Script Revision 3426 - Sumilion

r3426 | sumilion | 2011-03-31 10:25:47 -0500 (Thu, 31 Mar 2011) | 1 line 

* [Hunter] Lock And Load - corrected ICD

The Internal Cooldown was incorrectly set to 30 sec instead of 22 sec like it should be. This was actually a big nerf for Survival hunter since the Lock and Load procs play a huge part in the overall dps and burst they can do with that spec. Now this has been fix and it will have the correct 22 sec internal cooldown like it should.

Script Revision 3370 - Sumilion

r3370 | sumilion | 2011-03-28 08:16:38 -0500 (Mon, 28 Mar 2011) | 2 lines
* [Hunter] Masters Call - affects pet too

Until recently Master call was bugged and the problem was that Master Call didn't effect the pet at all. When you were casting it, it was freeing you or your target but it didn't effect the pet at all.

After this revision when you cast Master call it will free both you and your pet from moving impairing effects .

Spell Penetration.... is it worth it?

Note: The info below are for PvP and PVP only. Do NOT gem Spell penetration for anything else other than dedicated PvP.

A lot of ppl ask me about spell penetration and why i have gemmed to it. Is it worth it and what's it's purpose for a Marksmanship hunter? Well I am about to tell you.


Spell Penetration – This stat is used to break through enemy resistances. Hunters do not cast harmful spells, but they do cast harmful physical attacks which can cause spell damage. Enemy players that have resistances to spell damage, such as Mages and Druids, can mitigate damage done to them by harmful spell damage attacks such as Explosive Shot, Chimera Shot and Arcane Shot, for example. Casual PvPers and Beast Mastery hunters don’t really need to itemize this stat, as it’s somewhat situational, and in the case of BM hunters, it’s not worth the trade-off resulting in the loss of attack power or survivability. For more serious Marksmanship and Survival hunters however, read on.

Each point of Spell Penetration counters one point of enemy resistance, with the magic number we want to shoot for being 75. The reason for this, is because it is roughly equal to the most active spell resistance buff out there – Improved Mark of the Wild. Anything beyond 75 Spell Penetration is not advisable because the stat requires you to sacrifice other stats in favor of it, plus it is useless against targets with zero resistances.

So if you team up against a druid team you will be able to do the whole damage of your shots since the spell penetration will be equal with the spell resistance the Improved Mark of the Wild gives them.

There are more buffs out there that can provide resistances against hunter shots like paladin's fire resistance against Survival hunters or Aspect of the wild/Nature Totems against MM hunter's Chimera shot. Those auras provide 130 Spell Resistance to this schools of magic. Even those are for a specific school of magic only and the rest shots can actually do their real damage, mitigating Chimera shot or Explosive shot damage is bad. Even in this cases it's a lot better to be able to pierce a portion of that resistance than let then run around an mitigate your damage for the whole resistance value. So you can't actually lose.

Trinkets all around and what to choose...

by Brian Wood of Scattered Shots

Ranking the Trinkets by Spec

Let's get down to ranking them from best to worst. With this list you can easily pick out what trinkets you want to pursue for the content that you have access to.

Keep in mind that this list is evaluating purely on the average stat uptime. This means Supremacy will be always be ranked high, but it's only good if you're using all of the hit rating -- and you may want to get your hit elsewhere and get other trinkets anyway. You're actually better off getting your hit from your other gear or gems and pursuing a different trinket. Also note that the difference between two trinkets is sometimes small, and you won't always see a statistically significant difference moving one step up the list.

Also if you're going for a MM ArP softcap, you may prefer ArP proc trinkets, putting them ahead of Herkuml.

MM Trinkets From Best to Worst

• Mark of Supremacy (but only if you're using all of the hit rating)
• Deathbringer's Will (ranks #1 for ArP builds)
• Death's Verdict
• Whispering Fanged Skull (at some gear levels may be better than Death's Verdict)
• Herkuml War Token
• Mjolnir Runestone
• Needle-Encrusted Scorpion
• Darkmoon Card: Greatness

SV Trinkets From Best to Worst

• Mark of Supremacy (but only if you're using all of the hit rating)
• Death's Verdict
• Deathbringer's Will
• Herkuml War Token
• Whispering Fanged Skull
• Darkmoon Card: Greatness
• Mjolnir Runestone
• Needle-Encrusted Scorpion

BM Trinkets From Best to Worst

• Mark of Supremacy (but only if you're using all of the hit rating)
• Deathbringer's Will
• Whispering Fanged Skull
• Death's Verdict
• Herkuml War Token
• Mjolnir Runestone
• Needle-Encrusted Scorpion
• Darkmoon Card: Greatness

Piercing Shots - Rolling dots

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union
 

The Cataclysm changes to the MM talent Careful Aim and the way this interacts with Piercing Shots has brought up some questions about exactly how the MM hunter bleed effect of Piercing Shots works.

Specifically if you’re just watching the debuff on the target, it looks like every new piercing shots proc overwrites the debuff with the new one — making it look like you’re actually losing part of your previous piercing shots bleed. This is not the case.

The short version is this:

Every Piercing Shots proc from Aimed Shot, Chimera Shot, or Steady Shot crits gives you a bleed effect that does 30% of that crit damage. You get this effect for every single crit from those shots. It does not overwrite the existing buff. It does not refresh the existing buff — so you aren’t actually able to get more than the 30%, or less. You just get the full 30% extra bleed damage from every aimed, chimera, or steady crit, just like the tooltip says.

When you see the piercing shots debuff refresh, here’s what the game is actually doing:

The game looks at how much damage is left to be done on the existing piercing shots, then adds that to the total damage of the new piercing shots — it then takes that new total and divides it by 8 seconds, doing that damage each second.

Piercing Shots Example

So if your steady shot crits for 10,000 damage (for the sake of round numbers) it then gets a piercing shots proc that will do 3,000 damage over 8 seconds — or 375 damage per second for 8 seconds.

Now lets say three second later you get another steady shot crit for 10,000 damage, which will also get a piercing shots proc for 3,000 damage over 8 seconds. That first proc has ticked for 3 seconds at 375 per second, and has done 1,125 damage — but has 1,875 damage left to do over the next 5 seconds. We add that 1,875 to the 3,000 damage of our new proc, to get 4,875 damage that will be done over the next 8 seconds — so piercing shots now has a full 8-second duration, but will do 609 damage per second.

This is why if you look at combat logs, the average tick of the piercing shots bleed is so much higher than it should be based on your average crits.

The 30% Bleed Buff

It’s worth noting that Piercing Shots is a bleed effect, and its damage is increased by the 30% bleed debuff, which can be provided by the hunter pets hyena, boar, and rhino (exotic). The buff is also provided by arms warriors, subtlety rogues, and feral druids.

To Arcane or not to Arcane.....That is the question......

No, it’s not because of Armor Penetration alone. Stop saying that.

*sigh*

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on to the meat of this discussion – why you drop Arcane Shot from your normal stand-still rotation. (Bear in mind, and I’m gonna say this in bold letters: Arcane Shot is still extremely useful when moving. Keep it easily keybound and at hand. This is only talking about a stand-and-shoot encounter like Patchwerk/Festergut.)

To really get into the meat of why you drop Arcanes for Steadies, we have to first learn how each shot works.

Steady: A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo, plus [RAP * 0.1 + 252].

Arcane: An instant shot that causes [RAP * 0.15 + 492] Arcane damage.

Steady is a lot more complex than Arcane, but it’s not too bad. The “plus ammo” quip is due to the fact that ammunition isn’t a damage increase, it’s a DPS increase, meaning that the amount of damage it contributes is based on weapon speed – or it would be, if it weren’t for normalization. This occurred way back when in patch 1.7, and it basically means that for any special attack (Steady, Aimed, Chimera), 2.8 is used in place of your weapon’s speed for calculating both damage contribution from RAP and from ammo.

So in math terms, this means that each shot looks like:

Steady: rand(weapon bottomend, weapon topend) + (ammo DPS * 2.8) + (Ranged AP * .1) + 252

Arcane: (Ranged AP * .15) + 492

Let’s look at those with my personal stats, unbuffed, from Armory.

Steady: rand(541, 887) + (91.5 * 2.8) + (5214 * .1) + 252 = 1570.6-1916.6 damage

Arcane: (5214 * .15) + 492 = 1274.1 damage

Now, at first glance, this looks like a no-brainer to not use Steady. But… Steady is physical damage, and thus mitigated by armor. We know, from extensive testing, that a WotLK raid boss has 10643 Armor, and using the armor formulas from WoWWiki, we get a damage reduction percentage of 41.13%. This means that, with no ArPen or any debuffs on a target, only 58.87% of my damage goes through. Suddenly, that 1916.6 damage Steady is now:

Steady: 1570.6-1916.6 * .5887 = 924.61-1128.30 damage

Arcane: 1274.1 damage

Makes a world of difference, right? But wait… there’s a few things that Steady has in its favor that Arcane doesn’t. First off, there’s the wonderful Glyph of Steady Shot, which is another 10% damage on the top. On the top end, this helps to push Steady over Arcane in its favor, but it’s not enough in all cases.

The biggest factor that can get Steady to prevail, aside from reduction of armor, is Piercing Shots.

We already have Mortal Shots and the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond powering our critical strikes, which means that our crits do 237.8% more damage than a normal attack, due to how RED and PS interact. But… Piercing Shots causes Steady Shot to bleed for another 30% of the total damage it dealt, essentially adding another 30% modifier to a critical attack. Let’s look at what that does to the post-armor numbers.

Steady: 924.61-1128.30 * 2.378 = 2198.72-2683.10 * 1.3 = 2858.34-3488.03 damage

Arcane: 1274.1 * 2.378 = 3029.80 damage

Already, Steady’s looking better and better! And we haven’t even begun to get into raid buffs like Sunder Armor/Faerie Fire, Mangle (which increase that bleed damage from Piercing Shots), and concepts like Armor Penetration.

The summary of what I’m trying to tell you is this: There are many factors that go into removing Arcane from your rotation – mana usage (Arcane doesn’t benefit from Master Marksman), weapon damage, critical chance, armor penetration, and raid buffs. In all things, use your tools to determine what is the best course of action for you. Do not listen to anyone who tells you “oh you can drop arcane at $NUMBER arpen rating” or “oh you have to have $RAID_TIER gear to drop arcane” or any supposed “guideline”. Do what mathematically works for you in your raid setting with your gear and your raid composition.

Marksman MM Hunter Shot Rotation Guide

By Arust of Warcraft Hunters Union

This guide is for optimizing the Marksman MM Hunter Shot Rotation in WotLK.

Marksman hunters have a varied and flexible shot rotation, and while not as difficult as it was in BC, MM hunters have a lot of choices in their shot rotation. The basic idea is a priority-based shot cycle. Because so many shots in the MM hunter rotation have cooldowns, you want to use the most damaging shots whenever you can, and move on to the 2nd most damaging shot, 3rd, etc. Steady Shot is your last resort when everything else is on cooldown.

Marksman MM Hunter Shot Rotation:

Hunter’s Mark
Serpent Sting
Chimera Shot
Aimed Shot
Arcane Shot
Steady Shot
Silencing Shot (whenever available)
Use Kill Shot as top priority if it is available.

Repeat steady shot until Arcane is back off cooldown, then use it, Chimera, and whatever else is available in the priority order. The MM hunter shot rotation is basically playing wack-a-mole with your available buttons. For the most part you’re smacking whatever one is available.

Arcane Shot note: If you have a good ranged weapon (ilvl 264) and around 450 armor pen, you’ll want to drop arcane shot from your rotation. This will make your standard rotation: Chimera, Aimed, Steadyx4. Still use your arcane when you need an instant shot on the move.

Be sure that you don’t miss Chimera Shot. Not only is it the MM hunter’s single most damaging shot, but you’ll then have to waste a Global Cooldown (GCD) reapplying Serpent Sting. (Also, don’t use Chimera before you put up Serpent Sting — serpent is a nice part of your Chimera shot damage!) And an important note: Chimera does it’s full damage regardless of how long serpent sting is up — the serpent sting portion of Chimera Shot’s damage is based on the full potential of serpent sting, not how much is left or how much has already been done.

Note that you do want to use Silencing Shot whenever you can. Sure, it doesn’t do much damage, but it’s also not on the global cooldown — so you can macro it in with your other shots.

As a MM Hunter you always want your hunter’s mark up because it increases your crit bonus damage as well as your base damage. Start your shot rotation with it, and put it back up every five minutes, even though you’ll have to interrupt your rotation to do so.

Macros: Don’t Do It

It is possible to create a one button MM hunter shot cycle macro using castsequence; however, you will lower your dps as a result. Any time you’re building a shot rotation macro to lower you dps… it’s a bad idea. Just pay attention to your MM shot rotation instead.

You should, however, macro your Kill Command and Silencing Shot onto your shots.

How to do Top DPS

Credits to Kripparrian

This post is gonna talk about the basic skills required to do the maximum DPS and it assumes you know the basic of the hunter class.

The most important thing is how you play. It's not about  gear, gems or specs and there is evidences about this cause if you look at the dps for a class on a particular encounter you will see a big variation in max DPS

So what is DPS?

Maximizing your Globals

Maximizing the number of spell that you can cast in a given period of time and how much damage you can do with each of this abilities. Maximizing this 2 factors is what you need to do Top DPS.

Part 1

Increasing the number of Spells casts

The first thing you need to know when maximizing your globals is that you have to know which ability you are going to use 1 or 2 global after the current one. So you are not reacting to what you already done, you reacting to what you are going to be doing. If you are casting something you have to know before the cast finishes what ability you are gonna cast next.

For instance if you have just started casting steady shot and you see that your Aimed shot will be up 3 sec from now you are gonna know ahead of time that you have 1 more Steady Shot before you can use Aimed shot. You should learn to plan that out before actually execute it.

Once you planned all your skill and know a general rotation of your class you want to know the best way to use those abilities. To press the buttons.

• The worst way of doing that is actually pressing the button. Don't do it.

• Second worst way is reacting to a finished cast

When a cast end you notice that has ended and you start casting a new one.

• 3rd worst and most popular of all is to react according to the latency bar of your cast bar 

Although this is better since you take into account the latency the problem here is that the latency is calculated at the beginning of the cast and may vary of the latency you will have at the end.

The method that is gonna resolve as the best use of global cooldown is spamming your keys:

With this method your in advance reacting in any possible error you might do and you will do errors admit it or not.

So as a tip of advice is to macro your most used ability, for a hunter that would be Steady Shot, to your scroll down or scroll up keys of your mouse.

Planning your Movement

In a boss fight it's best to avoid movement but then again the reality is different. You have to move. For that reason only you  have use abilities that does damage or will help you do damage later in the fight. For example you can use Arcane shot or Aimed Shot since those skill are instant casts and doesn't require you to stand still to use them.

2nd Part

Increasing Average Damage per Cast

The next step of maximizing your dps is maximizing the damage it's of the spell does.

And to do so you stack your cooldowns.

Lets say you have 2 different cooldown that 1 increases your Damage by 10% and the other increases your Attack Speed by 10%. If you overlap this 2 cooldowns you will be doing 10% more damage while attacking 10% faster.

 

Something else is trinkets and their internal cooldown.

Most use addons to monitor when their trinket proc but this is half the information they gaining.

Many people use this bar to monitor the procs or other abilities but they usually react a bit later than the time the trinket actually proced. The best way to get the seconds back is having addons that monitor also the Internal Cooldowns of those abilities. That way you will know ahead of time if the internal cooldown is about to go off that your trinket will proc soon. If you have this kind of info you can use for example your Rapid fire before the trinket proc and time them so that you will get the whole benefit of the trinket while on rapid fire.

Another thing is that you have to know is how long the fight is going to last and also things in the fight that will give you additional damage benefit ke Icehowl encounter. When Icehowl crashes on the wall he get 100% more damage so you have to time your cooldowns for that moment so that you can gain and additional multiplier to your abilities.

All the above will require a lot of practice and it wont be easy at the beginning but seeing your DPS increasing in every fight will motivate you to do more (MOAR!!!!) DPS each time. You will find yourself a lot of ways to increase your dps like learning to DPS 2-3 targets at the same time, pots(preports), elixir and food or even items.

Till then Happy Hunting.

Fail or Win?

Lord Marrowgar in ICC

Is this a Win? or a Fail?

MM Hunter Armor Pen Build

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

With the ascension of armor pen available on ICC gear, it’s time to take a good look at how the MM hunter armor pen build works.

Bbefore we get started: even if you have the gear, you may not see better dps from a hunter armor pen build. There’s more to it than just gathering the gear. Also, you can absolutely do competitive dps without an armor pen build, and MM does not need high armor pen or an armor pen build to do fantastic dps.

The Armor Penetration Advantage

 

I’m not going to go into detail on how armor pen works — we’ve covered that in our Armor Pen Guide. Suffice to say that 20% armor pen doesn’t increase your damage by 20%, it just reduces the opponent’s armor by 20%.

Armor Pen is useful for all hunter specs, but is most useful to MM hunters who get a bit more of their damage from physical shots, and have talents that boost the damage of those physical shots and combo with armor pen. The armor pen build takes advantage of increased steady shot damage combined with the side effect of piercing shots and the improved steady shot talent.

The Armor Pen Gear

In order for an armor pen build to surpass a standard agility MM build you need the right gear, and there’s more to it than just the armor pen rating. It’s a combination of armor pen, crit, and attack power. In general we try to estimate a passive armor pen rating baseline beyond which you’ll benefit from an armor ben build — we’re assuming that if you have that much armor pen, your crit and AP must be fine too. Keep in mind this passive armor pen floor is the minimum armor pen without gemming for it or sacrificing better gear for it.

Furthermore, at this magical crossover point, you’ll see no statistically viable difference in your dps, even if you’re a bit beyond the crossover. In other words the difference in your dps from the new build is less than the factors of randomness on your dps.

In general I recommend switching to an armor pen model only after you have more than 400 or 450 passive armor pen (that is, without gemming or taking big gear downgrades to get the armor pen). At this point you should see an increase in your dps if you’re doing everything right.

Some other armor pen build notes:

• You do not need an armor pen proc trinket to benefit from an armor pen build.
• If you do have such a trinket, softcaps for the various trinkets can be found on the WHU Armor Pen Guide page.
• Don’t start gemming for amor pen until your passive ArP rating gets around  800. You may even need to wait longer, depending on your gear and playstyle (the exact mark is different for different gear sets).
• Don’t forget to look at leather gear — you will often find better armor pen and agility on leather (at the expense of int).
• Again, MM does not need armor pen to make it a top spec, but at high gear levels MM armor pen builds will outperform non-armor pen builds.

The Armor Pen Talent Build

The armor pen MM hunter uses a slightly different talent build, which looks something like this: MM Hunter Armor Pen Build

The idea here is to use Imp Steady Shot to maximize your extra steady shots, and remove imp arcane since you’ll be dropping that from your rotation most of the time. In addition, truly hardcore armor pen builds (such as those hardcapping armor pen) will usually need at least one point in focused aim because they end up not getting enough hit from all their armor pen gear. If you’re still okay on hit rating, you probably want that point in Imp Hunter’s Mark.

In all honesty, most MM hunters pursuing the ArP route will want 3/3 Focused Aim. They want their hit from talents (and the pushback reduction is okay) so they can get ArP from their gear. If you have a choice, ditch your hit gear for ArP gear and put more talent points here. Take them out of Rapid Recouperation, or even Trueshot Aura if you’ve got DKs providing that buff.

Armor Pen Shot Rotation

Armor pen builds also use a slightly different rotation than the standard MM hunter rotation. Specifically, they drop Arcane Shot from their rotation entirely. With high enough armor pen rating and the steady shot glyph, your steady shot can actually do more damage than arcane shot. But even before that point it can be worth dropping arcane shot because of the extra advantage the additional steady shots give to piercing shots and through the improved steady shot talent.

The point at which you’ll see benefit to dropping arcane is again around 400 – 450 passive armor pen rating. And again, we’re assuming that you have good crit and plenty of attack power at that point (which you will as long as you aren’t doing silly things like massive downgrades in search of more armor pen).

Note however that you’ll still want to use arcane shot in the following situations:

• Shooting on the move when aimed and chimera shot are not available
• Shooting adds that don’t have sunder or expose armor on them
• At the very beginning of a fight, before the sunder stacks have been applied

 

The Movement Factor of Armor Pen Builds

 

Armor pen boosts physical damage only, and most of the physical damage we do comes from steady shot and auto shot. As a result, armor pen builds are very sensitive to movement.

Most boss fights require movement; however, the movement in most of those fights is predictable and can be planned for and mitigated. This is the big area where the armor pen builds really favor skilled players.

Without question every hunter of every spec should be planning and limiting their movement as much as possible. You want to shoot & scoot — pausing while running to let your auto-shots fire. You want to use disengage to cover larger distances quickly. Managing movement is one of the biggest differences between a competent hunter and a skilled hunter. Hunters with poor movement skills can still do just fine and show nice dps numbers under normal builds, but an armor pen build will brutally punish you for poor (or average) movement skills. The vast majority of hunters to not have good movement skills, as a reference.

This is a big deal, so think long and hard about your movement skills before pursuing an armor pen build.

Armor Penetration vs Agility

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

There has been an increasing amount of talk of the value of hunter armor pen vs agility. The whole armor penetration vs agility debate started, as these things tend to, with the spreadsheet theorycrafters who found that at a very high level of armor pen, and with the right armor pen trinkets, armor pen would actually be a better stat point for point than agility.

What’s the Armor Pen Cap?

Right now it’s about 1400 armor penetration. That’s right, 1,400. You now need a crazy amount of armor pen for it to be worth your while, on the other hand our top end loot now has a crazy amount of armor pen on it, making it possible to actually hardcap.

Is Armor Pen Better Than Agility?

 

For the majority of hunters the answer is no. Agility is better than armor pen (for MM and SV). You should not use armor pen gems, and you should not use armor pen food – you should stack agility. You will do less damage stacking armor pen than if you use agility/attack power in those slots. Obviously BM hunters prefer attack power over agility or armor pen.

However, at a certain high gear levels armor pen does actually surpass agility and you can do more dps by stacking armor pen. The exact number varies depending on your specific gear (’cause there’s more to it than just the ArP) but figure in general somewhere around 800 passive ArP rating from gear (not procs) is needed before armor pen becomes better than agility.

But wait, there’s more:

Because armor pen only benefits our physical shots and not our magical shots, the armor pen versus agility rule only works if you are MM – who have a lot more physical damage. Furthermore, since most of our physical damage is in the form of autoshot and steady shot, we only get the full advantage on fight in which we can stand still a lot. The armor pen advantage works best for hunter who are very skilled at managing their movement (and managing movement is a key skill for all hunters). And you will want a special talent build to take advantage of that (with Imp Steady Shot and no imp arcane) and  remove arcane shot from your rotation except in special circumstances like running shots when nothing else is available.

You can see more details in the WHU MM Armor Pen Build guide.

And even then, if you’re in a fight where you have to move a lot or need to manage multiple target dps (or aoe) the armor pen route may yield lower dps.

How Much Better Is It?

 

If you can get the gear, the armor pen vs agility is significantly better if you can manage your movement well. You can be competitive without explicitly optimizing for it, however.