Lethal Shots

Last night a guildie of mine pointed me in the direction of new tool for Hunters: Zeherah’s Hunter DPS Analyzer. I did some playing around with it last night and so far I like what I see.

Now for those of you who have used the spreadsheets over at Elitist Jerks and/or The Hunting Lodge, this is going to look very familiar. Hell, the creator even states at the top of the page that the site is “a web based adaptation of Shandara’s Hunter DPS Spreadsheet“. There are a few things about it I like better than the standard spreadsheets:

1. Web Based – Not everyone has a copy of Microsoft Office laying around, meaning they have no way to use the spreadsheets. Even our Mac and Linux using brethren who have Excel generally have to manually input their character stats and gear.
2. User Friendly – This thing is simple. You click a button to import your character and pet, adjust your buffs with the simple drop-down menus, build your shot rotation with a slick drag and drop interface, click the “Update DPS” button at the bottom, and presto. Everything you could want to know about your DPS shows up at the bottom of the page for your viewing pleasure.
3. Dead Simple – This thing is easy. The spreadsheets can be fairly confusing for the first time user. This site presents options to you in a very simple layout and gives instructions where they are needed.

Of course the one thing missing that I love in the spreadsheets is the gear planner. I find it to be an invaluable tool during raids to quickly see whether I want to roll on something or not.

I do have one complaint though. I want to know which version of the spreadsheet the site is based off of or if it is taking off down its own development path (I sincerely hope that isn’t the case).

So go check out the site, play with it some, and come back and let me know what you think of it. Leave your opinions, tips, etc. in the comments.

Maintenance today, might as well put my thoughts to screen while waiting for the servers to come back up.

• Dual specs are fun. Now Blizz just needs to give us triple specs to make me really happy.
• Not much WoW playing lately. But I have been playing Guitar Hero. Didn’t think I would like it, but it is actually pretty fun.
• I’m still on vacation, so the beach is taking up a lot of my time. But I’m ok with that.
• I think I finally have specs ironed out for my Hunter. I’ve been putting off spending any talents points on him until I had it all figured out.
• I’m liking the numbers the spreadsheet is showing from the changes in the patch. In-game testing is looking real promising too. I can’t wait to see what kind of numbers I do in a real raid environment.

That’s all for now, time for me to get back to the sand and the waves.

Ghostcrawler announced yesterday that Blizzard recognizes their screw-up trying to balance Hunters and that they plan to fix us before 3.1 hits. Now I’m not going to analyze everything he said, Brigwyn already did a great job of that here. One thing that I wanted to tough on was brought up by one of the commenters on Brig’s post.

Dave mentioned that one of the largest problems with the BM tree is its reliance on your pet. Some fights are downright nasty for pets. Think the Keristrasza in The Nexus or Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum. He brings up a good point that when a BM’s pet dies, he loses 35% to 45% of his overall DPS.

Now Ghostcrawler has said that BM is the “easy” Hunter spec. Well I don’t know about you, but any Spec that can lose almost half its DPS from one whirlwind or AOE does not fall in the easy category. Pet management while maintaining DPS can be tough thing to master. If he really wants BM to be the easy spec he needs to make a few changes to pets, mainly in the area of durability.

One idea would be to let Hunters re-spec their pet in the field. This would allow us to custom tailor our pets for each specific encounter. Stack DPS talents for some fights, survivability talents for others. While this would be nice, I don’t see it as the optimal solution.

I’m thinking more along the line of buffing pets back up. Along with buffing BM pet damage back up some (not like they were, just enough to make them competitive with Marks and Surv), talents could be changed to also give extra health, armor, resistances, ect. Not necessarily flat numbers though. Maybe Kindred Spirits could be changed to also provide a higher conversion rate of the Hunter’s stats to the pet. If done right, this method could also be used to bring pet DPS back up.

Now I know balancing would be extremely important, and it would be easy to put the BM tree back in the OP range, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done.

Anyway, that is just my $.02, what’s yours?

There has been a lot of discussion going around about Haste, specifically the stacking of it on the T7 Hunter set. These was a particularly interesting post about it at Bre’s blog. Many players consider Haste to be a useless stat for Beast Master Hunters since the combination of Serpents Swiftness and a Quiver already lowers the cast time of Steady Shot to just under 1.5 seconds.

I disagree. Haste is hardly useless for a BM Hunter. Is it an optimal stat? Definitely not. But it still has a use.

What Haste does is it allows our Autoshot and Steady Shot to fire faster. Yes, it is pointless to sacrifice other stats to stack haste to get your Steady Shot under 1.5 second cast time, but it does not hurt you to have your cast time lower. In fact, having it lower might even help you in some situations.

In any kind of movement intensive fight Hunters generally see a decrease in DPS. This includes some boss fights, Battlegrounds, and Arenas. The faster you can fire off shots the better. So the more Haste you have, the less time you have to stand still to fire off an Autoshot and Steady Shot.

Now I am not saying that a Hunter should stack haste over other stats. I’m saying that just because a stat is not optimal does not mean it is useless.

As always, thoughts and comments below.

I decided to go head to head with a level 80 Training Dummy last night to get some numbers to play with so I could see exactly how bad the Steady Shot nerf will be. I ran two sets of data, the first doing a straight Steady-Auto rotation, the second using Serpent Sting, hitting Arcane Shot and Aimed Shot whenever their cooldown was up, and using Steady Shot in between. I followed a few guidelines to maintain some symmetry between the data:

1. I limited each data set to 200 arrows. I did this by only having 200 arrows in my bag during each test.
2. The only buffs in use were Aspect of the Dragonhawk and Aspect of the Viper.
3. When mana reached approximately 20%, i switched to Aspect of the Viper, and maintained a Serpent Sting-Auto rotation to regen mana. When full mana was reached, I switched back to Aspect of the Dragonhawk and resumed my rotation. In the case of the Steady-Auto rotation, I allowed Serpent Sting to expire once back into Dragonhawk.
4. I had my pet dismissed. I feel pet damage should be calculated separately for the purpose of these tests.

A few things to note about my DPS for these test.

• This is personal damage only. No pet damage.
• I did not take the time to set up macros, so understand that my desired rotations were not executed perfectly.

Here is the WWS links for my DPS test:

1. Steady – Auto Rotation – This rotation consisted of simply spamming Steady Shot and only using Serpent Sting during regen phases.
2. All Out Rotation – Best description I could think of. Basically, I maintained Serpent Sting, fired off Aimed shot and Arcane shot whenever the cooldowns were up, and filled in the gaps with Steady Shot.

Currently, Steady Shot damage is calculated by adding 252 to 20% of your Ranged Attack Power (RAP). The proposed changes knocks that down to 10% of your RAP. Currently, I am at 2539 RAP with only AotDH active. So lets plug that number into the formulas.

Current Formula:
(2539 * 0.2) + 252 = 759.8

Proposed Formula:
(2539 * 0.1) + 252 = 505.9

As you can see, this is a loss of 253.9 damage per cast, a 33.42% reduction. But the important thing to notice here is that this reduction scales with AP, in a bad way. The higher your AP, the more of a reduction in damage you are going to see. More on that later.

Lets look at the Steady – Auto rotation data first. This is the rotation that most Beast Master (BM) Hunters use.

• Steady Shot: 62440 – 51%
• Auto Shot: 56339 – 46%
• Serpent Sting: 4785 – 4%
• Total Damage: 123564

Now, from my earlier calculations we know that I will see a 33.42% reduction in Steady Shot damage.

62440 – (62440 * .3342) = 41572.552

Substitute that into our overall data and we get:

• Steady Shot: 41572
• Auto Shot: 56339
• Serpent Sting: 4785
• Total Damage: 102696

According to the math, that gives us a 16.89% reduction in total damage done. Now that may not seem too bad, but remember what I said earlier. As your AP goes up, this nerf will scale up also, and you will see an even bigger reduction in damage done. So imagine a raider sitting at 5000 AP. He will suffer a 39.94% reduction in Steady Shot damage, and if like my test, Steady Shot makes up half his DPS he will see approximately a 30% reduction in damage.

Anyway, lets leave that line of thought for now and look at the second set of data. For this rotation I maintained Serpent Sting, used Arcane Shot and Aimed Shot when their cooldown was up, and used Steady Shot for the space in between.

• Auto Shot: 58380 – 44%
• Steady Shot: 28957 – 22%
• Serpent Sting: 18784 – 14%
• Arcane Shot: 17392 – 13%
• Aimed Shot: 10794 – 8%
• Total Damage: 134307

Now the first thing you will notice is that more damage was done overall, and According to WWS, both tests took close to the same amount of time, and the second test had slightly better DPS. Also notice that Auto Shot still represents approximately the same percentage of damage, while Steady Shot is reduced to a mere quarter of our damage. Applying the same 33.42% reduction to Steady Shot damage to this set of numbers gives us this:

• Auto Shot: 58380
• Steady Shot: 19279
• Serpent Sting: 18784
• Arcane Shot: 17392
• Aimed Shot: 10794
• Total Damage: 124629

With this rotation, I would suffer a 7.2% reduction in total damage done.

Overall, I think that Blizzard is trying to encourage Hunters to stop spamming one shot and use more of what is available to them. The only problem I see is that mana efficiency. Steady Shot is currently the most mana efficient shot available to us, and by nerfing its damage that efficiency is destroyed. To help balance this out, Blizzard may have to rework AotV a little to (again) to help offset the speed at which we will run out of mana.

Tonight I plan to test out an idea for a shot rotation macro that I have that should make switching over to this new play style easier.

As always, leave you thoughts, questions, or concerns in the comments.