Talent build advice from you Goodly Folkes...Follow

what people do is just type

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You've picked up everything in shadow that increases your damage. If you're not running out of mana, you could not change your spec in such a way that your DPS would actually increase. That said, you probably *will* run out of mana on proper raid bosses - I'm not saying your spec is perfect. Regardless, you're probably better off working on your rotation rather than your spec.

Wherever you see a cookie cutter build (including on Allakhazam), it's a starting point to ask yourself "Why do people take that?". It is good to try to understand other people's decisions, then make your own choices.

Thanks for the info folks, I just was not sure if I was missing something obvious...

Going to have to mess about with this, see what I can drop to take back up Spirit Tap, I've rarely ever had to stop to drink a Tea or a potion. I had just assumed it was down to poor gear and so forth...

Anyways, thanks again Guys 'n' Gals, I'll have a look at the link above, and also at my Talents and so forth...I think my rotation is cool.

Speak soon, and be at peace!

DrFolly.

I would like to say I agree with you, but given the horrors I've seen hunters run around with I suggest everyone to look at the cookie cutter(s) and try to understand them instead of going off and building your own build.

I have in fact seen hunters spend nearly all their talent points in Marksmen and manage to miss some of the best talents in that tree.

You're assuming that people think about what talents they take.
Research has proven that in roughly 75% of all cases, people just randomly click talents that look funny.

I still prefer the other way around.
Go spec cookie cutter, use the cookie cutter rotation and try to understand it.
Then, when you know what, why and how you can move away from the cookie cutter to improve yourself.

But before that, I'd rather have people limit the damage they do to the raid by following whatever is calculated to be optimal and try to not mess up too much.


Oh, en prestation is geen woord, ik denk dat je performance bedoelde ^^

That's probably because in 75% of all cases the people clicking the talents is a windowlicker =P. They're going to suck even with a cookie cutter.


I guess it depends on the people in question. If nobody took the 'long and painful route', we wouldn't have cookie cutters.


Aye, die twee haal ik altijd door de war omdat ik performance vergeet =P

Nee, we zitten te ver naar het zuiden om voor trollen door te gaan.
Die zitten in scandinavie en zo, wij hebben klompen, kaas, wiet en *******

They'll suck less with a cookie cutter.





They don't take the 'long and painful route' to min/max. The benefits come from understanding the talents and abilities and rotations and the game encounters. Taking a cookie cutter or jumping outside of the box has nothing to do with it. The players who hate cookie cutter simply to be different are the stupid ones. It's funny because by actually taking cookie cutters and not sucking you'll stand out a lot more than if you suck like the millions of other 'unique snowflakes'. Excelling at your class makes you unique, not bypassing talents and abilities that will in fact improve your performance.

Take the cookie cutters and then look at each talent and ability and find out what's so great about it and how it syncs with other things. Once you do that you can start to create your own builds based on your knowledge. By not taking cookie cutter all you're doing is learning the hard way, you're reinventing the wheel. You'll have to try different talents out and find out why they suck. And if you don't take cookie cutter talents prior to that you won't understand how much of a difference a 'sucky' talent is compared to a much more beneficial 'cookie cutter' talent. You can keep saying it works fine for you, while that may be true you really are limiting yourself.

If you head over to www.elitistjerks.com you'll find posts on the priest forum that explain in huge detail (too much for me to bother paying full attention to) why spirit is now an utterly pointless stat for SPs. The general recommendation is to move the points into imp psychic scream, silence and psychic horror - even though these provide no dps increase whatsoever, the belief is that the occasional utility they provide (I'm looking at you, Faction Champions) is more useful than spirit tap.

Of course, if you're frequently running out of mana, I don't see any reason to stick to this principle and not take spirit tap.

However, I'd recommend learning how to use your shadowfiend and dispersion, as obvious as that sounds. There are a lot of fights when you're forced to stop dpsing temporarily, whether it's because the boss disappears, you have to run, swap targets, etc. These breaks are when you should pop your cool downs and minimise/rule out the time you'd waste if you popped them while dpsing. Alternatively, pop your shadowfiend in that occasional 1.5 second window between refreshing DoTs, when otherwise you might SW:D or just do nothing.

And it goes without saying that you shouldn't wait until you're oom to do something about it - I'll generally look to use my fiend or dispersion when I'm at around 60% mana, if I know it's a mana-intensive fight, so that by the time I'm low again at least one of them will be off cool down.

Edit:



Apologies if I've missed someone else mentioning this, but in case not - as Alliance, while raiding you'll more likely than not have a draenei with you, in which case your hit cap is 262. It's not worth targeting a higher hit rating when you're working on gear, though it can be handy to have an alternative piece (wands make good examples) in your bags on the off chance it's necessary.

Edited, Sep 10th 2009 8:57am by Alestian

Indeed, at the moment it's just deciding which of two pretty mediocre options is the most suitable for you.