Realm Down = WWS Analysis Time

Oh joy. I get a few minutes to check on a few things in game, but no. Then again, I really wanted to just get "/played" on Kheldul so I could drop it in a post here. But that'll have to wait. The realm is down for the next few hours. I guess this leaves me open for making some posts and checking some WWStats.

I should say off the bat that every guild on our server has been struggling. Not really with the content, but with the various forms of lag and DCs.

The past two weeks lag has just gotten worse and worse. I think we've had three different flavors of "lag". The elderly realm has:

1) Too many people, two few 25man servers. We've seen this for a while. It's always fun doing farm runs and having your tanks all DC. Right? This is an old problem that has gotten worse and worse. Do a 10man, you're fine. Do a 25man and some DC even if they didn't have bad latency shown on their client.

2) Wintergrasp and Dalaran are hot spots, combined with a queues-worth of people on the server. This isn't particularly new, and "only" affects BGers for the most part.

3) Widespread bandwidth shortfall or failures affecting client latency going into Blizzard's colos. I have 3Mbps coming into my house. The traceroute showed a problem a step or two outside Blizz's colo. If traceroute shows an extra 500ms and dropped packets and it's four hops away from my ISP, "resetting my router" is about as useful as re-installing WoW. This seems like a new problem. The concern here is that it was affecting a LARGE and DIVERSE player-base. Hopefully, this new problem is temporary.

So, yeah, it's the beginning of the third week of having a 25man with maybe 18 connected at any one time.

Anyway, so I can look over a 25man WWS from Tuesday. I'm the top slot hunter. I'd just give the anonymized name, but it seems to change. Thursday, we just barely got a 10man going. But even on Tuesday, we had DCs coming out of everywhere. On Archavon we lost our MT and a bunch of healers the first time. (Almost got him anyway.) The second time I DC'd. Definitely not one of my finer performances. I guess I can blame latency being 2-3x what I normally play with. Loatheb I only got to 4k. I've come close to cracking 5k before. My crit rate was about where it should have been on that fight so I didn't under-dip on spores. I should point out for anyone that hasn't done Loatheb before, that dps should group up in 5packs under a spore and get the buff from its explosion. Based on crit rate, I see our other hunter didn't know that. I'll have to let them know.

I suppose this is also as fine a time as any to talk about shot rotation to help any hunters that are looking for a boost. This may be moot when 3.0.8 comes out, since Steady Shot is getting nerf'd on its AP coefficient -- but that patch is taking a long time.

Steady-shot (SS) is our meat-and-potatoes shot. For a vegetable side, you'll apply a serpent sting (SrS). You apply the sting because you've taken a glyph of improved steady shot which bumps your SS damage up 10% when you have a sting applied. You probably also have a glyphed serpent sting that increases its dot by 3 seconds. Hunter glyphs FTW.

BM hunters should just wail away with SS, mixed in with some SrS refreshes. Toss in Arcane Shot or stutter-stepped Multishot while moving.

MM hunters like that as well, but they'll also Chimera Shot (CS). Aimed shot will be more common too.

SV hunters also do the SS, but generally they'll trap-dance to proc their Lock and Load, such that they can get their free Lock and Load Explosive (ES) dot-shots off (spaced out of course).

So is there a decent macro for the base SS? Yes, there is. There are many like this, but I haven't found any exactly like it. Basically, it makes sure you're auto shotting, and allows you to spam-press for steady shot. If Kill Shot is up and the mob health makes it possible, then it'll do that instead. If Kill Command is available, it'll do that as well. It also gets rid of many of the failure sounds such as "I can't do that yet!" and red error messages.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast Kill Shot
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

You'll fire your SrS, ES, CS, arcane, and aimed all some other way. But SS is meat-n-potatoes. You could throw Kill Shot and Kill Command in other loaded shot macros. I do. But SS should be the most pressed button so this is where it needs to be.