AotV and EndgameFollow

Yeah... I see that, too. I've actually seen a "raiding" hunter with improved stings. I also see people ALL THE TIME who skip Go for the Throat and Rapid Killing to put points into Improved Arcane Shot.

Yes, and that is exactly your problem.
I said mana is not an issue if you take it as soon as you are missing 2-3k mana.
By taking a haste pot instead, you will likely run short at the end of the fight.

The only fights where I can take haste pots are:
- rather short fights (like Shade of Akama)
- those with different mechanics (Reliquary of Souls, where in between each phase your mana is full again, making it essentially three short fights).
- all fights where we have a pally putting this manareg buff upon the boss (74mana for every 2nd shot working out as >150MP5).

Mana can become an issue in some circumstances, but those are avoidable.

With standard raid buffs and without a ret pally keeping mana seal up, I can sustain a 3:2 or a 1.5:1 rotation entirely by using super mana pots (and I don't have to chainpot for this to work).
Yes, SV specced hunters have it a little easier here. At least when they are using a 3:2 rotation. If they are doing a 1.5:1 they spend a lot of mana on those arcane shots and multishots which puts their mana consumption at least on par with BM hunters.
There are quite a few factors which influence mana consumption.
- Efficiency talent
- Thrill of the hunt talent
- Shot rotation
- Skorpid sting duty
- Pally keeping up a mana seal
- Illidan bow (for those who are lucky enough to have one)

If you have a mana seal on the boss, forget about mana. As a SV hunter I can generate more mana then I use in my 3:2 rotation. Chain potting haste pots is a great thing then.

Efficiency saves 10% of your mana.
Thrill of the hunt will save ~10-15% of your mana.
The shot rotation describes your mana consumption. A BM doing his 3:2 or 1:1 will use ~300MP5. A SV using 1.5:1 will use a little more.
Skorpid sting has to be done by one hunter and consumes another 100MP5.
Thus depending on role and spec you need ~300 - ~450 MP5 to never run oom.

The Illidan bow gets you ~40MP5 (2 of our 4 hunters have it, I am unlucky with ranged weapon drops it seems).
Raid buffed a hunter has ~80-100MP5 without AotV.
A fel mana pot yields 3600mana every 120seconds = 150MP5; a super mana pot is roughly 120MP5.
Thus with normal raid buffs a hunter should have his mana pool + 250MP5 to spend.
By chain potting fel mana pots you are 50MP5 short as a BM hunter.
With a raidbuffed 7k Mana pool (I'm at 8.7k ATM) it takes 7000 / 50 *5 = 700 seconds till you run oom. That is about 11minutes 40seconds. I think no fight until Illidan takes longer than 10minutes (perhaps Illidari Council with its 15min enrage timer).
Thus a BM hunter who is not on scorpid sting duty should be golden for nearly 12minutes.

Of course there are a lot of things which can change those numbers:
The hunter with scorpid sting duty will run OOM a lot earlier. Thus you better chose the hunter with the best mana reg for this task. In my raid I am on scorpid sting duty almost always since I have the "best" mana situation (thrill of the hunt and efficiency are both in my build ATM).

To help with mana regeneration you have a few options:
Leatherworkers have drums to regenerate mana. 600mana every 2min (= 25mp5) for every leatherworker in your group.
An alchemist stone increases the MP5 of your mana pots by 40% (which another reason I'm on scorpid sting duty).
A shadow priest will give you so much mana that you do not know how to spend it (which is a reason why we never group hunters with a shadow priest, they simply do not need the extra mana).
A resto shaman has two nice ways to give you mana back (and we do group our hunters with a resto shaman from time to time).

So as a bottom line. Yes a hunter can run oom on a boss fight. However there are plenty of ways to prevent this situation. If you assign the tasks of your hunter according to their spec, you can prevent oom situations pretty much.
There are also a lot of ways to prevent you from running oom.

The reason why I'm doing such long posts about mana consumption is that we currently are trying to beat Brutallus. A 6 minute fight where we have to go all out (thus no mana saving shot rotation, no aspect of the viper). We are currently planning to use 0 mana pots during that fight (which allows us to use 3 haste pots to increase our dps). That of course only works with good raid support to sustain our mana (read: we are using a ret pally *g*).
But by preparing for that fight we also realized how many ways there are to keep mana up. It basically is not an issue for us hunters. Ask our mages how they plan on sustaining their mana for 6minutes. They have it a lot harder than we do.

Mulgrin summed it up well.

3:2 steady rotation is a maximum of 330mp5 if Efficiency. Fel mana pots, BoW, one oil, and mageblood elixir is a total of 214mp5, which puts your oom time at 5 minutes with only 7k mana. If you use Demonic Runes, it's extended out to over 7.5 minutes.

Without Runes, every JoW duration extends your oom by about 50 seconds (1000 extra mana); with runes it's more like 80 seconds. If you've got a non-tanking prot pally or a ret pally JoW should have 100% uptime; if you have 2 healing pallies you should still see decent uptime at least until you get into BT, since no fight until then is so healing intensive they can't spend 10 seconds running in to drop a judgement (or just stay in with the melee).

We're talking averages though, so in reality it'll probably be shorter due to how cooldowns line up, but longer because of any inactivity (cubecliking, graves, movement, whatever). Even without JoW, that means you really have no excuse for mana issues down to 5 or 6 minutes, barring pet deaths or mana drains. That's longer than most Hyjal/BT fights, about as long as most Kara fights, and means you'll need either AotV or JoW to make up the last 20% or 30% of the fights in SSC/TK. In reality, mana will probably be higher than that, and so oom even longer.

And really, your raid leaders should be hounding pallies for JoW on every fight. The only two fights pre-BT I can think of that not having at least a few JoW's up is expected is Al'ar and maybe Kael (haven't done him yet), and then Maiden and Prince in Kara.

There is never a Spriest with the Hunters, and we don't have a Ret Pally to Judge Wisdom. I don't remember the last time I even had a Shaman in my group on a raid. So a part of the problem may be that other DPS types are being prioritized over the Hunters. Our Warlocks are typically the top DPS against any target, with the Mages and Hunters interleaved after that. Rogues also perform very well, but being melee and non-mana users they have different needs. But I can hardly complain about Spriests being in the healers group, it's less devastating for a Hunter to have to coast on Viper for a while than it is for a raid healer to be OOM.

The only thing in your list which I have control over is the drums. I've been using Drums of Battle. The last fight I remember using Drums of Restoration in was a Gruul's Lair before we stopped farming him. Maybe it's time for me to make another couple Resto drums and see if that helps my mana regen. If I open with Battle drums that'll let me Fel Mana earlier, and after drums are off cool down I can use Resto for the remainder of the fight.

Edited, May 20th 2008 12:52am by Kompera

I have been toying with the Alchemy profession. Currently I'm skinning/LW. I could lose skinning and just buy my mats on the AH or pay a Guildy to farm them for me.

We have no SV Hunter. Not a one. The Ret Pally and a SV Hunter are pretty much the only class/spec combinations we don't have a regular raider for. We have Boomkin and Ele Shaman, a pair of DPS Warriors and even one (maybe two) Enh Shaman. The raid leaders will not assign a Holy or Tankadin JoW duty, so that's not an option for me and my mana issues.

Another thing I've toyed with is running SV for a few weeks to see how it plays. My AGI is not the best, but with the amount of melee we typically have I think it would give more DPS to the raid than I would lose personally. The only issue then is one of perception. We have enough raiders that we often rotate out the lowest DPS on one Boss kill to let someone else have a shot at the next. Which is fine, it tends to keep people on their toes and not coasting through the raid. It has had the unintended effect of having some DPS ignore the calls for DPS on adds since they would prefer to show the big numbers they can get against the Boss as opposed to running down adds, which I have pointed out. No system is perfect. But with this history, being lowest DPS due to being specced SV is not an attractive prospect, because Recount can't add in the contribution of EW.

If your raid leaders are incapable of understanding what "raid DPS" as opposed to "personal DPS" is, I'd seriously consider a new guild. Survival pulls sooo far ahead of BM once you consider everyone else that dropping a Surv hunter is just stupidity. Basing people's performance around DPS is a lackluster system too; anyone who pulls aggro or doesn't switch to adds should be immediately kicked from the raid, not the person on lowest DPS.

Also, there should be no problems getting JoW up. Assigning one pally to do it might not work, rather "when no one needs healing and you have a second." Fights like Mag, Hydross, Lurker, Tidewalker, and Reaver, there are *no excuses* to not see at least 2-3 JoW's thrown on the boss. This has nothing to do with whether or not the raid leaders will assign someone, but about how willing your pallies are to support their DPS (the raid leaders obviously aren't willing if they have no concept of raid damage).