I haven’t seen any “state of hunter dps” posts in a while so I thought I’d throw one together.
This post takes its data from DPS Bot and uses the default settings of a two week sample period and the average spec score. For explanations of what these and other settings mean, check out my guide to DPS Bot here.
The table below presents the most recent statistics as of Sep. 25, 2011 for the three hunter specs in all four T12 raid types. Each cell in the table holds two values. The value before the hyphen is the hunter spec’s rank among the 22 different dps specs by average spec score. The value after the hyphen is the average spec score. If a MM has an average spec score of 72.6 it means that, on average, MM is doing 72.6 percent of the DPS of the top specs in the given type of raid. Remember that these figures only deal with averages and should only be used to make claims about averages.
| 25H | 25 | 10H | 10 | |
| MM | 8 – 72.6 | 7 – 82.9 | 5 – 78.4 | 5 – 86.6 |
| SV | 18 – 60.5 | 16 – 69.9 | 12 – 69.3 | 12 – 79.1 |
| BM | 20 – 53.8 | 21 – 58.2 | 21 – 53.8 | 20 – 62.7 |
We are not in an era of hunter dominance. Though MM ranks well in 10s, in 25s it is slipping to the middle of the pack. SV and BM never rank in the top half of dps specs. What is particularly problematic about this is not the rankings, though, but the spec scores. It would not matter much if BM were rank 20 if its spec score were in the 85-90 range because that would mean that the game’s dps specs were very close to each other and quite competitive. But this is not the case. BM is doing on average roughly 54-63% of the DPS of the top spec by fight, and this lends creedence to the argument that BM is declining in competitiveness. SV is in a similar situation, but in 10s it tends to hold its own a little better and creeps into 70-80% spec score range.
All hunter specs tend to fair better in ranking the easier the difficulty and the smaller the raid size, and spec scores tend to mirror this. An exception is BM falling one rank between 25H and 25N, but even there its average spec score improves on the move to the lower difficulty. This overall trend suggests that hunters do not scale as favorably with size and difficulty as some other dps specs. Boomkin and Shadow Priests in particular seem to always do well, and this was true in T11 also.
The hunter specs when compared to each other appear somewhat divergent. 20-point differences in average spec scores consistently separate MM and BM, with SV always being somewhere in between. The `all hunter specs are pretty darn good and close’ era in T11 that the Hunting Party Podcast lauded is apparently no more.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
If there is a time to safely make big changes to the class and its trees and balance it is during these circumstances. I have seen a growing number of posts (mostly by PVP posters) in the WoW official forumsadvocating for the trees to be respeciallized for different types of play/role at least to a limited extent.
I think weapon scaling should be included with all trees.
I submit if recommendations are to be made to cause each tree to become speciallized then the trees (with some big modifications to them) should be divided as follows: BM with strong Tanking and also ability to give pets better range on attacks or maybe at least on Kill Command; MM as the PVP tree due Readiness, Silencing, and Steady Shot working differently on Cloth v Plate opponents and SV (renamed Elemental ) as the raiding tree since it brings strong AOE, fluid movement, Raid Buffs of haste and maybe add another buff by replacing the golden talent “Counterattack” with revamped “Expose Weakness” which was a true and unique old school spec defining Survival talent and Raid buff.
It is only due to current threat changes and a purpose for Tenacity pets that I cite BM as potentially a tanking type tree if things were revamped (something like swapping Crouching tiger and Resistance is Futile would be examples of changes that could reinforce this vision). Although I wouldn’t want to exclude BM from it’s current DPS roll but I could see that it would be a way to substitute some ad hoc utility in place of its DPS shortcoming under the current state of affairs.
The new T13 per Bullettime’s analysis will help BM on DPS and have a benefit for SV as well. Indicating developing balance via gear rather than direct change. But, for those who raid middle isn’t bad but also means that your market value diminshes more so in 10 man to say the new kings of the DPS hill.
But, changes to support SV with weapon scaling and an additional Raid Buff would help secure viable place in groups I would think ahead of MM (who by current stats wouldn’t necessarily be left out but SV could offer unique things to the Raid). I scorned BM in BC but revelled in my ability to buff the group as SV in BC. I think there is opportunity now to get class base tweaking given the current condition without fear of making hunters OP.
Great post one again Eidotrope.
Expose Weakness = Unique buffs do not exist in the current raiding paradigm.
Additional raid buff = My healers would be happy if Hunting Party applied to spells as well.
SV weapon scaling = Buff our mastery instead.
Great post, thanks for researching this.
Please post this on the official Hunter Forums, it will be interesting to see what happens with it.
Also, make sure you get Frostheim to read this. I appreciate his enthusiasm when he thought the 3 hunters specs were relatively balanced and competitive in PVE, but this is some strong evidence that things are no longer balanced. The developers are more likely to pay attention if the most followed hunter stops saying that things are relatively balanced and fine.
Thanks!
I don’t really have much interest in copying my posts into the forums.
I don’t have a direct line to Frostheim. That would be Euripides.
I don’t want to argue again but if there ever was a time during T11 when BM was equivalent to MM or SV it was only for a short time and required a degree of rose tinted spectacles wrt to BMs capability.
I think it is true that for the vast majority of this release, for the vast majority of raid bosses the same player, same skill, same gear would have done significantly more DPS with MM or SV than BM.
If there is an analysis as thorough as this for that time that proves otherwise I will be happy to eat my engineering goggles.
I don’t know if there ever was any analysis. I only remember Frostheim saying on the HPP that we were in a golden age of hunterdom or something where all the specs were fairly close to one another. I’d guess that it was related to the pet focus bug buffing BM.
Considering Frostheim has no experience with the current tier I take everything he says with a grain of salt. BM and SV only need a “teeny tiny” buff to bring it up to par with MM? Those of us who actually raid and base our opinions on more than conjecture know better. BM and SV are both far behind MM which has become the worst pure dps spec in the game, trailing several hybrid classes to boot.
I appreciate Eidotrope stepping up and calling it like is. I wish the HPP would do the same although it would cut into their time talking about the lack of guns this tier.
To be honest, experience didn’t factor into this piece much for me. I just went where the data took me.
That said, experience (or at least some form of contextual knowledge) is certainly important for understanding why the data says what it does.
Thanks for another great post.
What is especially worrying for BM is that Blizzard have already said they will be buffing melee raid dps in 4.3 due to the mechanics of new bosses. Not exactly a surprise as dragons fly… but still a disappointing frig solution nonetheless.
If Blizzard don’t buff pet DPS in a similar way then BM will fall yet further behind. Ironically even if they do then warlocks will gain more than BM hunters.
Blizzard has given itself so many tools for tweaking dps that I have to say I’m confused at why they’re still resorting to zone buffs to fix late-expansion scaling issues.
Racial
Blood Fury: Increases your melee attack power by 1169 and your spell power damage by 584. Lasts 15 sec
As stated by someone else..
Early days yet but it ooks like all the QQers get their way again, it was all about how command is too op for orc hunter so they screwed with blood fury. Watch now when hunters go troll all he crys of how bezerking is op now.
Apparently blizzard isn’t reading OutDPS
From the new devblog explaining balance changes: Hunter DPS is fine, or even high in 4.2, so we didn’t want this buff to extend to them, which is why the AP benefit is now 20% for melee attacks but still 10% for ranged attacks.
Link here: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/200416/explanation-of-43-balance-changes-part-one
Given the clear evidence you’ve posted in this post, it’s very disconcerting to hear that blizzard thinks hunters are 1) basically ok and 2) don’t seem to have any interest at all in fixing our spec disparity.
Please keep this line from that post in mind:
“You’ll also notice some classes aren’t mentioned at all. It’s possible we’re just happy with them, but it’s more likely we just haven’t gotten to them yet. We don’t want to hold a PTR until every single thing is done, because that minimizes test time.”
At this point, just about everything related to hunters other than the TSA change and the set bonuses is still “coming soon.” As such, I think it’s too early to say whether their attention to hunters has been bad or good. And the melee buff in TSA isn’t a a comment that hunters are fine so much as a comment that all melee are not fine. Any tweaking to a single class, like us, will likely come in some other form.
Question: Is DPS Bot just taking raw DPS numbers by spec over all FL fights and not normalizing for context?
For instance, not too many hunters are asked to go up in the air on Alysrazor. The specs that go up more often, such as Fire Mage, will have their DPS skewed. Now DPS Bot using the median DPS does help reduce the skew, but it can still be there.
How about Ryolith? Are a higher percentage of hunters on the legs lowering our DPS while more of other classes are on the adds?
On a lot of other fights, hunters are asked to do some difficult but important jobs due to all of our utility. For instance, on Shannox, I switch targets a lot. Or normal mode, I was responsible for keeping the dogs even. On heroic, I switch between the boss and helping on Ragface and getting him trapped. If hunters in general do these tasks more than other classes, it hurts our relative DPS numbers in the raw data.
If you really want an accurate representation of relative DPS, I suggest only looking at the Baleroc fight, where pretty much every DPS class is on somewhat equal footing. On that fight, my MM hunter rocks.
The things about statistics like these is that they lie unless you fully understand their context and take out results that skew the averages and do not put things on an equal footing. Basically garbage in is garbage out. You have to filter the garbage to find the treasures and true meaningful data.
I believe average specs scores do control the influence of outlier fights to some extent in that they standardize scores from 1-100. They do not impose fight-specific weightings, though, as far as I know.
You raise a valid concern about Baleroc and in retrospect I regret not including a second table reflecting only that fight. However, I’m not convinced that overall stats are lying to us or have little value simply because different fights have different mechanics. If the various mechanics-derived advantages and disadvantages are roughly random across fights then relative practical dps propensities should be reflected in a valid way.
The average spec score being a misleading stat would require, I think, there being a systematic bias regarding hunters across fights. You suggest that there could be one, but your experience could also be idiosyncratic. I think that absent a better demonstration of overall bias that the averaged spec score remains a reasonable reflection of general (rather than merely stand-still) hunter DPS propensity. I’m open to the possibilty that I’m wrong to use overall numbers, I just don’t see how I am yet.
I think he wants theoretical maximums validated by the one single target fight (an aside Whytefist love you man and your work as well as your WHU post on t13).
But, experience trumps and I think hunters are experiencing themselves slipping. Although statements have been made in context. At what point has GC mentioned hunter and then related it to the hunter experience at all this expansion? I can see how hunters can take that as an ominous tea leaf reading.
The fight mechanics dictate the results. An average raid leader will make decisions on gut feelings and limited data- it’s just human to do so. I think they would say hunters are slipping even if it appears anectdotely. And that has real consequences.
Taking a step back I think there is a wider issue revealed about this post.
The job of DPS, it seems, is 99% just about DPS. As hunters we have to hold our hands up to helping this, we all like to look at the meters and see how OP we are (or are not right now or havnt been in living memory if you happen to be BM).
As I have already said I have been hugely disappointed by Cataclysm. One thing that was meant to be part of this release was a need to again use some of the other buttons on our keyboard. Remember back at the start when we had to trap mobs in the new dungeons/raids?
This really hasn’t come to pass. Most boss fights just revolve around finding the right place to stand in and RSIing your way through your rotation. As hunters the main other thing we do is throw a trap plus maybe tranq the occasional enrage. Rarely, very rarely we get some real fun and have to kite something. The same is true of most other classes. The luckiest I think are those with a good interrupt as this is needed quite often. I enjoyed learning Aly as it meant I had some variety as I could silence and use my nether rays pet ability at last. It was a good thing imo that the Ragy phase transition mobs needed stuns, it would have been even nicer if some had moved faster and needed a scatter or blind to avoid a wipe.
The only good thing about all this for me is that I have pretty much relegated raiding to the back burner and taken up PVP. I like this because you have to use pretty much every ability you have and , to do well, know about every other class’s ability as well.
With just a little ingenuity Blizzard could have helped sort out the game imbalances that lead to stupid sad fixes like the 4.3 melee buff by designing encounters that make players use more of their buttons. Ideally in order to clear a raid you would imo need to bring a group that was pretty much balanced in terms of class because you need to all of their special abilities, not just DPS so players will be appreciated for more than just a DPS ladder number.
Here are just a few ideas I came up with.
- Give boss raid wipe ability that requires a 12s stun to prevent (so you need a stun chain). Most melee and especially rogues become invaluable and BM gets to use its signature ability!!
- Root players, needing abilities like master’s call/freedom
- Boss ability that means he will crit tanks unless ability like roar of sacrifice is used on them.
- Stupid mob that will do massive damage but can be disorientated for the whole fight (blind, scatters and bring on the monkey)
- Ditto other mobs that have a selective vulnerability to other classes cc (fear, cyclones mind controls etc)
- Event that requires many players to near instantly move to the same place at the same time so blinks, disengages, ports, intervene, shadowstep,life grips have to be co-ordinated
- Give DPS buffs that require skill to take advantage of. So a zone around boss that buffs melee DPS but also gives stacking debuff if boss isnt kited. Or a buff area for ranged that moves in a way that forces you out of your default rotation. Or buff zones that also mean you will be critted/rooted or take more damage in other ways so you can only use by combining other abilities. Or a mob that leaves a dps buff zone trail but only if skillfully kited.
I am sure others could come up with more and better ideas than this. It really frustrates and saddens me that Blizzard seem to be incapable of doing the same.
As far as MM and SV, you could certainly be right. Unfortunately, this sort of information has been completely pointless to consider BM with for years now. There are just too few people playing it, particularly people of high skill and gear level. While there are some of us middle of the road people who are neither amazing nor terrible clinging to the spec with all our might, the average person willing to take what’s arguably the most reviled spec in the game tend to be more than a little bad. As a slightly above average player at best, I’m in the top 200 normal BM parses for almost all of the Cata fights. If I had played MM instead of BM all this time and passionately dedicated myself to fine tuning my skills at it…I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top 200. If I was in the top 10,000, I’d be surprised, but as BM…I’m one of the top players in the world in a guild that hasn’t even cleared all of normal Firelands yet.
BM and probably Sub and Frost mages really can’t be put onto any sort of charts like this. All three of them are certainly capable of doing more dps, sometimes much more dps, than the sims are showing. It’s a perception and player problem and a lack of comparative data. When the sims are showing BM as above SV when they’re not even programmed to play BM correctly (which is the case with the Simcraft BIS dps page I see linked most often), there are definitely other factors at work than simply the spec itself. That’s not to say the spec is in great shape, but I don’t think any of us actually know except possibly Blizz (and that’s highly questionable given the number of utterly bizarre statements and patch notes written that suggest the devs don’t know anything about hunters at all…).
The problem is that there’s no way to test assumptions about the data, such as there being selection effects like you note. If there were, this post would either never have been released or I’d have a stronger defense to your criticisms.
As it is, all I can say is that I made the assumption that selection effects were not strong enough to horribly skew BM’s standings. I may have been wrong to do this and I wish I could know for sure one way or the other. Regardless, thank you for your thoughtful comment.
I’m not sure if you can look back through previous weeks of data on raidbots, but I can tell you that it was weeks before BM was even being shown by default on their tracking chart because they didn’t have enough samples to provide relevant data. This was also the case with sub and frost mages. When there are specs that are taking several times as long as the rest to get enough data to even begin to include them in things, there’s definitely a representation problem, which certainly suggests a selection effect. Whether it’s the kind of selection effect that I’ve suggested I certainly can’t prove, but that the spec is underrepresented compared to the others is pretty easily shown. A smaller sample size will, of course, be more apt to be skewed by something like what I’ve suggested. It’s anecdotal to be sure, but the way the community treats BM hunters suggests that I might not just be grasping at straws. When you’re mocked, belittled, and even refused entry to groups based just on your spec, if you’re not hugely motivated to be that particular spec, many people will switch to a different one or even a different class.
Frostheim provided a similar post on his site and provided the actual tables for all specs for all parses over the last two weeks. His data clearly shows the bias that can occur when looking at all FL fights due to the tendency of certain classes to fulfill certain roles.
The glaring example in that data is Fire Mages. When looking at all parses, the median Fire Mage DPS was way higher than anyone else. Hence, an ignorant conclusion would be that Fire Mages are the best DPS and that I should reroll one.
But when you look at the top 100 parses, you see that Fire Mages are both underrepresented and in the lower 5 in DPS. How is this possible if they are kings in all of the parses? Then if you look more closely at the 10 man all parses, you will see that fire mage role percentage is very small, only 1.7%. On the other hand, Arcane Mages, who are shown as average of the DPS specs, has much larger representation at 14% by role.
This clearly indicates that Arcane Mages are the best DPS spec for mages on a normal fight. The reason that the Fire Mage DPS is so high in the charts though is because it is skewed by Alysrazor results, where even a bad Fire Mage on this fight can outperform the best Fire Mage DPS on any of the other fights. Per raid strategies, a lot of raids have their Arcane Mages respect Fire Mage for that fight and perform the fly role since Fire Mages are very ideal for that role with what the buffs from it do to Combustion. Although there is probably a decent number of mages that play Fire on most or all of the fights, there is a high percentage of mages that only spec Fire for that one fight. This results in a large portion of the Fire Mage data being from Alysrazor with crazy high DPS.
Now this Fire Mage skewing is not enough where it results in the median Fire Mage DPS being taken from the Alysrazor fight, but it does result in the Fire Mage median DPS being taken from higher performances of highly skilled fire mages than from the median performance if you excluded the Alysrazor fights.
To illustrate, there are 7 fights in FL. With assuming that every guild clears FL every week (I know this does not happen), that is on average each fight being about 14.3% of the records. If the Alysrazor records are say 40% of the parses, then that means that the other fights total 60% of the parses or 10% each. So with assuming 100 parses, the 60 non-Alysrazor parses have a median at about the 30th parse. When you add in the 40 Alysrazor parses, the median of all parses is at 50. The 50th is on the high end of parses for the non-DPS fight making Fire Mage DPS appear higher than it really is.
Other role mechanics have similar positive or negative effects on perceived DPS, although none of them currently are as glaring as the Alysrazor effect, which skews the data for other specs besides Fire Mage as well.
I guess I’d direct you to my post explaining how spec scores work. It shows how spec scores don’t just, as you appear to suggest, take all parses from all fights and lump them together without any parceling by fight. Their medians are taken from each fight, used to generate spec scores by fight, and then those scores are averaged for an overall spec score. This avoids the “aly fights overwhelm all other fights in number” problem that you suggest.
http://outdps.com/2011/07/28/how-to-read-and-use-dps-bot/
Aly fights would be at most 14.3% of an overall spec score (and even there fire mage dps would be mitigated by using the median to generate the spec score) and the standardization imposed by the spec scores greatly reduces the effect that outlier fights have on overall standings.
So, is there bias in favor of fire mages? Yes, definitely. Is it as horrible as you make it out to be? Not even close.
Sums it up tbh ;p
http://www.thedailyblink.com/comics/2011-09-19-206.jpg
This was a great post and led to a lot of interesting debate. Any chance of similar update for DS?
I’m waiting for the screwy data from the opening days of DS to be excluded from the sample.
Great, look forward to it. Should be interesting. The plentiful gear available from LFR should hopefully make the comparisons more meaningful as there should be less disparity due to gearing,