More gear stuff + a quick tip

Does anyone out there know of a handy way to link or embed bits of spreadsheets - especially Open Office ones - into blogger posts?  Because it would be really handy.  I just finished comparing the gearset in this post to one that swapped the T9 chest and gloves for the crafted chest and the leather gloves from the previous post.  According to femaledwarf, the 4pc T9 bonus beats out the increased armor pen gearset by about 66 DPS.  This leaves me in a rare condition of indecision, because 600 AP for a Marks hunter's pet seems like an underwhelming bonus, while all that armor pen on the other gearset seems awesome.  Heck, I've got more armor pen in my current gear than my non-heroic BiS gearset has, and my current stuff is all kinds of out of date.  It really seems like I should be wearing the heavy armor pen stuff - it is all the rage, right?  And that T9 bonus is pretty bad.  But still, the spreadsheet thinks the bonus is worth it.  Mysterious!

Anyway, apologies for the short, fairly contentless post.  I have been meaning to mention the "stutter run" for a little while.  Stutter running is a technique to squeeze a few more auto shots out of movement-heavy fights.  A good example of when it's useful is legion flame on Jaraxxus.  A lot of people tend to run continuously for the entire time they have the debuff, but the fire only spawns every couple seconds.  So if you watch your auto shot timer, you can move out of the first fire that drops, wait for an auto shot to fire, then move again.  You can use this when repositioning around the moving worms in beasts, moving out of the way of predictable boss AoE, so on and so forth.  It's not really complicated or tough or anything, but it's something you can do to try to get a little more damage out of times you're forced to move.

If you're wondering why I haven't been putting as much time into the blog for the past couple weeks, it's because I've started a new job, and the hours are pretty long.  Hopefully I'll get into more of a rhythm and resume writing posts worth reading!

Maximizing Marksmanship

I was taking a look at the Marksmanship thread on EJ and saw someone recently suggesting that, even for a Marks hunter still gemming agility, it's pretty easy to reach the point where it's worthwhile to spec out of imp arcane and drop arcane shot from your rotation.  Further, it was suggested that glyphing for Aimed Shot and True Shot Aura and then moving Aimed Shot's priority above Chimera Shot would yield better damage.

The tests that one person posted looked interesting, so I wandered over to FemaleDwarf.com and plugged the changes in just to see what it looked like.  Surprisingly, at least according to a simulated model, it looked like the EJ poster was right.  I switched glyphs around a little bit, but it looked like the highest DPS option was to keep the Serpent Sting glyph and then use the other two glyph slots for the above glyphs.

If you're curious, the reasoning for the priority change goes something like this: if you glyph AiS, you're going to have that cooldown and CS's cooldown run into each other every so often.  CS is always going to do more damage than AiS but it also has a longer cooldown.  This means that when you push it back by the length of a GCD, you create room for more Aimed Shots.  Over the course of a boss fight, this means that you get more extra Aimed Shots than you cost yourself Chimera Shots.  The extra crit chance on Aimed Shot (10% is a ton) also means that the Piercing Shots debuff gets more uptime and more of that uptime comes from Aimed Shot crits instead of Steady Shot crits.  AiS hits harder than SS and that means dot ticks generated from it are bigger.

I also thought that it was a little odd that I would be dropping AS from my spec and rotation with under 500 armor penetration rating.  The usual reasoning behind that change is that, at a certain point of armor pen rating, a Steady Shot plus the bonus damage from the Piercing Shots dot will do more damage than AS, even though AS will always hit harder than SS on their own.  I wasn't aware that I had already reached that point, but I can't say that it was an unpleasant discovery.  Getting the talent points refunded from Imp AS meant that I could put those into Improved Hunter's Mark, which should be good for the raid as a whole.  Of course, simulated models are only so useful, and everything going on in an actual boss fight could negate whatever gains the model says you should see.  It's always going to come down to spending the gold to test out the changes on actual raid bosses and see if they pan out.

The results of the testing have been really encouraging so far.  To begin with, I should note that the bug with the TSA glyph isn't totally fixed.  They have fixed it so that another hunter with TSA on won't overwrite your own aura and break your glyph, but Unleashed Rage and Abominable Might both will.  Luckily, you can deal with this with a macro.  For example, here's my AiS macro:

/cancelaura unleashed rage
/cancelaura abominable might
/cast aimed shot
/cast silencing shot

As you can see, I've also got my silencing shot in there.  That's because silencing does some damage and doesn't activate the GCD, so as long as you've got it macroed to something you use frequently, you can make sure it's kept more or less on cooldown.  It's worth a few extra DPS.

It was really interesting to see how the glyph change altered my damage breakdown.  Northrend Beasts is a pretty solid "stand there and shoot the boss" benchmark fight, so looking at my numbers from it was a great way to verify that the changes I was hoping for actually happened.  The first thing I noticed is that Piercing Shots shifted from 5th-6th on my list of damaging abilities up to 3rd.  What this means is that dropping Arcane and buffing AiS meant I got a lot more uptime on that dot as well as increased the size of the dot ticks.  The next thing I checked was the critical strike rate on AiS to see if my TSA glyph was working as it should.  My baseline, auto shot critical strike rate was about 51%.  I have 3/3 Improved Barrage, which should bring the AiS crit rate up to 63% just on its own.  My actual AiS crit rate was 74.5%: pretty much exactly what you would expect if the glyph was working properly.

The other cool thing about this change is directly related to dropping Arcane Shot.  All of my arcane shots have been replaced by Steady Shots.  Now: on their own, they do less damage.  They increase piercing shots uptime, though, and more importantly for the glyph changes, firing more Steadies means getting more ISS procs.  The glyph of Aimed Shot and glyph of TSA combination then means that I'm channeling more of those ISS procs into Aimed Shots that themselves have a higher critical strike chance, making the Piercing Shot dot ticks even bigger.

The whole thing is an example of what's cool about playing a DPS class: getting to see your gear, spec, glyphs, and playstyle all work together intuitively for big yellow numbers.  Totally enjoyable.

I should mention that Glyph of the Hawk and Glyph of Hunter's Mark are both possible alternatives to the AiS glyph.  It's not quite as aesthetically satisfying, and the numbers seem very close, so I will very possibly keep the AiS glyph, but I do feel duty-bound to test it.  At a guess, it works in a more brute-force fashion by just pumping out more auto shots.  The lowly white damage attack remains the Marks hunter's top source of damage and is one of the few things that's very, very difficult to haste cap, so I could certainly see a straightforward buff to it being effective.  I'll keep testing and post my results here.

Next week's post will be a more in-depth look at configuration of the Watcher addon - complete with screenshots!

So your hunter's finally 80, part 3

Update: this guide is out of date! I'll be writing a new series for Cataclysm.
(Previously: Part 1, Part 2)

Alright, we've made it to post three in a series of four! The next and last post will cover things like enchantments, gem choices and strategies, and miscellaneous tips - but first:

Marksmanship Hunter PvE Primer!

Marksmanship as a raiding spec emerged early in 3.1 due to a variety of factors. The first was that Survival took a couple nerfs to the face, so the theorycrafters started looking around for alternatives. What some of them noticed was that armor penetration had been buffed and Marks hunters did a lot of physical damage. Not only that, but the base weapon damage of items dropped in Ulduar were buffed in a patch to account for the lack of new ammo to match the new raid tier, and Marks abilities make better use of that weapon damage than do Survival abilities. Before too long, the spec that emerged was this: 7/57/7. Following is a quick rundown of some of the key talents and why they're important.

• The talents in the Beast Mastery tree are pretty self explanatory, free haste and a free 2% extra damage.
• The Survival talents are similar, a free 5% damage and free crit on two of the spec's more frequently used shots.
• Improved Arcane shot and Rapid Killing are the first talents from the Marks tree that are different from talents that Survival or even BM hunters would pick up. Improved Arcane Shot makes Arcane Shot(AS) an important part of your damage, and Rapid Killing synergizes well with the Readiness talent, further down the tree.
• Improved Stings is taken because it makes your Chimera Shots (CS), another extremely important part of your damage, hit harder.
• Readiness is an important ability that, combined with Rapid Killing, allows Marks hunters to use Rapid Fire four times in many boss fights.
• Barrage and Improved Barrage are both required, maxed talents. Not only do they give AiS a nice boost on their own, they also drive up your damage from:
• Piercing Shots. This initially unprepossessing talent will actually end up being more and more important to your damage as your gear improves. By the time your armor penetration rating is climbing past 600, damage from this talent should have moved up to third on your list of damaging abilities, passed in importance only by Chimera Shot and Auto Shot.
• Trueshot Aura is one of those talents that sort of depends. Some hunters that raid exclusively in a 25-person raid will choose not to take it because someone else is covering the buff. If you're a brand new 80 and you're running a lot of heroics, however, you should definitely take it. And even if you're, say, a raider switching classes to hunter and there's a Blood DK or Enhancement Shaman providing their equivalent buffs, I would suggest you take the talent. TSA is guaranteed 100% uptime, while Abomination's Might and Unleashed Rage both have downtime. Your fellow hunters and the melee DPS will thank you.
• Improved Steady Shot is the tree's best "flex" talent. What I mean by this is that if you need points for another talent that's not budgeted for in the spec I linked to, take those points from ISS. Are you raiding a lot of 10-mans and feel like you could use the mana from Rapid Recuperation? Take them from ISS. Hit-starved and want to knock a couple percent off your cap with Focused Aim? ISS is where to get them.
• Chimera Shot is, of course, the tree's primary non-automatic damaging ability. We'll cover that below.

You'll remember the "damage priority" concept from the previous post on Survival hunters. The Marksmanship priority is actually easier to manage than the Survival priority, and by the way, that's one of the reasons I find Ghostcrawler's comments about how Beast Mastery is "easier" than the other two trees a little odd. But then, down that road lies only finicky and annoying pedantic argument, so instead we'll move on with the guide. The Marksmanship damage priorities look like this:

1. Kill Shot
   
2. Serpent Sting
3. Chimera Shot
4. Aimed Shot / Multi Shot
   
5. Arcane Shot
6. Steady Shot

As you can see, only one of those abilities is a DOT, and it's the easiest to manage DOT of all of them. That's pretty much the entirety of why the Marksmanship priority is easier to manage than Survival. Some may be curious about why SrS is so much further up the priority here than it is for its sister tree, and the answer is in Chimera Shot. Most of CS's damage is derived from the SrS DOT (which is part of why so many hunters swapped to Marksmanship for Ulduar, the hunter tier 8 two-piece bonus is a direct buff to CS), and a CS fired at a target that doesn't have SrS applied to it is a waste of a GCD and the CS cooldown.

The Aimed/Multi choice is the same as it was for Survival. If a Multi will hit several targets, as in phase 4 of the Mimiron encounter, you should use it. If you're doing single-target damage, Aimed is the right answer.

That's pretty much it, with the exception of one quirk: cooldown management. Now, by "cooldown," I don't mean the Chimera Shot or AiS cooldowns, but the big cooldowns. Things like Rapid Fire, Call of the Wild, AP-on-use trinkets like the Wrathstone, and how those all interact with Readiness.

To start with, I would recommend making a macro that just blew everything all at once. I'd also say you should figure out what mod works best for you to track your cooldowns, because getting the most out of them is way more important for a Marksmanship hunter than it is for Survival. In an ideal boss fight, you would be able to do something like this:

1. Use your "blow everything" macro within the first fifteen seconds of the encounter, ideally after you've fired your first Chimera, Aimed, and Arcane shots, then immediately use Readiness.
2. Once your first Rapid Fire has worn off, immediately use it again. Your goal here is to get everything on cooldown as soon as possible.
3. In three minutes, use your macro and then immediately use Readiness again.
4. Once your third Rapid Fire has worn off, use it again, for a total of four Rapid Fires over the course of an average-length boss fight.

The idea here should be pretty apparent. You're trying to get the most value possible out of the first Readiness (cutting three shot cooldowns short) and maximizing your chance to get another two Rapid Fires later in the boss fight. The obvious danger is that dumping all your cooldowns so early makes it very easy to pull off the tank, so don't be shy with that early Feign Death. The earlier you get everything on cooldown, the earlier it can all come off of cooldown and let you use it again. This is especially important because a Marksmanship hunter's top damaging ability is Auto Shot, the only thing we've got that receives almost unlimited benefit from haste.

The only real wrinkle in this scheme is the existence of Bloodlust. The only thing better than stacking a bunch of AP effects on top of Rapid Fire is stacking the same effects on top of Rapid Fire and a 'lust. Sadly, the timing of the Bloodlust is outside of your control, and in most cases, it's not going to be worth losing two entire Rapid Fires for the sake of having one really, really good 'lust. However, if the Bloodlust is called sometime in the middle, and you've got, for example, an AP trinket but nothing else available, by all means! Use the trinket with the Bloodlust! Just don't delay your very first Rapid Fire/Readiness sequence while you're waiting for it to be called.

Marksmanship pet and gem/enchantment considerations are identical to those for Survival, so scroll down a post if you skipped that part last week. Well, identical with one exception, and that exception has created enough confusion everywhere to warrant its own little section. So!

Armor Penetration and the Marksmanship Hunter!

Shortly after the release of Patch 3.1, some bright theorycrafter noticed a few things:

1. There was a lot of armor penetration rating on the mail that dropped in Ulduar
2. Hunter ranged weapon damage had gone way, way up to make up for the loss of higher damage ammunition
3. Marksmanship hunters did a lot more physical damage than Survival hunters and,
4. Their damaging abilities incorporated base weapon damage while Explosive Shot incorporated only Ranged AP
5. Finally, the 10-man hard mode version of the Thorim encounter had a chance to drop a trinket called the Mjolnir Runestone

The conclusion that this person reached was that, with enough Ulduar gear, you could drop some agility gems for armor penetration gems such that the Runestone's proc would bring you to 100% armor penetration. With this level of gear you could drop Arcane Shot from your priority and use the three talent points thus saved on something else, like Improved Hunter's Mark. The theory was borne out, with top Marks hunters posting numbers like 8-9,000 DPS on stand-still fights like Ignis.

Suddenly there was mass confusion. Hunters at all gear levels and specs had heard that somewhere, the hunters in the top progression guilds in the world were gemming exclusively for armor penetration and began to wonder if they should too. When was the tipping point? Should they respec? Did they need a better weapon, or something more? So on and so forth, and to this day, it's not extremely well understood. To make things worse, they nerfed armor penetration rating by 12% in patch 3.2, so all of the already-posted numbers were no longer valid. So here's what you need to know:

1. You need 1380 armor penetration rating total to reach 100% penetration. This includes gear, trinket procs, gems, enchantments, buff foods, and elixirs.
2. This means that if you've got a Runestone, you would want your armor penetration rating before the trinket's proc to total 714.
3. If you don't have a Runestone, you'll be better off gemming straight agility until you reach a very high armor penetration rating from gear. I would suggest the ability to reach a threshold of 80%, or 1103 rating. Which is to say that the earliest I would even try switching to armor penetration gems is if I reached the point where rating gained from gear, gems, enchants, buff food, and elixir totaled 1103 rating.
4. Once you reach the point where you're within reach of 90% or more armor penetration, you should absolutely respec and regem.

And that's it, really. It's not actually too confusing, it's just that it's a little harder to find the exact numbers than it is to find the numbers for, say, hit rating. Speaking of, however, hit rating will be one of the subjects I cover in part 4 of this series. I'm going to go over enchantments, sockets, metagem requirements and hitcap, and everything else that goes in to maximizing your performance in a raid. I'll also share a couple tips in the form of macros and UI tweaks that have been really helpful for me, and that will wrap up the series. I know, I know: I'm ignoring the poor Beast Mastery hunters. I'm sorry! I just haven't raided as BM since the Burning Crusade and I'm just not up to date on them. Still, maybe researching and posting about them can be a project for the future!

Armor penetration rating <3 Sunders

Armor penetration rating on gear isn't the world's most intuitive system, and dimly-heard rumors of a "marks armor pen build" have been creating a lot of confusion that bubbles up pretty much daily on the WoW hunter forum.

To start with, armor penetration rating reduces target armor by a set percentage. The more armor pen rating on your gear, the higher that percentage, capped at 100% when you reach 1232 rating. It's important when considering this to factor in raid buffs like buff food and armor piercing elixirs, because it's possible for those buffs to make gemming for armor pen edge out, say, gemming for agility.

One of the places people get into trouble is when they take the above fact and consider it next to things like the warrior debuff Sunder Armor. Five stacks of sunders would mean 20% armor reduction, so it seems reasonable to think that if your raid is putting sunders or Expose Armor on the boss, then you would only need enough armor pen rating to equal 80% armor reduction.

As it happens, however, that's not how it works. What happens is that the game calculates the armor reduction from debuffs first, then applies your reduction from rating on your gear. That is: if a boss has 10,000 armor and five sunders up on it, then your armor penetration rating will be applied to 10,000 - 20%, or 8,000 armor. In a way, this reduces the value of your armor pen rating, because you're taking the same percentage of a smaller number. In terms of actual in-game DPS, though, sunders (and other similar debuffs on the boss) actually increase the value of your personal armor pen rating, because even though you're subtracting a smaller amount, you're also subtracting it from a smaller number. To continue with the example from above, imagine you had enough rating to equal 50% armor reduction. Without sunders, you're reducing that 10,000 armor on the boss to 5,000; with sunders, you're reducing 8,000 armor to 4,000.

The final mechanic to consider when you're thinking about armor penetration rating is diminishing returns. DR interacts with armor from a DPS perspective in a couple different ways. The first is that armor suffers from DR the more of it you add to a mob or player. The first point of armor mitigates more damage than the second, the second does more than the 10th, and so on. This in turn means that armor penetration rating is the only (or one of the very few) things that benefits from increased returns. The more armor you strip off of your target, the more the next point you take off benefits your damage. Second, as boss armor goes over 8,317, it applies diminishing returns to any armor reduction used against it. This makes armor reduction debuffs even more important, because it reduces the impact of those diminishing returns. Bosses in Wrath of the Lich King have 13083 armor, putting them well into that territory.

You can read a little more about armor and armor penetration here and here (this post is pretty much re-wording the information found at those links), but hopefully this helped explain a couple of game mechanics that aren't really intuitive.