Monday, July 21, 2008

Hunter Buffs

Each of the 3 Hunter trees brings it's own unique buffs, first lets look at the 2 easiest to compare buffs.

Marksman's Trueshot aura which is 125AP to the whole party
And Beast Master's Ferocious inspiration which is a flat 3% dps increase.
Survival's expose Weakness is 25% of the hunter Agil as an AP increase on the boss.

125AP will increase white hits by just under 9DPS, now if we assume a the same increase for melee yellow hits (it will be close) that would be an 18DPS increase. So at a 3% increase the party would have to on average be doing 600dps for FI to be better than Trueshot. However Trueshot only affects physical dps and by the time you have 4 other physical dps in the party with you, your in kara and should be well on your way to passing 600dps.

This is much harder to calculate because the more crit you have the more frequently it will be up and the more Agility you have the more AP there is and the more physical DPS there is in the raid, the more benefit will be gained from it. As a general rule.

Also improtant to consider is FI increase all dps not just physical and stacks (so 5 BM hunters in a group will get a 15% dps increase). Trueshot does not stack and neither does expose weakness so it doesn't make sense to have more than 1 marks hunter in a group or more than 1 survival hunter in a raid.


BM provides the most DPS increase in 5-10 mans with gear.
Survival will provide the largest raid wide dps increase in a 25 man as long as the hunter has over 600 Agil (800 Agility raid buff is what I would considered the minimum for raiding survival)
And Marks is only best you have low gear and are only melee in the group.



However these aren't the only ways that a hunter can benefit the raid.
Imp Hunter's mark with increase all melee DPS AP by 110, and is worthwhile having 1 hunter take in a 25 man raid. Also another thing to consider is having 1 hunter take an owl for screech and then having the warlocks put up curse of recklessness. The owl with nerf that hunters dps but having recklessness up will nearly make up for it and increase the Raids DPS greatly. Also since recklessness is a 135AP increase and screech is a 210AP debuff, this tactic will actually decrease the bosses's damage output.

Gearing for T6 without stepping foot in 25 mans

Thanks to the addition of ridiculously good badge, PvP and Crafted Gear it's possible to get up to T6+ level DPS without doing anything but 5-mans, Kara, ZA or arena's.

Best in game for hunters that can be achieve without doing 25 mans:
Helm: S4, S3, S2 or Coif of Jungle Stalker.
Neck: Badge neck or Shattered sun neck.
Shoulders: Lightning reflexes, Pauldron's of primal fury or Shoulderpad's of Silvermoon retainer
Back: Cloak of Fiends, Drape of dark reavers, Dory's embrace
Chest: S4, Scaled Drakeskin Chestguard, Hauberk of the war bringer
Wrist: Binding of Lightning reflexes, Master Assasin wristwraps, S4
Hands: Gaunlets of rapidity
Waist: Belt of the silent path, Belt of the black eagle
Legs: Leggings of pursuit, S4, Skulker's Greaves
Feet: Nyjah's tabi boots, fiend slayer boots
Ring: Angelista's Revenge, Signet primal wrath, ring of a thousand marks, garon's signet.
Trinket: Berserker's Call, Darkmoon card: Crusade, Bloodlust broach, hourglass of the unraveller, abacus of violent odds
Weapon: S3, Blade of the Harbingers
Bow: Crossbow of relentless strikets or S3.


The gear is listed from better to worse, though it will depend on the rest of your gear. Also much of this gear has hit rating on it and anything over 142 is a waste with Hit rating. So there you have it, a list of badge, Kara/ZA, PvP, 5-man and crafted gear you can easily work toward without 25 people, that will let you put out T6 level DPS.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Haste Cap?

So your hit capped, your stacking other stats but the best bang for your buck is haste in almost all cases (Presuming your BM). If your using a 1:1 shot rotation, there comes a point when stacking too much haste can actually push your auto shots under the 1s mark and you will be forced to clip shots. This doesn't sound likely, but it can actually happen fairly easily, lets walk through it.

Constant Modifier's
15% haste from Pouch
20% haste from Talent

Possible Modifiers
5% haste from Drums
15% haste from imp AotH
40% Rapid Fire
30% blood lust
20% DST

Now if your hitting haste cap it's going to be a safe bet you have a drum rotation going so almost always have drums up. As an example lets use the 2.8 speed badge weapon as our example.

2.8 / 1.15 = 2.434 (ammo pouch)
2.434 / 1.2 = 2.02 (talent)
2.02 / 1.05 = 1.932 (drums)

So before any haste on gear or procs we have 1.932s speed, now the only concern comes in if imp hawk goes off during rapid fire (which it is incredibly likely to do since your firing so often.

1.932 / 1.4 = 1.38 (rapid fire)
1.38 / 1.2 = 1.2

At 1.2s speed you should have enough room to get a 1:1 rotation in (if you have really good latency it's possible to keep a perfect 1:1 even at 1.1s).

So you could safely stack about 10% haste without worrying too much about shots getting clipped. Anything above 20% and you will definitely end up clipping shots.


So as a summary if you are using a 2.8s bow you don't want to be stacking much more than 10% haste (or 15% if you don't have a drum rotation) and if you have the DST you will want to be using a 2.9 or 3.0s weapon.

If you plan on keeping viper up the whole time, or don't have points in imp AotH then you can stack an additional 15% haste before worrying about hitting GCD cap.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Ravager vs. Windserpent

First off I should preface this with the easiest way to figure this out is to go download cheeky's spreadsheet, and compare your pets in there. This is only for people who want to verify the math.
Cheeky's Spreadsheet - http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t9816-hunter_spreadsheets_--_development/

Gore vs. LB Gore Lightning Breath
Base Damage 73.5 106
Damage per focus 2.94 2.12
+dmg from 2k AP 0 25
Modified DPF 2.94 2.62


A Windserpent's Lightning Breath only pushes past a ravager's gore 3280+ AP, and will always do 3% less on regular attacks so why would we choose it? The problem comes when a BM hunter's focus production starts moving past 25 focus per GCD or roughly 17 focus per second.

A pets default focus regen is 18 per GCD (12 per second) with bestial discipline (9/6 without), so you need the go for the throat talent to increase your pets focus regen past the 25 per GCD point.


To calculate your focus regen per GCD:
(Crit %) x (shot rotation) (1:1 is 2, 1:1.5 is 2.5)
(previous answer) / (attack speed)
(previous answer) / 100
(previous answer) x 1.5
(previous answer) x (Go for the throat amount) (no ranks is 0, 1 rank is 25, 2 ranks is 50)
(previous answer) + 9 (if you have bestial discipline make this 18)

Or Over-Simplified for BM hunters with both talent points:
((Crit %) * .5) + 18 = Focus per second
(previous answer) x 1.5 = Focus per GCD

Now to determine if a wind serpent will be better than a ravager for your hunter.

take your ravagers DPS from a raid subtract gore (so only auto attack and Kill Command) multiply that by .03, That is the number that lightning breath must increase your wind serpents DPS by to pass the ravager.

Now take your focus per second and multiply it by your modified damage per focus for both gore and lightning breath. If the difference between lightning breath is greater than your ravager's DPS * .03, then a wind serpent will be better DPS for you than a ravager.



A few other things to consider is a wind serpent will 7% more health than a ravager making it slightly easier to keep alive in a raid. Wind serpents can eat mage bread which is a cost saver and handy since I now feed my pet before every boss fight so he doesn't randomly drop from happy in the fight. The other thing is if you have an elemental shaman your wind serpent will remove his elemental debuff and reduce your shaman's dps slightly, rogue poisons do the same thing though so it will be up to your raid leader to decide if you can bring a windserpent with an ele shaman.