I need help

[justinT1995]

Im playing with the new hunter specs for patch 4.0.1 as of release in october. and i am 99% sure im gonna quit wow, ive gone from 11k to 7k 25man raid buffed, and there isnt 1 clear explanation of whats the best raid spec and rotation on any website, they seem to all have different opions, so plz if u play a hunter and know what ur doing and have managed to bring back ur dps to where it was or higher plz pst me.

[iJax]

not gonna get an answer to this for weeks. With all the bugs in the game, the Hunter bugs are the last thing Bliz is going to fit. they are saying at lvl 85 hunters regain dps with the other dps classes. we are just bottom of the tree at 80. I am seeing mages who pushed 10K push 12K now. priest who pushed 8K push 10K...rogues are slaughtering things. Hunters seem to be nerfed by 2K. those numbers will slowly rise as more people figure out how the rotation and specs go...but that is weeks away. Bliz is lucky Star Wars O.R. doesnt ship til next year or they would be in a heap of trouble.

[Reev]

Im playing with the new hunter specs for patch 4.0.1 as of release in october. and i am 99% sure im gonna quit wow, ive gone from 11k to 7k 25man raid buffed, and there isnt 1 clear explanation of whats the best raid spec and rotation on any website, they seem to all have different opions, so plz if u play a hunter and know what ur doing and have managed to bring back ur dps to where it was or higher plz pst me.

So instead of trying to figure out how to improve your damage on your own, you're going to quit the game unless someone tells you how to play your class? Hunter rotations are going to be wonky for a while. First of all, there may initially be a "highest dps rotation" when a fight starts, but when you get interrupted through movement, or anything else, you'll have to revert to a priority system, since when you start dps after the interruption (movement, stuns, whatever), you may not have 100 focus to start out with, and your rotation will have to adapt to the new situation. You'll have to readjust based on the priorities of highest damage per focus and making sure you always have enough focus on hand to make that happen. That won't be the same in every fight.

I'd recommend just enjoying yourself for a while and learn the new mechanics at your own pace instead of getting worked up by the differences in dps. You'll be moving on to level 85 in December anyway, and everything will start over. If the changes to the hunter mechanics frustrate you so much, you may want to try simply playing an alt until the expansion comes out, which can really help to cool off and rediscover the game.

[justinT1995]

ty Reev and Ijax, just annoys me when u put in the work for the gear and it doesnt supply the dps, but ill see how cata works out, ty for tips

[Brigandy]

Part of the problem that I can see right now through extensive testing with different Marksmanship builds is that Chimera shot, and Aimed shot are not scaling appropriately to currently possessed RAP OR base weapon dmg for starters. Chimera shot used to come in around 3rd on dmg pre-patch and currently falls BELOW the attacks of my pet, and costs entirely too much focus to bother with at this point. having 19.44% mastery reforged onto my gear has put wild quiver in the 3rd place spot on dmg done tied with arcane shot. Steady shot and auto-attack dance between 1st and second on a regular basis. Aimed shot is only useful/efficient when fire! procs and makes it free/instant cast. using both chimera shot when it is off cd consistently and aimed shot on the proc every time actually decreased my dps. Another bug I noted was regardless of if you have 3 points in One with Nature or not, the tooltip for aspect of the hawk still displays attack power increased by 234. Either it is a legit tooltip bug or the talent is not increasing it's effectiveness. I am leaning towards the talent not working because i didn't really notice a change in dps at all. Currently my rotation is reduced to steady shot, manual re-applications of serpent sting and arcane shot (rarely hitting aimed shot on the proc) i am able to maintain close to 9k dps on the target dummy with self buffs only. that is with 6k base R.A.P., 31% haste, 48.8% crit, 19.44% mastery and 8.04& hit and a 3328 gearscore. I have confidence that blizzard will fix our signature spec abilities, however I am really bother at the disparity in amounts of dmg i'm seeing compared to other classes. I know very well that skilled player can out perform a moderate player that has better gear, but there is still only so much that skilled player can do in the gear he/she is wearing compared to people with gear appropriate to the content, right glyphs/enchants, etc, plain and simple. A naxx geared mage should NOT be dangerously close to out-dpsing a heroic ICC 25 geared hunter IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM. I don't care if the mage is the world's best. our class need some serious fixing and nobody is willing to make a peep about it for some reason. Patch day warriors and paladins were said to be pretty broken, they got a hotfix nearly THE SAME DAY. Seriously blizzard, this is bad. Every day I see blue posts about hotfixes to every class almost and not a single one about Hunters. I'mm not going to stop playing it but I would like to see some change soon.

[Reev]

Keep in mind also that Damage Meters may be a bit wonky at the moment. Apparently Recount hasn't been recording Kill Command (at least as of a couple days ago), so who knows what else it may be recording incorrectly?

Again, I suggest you not worry so much about what the meters say (especially so soon before the expo, which will change all the numbers), and concentrate more on just killing the bosses.

[Brigandy]

Meters aside, seeing chimera shot crit at best for 10k when it used to crit for over 20k while an arcane mage with gear comparable to mine is getting arcane blast crits in excess of 65k is ridiculous

[Reev]

Mages are getting nerfed for a reason.

Besides, you can't compare abilities of one class to abilities of another. While you have Chimera Shot, Autoshot, Serpent Sting, and a Pet pounding on that mob, the mage has Arcane Blast, and only Arcane Blast hitting the mob. Arcane Blast SHOULD hit far harder than Chimera Shot. If you really really just like seeing big numbers pop up over mobs' heads, you should consider rolling a mage, because that's the Arcane damage model.

[Brigandy]

That's part of the problem, I USED to see big numbers pop up, like 20k+ chimera shots and 25-28k+ kill shots outside of icc, now it's quite apparent to me that chimera shot is not honestly worth the 44 focus cost it carries at the moment. For an ability with such a high cost, and a 10 second cooldown, and considering it is Marksmanship's signature shot, it should be hitting just a bit harder imho.

[Bashal]

I've played around on all three specs on my hunter; there are also some main toon hunters in my guild as well, and we've all seen a boost to our dps. I'm not going to say we have perfect understanding of what the best spec, etc., is, but we seem to have gotten the hang of it enough that we're doing better than we did pre 4.0.1.

I've managed to almost hit 7k dps as MM on a target dummy (average ilvl 251 gear), and around 6.4k as SV. I've tried out BM but mostly just to screw around soloing lvl 70 heroics (and OMG is my bear pet tanky!), so my BM spec isn't really designed with raiding in mind.

The general idea -- at least the notion I'm following, is this (please, anyone with better info/experience feel free to contradict or confirm any of this):

* Agility is the stat you stack now, regardless of spec.
* You never want to sit at full focus. Full focus is wasted focus (because then your focus regen is wasted).
* Every spec has a couple high-cost shots/abilities, and at least one "focus dump" to get rid of excess focus. They (the high-cost abilities) usually have a cooldown, so make sure your focus is high enough (using steady shot to regain focus) to use them when available.

I use IceHud, which puts a bar right beside my toon showing focus; this makes it easier for me to make sure my focus is high enough when it needs to be, and not too high so I cap out focus and lose out on regeneration.

My advice would be to just spend time on a target dummy, and note what abilities are cheap and what ones aren't. From there, you can start to feel your way into a rhythm that makes sure your heavy-hitting, high-focus-cost abilities are kept on cooldown. You may find that you can't do that for all of your high-cost abilities at all times, so you need to prioritize: if I have enough focus for chimera shot or kill command, which does more damage? And so on.

You're using a different resource, it behaves differently, and so it changes the way your toon is played; you can't just pretend your focus bar is the same old mana bar and try to follow your old rotation/priority system.

I guess the tldr is: feel your way through it, spend more time on a target dummy, and you'll get the hang of it.

[Alent]

Keep in mind also that Damage Meters may be a bit wonky at the moment. Apparently Recount hasn't been recording Kill Command (at least as of a couple days ago), so who knows what else it may be recording incorrectly?

Again, I suggest you not worry so much about what the meters say (especially so soon before the expo, which will change all the numbers), and concentrate more on just killing the bosses.

I set about solving this issue a few nights ago, Recount isn't showing merged pet dps on personal dps analysis. The solution is to go into settings and tell it to show pets in the dps meter and Kill Command shows up on your pet's meter.

[Brigandy]

So I think they finally got tired of us hunters collectively complaining that our signature shots were weak a the moment, the hotfix that rolled through this morning increased the dmg done by hunter's signature abilities, kill command, kill shot, explosive shot, chimera shot, etc. I did notice a little increase in testing my chimera shots and it is mildly noticable, critting for 8-10k instead of the lame 3-6k yesterday. It still needs a little help, but I think it's a step in the right direction. As for actual raid testing I will have to wait until friday to do so

[Theotherone]

I've played with all three specs on my hunter and I'm finding Survival is the best for me; and it's taken a bit of time to get used to the focus system and to understand shot priorities instead of rotation. What's interesting is that I was in a 25 man ICC with another Sur hunter and we were both doing about the same dps (9 -10k give or take depending on the fight), but our main damage shots were a bit different. Rotations are dead, long live priorities.

Also, because of the close damage of a few shots, shot selection feels dumbed down (and I say that in a nice way) - SS hits hard in Survival now (the DoT is nasty), Arcane hits hard, Explosive shot now hits fairly hard; although I have to try it out on a dummy, my observation so far has been that you could use three shots (SS, Steady Shot and Arcane) and do very respectable dps.

[Reev]

This is a recent parse from a boss taken after the signature shot buff. It looks about right to me, with Chimera doing the most damage per shot, and arcane functioning as the filler. An average Chimera Crit of 16k ain't bad.

[swollenpickles]

My main has been a MM hunter since the day I loaded WoW so it's probably not much of a stretch to say that I wasn't overjoyed with the changes. Of my 5 80's, my hunter is the one that feels the most 'broken'. Long term I think it'll probably work itself out but right now it just feels clunky. There were obviously scaling issues with certain shots - which I'm not sure why that wasn't picked up on the test realms? - and thanks to focus you can boil down hunter damage, regardless of spec, to steady shot spam. In MM aimed shot is a useless - toothless - tiger that hits like a slow wet noodle, kill shot gives more or a tickle now than a kill, and to max. your dps it's almost like your best bet is to spam arcane shot then refill with steady shots. Hopefully the 'buff' I've read about fixes it, but from what I've read it's not amounting to a huge DPS increase.

Relying on steady shot to refill focus makes pvp a nightmare too. 'Hold on, don't attack me for a sec, I need to cast this 1.7 sec shot so that I can then have something to hit you with'.

I don't really want to hear 'but it's all balanced around lvl85' either because in my opinion it should be balanced at every level. If it's broken at 80 and doesn't right itself until 85 then that means 1-84 is going to be a painful experience for anyone starting out.

[Brigandy]

This is a recent parse from a boss taken after the signature shot buff. It looks about right to me, with Chimera doing the most damage per shot, and arcane functioning as the filler. An average Chimera Crit of 16k ain't bad.

Just out of curiosity, the blighted spores I see in this list is from a naxx instance correct? they buffed the players standing under them with 100% crit chance or something to that effect, (forgive my rusty knowledge of naxx) I don't think i could judge accurately with this clip considering even though I have noticed a buff to the shots, I did not notice that much of one

My main has been a MM hunter since the day I loaded WoW so it's probably not much of a stretch to say that I wasn't overjoyed with the changes. Of my 5 80's, my hunter is the one that feels the most 'broken'. Long term I think it'll probably work itself out but right now it just feels clunky. There were obviously scaling issues with certain shots - which I'm not sure why that wasn't picked up on the test realms? - and thanks to focus you can boil down hunter damage, regardless of spec, to steady shot spam. In MM aimed shot is a useless - toothless - tiger that hits like a slow wet noodle, kill shot gives more or a tickle now than a kill, and to max. your dps it's almost like your best bet is to spam arcane shot then refill with steady shots. Hopefully the 'buff' I've read about fixes it, but from what I've read it's not amounting to a huge DPS increase.

Relying on steady shot to refill focus makes pvp a nightmare too. 'Hold on, don't attack me for a sec, I need to cast this 1.7 sec shot so that I can then have something to hit you with'.

I don't really want to hear 'but it's all balanced around lvl85' either because in my opinion it should be balanced at every level. If it's broken at 80 and doesn't right itself until 85 then that means 1-84 is going to be a painful experience for anyone starting out.

You're right, PVP was a nightmare, I used to be rather good at BG's, however i have tried a few and the resulting massacre resulted in me putting my PvP gear back in the bank for now. I won't even count the 2-3 times I got one-shotted by an arcane blast with over 1k resil.... Come Cata aspect of the fox will be a HUGE help o the pvp end for my hunter, but until then i think im going to stay away.

[Alent]

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=69279

It's from what's his name in ICC. >_>;

[Reev]

Upon further discussion with my guildmate, it's not as simple as I mentioned above. Chimera Shot still costs about double the focus of Arcane without doing double the damage, so he was saying that currently it pretty much only makes sense to use Chimera to keep up Serpent Sting, and otherwise just SS, SS, AS, AS, SS, SS etc.

[Theotherone]

Of my 5 80's, my hunter is the one that feels the most 'broken'. Long term I think it'll probably work itself out but right now it just feels clunky.

My feelings exactly of my 4 80s the hunter feels in the worst place, in fact I like the changes to the others, (mage, dk and pally); however, the hunter's actual dps in raid, once I stopped stepping on Steady Shot's cool down and began relying more on Arcane was pretty good. But as you say it just feels clunky, it's not smooth. I'm thinking focus is not a good mechanic for ranged toons, since auto shot just doesn't feel like a melee swing.

[Hügs]

Keep in mind also that Damage Meters may be a bit wonky at the moment. Apparently Recount hasn't been recording Kill Command (at least as of a couple days ago), so who knows what else it may be recording incorrectly?

Again, I suggest you not worry so much about what the meters say (especially so soon before the expo, which will change all the numbers), and concentrate more on just killing the bosses.

I use Skada it is a dps/threat meter in one. Might be able to try that and see if it records the kill command. But yeah you are correct worrying about dps meters while we are getting ready for the expansion is a headache waiting to happen.