On The Road To Being a Marksman - Part 7

Another hunter asked me in the raid Wed night if I wanted a particular drop (if it dropped). I had no idea. So gear planning is the order of the day. I revisited one great resource I already knew about and found one I hadn't ever tried before. I learned the answer to the question and I found out a lot more.

The first stop is "hunter-loot.com". You can get to it directly or you can get a nice and easy custom loot list by; a) going to femaledwarf.com, b) importing your profile, c) enabling the best raid buffs and debuffs, d) hitting update DPS, and finally in the update DPS tab click the link to the customized hunter-loot list. It sounds long, but it takes me 15seconds now. Here is my custom loot list. It is pretty handy to be able to link to the list.

It tells me I should downgrade (iLevels) in a bunch of places in order to get higher DPS. Yes! I'm currently doing gear wrong for Marksman. It also points out a few upgrades that I already know I should make. And it highlights how incredibly well-itemized gear is from ICC-10 Heroic. I however don't really trust hunter-loot.com for proc based gear. It ranked the Lady DW bow that has a proc as pretty low. And it says it doesn't handle trinkets well.

The second gear planner I tried was RAWR. I had never tried it before and it's pretty nice. You go there and download it. I re-discovered it after talking to a rogue friend who wanted help with gear planning. To his dismay it is a Windows program. RAWR3 is in beta and is a Silverlight-based web app. Silverlight purports to support Apples but it's a Microsoft library. That said, Silverlight is competing against Flash so Microsoft does have a little incentive to have it work everywhere.

RAWR seems to hide a lot of detail from the user. And it isn't fast to configure raid buffs. But it does a great job graphically. And it lets you gear plan and prune possible drops that may be out of your ability to obtain. For instance: my guild is not going to be headed to ToGC-25 any time soon. Uncheck it and boom! Those items are gone.

RAWR also has a nice stat benefit/analysis. It claims that currently ArPen is in fact slightly better for me than Agility. But only ever so slightly. Since my SV and MM gear are currently the same, I won't be switching anything out. But when I get a side-grade piece just for MM, I'll know which gem to slot in.
I am a little suspicious of both hunter-loot.com and RAWR as far as set bonuses. I suspect RAWR handles procs better. That said, I believe femaledwarf.com and the spreadsheet both would be a good verification step before anyone does anything ... drastic with their gear.