Classic Tips inc

I plan on going through my two dozen hunter DPS tips -- clean them off -- prune them for patch differences -- and lay them out once again all nice and pretty.

Water No More

My DNS server was under water thanks to a basement rack in the lovely north-east and Hurricane Irene. But we are back in action once again!

Which Hunter Spec Is Best? (OMFG!)

Despite my inner voice yelling, "OMFG! Don't go there!" I'm feeling the need to "help".  Sure you wouldn't want to "help" a random stranger and suggest things they should be doing in a 5man or PUG raid.  It won't be taken constructively.  My rational side however is telling me that people visiting a site called "Hunter DPS" want to know these things.

The below graphs show the average DPS of hunters of a given talent tree over the course of the last 180 days.  The data comes from all the public combat logs uploaded to worldoflogs.com and is parsed and prepared by raidbots.  This data is from all raid bosses.  DPS increases as gear increases over time. The graphs are a breakdown by raid size.

I include the 10-man and 25-man raid data here.  I'm excluding all the heroic raids.  There isn't enough data there to be fair to beast mastery.  And for the most part, heroic raiders have already leveraged information like this and skew the scales.



In the 10-man normal raid DPS chart we can see that all the specs were very competitive with each other in patch 4.0.x and 4.1.x.  But then 4.2 happened.  MM and SV received nice benefits from 4.2 in talents and gear.  BM continued to plug away on its previous course without much benefit.



When looked at in 25-man normal raids, we see a different picture.  SV appears to be at the same level it is in 10-man normal raids.  It appears to receive no significant synergy benefit from being in a larger raid with every buff covered.  BM however does benefit significantly more in 25-man.  But far and away MM leaps to new heights.

Then I looked at what T12 fights MM is not top dog.  I was surprised.  MM is top on every fight even the AoE-heavy ones like Beth'tilac and Lord Rhyolith.  10-man or 25-man ... it doesn't matter.  Mind you, SV is close and very much able to top a particular MM hunter, but the majority of MM hunters do better than the majority of SV hunters in the parses.

Then I looked at the main stand-and-fight boss, Baleroc.  SV hunters are doing about 4k DPS higher than BM hunters.  And MM hunters are doing about 4k DPS higher than SV hunters there:

			31,844.5
			27,329.0
			23,379.5

Take Aways

1. It was true that BM, SV, and MM were all quite close in damage dealing back in the end of June.  
2. Since July, taken as a whole, MM hunters are topping SV and BM.  Often by a lot.
3. MM hunters can pump out enough AoE damage to top SV hunters on AoE-heavy fights.
4. If you're looking at spending time with a target dummy, you might try swapping out one of your talent trees and try MM.
5. But as always, you should always play what you know best and feel best playing. On normal fights, the boss is going to die if everyone is playing well and you are doing reasonable damage.

RIP 11 Warcraft Hunter Blogs

It's been many months since I combed my listing of hunter blogs (see sidebar).  I'm fairly shocked to be staring in the face the long list of blogs which are now quite inactive. Here are the changes:

http://thehuntersrefuge.blogspot.com/
Removed: The Hunter's Refuge - No more Wow for Shaedon

http://www.thebrewhall.com/
Hmmm.. The Brew Hall - for some reason this blog's feed fell apart and it was showing the most recent post as being from last year.  This is not the case.  It's fixed now.  Sorry Darkbrew!

http://theangrybutterfly.blogspot.com/
Removed: I loved Negathle's sass. Sorry if that makes me sound like I'm 70 years old. However her tauren has moved to greener pastures.

http://35yards.wordpress.com/
Keep:  He's on hiatus.  One would hope!

http://mirshwow.blogspot.com/
Removed: Mirshalak uninstalled wow many months ago.

http://www.maniasarcania.com/
ReMoving... Mania's blog isn't active anymore, but I want to keep links to the pet database so I'm adding a link to Petopia and removing the blog listing.

http://www.aspectofthehare.net/
Removed: It appears that Pike and her sister incarnations have cleared the field of wow.  I loved her sketches and icons.

http://oonoes.blogspot.com/
Removed: Short lived and apparently no longer up.  Farewell "It's a Trap".

http://www.stabilizedeffortscope.com/
Removed: No updates in nearly four months ... and those were about Rift.  Really it's been almost a year since Rilgon graced us with his heated dialog.

http://www.lethalshots.com/
Removed: No updates in a long while.  None on Wow really since his site blew up.

http://www.qqpewpew.com
Removed: Drotara has been MIA since March

http://slowwolf.wordpress.com/
Removed: No updates since February from Klinderas.

http://bigredrhino.wordpress.com/
Keep:  No updates since Feb.  But I'll give it some time.  Pet tanking is often secondary to most hunter objectives.  Plus it usually requires that you over-gear the raid boss -- or at least have a second set of the same gear that you gem, enchant, and reforge differently.  I'm still putting my set together myself.

http://www.mmnassira.com/
Removed: Not even a domain name anymore.  See ya "Diaries of a Marksman Hunter".

http://www.bigredkitty.net/
Keep:  Always great to see anything here.  He has sworn off any new posts, but I have to just leave it here in case some arise.

http://wtfareyousurvival.blogspot.com/
Removed: Kordwar hasn't posted in a long long while.

Which Transmorgrification Will You Use?

I'm fairly stupidly excited over the transmorgrification news.  I was just looking over some of the gear I have kept and was considering throwing out stuff.  Now I'm wondering what I did throw out over the years and will miss.  What I know I do have is a very full gun rack.  Now I can pick things just based on their model.  But which?  My gun rack has increased a bit since two years ago.