Macro or Rotation?Follow

Ah, the partial sentence, cut & paste quote. What are you, Michael Moore? If you're going to quote a person, be sure to include their entire thought so that their meaning comes across the way it was intended to.

Honestly if you're a BM hunter, just stick with steady shot. The dpm is just so much better. If you're MM or SV, then it's worth it to throw in arcanes and multis, but it will drain your mana. Tkasomething has a few really good threads on macros and shot cycles.

no offense, but you dont know much about hunter dps.
An autoshot timer is crucial, the difference in dps between well woven steadyshots and badly woven steadyshots can get up to a difference of 120% tooltipdps vs 190% tooltipdps so a 70%(!) dps difference.
Although that is extreme, you can count on losing 10% or more dps by not using an autoshot timer.

Also, your rotation uses way to much mana and using normal mana potions is stupid because we already have the option of using fel mana pots.

Not to mention the fact that switching to AotV is something you should NEVER do in raids because 155 AP makes a big difference.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that which Aspect you use is determined by how long you know the fight is going to be, what your party make-up is and how much downtime you'll have in the fight.

Example 1: Prince Malchezzar- about a 4-5 minute fight depending on how much DPS you have (all being pre-Kara or fully Kara geared or a mix of both) and how lucky you are with Infernal drop placement. If all goes well, you can stand in one place the whole fight and just fire away... probably the easiest boss you will ever fight for Ranged DPS players. That being said, it's a long fight, always will be so I have always gone with AotV and just popped my cooldowns in a rotation, mending pet when necessary (I'm BM build and the damn infernals tend to be bad for pets...) and just doing MD at start Aimed, Arcane, Steady/ Auto Rotation and I never run out of mana.... but in the long fight, I do sometimes come close depending on whether or not I have a Resto Shaman next to me, SPriest next to me, or both, in which case I will of course use AotH the whole fight and pop a mana pot when needed.

Example 2: Gruul- About 7-8 minutes (can't be longer or else you'll wipe because he'll be able to one shot the tank). This fight is even longer than Prince, but with his Ground Slam ability and Cave-Ins constantly, you'll be moving alot, and sometimes spend a whole 15-20 seconds not firing. In this case no matter what your party make-up is, you'll want to keep AotH up every time you're firing and switch to AotV whenever you're not, 20 seconds of AotV up means 4 ticks of the mana regen bonus along with 15 seconds of normal mana regen.

This is all coming from a BM hunter's perspective, and with the mind-set that constant DPS is better than fluctuating DPS. Because simple things like switching Aspect in fights, popping pots and having to wait for mana regen, can make your DPS drop from say 1000 DPS to 850-900DPS, whereas keeping one aspect up and never stopping can keep it up at around 950 the entire fight.

I know this tactic may not work for everyone and probably isn't the BEST, but it works extremely well for me, and on fights that I can just stand and shoot with AotV up(aka Prince) I lead the damage meters every time.

Any hunter who doesn't macro, assuming they don't have abysmal ping, is gimping their damage, plain and simple. A macro will be able to get much, much tighter rotations that any human reaction time can. It's like the difference between the old /stopcasting and the new spell queuing for dps casters - an improvement in the range of 50dps just on account that you can get the spells off .01 seconds after each other versus ~.15.

EDIT: Sometimes I try to be good at math, and sometimes I realize it's just better if I delete that part of my post.

Edited, Jan 15th 2008 11:41am by lsfreak

I'm not about to question the wisdom of my exeprienced hunter bretheren, who have taught me so much since I discovered this forum. However, I must relate my own experience on this point.

I am a 70 survival hunter. Armory link if you care: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Aggramar&n=Panteleone

I often run instances and recently started raiding Kara, often with other comparably-geared hunters from my guild. I know most of them use shot rotation macros, several accompanied by autoshot timers as well. I, myself, choose to run on feel alone - think of this what you will. (I play for fun, not for math or stressing over min-maxing.)

When studying the damage meters after the instance/raid, I average the same DPS as any other hunter, sometimes (rarely) even being top DPS among hunters. I know there's several reasons why this might be, but I can absolutely rule out the other hunters being incompetent. (Our guild is big on knowing how to play your class, something we judge on several instance runs during the recruitment process.)

So, again, while I'm not about to try and debate those who insist that you must use macros/timers or unacceptably suffer on DPS output - the evidence presented certainly appears sound and reasonable - my own experience tells me otherwise regarding their absolute necessity.

My 2 cents.


Edited, Jan 16th 2008 1:48pm by Panteleone

No offense taken - I understand the point you're making. I'll try what you suggest.

EDIT: Now that I've visited your link, my guild uses WWS for their 25-man raid analysis. I'll see if I can get them to log this Friday night's Kara run. I'm not sure how WWS works, but I'll find out.

Edited, Jan 16th 2008 2:53pm by Panteleone

That seems to be identical to the post on WWS regarding combat logging,m range, etc.

Edited, Jan 17th 2008 4:46am by Kompera

Ummmmmmm, sorry, another question -_-

So what is the effect of things that have haste effects on our shot rotations? My current gear could sport the abacus, I have Imp AotH, and rapid killing for more rapid fires. Don't these abilities cause me to clip my autoshots?

If your auto shot gets too close to 1.5 it will start being clipped. I think the ideal speed is 1.7

dfexpc, go to tkasomething and look at their shot cycle guide.

Edited, Jan 17th 2008 2:51pm by Xsarus

Recount is excellent, better than Recap. It's basically WWS in-game, but with pie charts, and who doesn't love pie charts?! As a raid leader, it lets me glance at someone's performance mid-fight rather than having to wait till well after it's over.

Ideal bow speed for BM is as low as you can get it with your latency and be able to spam Steady ever GCD without clipping Auto, so just under 1.5 speed with zero latency. The 1.7 mentioned is more realistic, however, which equates to a 2.6 speed with about 61 haste or a 2.7 speed with about 117 haste, if I did it correctly. Woflslayer or Barrel-Bladed are easily the two best BM weapons so far, unfortunately, outdamaging even the ones from Archimonde and Illidan because of speed.

Full DPS for MM/Surv, with a bow speed of 2.9-ish, is
Auto/Steady/Multi
Auto/Steady/Arcane
Auto/Steady
If you've got 2 points in Arcane Shot, you can apparently get a
Auto/Steady/Arcane
Auto/Steady/Multi
Auto/Steady/Arcane
Auto/Steady
Not having a 70 hunter, I have no idea how much of a drain all-out like that is on your mana though (whether you need dual mana oils, aotv, and fel mana pots to keep it going; I imagine it's a lot worse on MM since they won't have TotH). Also don't know how drastically it changes based on going up to a 3.1+ speed, if you're using the S1 crossbow.

Please correct me if any of this is wrong, don't play a high-level hunter yet but like to skip ElitistJerks for anything about any class :D

Edited, Jan 18th 2008 2:10pm by lsfreak