Weekly Skill Overview (Aimed Shot)

Aimed Shot

Without question Aimed Shot is a purely confusing tooltip. It's the kind of instruction manual you would expect from, say, a race of people that irradiated their entire homeland, forcing them to freeload off a great and overly kind nation. The misunderstanding of Aimed Shot is also one of the most fervently argued. Here's what the tooltip says:

An aimed shot that increases ranged damage by 408 and reduces healing done to that target by 50%. Lasts 10 sec.

Cooldown Stacking

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

 

 Here’s the Theory

First of all, this assumes that you have a trinket that procs. Since Darkmoon Card: Greatness is so amazingly awesome, probably every hunter has it unless they have Death’s Verdict. This proc is the key.
The theory is that since it’s an agility proc instead of ap, the various hunter cooldowns are not strictly additive, but are multiplicative.
For example: Furious Howl adds 320 ap. Greatness card adds 300 agility on a proc. In addition to increasing your AP, that agility also increases your crit chance. So by combining them you’re not only getting the 320 ap bonus from Furious Howl, but that 320 also has a greater chance to crit and do yet more damage.
Everything about this is perfectly logical and got me excited to take Furious Howl off of auto cast!

Kinds of Cooldowns

We hunters basically have 4 kinds of cooldowns to work with:

• Attack Power Cooldowns (Furious Howl, on-use trinkets)
• Haste Cooldowns (rapid fire)
• Agility Cooldowns (greatness or death’s verdict – procs every 46 sec or so)
• Multiplicitive Cooldowns (Call of the Wild)

The secret is to stack these in a way that gives you a multiplicative advantage. Combining two attack power cooldowns is purely additive — its the same dps gain overall as using them separately. But if you combine an attack power cooldown with one in any other category, it becomes multiplicative (with haste you have more shots getting that AP buff, with agil the shots with the buff crit more, etc).
Now agility and multiplicative cooldown categories are automatically multiplicative even with themselves and whatever else you add to them. So the secret is to make sure you combine your AP cooldowns (mainly furious howl) with cooldowns from other categories.

Best trinket EVER!!!!!!

How Deathbringer’s Will Works for Hunters:

You get one of only three procs:

1. 600 (700 Heroic) Agility
2. 600 (700 Heroic) Critical Chance
3. 1,200 (1,400 Heroic) Attack Power

It has a 105 sec internal cooldown, with a 30% proc chance, lasts for 30 seconds.
That means that you’ll see about a 28% uptime (as opposed to 33% uptime with Death’s Verdict / Greatness).

Do We Want It?

In a word, yes. It’s a great trinket, and it’s fantastic for hunters. Unfortunately, most other physical dps classes will want it to. Different classes get different procs; however, the good news is that the procs aren’t as good for all the classes.
For the record, here’s the breakdown as we know it:

• Death Knight: Str, Haste, Crit
• Druid: Str, Agil, Crit
• Paladin: Str, Haste, Crit
• Rogue: Agil, Haste, AP
• Shaman: Agil, Haste, AP
• Warrior:  Str, Crit, Haste

Am I doing Lord Marrowgar right?

Lord Marrowgar is the first boss in Icecrown Citadel. He’s a fairly easy boss that is forgiving for a good deal of dps slop (even on 10-man after the 12/14 nerf). This strat guide focuses on the hunter perspective. For a complete raid strat I recommend Tankspot’s Marrowgar Video. The value of actually seeing a video of a fight cannot be overstated.

Phase 1: Bonespike and DPS

During phase 1 hunters have three jobs. In order of priority these are:

1. Avoid the coldflame
2. Dps the bonespikes
3. Dps the boss

Phase 1 will be the majority of your dps. Start off with a misdirect and pop your cooldowns right off the bat to get a good start on the boss. There are three things we need to be aware of:

• Coldflame: Marrowgar will pick a random ranged target and send a line of blue flame crawling across the ground to that target. If you’re in the flame, you’ll get a frost damage dot. Coldflame moves at a moderate pace and is very easy to sidestep. It’s also important to note that it’s not a big deal to take one dot of coldflame damage. If you need to get to the other side of a coldflame line to be within range of a dps target, go ahead and run through it (as long as you’re not at really low health). As long as you aren’t just standing in it, you should be fine.
• Bonespike: Marrowgar will periodically cast Bonespike Graveyard on random raid members (1 in 10-man, 3 in 25-man). This can be cast on anyone other than the tanks, and this is your #1 dps priority. You should have a macro “/tar bone” on your hotbar to instantly target these the second they appear. Don’t bother with hunter’s mark, serpent sting, or your pet on them. They should be going down far too fast for any of those to be effective. Depending on your strat, it’s likely that only ranged will be dpsing these.
• Positioning: You want to remain about 30 yards from Marrowgar. You don’t want to be too close because you want plenty of time to avoid the coldflame, but you also don’t want to be too far, because you want to be within range of others to dps down bonespikes. On a similar note, all ranged dps should be in the front right or front left. Don’t go running off to some secluded corner. The coldflames are easy to avoid, and you want to be within range of the other dps on your side for when you’re targeted with bonespike — that way they can free you without having to chase you down (which you’ll soon learn is incredibly aggravating).

Phase 2: Bonestorm

Every minute Marrowgar will cast Bonestorm. During this he’ll spin around (like a warrior’s whirlwind) doing aoe damage to the raid. He will pick a random raid member and zip over to them then stand in place before choosing another member. He’ll do this 4 times, and the same person can be chosen twice in a row. And when he stops after chasing someone he’ll shoot out his coldflame in 4 directions at once (so in phase 2 there can be 8 lines of coldflame out, all over the place).
There are two important things to understand for phase 2:

• Bonestorm Damage: Bonestorm does more damage the closer you are to Marrowgar, and much, much less when you’re farther away.
• Avoid Cross Coldflames

You want to continue to dps during Bonestorm, taking extra care to avoid the coldflame all over the place and be sure to stay at a decent range from the boss. Remember to use your disengage on this phase if you’re too close to Marrowgar to get to range quickly and without losing your auto shots (but look where you’re jumping so you don’t leap into coldflame).

If you’re MM you should be getting 4 rapid fires during this fight (6 if it’s going slowly). In general they’re best used at the beginning of phase 1 (I use two of them during the first phase 1 if it’s going to be a long fight (ie: low overall dps) to ensure that I’ll get all six). Don’t use haste boosts during phase 2 as you will be moving around too much to get much (if any) benefit from it.

Weekly Skill Overview (Noxious Stings)

Noxious Stings

The confusion with Noxious Stings over in the Survival talent tree lies in the fact that it has two unrelated effects, and many hunters mistakenly believe the two effects are the same. Here's what the tooltip says:

If Wyvern Sting is dispelled, the dispeller is also afflicted by Wyvern Sting lasting 50% of the duration remaining, and increases all damage done by you on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 3%.

From a raid DPS perspective, we don't care about Wyvern Sting at all. We're shooting the boss, and as raid CC goes, Wyvern Sting is a horrible one. The important thing to note is the second effect of this talent, which has nothing to do with Wyvern Sting.

Ignore everything before the "and" in the tooltip. Everything after that conjunction is a separate ability. As long as we have Serpent Sting on our target, all damage we do is increased by 3% (with all three ranks of the talent). You don't ever need to fire Wyvern Sting to benefit from that effect. You only need Serpent Sting on your target -- which we're keeping up anyway -- and all the rest of your damage is boosted by 3%. That's why every SV hunter has that talent!

Week Skill Overview

I would like to introduce a new weekly Section about some "misunderstood" hunter's abilities and bring light to the darkness around them and a new random (depends on how often they release new content)

Am I doing .... right?

So without further ado..

Welcome to Weekly Skill Overview

(I know quite lame title but oh well....)

Each week I will try to spread some little into the little details of some skills/abilities/talents I can think of and note down the best way of using it and why you should use it. Sometimes I might even say why you should never use it, in any senario and for whatever reason but that's another story...

and

  

Welcome to Am I doing ...... right?

In this section I will simply try to pin down some important things from a hunter's perspective on how to kill raid bosses, the roles a hunter can fullfill and almost everything about it.

Hit Cap

If you don't cap it you are bad!!!

Hit hard cap: 8%, or 263 hit rating*
32.79 hit rating = 1% hit

Hit rating is often lauded as the stat that is the single largest contributor to our DPS (though technically that would be the DPS on our ranged weapon) and hit is certainly a critical stat for hunters. Any time we attack, there is a small chance that our attack will miss. This chance is based on the level of our opponent. Hit rating helps us to reduce the chance that we'll miss.

Eventually, with enough hit rating, we don't miss at all, ever. That point is the hit cap. Since we can't hit any more often than "always" any extra hit rating doesn't do anything for us at all. It doesn't hurt us, technically, but it doesn't help at all and we'd rather that extra hit was another stat that would benefit us.

Hunters have several ways of reaching the hit cap, including hit rating from gear and gems, the Focused Aim talent, and the Dreanei racial bonus. So for example if we have one point in Focused Aim, we now only need another 7% hit, or 230 hit rating.

Is it important? Heck yes. Every hunter's first goal should be to reach the hit cap. You should always take the gear that is the biggest upgrade, but if you're below the hit cap gemming hit will be a better use of your gems slots than any other kind of gem.

* 8% is the hit cap for a raid boss. A heroic boss has a hit cap of 6%, and a level 80 has a hit cap of 5% (though players may have other ways of increasing your chance to miss them, depending on the class).

Core Revision 6056 - Sumilion

r6056 | sumilion | 2011-05-11 07:11:25 -0500 (Wed, 11 May 2011) | 1 line
* Calculating crit damage is now centralized, should only affect DOT crits

This will fix the T9 2p bonus be affected by mortal shot and also use ranged crit chance and not spell crit.

Hunter Crit Cap

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

I get questions about the hunter crit cap every now and then since WotLK, and the topic of the crit cap pops up on hunter forums as well. It’s a persistent bugger that doesn’t seem to ever go away and is positively filled with gross misinformation, so I’m putting this simple hunter crit cap guide together. Here we go:

The hunter crit cap is 104.8% crit.

That’s right, our crit cap is actually over 100%. The reason is that raid bosses are a higher level then us and thus are harder to crit. So if you have a 104.8% crit chance, you’ll actually crit 100% of the time. If you have a 103.8% crit chance, you’ll actually crit a rad boss 99% of the time.

It is theoretically possible for a hunter to crit with every single shot!

Now, we have several talents and glyphs that increase the crit chance of just one or some of our shots, and this won’t be reflected on our tooltip. In that case we would have a soft cap for just those shots.

For example, as a SV hunter with 3 ranks of Sniper Training, your Kill Shot softcap is 79.8% crit (because of Sniper Training and Master Tactician procs). That means if you go crazy and stack crit, after 79.8% your kill shot won’t benefit from any more crit. Your explosive shot softcap is 90.8%.

For MM, you can get to a Aimed Shot softcap of 82.8% with the TSA glyph.

(Note those numbers are without raid buffs: crit increasing raid buffs will lower the softcaps proportionally – max raid buffs give you about the equivalent of anotther 14% crit).

However, these numbers are all so high that no hunter should ever reach them unless your doing something suboptimal like stacking crit. But the point is that you can indeed have your shots crit 100% of the time. There is no external force capping our ability to crit.

96% crit chance demonstrates how high our crit can get. There is no artificial limit lowering our chance to crit. We (in theory) can crit with every, single, shot.

But…. I heard it was 42%, or 65%, or 75%?

Indeed there is a lot of misinformation out there about hunter crit cap that says we have a crit cap at some crazy low crit level. There are three reasons you hear that:

Reason 1: Sheeple
The first is simply that someone hears about the crit cap and it nags at them, gnawing away the reasoning centers of the brain. Surely they wouldn’t have heard there was a 35% crit cap without a reason, right? And then this person repeats the story, infecting others. Sure there’s no evidence of an artificial hunter crit cap and no logic behind it, but they won’t give up the idea without evidence that there is not a hunter crit cap. Go figure.

Reason 2: Poor Science
Secondly, some people don’t realize that the crit chance shown on their character sheet is their crit chance against a mob of the same level as them (lvl 80). Your chance to crit a higher level mob (like, say a level 83 boss) will be lower. So they see in their raid results that their crit was lower than their character sheet and BAM, the memory of the crit cap gnawing at their brain comes into play as confirmed.

Reason 3: Comparison to those Melee Guys
Finally the most legitimate reason is that melee classes (especially dual-wielding ones) do have a much lower crit cap. When you’re attacking in melee the mob has a chance to block, a chance to dodge, a chance to parry, and a chance at a glancing blow. So if you have a 90% crit chance, you won’t crit 90% of the time ’cause the mob still has it’s dodge/parry/block chances against you. We shoot, so we don’t worry about that. It’s good to be a hunter.

Script Revision 3649 - Sumilion

r3649 | sumilion | 2011-05-01 11:42:13 -0500 (Sun, 01 May 2011) | 1 line
* [Manager] BreakableByDamage - correction, fixes pin and web

This revision should fix Pet skills like Pin and Web which were incorrectly breaking on damage.