On The Road To Being a Marksman - Part 11 - New Gear and Enlightenment

Last night I had a free night and ran with our guild ICC-10. It isn't a completely consistent group. Some "ten man nights" there aren't 10. Other nights there are plenty of people to choose from. I've only run with the guild in ICC-10 three or four times. The two most recent runs were last night and at the end of April when we first nailed the Lich King to the floor. Last night we had a bunch of people new to heroic 10man versions. Myself being one of them.

In a little less than three hours we killed Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Lootship, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, and Rotface. There wasn't too much to learn and honestly Marrowgar seemed the most difficult. Perhaps it was most difficult because our ten man had two hunters (neither of us had done the heroics) and Marrowgar's melee hitbox is ridiculously large.

I had to swap to Survival on Saurfang so we'd have enough replenishment for the spam healers. It was just us two hunters. (We also had no locks so we couldn't use the pally DI-and-soulstone-back approach.)

It was a lot of fun learning some challenging fights. I also came away with two new pieces of gear from the night. I thought that the Pauldrons of Lost Hope should replace my Dual-Bladed Pauldrons without question at least for Marksman use. I also thought that Saurfang's Cold-Forged Band would find an easy home with my Marksman gear. I was in error. All the numbers showed equipping these as a DPS loss. And regardless of how I gemmed them.

My enlightenment came from re-reading some of my previous posts. I decided to use Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer to change my shot rotation and remove Arcane Shot. This let everything click into place:

• Don't use Arcane Shots for stand and shoot bosses for a DPS profit.
• Pull out the talents from the now less-used Improved Arcane and since I'm [amazingly] still above the hit cap dump them into either being the Hunter's Mark bitch or full bore steady shot which I'll now be spamming a bit more.
  
• HM on a personal basis is a +100 DPS win. I'll pull the other hunters along too of course. ;-)
• Full improved steady shot and rapid recuperation would help about the same with damage, but would work on adds. I may just split the difference a bit.
  
• We usually can rely on having a space goat so I am okay at 7% hit. But I will need to dip into the +hit talents with another gear swap.
• My Outfitter gear addon now auto-swaps gear sets for my primary and secondary talent tree swaps.
  
• I now do marginally better with armor pen gems now than with agility gems which is a first. I'll stay with agility gems in shared gear but move to armor pen gems in strictly Marksman gear. If I re-gemmed everything to armor pen I would get only about a 70 DPS gain. I would also hurt my Survival side. I may need to run SV for ten-mans in the future.