead of whatever I’d use to get the socket bonuses, and the DPS Spreadsheet says that that’s more DPS for me. Not much, however, so if I ever need a talent point for TSA, I know where I’ll get it, but in the meantime, efficiency is the only other option and I would only benefit in that on Vezax.
As for SV, I don’t see myself ever needing to use it again, however I always carry enough gems on me that I can regem to hit cap if the occasion presents itself.
This post kind of bugs me. So you’re saying that putting points in FA aim instead of TA (dks, enh shammys, aforementioned) is a waste of talent points.
You are also saying that MM has so many damage-boosting talents making FA a waste. Unfortunately for you a good hunter has ALL damage boosting talents from the sixth talent tier, forcing the other talents either in FA or improved arcane shot. With an armor pen build you totally eliminate arcane shot out of your rotation making improved arcane shot useless.
If you move your 3 improved arcane shot points to 2/3 FA your hit cap lays at 197 if memory serves (non draenei) allowing you to use mjolnir instead of grimtoll, giving you 2.2 percent crit. So infact you converted 2 points in FA to 2 percent crit and furthermore allows you to gem armor pen, agility or maby agi/crit gem instead of useless hit + stamina ones.
TLDR : FA is a good talent
or
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Defias+Brotherhood&n=zehluj
For the moment, however Zeherah mentioned that it looks like 3.2 will be shipping with a bug where FA does not confer all of the benefits of hit rating from gear to pets.
Why not belt of the betrayed? not dropping?
Not recently, and I’d probably be outbid on it the first three drops. That and I have nothing else to spend my gold on ;)
btw belt of dragons -> great pvp belt. slap a spell pen gem in there and ur gloves (s6 or gloves of the steady hand) and ull be hitcapped, if you enchant your cloak.
Just one comment on focused aim- right now you don’t lose anything (except a talent point you could put elsewhere) by using it for hit, but with the expertise changes in 3.2 things will change once again.
Currently on PTR focused aim is bugged and is only giving part of the expertise bonus it should be. I haven’t figured out the exact pattern to the bug yet (it seems to be working at about half effectiveness but that doesn’t completely explain the numbers) so I haven’t adjusted the femaledwarf site to reflect it yet, but I’m fairly sure the bug will go live in its current form.
Additionally, the draenei racial does not seem to be giving pet expertise.
So it looks like we’re in for another situation where pet dps is affected by where you get your hit from, at least till they get around to addressing the situation.
Thanks Zeherah, I’ll probably respec once 3.2 hits then. Either way, whenever a new patch hits, I always run my toon through a sim to see if I can make any changes to spec to get a few extra DPS. Need every ounce I can get to keep our feral druid in check.
I got teh rune edge cause i asked nice :D thanks again Euri i still love it. No worries after i got wrathstone and T8.5 chest im completely out of dkp so hunter stuff is all yours from now on lol. Best wishes on your dps maxxing madness. I will however beat you soon…consistantly
Getting rid of Grim Toll while having an ArP build is a bad idea, a good MM ArP build relies on the ArP proc from Grim Toll to get you to the ArP cap of 1231. So I would keep Grim Toll if I were you, and lose the hit rating by switching around other items.
I don’t have an ArP build :) I gem straight agility.