Kheldul's Hunter DPS Tips and Tricks Roundup

I hope you enjoyed my not-so-typical hunter DPS tips. They were mostly about behavior and excluded any talk of gear, enchants, gems, glyphs, flasks, or even shot selection specific to a hunter talent tree. Don't worry - This is not a going out of business sale!

Here's the round-up.

Tip #1: Maximize Yer Powerhouse Cooldowns


Tip #2: Use That In-Combat Pot


Tip #3: Don't Cheap Out


Tip #4: Buff That Pet!


Tip #5: Time on Target and Movement


Tip #6: Pre-Combat Pottin'


Tip #7: Network Latency


Tip #8: Low FPS FTL


Tip #9: Strategies and Situational Awareness


Tip #10: Minimize the Viper


Tip #11: Pet Time on Target


Tip #12: Maur DoTs!


Tip #14: Go Forth and Multiply


Tip #15: Be a Leech


Tip #16: Kill It Dead


Tip #17: Small Pauses Aren't Always Bad


Tip #18: Mind Your Peripherals


Tip #19: DPS for Dummies


Tip #20: A Room With a View


Tip #21: Macros and Saving Steps


Tip #22: The Skin Is Always Greener


Tip #23: KISS


Tip #24: Taking a Metered Approach


Tip #25: Timing Autoshot


Tip #26: Pet Auto-Casts


Tip #27: See What You Need

Kheldul's Hunter DPS Tip #24: Taking a Metered Approach

Tip #24: Taking a Metered Approach
Should you make use of the Recount addon? Should you use the WWS combat log visualization website? What about WorldofLogs? The answer is yes, yes, and ... yes.

Recount is far more than "who is on top of the meters". You can drill into it and find out your shot distribution and further in for %miss, %crit. You can make sure your pet is doing the damage types it should. You can look at it for just a particular boss or overall. You can see what other people in your raid are doing and how they did or didn't do good damage. You can see it all as it is happening without waiting around. Please do not stare at it while raiding. You can have it minimized and look at it after a fight. Please do not share or spam the meters.

wowwebstats.com (AKA WWS) allows you to upload your normal raw combat.log. So does WorldofLogs.com. Both provide incredibly fascinating views and explorations of the data. In order to use it, you do need to have the combat.log file. You start writing to the combat log file by typing /combatlog. You also stop writing to the combat log file by typing /combatlog. If you have it on too long or don't delete the file after you're done with it, then you'll need to edit the file with a reasonable text editing program. Just make sure to have complete lines. If you always want to generate a combat log for a particular instance (or zone), you can use a great little addon called clsaver. It allows you to permanently toggle combat logging of an instance or zone.

Both websites show you aggregate information, but also let you slice and dice the information down to the boss, the player, and/or even the spell or spell effect. You can see who took how many ticks of standing in fire, how effective an auto-shot is, or even how many times your trinket proc'd. You can also see other hunters on other servers on the same bosses and look at what they did. I should also add that worldoflogs.com has great time-series graphs to see how a fight went over time. This lets you see how, when, and how often you spike your DPS.

Kheldul's Hunter DPS Tip #11: Pet Time on Target

Tip 11: Pet Time on Target
Nothing makes me wince more than seeing a hunter with their pet by their side in the middle of a standard fight. And no, I'm not talking about things like Mimiron and Kel'Thuzad. (I will recall my pet a ton in those fights.) Your pet should be DPS'ng. It should not be by your side.

Except on some careful occasions and times when you'll need to pull your pet out, you most likely should not have your pet on passive. You want your pet on defensive. Is that a controversial statement? The reason is that you don't want to have to constantly send your pet "back in". It's both an extra button press for you, and it's travel time away and to the fight. What else? The pet talents, dash and charge are very good to minimizing your pet's downtime. They behave quite well on autocast. Charge can have a slight downside if a mob is being repositioned but doesn't affect bosses. Remember that pet movement is your overall dps loss.

In further effort to minimize pet movement time, you can park your pet closer to where a boss will be pulled to. Don't park it exactly where the tank will stand. You don't want the pet cleaved or one-shotted. Park it closer than your outfield position and closer to where the back of the boss will be.

Kheldul's Unspoken Hunter DPS Tips Spoken

Everyone knows you need gear, proper enchants, proper gems, glyphs, flasks, food buffs, and a good understanding of shot selection. I've seen positive changes in that area double and even triple hunter's damage dealing. I've spoken about them before, and so have at least 30% of the hunter blogs out there.

All of that is important, but there's a lot more to maximizing the DPS you bring. Some of it is behavior. Some of it is prep. Good play, ability use, and tricks can squeak out a bunch more dps. And sadly, some of it is hardware. Has this all been said before? I imagine so.

Over the next few days I'll be releasing DPS tips. For many of you, these are just good reminders. They are mostly off the cuff and not intended to cover everything. In fact, I'm leaving out all the niche areas of different talented spells, gear min-maxing, and shot prioritization. I'm taking that you already know what you're doing or at least know what you're not doing in those areas. These tips are the extras.

The first will appear this evening. Then I'll let one fly each morning and evening.

Atonement

I'm not a guild-hopper. I'm really anything but that. I spent two years in one and three in another. I really loved both guilds. I spent the past couple weeks in a ten man guild, made entirely of people who came from the previous guild.

We had about 15 good solid raiders in the 10-man guild to ensure it would succeed. None of us had any interest in recruiting any more. And then one, two, three of those people left or were out on extended unknown breaks. And in a very short period of time, raids dwindled to nothing. More people left. There had only been 8 raiders logging in at all in a week's time. I was alone in guild a few nights last week. There was nobody to talk to about it. Things weren't viable. The writing was on the wall. Maybe even in neon letters.

I was being asked to pug some raids. I was also being asked to join one of the most long-lived raiding guilds on the server. And asked and asked. The guild had eleven people I already knew. Some of whom I know their real names better than their character names. My work buddy also belonged to the guild years ago and told me the GM was great and the guild was a perfect match. However, my raiding friends weren't there. But they weren't anywhere anymore. There wasn't anyone to talk to about it in guild. There wasn't even anyone to see my /gquit.

Within about 30secs of accepting the ginvite I was receiving a raid invite and summon. I didn't do anything dumb, dps'd only what I should, when I should, and how fast I should, got Misdirects to the tanks (and not healers!), and tossed some good damage. I know the other competitive hunter pretty well. He is marksman and the class leader. He's exceptionally well geared and will probably put me to shame next time.

Now all I need to wrangle is the new raid night schedule.

Lock and Load Procs are Up

Totally anecdotal but interesting. Pre-patch 3-1/2 hour raid: 41 LnL procs. Post-patch 3-1/2 hour raid over many of the same bosses: 89 LnL procs. You can see the difference in Explosive Shots. This is for the whole raid, not just bosses.

Survival DPS on Hodir

I wasn't being a pig about dps. I didn't have a feral buff or good totems. We were just trying to take him down cleanly. I was using toasty fires, and the electrical crit buff, and a few rare occasions the boomkin pillar. Again, I wasn't being gross about it. I'd grab the electrical buff if it was within 10' of me. I'd run to the toasty fire to help contribute some boss debuff stacks for the ranged casters (with my ES "spell"). I'd move maybe 5' to get in a haste pillar.

Explosive Shot is pretty nice. As you can see ES crit 64% of the time which accounted for 87% of all the ES damage.



Images and combatlog analysis courtesy of World of Logs.

Two notes:

1) For the record because of the way the buffs work on Hodir, boomkins can completely rock and shatter the dps charts. With all three buffs and a full fire debuff stack on the boss, they can hit 12k dps.
2) Like Thaddius, pets don't enjoy many buffs and so pet dps classes will lag behind other classes by comparison.

Gear Sets

I'm a gear hound. I have all sorts of situational gear sets. I've always been like this. I used to use ItemRack. Now it's Outfitter.

I have on my person at all times gear for; my main DPS set, my experimental DPS set (usually not hit-capped), my PvP set (currently around 800 resilience), my mana restore trinket for farming, my pet tanking set, my pet instance solo tanking set, my tuxedo set (for weddings and other formal events), my party set (dual beer mugs, nice glasses, etc) and my frost resist set. Of course my frost resist set should have a major and minor setting.

That sounds like a lot, right? Well there used to be more overlaps in sets. Now there is less. But back in the lvl 60s and 70s, I had graduated Fire, Nature, and Shadow resist sets (high and medium resist levels). I had a melee set. (Remember hug-the-Annihilators in MC?) I had mana regen sets. I had a set for raid dps. I had a set for normal instances. And then I also had party sets.

Yes, it was insane. But I could range tank stuff that only did Nature damage. Or Fire damage. It was pretty cool. People knew. People rolled their eyes. But it was actually somewhat practical. Thanks to the long-spaced in-combat pulse, I could pull all the aggro I could on the nature-damaging shaman helping High King Maulgar and range tank him. Then when he was dead, I could FD and quickly hit my ItemRack dps set, spring up and dps HKM. Most of the time that would work pretty well.

I could also tank Fire Lords back in the MC days. That was a hoot. I went back to MC early in the lvl 80 phase. I still had my Fire Resist set. I put it on and melee'd Baron Geddon and never left for his pulses. I just resisted everything.

So I tried out my current experimental raid DPS set in Ulduar last night. It was a continuation so we had some harder bosses. My experimental set has two T7.5 and one T8 and one T8.5. It also flips out a chest for a slightly better chest with less hit since the T8 has some hit. So I get the pet bonus and the serpent sting bonus. I get a little less crit. I am around +7.5% hit. I have a fair amount more AP. No, I know I'm not Marksman spec. So I wasn't expecting much from the experiment. I was monitoring it closely with Recount. Here are the results:

Non-experiemental, hit-capped, easy bosses, some movement:



Experimental, slightly less than hit-capped, harder bosses, almost constant movement:


I was not expecting them to be close. I thought the tier-8 would LOSE. Given the movement challenges, and looking at the numbers, the SrS wasn't too bad. I am tempted to see what my numbers would look like as Marksman.

Neat Feature on WWS

Neat feature on WWS. Drill in on your character and then click on Buffs & Debuffs. It will show uptime of proc/use type items. If you narrow it to just a particular boss it is most valuable. Unfortunately for me it doesn't show my providing Replenishment uptime. If it did, I could toy with my talent points and find a good break point. At the moment, I don't know if I'm at 100% or 31% uptime. :-/ I'd like to see if I can reasonably trim Hunting Party down to rank 1. Or at least know if my rank 2 is doing the job.

Raiding Naxx

Maybe it's just this week. I've been on a never-ending treadmill of things to do. Every time something is achieved a new thing I need to take care of comes up. And the pager has been less than silent. So that doesn't allow one to really enjoy Wow.. or anything perhaps.

So, while we had a fairly good run in Naxx, my heart just wasn't in it. I even played around in Gothik for the first minute and just didn't DPS, but just ran around and danced on the walls. Things were going a little slow. The group make up was off. (Five tanks!) And of course maybe the content is just less than exciting.

There was one interesting thing we did. Normally on 4-Horsemen, we have the tanks taunt-twist the front two horsemen, while equal amounts of dps burn them both. (While of course just tank-heal-switching in the back.) Well this time we just stacked all our dps on the metor guy with one tank+heal on the front right guy. We burned the front left guy down in two stacks, moved to the front right guy, burned him in four stacks and then spread out and burned the back guys. It was certainly faster. No achievement, but neat.

Looking at my WWS report, I had one missed shot with my 7.99% to hit, and my pet stayed the same as last week with about 7% miss. (Oh, and don't look at non-boss fights. The person logging was also running master loot so he wasn't in range of most trash.) Of course the +hit issue is all moot with new loot. I moved up one step with ranged weapon and pants. I was reluctant to leave my gun, but this is the second-best in the game. And it has +hit. Enough such that I replaced another gem with +16 agility. At least the best is a gun and something to look forward toward. Dwaves and guns are just meant to be. The pants were also a little difficult. It's another break of my T7.5 set. But again, they're a 9dps up according to the spreadsheet.

One of those pony sticks

Nope! Not the awesome one. But it is funny looking with a red glow on it nonetheless. Is nonetheless even a word?

Cleared four wings of Naxx last night. Not our fastest for sure, but we got Thaddius down with two people who hadn't seen the fight before. Also had a Pally healer switch to tank, and a pally tank mostly in blues as another tank. Luckily, we had a regular OT/MT as MT. Our stand-in tanks did great. A little goosey on Patchwerk, but that's not the easiest to walk into. We also had strange imbalance. A bumper-crop of hunters (BMx2, MMx1, SVx2) and boomkins. Not our normal fare.

Arrowsong dropped again last night. I passed. I really should get it ... just like guns a little more. Okay. A lot more. However it would be a fairly decent up. It'd take away some more of my +hit gems too.

Here's a WWS if you like to chew. I'm Phobos. Oh, and I and three others got instaGlib'd on 4 Horsemen half-way through. I was at nearly full health. I was only getting stacks from the back-right horseman. Had two stacks ... was thinking of where to run and not hit black circles on the other side, and then boom! Took a 116,846 Holy damage hit.

EDIT: I forgot anonymous WWS change the names each time you go to it. So... ummm. I'm the hunter that did 4845 dps on the sketchy Patchwerk kill. We were MD'ng like mad for the novice Pally MT... had to brez him once or twice... I was eventually trap-dancing, but there was no calm watch-the-cooldowns rhythm.

Slightly different talents, different rotation

I bit the bullet and took one point in Careful Aim and took Aimed Shot. WWS... it seems better. I'm Callisto -- presuming it doesn't change the name around. However, different buffs, nobody else replenishing, etc. I wasn't really trying to max dps, I was mostly trying to get a feel for the cooldowns and whether to pause for specials or slam each as its up. I'm thinking I may slam if I'm not trap-dancing. My LnL doesn't proc anywhere near as much as I'd like. So waiting a little bit to clear it out isn't the worst.

Razuvious is a good one.. I was at 31 yards the whole fight and must have had my friendly Draenei in my group for the +hit. The Four Horsemen isn't a great one to look at. I was in the back tanking with my pet (wearing PvP gear). We started quite late and had several prolonged DCs, so we didn't really go anywhere.

Boy I sure could use a new helm.

Post Stealth Explosive Shot Nerf WWS

Too many variables. I have different gear than when I last hit on Patchwerk. I have different raid buffs. I had a different positioning strategy. So even looking at the individual Explosive Shot damage isn't possible.

WRT positioning, I decided to forgo my Heroic Presence friends and move to where I was within 30 yards of my Feral friend and other melee-based buffs, but greater than 30 yards away from Patchwerk. For me, this put me all alone almost in the slime by slime-frogger.



I didn't do too badly. I think the loss of 1% hit was more than mitigated by the large extra crit % buffs. I still need to remember I wont always have a Heroic Presence friend.

Jumping In With Two Feet

So, I decided to give SV a try. Because I was solo at home, I had to get my kids in bed before raid time. This left me about 45mins with a target dummy to get a mod going and try some rotations, fix some macros, nuke BWrath as a glyph and do all my talents and pet talents. I didn't bother swapping gear around, re-enchanting, or re-gemming.

I didn't do tooooo bad. But it is the first time I wasn't on top. If I stayed BM I might not have been on top either, but in this way I did get some Replenishment on the table. I definitely didn't trap-dance as well as I'm sure I could. And my rotations weren't the smoothest. There also seemed to be a change in the boss hitboxes that made trapping a little more difficult. Maybe I'm imagining that.

And yeah, my UI is a mess. I was just trying to get that LnL proc and ES dot easily visible.

Oh, and here's my UI while in raid but not in combat:



Oh! And I should mention that in 4 years of playing, I've never had more than a tiny number of talent points in the survival tree.

Oh! Oh! I should also mention that I got a decent polearm tonight. I'm not equipping it yet because I haven't gotten it enchanted.

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.