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.
That said, I noticed that my passive armor penetration rating was getting up there without any work (gems, food, etc) on my part. I decided to try taking improved arcane shot out of my build and arcane shot out of my standing still rotation. My logic was that since arcane shot is one of those shots that already ignores armor, I might be able to get more DPS out of the extra steady shot (which does benefit from ArP and piercing shots, and has two nice procs) per cycle, and the extra mana provided the freed up talent points.
The question was where would I put the talent points I now have free? I want to use as many as possible on mana and, since I needed something in the top part of the marksman tree in order to advance to the bottom part, I picked a point in efficiency over one point in improved arcane, improved hunter’s mark, or focused aim. There’s already a hunter with improved mark, and his is glyphed too. Focused aim doesn’t contribute to pet expertise like hit rating does, and I honestly don’t move that much in most of the content we are working on now. That left efficiency.
This combined with two points in rapid recuperation should mean the end of mana trouble for me. The last point is the stickler though- I dropped it in focused aim, but am thinking of putting it somewhere else. Trueshot aura would be a waste because of all the buffs it doesn’t stack with, and aside from maybe a little extra range from hawk eye, there’s nothing outside the marks tree within reaching distance that would increase my DPS. Still, I could easily get to hit cap by gear. For now, FA will do.
Now how does this change my rotation? It actually makes things simpler when I can stand and shoot- I hit chimera and aimed shot when they’re available, and fire steady shots when they’re not. There’s no chance of my wasting a charge of improved steady shot proc on an arcane shot any more either.
End result- if you have the right gear and find yourself in viper once in a while, you might be able to get some DPS out of taking arcane shot out of your rotation. Still cast it when you move, but not when you can cast a steady shot. To see whether you’re in this situation, import your character to www.femaledwarf.com.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
Shadowstreak
Euri, I began wondering about the Trueshot aura, it doesnt stack with an enhance shaman buff and a dk buff if im not mistaken, but I have never bothered to look at the uptime on those, TSA is passive and would always give 100% uptime, I dont know if the others are though. btw i still cant understand why the wasp outperforms the wolf, i havent dummy tested yet but hopefully will have some real numbers soon, other than spreadsheet math
Hi, thanks for the post. Interestingly I went to the femaledwarf site and followed a link hunterloot.com/gearplanner and it showed that I would release DPS upgrades by gemming the new +20 intellect gem in place of my existing AGI gems (regardless of slot colour). In all my reading I’ve never once come across the need for hunters to gem for intellect? I’m SV, is this something perhaps for an MM build?
Cheers,
WH.
That will only happen if the settings are very specific. First, you have to be in a long enough fight that you need to go into viper when you can use kill shot. Typically, this means the replenishment buff and judgment of wisdom debuff can not be present. In that case, int’s extra mana pool will give you more fight DPS than agility. Still, this would only help in reality on the very rare fights that match the simulator settings exactly.
tl;dr- make sure you have all the buffs and debuffs set up properly and try again.
The only time the wasp should be outpacing the wolf is if you’re missing a minor armor debuff (the -5% debuff). WIth proper raid debuffs (Sunder/Expose Armor, Feral Faerie Fire/Curse of Weakness), the wolf should always be ahead due to Furious Howl stacking with other AP buffs.
I was at this point until 3.2 dropped where the new epic gems gave me enough extra agil and crit where it pushed arcane shot back up on my rotation (without so I loose about 200 dps….so back to arcane shot I am. Still need a few more armor pen upgrades before I push arcane back out of my rotation.
Fluffy thanks for the reply, I think I have discovered why the discrepancy in dps based on pets, I was trying to show a roommate the spreadsheet and how it works. (he plays WoW obviously) I discovered that when I ran it now I was loosing 200dps when switching from wolf to wasp. Luckily it didn’t take to long for me to see why. The average abilities over time box was checked on, when turned off the wasp was now 2 dps gained. We both concluded that the dps spreadsheet is nice but has lots of pitfalls that could easily be overlooked and that it should not be looked at as a definate answer to all situations.
I have to disagree- while it’s not perfect, it is generally right about what’s more DPS. Could you send me the file that shows you the wasp gaining even though there’s already a minor armor debuff on the boss?