There has been a surge in questions about the basics lately- people telling me that they are not producing enough DPS based on what they think they should do with the gear they have. I’m going to go over the basics today, and if you do everything you read here, you shouldn’t have that problem.
Let’s start with at the very beginning- your expectations. Just because your gearscore is 4500 doesn’t mean you should be doing 3000 DPS on a target dummy. In fact, your gearscore is not a good measure of your gear, because it doesn’t know that hunters enchanting strength and going 300 over hit cap is bad. Also, your boss dummy DPS doesn’t necessarily indicate anything about your fully raid buffed performance. I can easily show you two hunters with similar quality gear and ideal specs for that gear, and one of them would do better on a raid boss, while doing worse on a target dummy.
Assuming your stated goal is raiding, target dummy parses and heroic parses are not the most useful tool to measure performance. Raid parses are. That said, if you aren’t already raiding, these will at least give you some information.
Let’s start with your gear. Hit is the most valuable stat until you never miss your target, which happens at 8% hit for raiding. Every point you spend on hit rating under the cap will give you more DPS than any other stat, generally. Never take a piece with spell power just because it has hit, however. In order to get yourself raid ready, take a look at Eidotrope’s pre-raid gear guide. He has a column for hit rating.
You need to gem and enchant your gear, as well as use epic ammo- it may not seem like much, but this is a vital step for your DPS. Also vital, while not gear specifically, is consumables. Use the best ones for raiding.
See? Gear is the easy part! Use the best gear you can, make sure you’ve polished it up nice, and you will be a tenth of the way there.
Now let’s talk about your spec and glyphs. If you are raiding, you will do the most DPS with survival or marksmanship. BM is fun, but unfortunately still gimped in raids, especially when you don’t have access to some of the more BM friendly raid gear (like the 4t9 set bonus).
If you’re starting out, you will likely find that you do more DPS as survival, because while marksmanship has the current high-water mark for DPS, survival is better DPS for many common (lower) gear levels. The difference is not much, however, so by all means, spec either way. Just make sure you are using a good raiding spec. My guides need an update, but to get you started, here’s the SV primer and the MM primer. When I rewrite them, I’ll go back and update this post. Those guides also contain information about glyphs.
Next up, your “rotation”. Note the quotation marks. You do not have a rotation, you have a priority list of shots. This is more often than anything else what a hunter can improve the most to get more DPS. In addition to what you would fire when you’re standing still, you also have to know what you would fire when you’re moving. The priorities can sometimes change based on cooldowns and boss abilities or phases. All in all, it’s not easy, however start working on it now and you’ll reap the rewards.
Your stand still priority lists for SV and MM are a good start. Again, I’ll update these links once I refresh the guides. Once you’ve gotten the hang of this (and gotten rid of any old bad habits like avoiding steady-shots for more than a cooldown in favor of a stronger shot), then start learning to plan your movements. All hunters do more DPS when they can stand still, so learn the fights, and try to position yourself in such a way that you’ll minimize your motion. Use disengage to get around- blizzard gave hunters a reverse blink for a reason :)
Last, and probably least, your pet. Wolves are the best DPS pet for all specs, and here‘s how you set them up. Don’t sweat the details- if you have to (or want to) use another pet, go ahead. Just make sure that for raiding, you always use a ferocity pet, that it’s always level 80, and that you don’t let it die. Macroing the new cower damage reduction to mend pet is a good first step, leaving the pet on passive and actively managing it to keep it out of danger is a good next step. Lastly, now that they get a 90% passive AoE reduction, chances are for most fights, you pet will not die even if you ignore it.
Now that you’ve gotten the basics down, here’s one final tip: learn to use the EJ DPS spreadsheet and/or femaledwarf.com. These tools are invaluable when it comes to deciding between one setup and another. A note- the DPS numbers you see in there are not actual DPS numbers, but are for comparison purposes only. Here are my guides (with screenshots) on how to use the spreadsheet and how to use the femaledwarf website.
Hope this helps! Happy new year!
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
Thanks for this guide, I’ve had a few fellow hunters recently ask me how I’m doing the dps i am, compaired to theirs on reletively the same gear. I’m going to send them straight to this post :)
Some guys get all bent out shape about what “the spreadsheet” says their dps should be vs. what they get in the “real world”. Just because femaledwarf says you should be doing 4.5K does not mean that’s what you will pull. Moving to avoid the fire (or the green stuff or the blue or black stuff), getting feared, missing a shot shot in rotation by a second, all affects the total.
On the other side of it …don’t always believe what guys “say” they can do either. I know a couple of guys will say they can pull XK dps on Trade (way more than me) but I can generally beat them in pugs.
More than that, the spreadsheets make no effort to make their number correspond to reality. They make sure that if the spreadsheet says “that item is an upgrade”, you will actually see a DPS increase by using it, however the number is always higher than can be realistically expected.
I always have this problem! I never really know how I am doing. I know I usually am in the top DPS of the raids I am in, but that’s not the same as ‘can I improve’. I was poking at femaledwarf earlier, and it seems I am doing well enough, but it’s all so subjective.
My guild/alliance struggles on content, so even though I do my job well, if I can do it better, we succeed more. But I can’t see what I can improve, really. And when I see some of the higher-tier hunters comment on pulling down 8k, 9k dps in a fight, I just feel so… Inadequate. I can’t picture pulling down those numbers in the gear I have, but I’m not that worse geared than they are, truly. ><
Don’t forget, a lot about your final DPS is going to depend on others. If you raid can finish a boss in 3 minutes, the hunters will look awesome. If your raid doesn’t have all the buffs and debuffs, that could also account for the differences. Also, certain fights have gimmicks that make them look better for hunters.
i.e. Loatheb, back in the Naxx days.
I was able to do 6000dps on Loatheb with an iLvl 213 weapon on 10man, back when Naxx10 was reasonably current, because of a near 100% crit rate.
I never hit the numbers off those spreadsheets, nor do I ever expect to hit them. It’s a nice indicator of what gear is an improvement, in the end it’s all about pressing the right keys at the right time. What helped for me was taking a moment to sit down and really look at my GUI, rearranging and remapping skills to more sensible set-ups.
I actually have my important skills right in my view, semi transparent to allow me to even move quite efficiently with my mouse as well as my keyboard. And after your addon to rearrange your bars, get the power aura’s one. I pretty much highlight all of my cooldowns, giving a warning when kill shot will almost be possible, when it will be possible, when serpent sting wore off, a nice warning for the 2 second lock and load pause between shots… at times I think I turned my screen into whack-a-mole advanced, ah well, that’s my two pence, and the way I do it, which is bound to not be perfect but it works for me.
This is a good point- a well designed UI will do loads for making you a better player. I might have to do another post on that.
I fully agree on the UI comments. I use the “in game” UI but I have spent a fair bit of time arranging my shots, traps, aspects, pots etc in such a way that they are convenient and I can keep track of what’s going on.
In a previous but similar post I asked the same type of questions about DPS. Your answers were very helpful, so thanks for that! You mentioned an addon that tracks yourperformance during raids and I believe it is the basis for your blog header. What is the addon again? I can’t seem to find the reference now.
Thanks for all the help from you and all of the posters here.
Welcome! That visual is actually from an old log parser site that is no longer functional (at least last time I checked). These days, people use the recount addon for in game tracking.
imo
target dummies are a great way to view your progress not your DPS.
I use them a lot to see what this or that new piece of gear gives me or which priority gives me the best performance but you have to compare target dummies data to target dummies data just like you compare your DPS on a raid boss to the same boss over time.
I think that target dummies are an awesome tool that hunters should learn to use at a very low lvl.
/imo
The problem with using a target dummy to test priorities is that without the debuffs you’ll have in a raid those priorities may be different. For example without sunders and faerie fire you may find having arcane shot in your priority to be a gain, but with those debuffs it may be a loss over just using steady shot.
Target dummies can be useful for testing certain things but you have to be very careful to keep in mind how the various buffs and debuffs will affect the scaling of abilities and that it won’t be in a uniform fashion.
Yup, and SV in general always looks good on dummies because explosive shot already ignores armor :\
So, I’ve heard mention of ‘clipping’ auto shot and steady shot.
I presume this means for auto shot, not allowing your auto shot to shoot. How does one determine whether this is happening and how does one fix it?
For steady shot, I presume it means starting to cast something else or moving after the GCD but before casting finishes. In fact, I see the ‘failed’ message in my cast bar for steady shot once in a while. I have always assumed that this was due to lag, and the server thinking I had cast steady shot but the client thinking otherwise. Is it? How can I make sure that my steady shots are being cast?
These days, the only “clipping” we worry about is if you fire two explosive shots in a row during lock and load and have the dot of the second one overwrite the dot of the first one, thereby “clipping” the last tick. If you are standing still, autoshot will always go off. If you are spamming the steady shot key, steady will always go off.
Hello im a hunter so play on Azsune and im 5,4k gearscore if that means something (dont mean’s something for me) and i do 4,4k.4,9k dps idk why so have u any idea? im best specced as survial til t10 gear and i have the right glyphs once time i was on 6k dps. So u have any idea how i get 6-7k dps to normal?