MMO Gameplay: Some Assembly Required

Note: updated April 11, 2012. I know I said I wasn't going to update this, but I used WoWHead links for the pop-up tooltips and the stuff on there was missing/incorrect about some pretty basic stuff.

There is a tendency amongst players of mediocre abilities and inflated egos to say things like "just go read Elitist Jerks," as if this advice alone suffices to bring a new player up to speed on the intricacies of playing their character in a raid environment. Unfortunately, the problems with this statement are legion. To begin with, the World of Warcraft isn't going to last forever. I'm increasingly excited about Guild Wars 2 for example, and in the past I've tried out EVE online, Warhammer Online, and Champions Online. The forums on Elitist Jerks were obviously not helpful for any of them.

Even after we limit our discussion to WoW, though, the EJ forums aren't necessarily going to be of much help. Did you want to play a BM hunter in Wrath or Cataclysm, or an MM hunter in BC? Sorry, EJ's got nothing for you. Threads weren't even posted. Or if they were posted, they fell into disrepair and neglect. Or perhaps there was lively, vital discussion going on in the thread proper, but the first post never got updated. If you're new to the class or the game, are you likely to learn anything useful combing through page after page of tendentious argument broken up with annoying ads? It seems unlikely.

And let's not forget that the EJ forums are run by an actual guild, the Elitist Jerks of Mal'ganis! They've been around far longer than most guilds survive. What happens if and when they break up? Will they outlive WoW, and if not, where do you go after that? What if they just get sick of paying for hosting?

Finally, even if the forum exists, and there is a thread for your spec, and it's not abandoned, and the first post is regularly updated, and the writing is intelligible: are you really likely to perform well in a dynamic environment if you're simply parroting information you've read elsewhere? What if it's wrong? I mean, sometimes it's going to be! No one's omniscient, we all make mistakes, and opinions evolve and change over time.

I certainly support doing external research, but it's not enough. We all need to be able to do our own evaluation and thinking to some extent. That's what this post is about, and we'll take it in steps.

Step One: determine your core purpose.

As a hunter in the World of Warcraft, our core purpose is doing a lot of damage per second. A holy priest's core purpose is keeping everyone alive by healing the damage they take. A blood death knight's core purpose is surviving the boss's attacks to protect the raid. And so on.

These are not the sum and totality of anyone's responsibilities! These games would be super boring if they were. This is the central skeleton upon which everything else is built. You may have to kite adds, or apply CC, or interrupt a certain effect, or any of a number of other things. The core reason you're there, though, is to take the boss's health from 100% to 0% as fast as possible. If you're doing that part poorly, you're failing in your role in the raid, regardless of how well you do everything else.

Step Two: identify your resources.

These can vary quite a bit. There are the obvious ones of course: focus, mana, rage, energy. In other games you might encounter things like action points or other concepts. These tend to be sort of the main "bar" or pool of points that you spend by using abilities.

There are a variety of twists on this main resource though, such as runes for death knights or holy power for paladins. Secondary and tertiary resources that interact with the primary resource as well as ability use. WoW hunters of course don't have any secondary resources, just focus.

Even for us, however, I think it's useful to think of one final resource: time. I mean this both in the sense of the passing of seconds as well as the global cooldown. The global cooldown - often called the GCD - is a very common restraint in MMOs (and RPGs more broadly) to keep everyone from just pushing all their buttons at the same time all the time: since everything can't happen simultaneously, you have to choose what you're going to do with each global. This means that I think it's easiest to think of GCDs in terms of being a resource that you have a smooth, constant income of.

Knowing what your resources are is important to keep you from wasting them. Focus maxes out at 100 points, and if even one second passes with you sitting at 100 focus, you've wasted the 4-5 focus you would have received in that second. If a warrior sits at 100 rage and then lands another melee swing, the rage they would have received for doing so is wasted. If a paladin has three holy power stored up and then uses holy shock, they've just wasted a point of holy power. If a second passes by and you don't use an ability, you've wasted that global cooldown.

Know what your resources are. Know what constraints they have, how you accrue them, and how you spend them.

Step Three: narrow it down.

The typo is Blizzard's. Hah!

This step can be easier or more difficult depending on your class (or profession or specialization or whatever) and on the game you're playing. You're pretty much just trying to simplify your problem by concentrating on the smallest number of possibilities. So instead of trying to understand the hunter class in WoW by looking at all three specializations at the same time, you look at just one.

Obviously this decision is already made for someone playing a warrior that wants to tank - they're going to pick protection. Likewise, a druid that wants to heal is going to be looking at restoration. But what about a priest that wants to heal, or one of the two remaining DPS-only classes in the game?

Well to be honest, there's nothing wrong with being arbitrary with this step. Pick the one you like and roll with it. It's a new expansion! No one knows what the "top" specialization is yet.

I'm going to be using the Beast Mastery specialization as my example for this article, mostly because outside of about a 10-minute trial on a target dummy at the start of the expansion, I didn't touch it at all for the duration of Cataclysm. I'm going to be as clueless as anyone else going through this!

Step Four: identify your abilities.

I don't mean this in some sort of arcane "to defeat your enemy you must know yourself" fashion! I mean it in the extra-straightforward sense of knowing what buttons you can press. We're concentrating on the core purpose we identified in Step One, so we're just going to look through everything for abilities that do damage. As time wears on, the abilities are going to change from what I've got linked. This is a feature! We'll be able to see how things change, and how that affects and changes the conclusions we reach.

Base abilities:
Arcane Shot
Steady Shot / Cobra Shot
Kill Command
Serpent Sting
Multi-Shot
Kill Shot

And that's it when it comes to base abilities every BM hunter will have that directly do damage. There's a lot of other stuff - of course! - but in terms of non-talented buttons you can push to make hurting happen, that's all of 'em. This is the skeleton we'll build our gameplay around, so let's start by sort of looking at each of these guys in turn.

Arcane Shot (ArcS): Instant (push the button and it happens, no cast time) - this means that use of this ability will be limited by available focus and available GCDs. Costs 25 focus - that's a quarter of the bar. Does damage.

Steady Shot (SS): 2 second cast time. Generates 9 focus. This ability is not limited by anything. However,  2 seconds is a long time to not be doing anything else, and if you're on full focus casting this will be a waste of time. It's interesting to note that the only thing making ArcS a higher-value attack than SS is the cast time: if SS were instant-cast, it would be more damage to just spam it. Since it does take 2 seconds, however, the goal is going to be to use this one as little as possible.

Cobra Shot (CoS): 2 second cast time. Generates 9 focus. All the same considerations apply to CoS as do to SS, with the added wrinkle that CoS extends the duration of any previously-applied Serpent Sting.

Kill Command (KC): Instant with a six second cooldown. Costs 37 focus. The hard limit on this ability will be the cooldown, while the focus cost is a softer limit. This is going to be where the lion's (or raptor's or hyena's or sporebat's) share of our damage is coming from. We want to push this button as soon as it's available, every single time, and that means making sure we have 37 focus available every six seconds.

Serpent Sting (SrS): Instant, no cooldown, costs 25 focus. Does its damage over the course of 15 seconds. This means that if you cast this again before it wears off, you've wasted some amount of that 25 focus you spent on it. This ability is limited by its own duration.

Multi-Shot (MS): Instant. This is an Area of Effect (AoE) ability that costs more focus than Kill Command and does not have a cooldown. This means that you pretty much just go out and test - see how much damage your KC does, then see how much MS does to a single target. Figure out how many things you have to hit with it before MS does more damage than a KC. At a guess, having never used MS in Pandaria, this is probably three or more targets.

Kill Shot (KS): Instant. Costs no focus. Has a 10 second cooldown. Can only be used on targets under 20% health.

So from this we can work out some basics. You're going to want to keep Kill Command on cooldown. That's 37 focus every 6 seconds. One second of those 6 will be used up by the GCD, leaving 5 seconds.

Steady Shot / Cobra Shot without haste take 2 seconds to cast, which means you can neatly fit in at most two in between KCs. That's 18 focus. The last I checked, focus also regenerates passively at a rate of around 4 points per second. So over 5 seconds you'll get another 20 points, for a total of 38.

This means that you're definitely always going to have enough focus for another KC just from casting two SS between KCs. And you should be starting the encounter with a little over 100 focus, so you've got some wiggle room to work with. This all means that as we're looking at the skeleton of BM ability use, we're going to see a priority something like this:

1. Kill Command
2. Kill Shot
3. Arcane Shot/Serpent Sting
4. Cobra Shot

That third priority is because some of the time we're going to have spare focus, enabling us to use that last second in the 6-second KC cooldown to do something like apply a SrS or fire an ArcS. Not all of the time! Because those two things are 25 focus each, so if we used one every single KC cooldown, we'd starve ourselves of focus. But every few we'll definitely be able to sneak one or the other in, depending on which one actually does more damage (it may well be that either SrS or ArcS isn't particularly worth casting for BM, this is the sort of stuff that just takes testing).

I've decided on CoS over SS as our focus-generating shot because I just can't see any reason not to. As far as I can tell, CoS simply does more damage than SS and it extends the duration of SrS, making it an easy decision to apply that dot at the beginning of an encounter.

And that's our skeleton!

Step Five: flesh it out.

In the final step, we look at everything else the spec has going on, look at talents, and think about cooldowns. This is the part where a lot of people tend to get a little bit intimidated, but I would say this is really the fun part! This is where you've got the most wiggle room and you can play with the various talents and glyphs and decide which options work well for you.

To begin with, we'll add in the relevant hunter/BM abilities that don't directly do damage, but have an affect on damage:

Frenzy
Focus Fire
Bestial Wrath
Cobra Strikes
The Beast Within
Rapid Fire
Kindred Spirits
Invigoration

Ok!

Frenzy is just a passive addition to damage that builds up over time. When it stacks up fully, you can consume it with Focus Fire and get a big haste boost. There's no cooldown on it! So you can just start out by using it as often as it's available.

Interestingly, this creates probably our first sort of counter-intuitive interaction with some of our other abilities here. Bestial Wrath gives your pet a percentage damage boost, and the thing with percentage damage boosts is that you want to stack those with other damage boosts as much as possible, because then the percentage is multiplying a bigger number. It's also a sort of intermediate cooldown: it's not a six-second thing like KC, so it's not going to be part of your regular priority. On the other hand, it's only a minute, so you're going to be using it several times in the course of a boss encounter.

This in turn means that you're going to want to have a sort of regular plan for how you'll generally use it. If Bestial Wrath were just out there on its own, you'd never want to use Focus Fire and Wrath at the same time, because you'd want to multiply your pet's Frenzy damage with the percentage bonus you get from Wrath, and Focus Fire consumes those Frenzy stacks.

The Beast Within, however, gives you a percentage damage bonus whenever you give your pet Wrath. So that makes you want to stack Focus Fire with Bestial Wrath, so you're getting that Focus Fire haste at the same time you're getting your percentage bonus from Beast Within.

Here's how I'd solve this conflict:

1. Even BM hunters are doing the majority of the hunter/pet total damage, so in general you'll want to err on the side of improving your own damage.
2. This means you'll generally plan on stacking Focus Fire with Bestial Wrath.
3. However, you'll start the fight with both Rapid Fire and Bestial Wrath available, of course. So for that first beginning portion, I would wait until Focus Fire became available. This means your pet has a full stack of Frenzy.
4. Then I'd use Rapid Fire and Bestial Wrath at the same time. This gives your pet the full benefit of Frenzy + Bestial Wrath while giving you a huge haste buff to pair with Beast Within.
5. While Rapid Fire is on cooldown, I'd stack Focus Fire with Bestial Wrath. Your pet's damage won't be as high as it could be, but your own damage will benefit from it.

The final effects - Cobra Strikes, Kindred Spirits, and Invigoration - can all be considered together. Cobra Strikes reward you for using ArcS, which costs precious focus. Kindred Spirits gives you a bigger bank of focus to work with, and Invigoration gives you bonus focus you can spend on Arcane Shots! Pretty neat! Given all of that, I would question if Serpent Sting is worth using at all!

Regardless of the eventual answer to that question, however, we can really see the shape of Beast Mastery DPS coming together. The last step is to figure out our talents and glyphs, and the beauty of those is that they're designed to be interesting choices that don't necessarily have a wrong answer. This is where you can experiment, run a dungeon with one configuration, and then change things around and run another.

Just from reading the tooltips, here's an idea of the talents I'd probably try out first.

• Exhilaration because I never really seem to need more distance on Disengage, but a big heal every time I use it? Yes please!
• Silencing Shot. Since I'm primarily a PvE player, the reality that I see in raids is that "having another interrupt" is generally more valuable than an in-combat CC of short or medium duration. Those are really better suited for PvP in my opinion.
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera - despite its silly name - synergizes with Exhilaration and gives us a huge cooldown reduction on Deterrence. Having access to immunity and/or 30% damage reduction twice as often is just insanely good. The combination of this talent and the first will make recovery from mistakes very easy, and that's a huge part of those imperfect first kills.
• Thrill of the Hunt was one of the more difficult choices for me. I was really, really tempted by Readiness. BM hunter cooldowns are already very short duration, though, and in the end my intuition is that TotH will synergize better with Cobra Strikes.
• Black Ice. Hunters are frequently called upon to kite groups of little adds around, and I think that this talent will be amazing for that task. Solo-kiting all 3 adds on the last guy in heroic Blackrock Caverns and getting the achievement would have been trivial with this talent, whereas it took me a few tries to get it in early Cataclysm.
• Powershot has the advantage of lining up nicely with the Bestial Wrath cooldown, which means you should also pretty much always be able to take advantage of the haste from Focus Fire to help reduce that 3 second cast. It's kind of boring! But it just fits in so nicely with the BM cooldowns.

You can see how I'm building all of this up in layers. I started with assembling the DPS skeleton, added on the other abilities in a manner that made intuitive sense to me, and finally picked talents that would complement the choices I'd already made. When you write it all up later it might seem complex and arcane, but it's really not! Each individual step was a small one, following naturally from the previous step and leading naturally into the next one. I'll leave the choosing of glyphs as an exercise for the reader!

It took me a lot longer to write all of this out than it did to see the patterns in the first place.

Of course a lot of this stuff is going to change, and even if it doesn't, some of the stuff I've written here will be wrong guesses! You don't have to - and you're not going to - get everything right on the first pass. You're going to be spending much of the expansion making mostly-small tweaks and adjustments in reaction to patch changes and testing and actual raid performance.

Finally, while the example I chose was a BM hunter from World of Warcraft, you could absolutely use this framework for any class or spec or role in WoW or other games. At the end of the day, the important part is just the thinking, the having of reasons for the choices you make. As long as you're not picking stuff wildly at random you are, to be quite honest, doing better than most of the people playing.

And that's not to make fun of those folks! It's just that they're not playing the game for the same reasons. They don't find the same things fun. If part of the fun for you is stepping up to content that's challenging for your group of friends and bringing it down, then I think this process will serve you well.

As I keep harping about though, I definitely don't know everything! I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on how they make their decisions, what talents they think they'll be using, and what fun new buttons to push they're looking forward to pushing.

UI in progress

Prompted by a post on WoW Ladies, I thought I'd update my old UI post. Since the last post I've taken two breaks from playing as well as spent several months raiding as a discipline priest so: quite a lot has changed. Further, although I've made my UI functional, it's not really where I'd like it to be. Heck, after having taken a look at my old UI post, that one wasn't where I'd like it to be either. But part of my vision for this blog has always been that I want to talk as much about the process as I do about the results. I know it's intimidating to just like... jump into the front page of Curse or whatever and go OK GUYS I'M GONNA MOD MY UI NOW without really having any idea of what or how.

To begin with, the biggest part of UI modification is paring your screen down so you only see the things you want to see. And to get to that point, you're going to have to spend some time deciding what those things are. What information is important to you? Focus? Cooldowns? Raid status? Ability to see if you're standing in fire? And so on. Then you try to figure out how to change your UI to get the results you want. Let's take a look at what I've got so far:

As you can see, I don't have a whole lot going on there so far. I'm still using the default minimap. I'm using the default chat window. I'm using default buff frames. Already, though, it's pretty far changed from what you might expect to see. I'll go through what I've got, and why I'm using it, just by the numbers.

Click to enlarge

1. Quartz. This is a highly customizable castbar modification. It lets me move my castbars around, resize them, add a GCD monitor to them, and (as you can see) add timers that monitor my debuffs on my target. You can see that right now I've applied the Marked for Death affect to the target dummy, as well as having the Piercing Shots and Serpent Sting dots ticking on it. The castbar for my current target appears just to the right - directly over the target's healthbar. Which brings us to:
2. PitBull4. This is another very powerful, highly customizable addon, but this one takes care of what are called frames. You know how, in the default UI, you get a portrait and healthbar, your party members do, your pet does, your target does, etc? Well those are all unit frames, and you can't do much with them in the default UI. Pitbull4 lets me (much like Quartz with castbars) move them around, resize them, add little 3d portraits, and decide exactly what gets displayed on which frame. You can see my kitty (Yann) right above my portrait, and if my target had a target, it would be another small box to the right of its frame. My target will also display a power bar if it has mana, rage, or whatever.
3. Watcher. Watcher is a really cool little addon that, as you can see, adds a scrolling timeline of your abilities. To be honest, keeping chimera shot on cooldown is not as important as it was pre-patch (I will frequently delay a chimer to renew my ISS buff), but I can also do things like add Rapid Fire to my priority list in it, so I'll know when it's available. Something like Watcher is almost required to play Survival, though, because it's honestly the best way to try to keep all of your dots and short cooldown abilities lined up. It would be a huge help with BM managing bestial wrath as well.
4. Bartender 4. BT4 lets me move my action bars where I want them as well as resize them (are we starting to detect a pattern here?). It also, as you can see, lets me keep things such as my mini-menu, pet bar, and stance bar mostly hidden, although they pop into full opacity when I mouse over them. I only rarely need to interact with those menus, and never during a boss attempt, so keeping them transparent frees up a lot of screen space. I also always open my bags just by hitting "B," so I have that menu totally disabled.
5. Grid. Grid is actually another unit-frames addon, but this one is geared more for use by healers. Nonetheless, having a compact and very clean raid-frames area lets me do things like target people for summons, monitor readychecks, and cast misdirect on the fly. My priest, of course, has a separate grid profile, and hers is located right in the middle of her screen and takes up more space, because she needs it to heal.

I've also outlined the location where Omen shows up. A raiding necessity since forever, Omen keeps me from pulling off the tank and wiping the raid.

You can see how, just by looking at my UI, you can tell what information is important to me and what is not. In the future I'd like to find a way to reduce the watcher/portrait/quartz bulky lump in the middle of my screen, and I'd like to make my minimap hideable as well. The chat box does a decent job of fading out when I'm not actively using it, but it still eats a pretty decent-sized chunk of space. Overall, though, I think this gives a pretty good sense of how to start modifying your UI: decide what you want to see and what you do not want to see and find mods that help make that happen. Of course, it's a WoW truism that, for some of us, our UI is always a work in progress.

So your hunter's finally 80, part 4

Update: this guide is out of date! I'll be writing a new series for Cataclysm.

(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

That last little hurdle that a lot of people have when they finally get to 80 is the world of item enhancement. By that I mean everything from profession perks to gem sockets (including metagems!) to enchantments to shoulder inscriptions. It can seem (and is!) quite intimidating, so we'll break it down into sections, starting with the easiest.

Enchantments!

I'll just do this by item slot, and I'll stick to the standard enchantments. If you have a profession perk that replaces an enchantment (Leatherworking's fur linings, for example), then you should of course use that profession perk. And now, on with the item slots:

Head:
Arcanum of Torment (+50 AP and +20 Crit Rating)

Cloak:
Major Agility (+22 Agility)

Shoulders:
Greater Inscription of the Axe (+40 AP and +15 Crit Rating)

Chest:
Powerful Stats (+10 to all stats)

Wrists:
Greater Assault (+50 AP)

Gloves:
Precision (+20 Hit)
Major Agility (+20 Agility)

Belt:
Eternal Belt Buckle (adds one prismatic socket)

Legs:
Icescale Leg Armor (+75 AP and +22 Crit Rating)

Feet:
Icewalker (+12 Hit and +12 Crit Rating)
Superior Agility (+16 Agility)

Melee Weapon (One-handed):
Exceptional Agility (+26 Agility)
Superior Potency (+65 AP)

Melee Weapon (Two-handed):
Massacre (+110 AP)

Ranged Weapon:
Hearseeker Scope (+40 Crit Rating)

A couple notes on all this stuff. First and foremost, it's not that hard to get to exalted with the Sons of Hodir and get the proper shoulder inscription. Please, if you want to raid, just do the dailies. I even did them on my alt priest using a 60% speed flying carpet, before the buff to normal flight. If you can't get this done, then raiding is probably not for you.

Second, where there are options for different enchants on the same item slot, I've listed the preferred enchant first. For the most part this is an issue of expense, as a lot of people don't want to spend the gold or farming time necessary to put top-shelf enchants on a lesser piece that they'll be replacing soon. I'm targeting this series of posts towards the hunter that wants to start raiding, though, so this list of enchants is what your gear should have when you start applying to raiding guilds. Feel free to put Greater Savagery on that Icier Barbed Spear, but you should be upgrading to the same enchantments you'd be putting on raid gear before you expect to get into a raid. Sadly, enchantments aren't everything. You've also got to fill your

Gem Sockets!

Filing the sockets in your gear with bright, sparkly gems is one of WoW's minigames for the quivering, OCD-afflicted MMO addict. It's also what those addicts use to make fun of their less OCD colleagues on the official forums. To the new hunter, the teasing and outright mockery seem capricious, unfair, and downright silly. This is especially true of hunters that carefully select all of their gems to activate the various socket bonuses in their gear. Socket bonuses say "bonus" right in the name, why shouldn't we use them?

There are three simple rules you can follow to silence the forum critics and, more importantly, increase your damage. They are, in order of importance:

1. Activate your metagem
2. Reach the hit rating cap
3. Maximize Agility

Let's address these in order. Beginning with:

1. The metagem every hunter should be using is the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond. The relevant features of this meta are that it provides agility, gives you an extra 3% damage on your crits, and is activated by equipping one gem of every color somewhere in your gear. Agility is the most important stat for hunters, so of course the agility meta is preferable to the critical strike rating meta. 3% extra damage on your crits is an extremely important contribution to your damage, especially as critical strike percentages climb past 50% unbuffed (by far the majority of your damage comes from crits).

Metagem activation is one of those things that can be a little confusing, so it gets its own paragraph. What the text of the meta means is that you need one instance of each of the primary colors red, yellow, and blue. The secondary color gems (green, orange, and purple) are all effectively two gems for this purpose, and prismatic gems count as three. That is: a green gem counts as one yellow and one blue, while a prismatic gem counts as one yellow, one red, and one blue gem. This means that, most of the time, a Nightmare Tear is going to be the best way to activate your meta. They simply squeeze more stats out of a gem socket than do any of the single or multi-color gems that you might find yourself using.

2. Most hunters are going to need at least one hit rating gem, either a Glinting Ametrine or a Rigid King's Amber to reach hitcap, and many will need more. "Hitcap" is the amount of hit rating you need from gear and buffs in order to never miss a raid boss. In Wrath of the Lich King, the target for hunters is 8%, which equates to 263 hit rating. There are a few rules of thumb to remember with hit rating and hit rating gems. First, the thing I always tell newer hunters is "you can gem for more hit rating, but you can't gem for talent points". What I mean by this is that, in my opinion, putting talent points into Focused Aim is always a last resort. You should always try to get the hit rating you need from gems, enchants, elixirs, and buff foods before you spend talent points on it. Second, if at all possible, use the Icewalker enchant. Icewalker is worth slightly more damage than the agility enchant. It's nothing to fret over, but it's worth trying for. Finally, achieving exactly 263 hit rating is pretty difficult, and often won't happen. In general, as long as you're going to be within 5 rating points of 263 either way, I would prefer to be under rather than over the cap. This is because hit rating is expensive in terms of item budget, and any points in it past 263 are entirely wasted. If you miss with one ability over the course of a night's raiding, that's not going to affect your damage a whole lot. Once you reach the point where you're deciding between 6 rating under or 4 rating over, however, go over the cap.

3. Maximizing your agility is the last, simplest step. Once you've satisfied the first and second requirements, just socket straight Delicate Cardinal Rubies. I'm serious. Ignore any remaining socket bonuses unless the bonus is pretty good and attached to a yellow socket, in which case it may be worth socketing a Deadly Ametrine. Even then, check in a spreadsheet or on Female Dwarf beforehand. Of course, you should have been able to cherry-pick the best socket bonuses in the course of fulfilling the first two requirements. Tier 9 pants, for example are an excellent spot to put that prismatic Nightmare Tear and get the 6 agility bonus. Pauldrons of the Devourer would be a nice spot to put a hit gem and get another agility bonus.

See? It only looks confusing or complex on the surface. As long as you follow those three rules, though, gemming and enchanting strategy comes naturally. If you're curious about whether Armor Penetration gems are the right choice for you, by all means check part 3 in this series, where I explain how that works.
The last and final section is what I've decided to call:

Random Crap!

Hooray! This is all the stuff that didn't obviously fit anywhere else. I'll begin with one of the things that turned out to be the secret to keeping my pet alive. I had a lot of pet deaths occur while I was reaching for the ctrl+2 combo to make my pet return to me to get him out of AoE, and Bartender wouldn't let me bind my own keys to the pet bar (probably because of a limitation with WoW). So I made this exceedingly simple macro:

/petfollow

And put it on my regular action bars. My pet started dying a lot less. Of course, the other part of this is that you the hunter need to keep a sharp watch on two parts of the boss fight: you have to watch yourself to make sure you're not standing in fire and you need to watch the melee and bring your pet back to your side when the rogues scatter like cockroaches. If you're looking for a standard raiding spec for pets, I link to one in my post for Survival hunters.

Enchantments, gems, and pets aren't the only things you're doing to maximize your damage during a raid, though. You've also got to come prepared with the proper consumables, the term that covers flasks, elixirs, and buff foods.

Blackened Dragonfin is our preferred buff food. If you need Snapper Extreme to reach your hitcap that's ok, but with the gear available to new hunters at this point, that shouldn't really be an issue. The only other option is for extremely well-geared hunters, who may be at a point where they would consider switching to Hearty Rhino. Again, this is all for maximum performance on progression bosses. If your guild is just clearing farm content in order to reach new stuff, then go ahead and use that fish feast the guild's farming maven put down. Once you get to the hard stuff though, you should be pulling out the real food.

The elixir vs. flask question needs to be considered too. The elixirs you would most likely use would be a combination of Mighty Agility and Mighty Thoughts elixirs; the only flask a hunter is going to be using will be Endless Rage. The decision of which to use comes down to you answering one question: "am I regularly running out of mana on attempts"? If you are, the extra mana pool and extra regen from the intellect elixir will put you above the flask's performance because it will keep you out of Aspect of the Viper and its 50% damage reduction. If, however, mana is not a problem, then the flask is always going to be better damage. The exception here is, again, armor penetration. If you're one of those Marksmanship hunters that's converted to an armor penetration build, then an Elixir of Armor Piercing will combine with the intellect elixir to yield greater performance. Much like with food, the best answer to the question is not which choice is more convenient, but instead which choice produces better damage.

And that concludes this series of guide posts! I would be more than appreciative of any questions anyone might have, suggestions on things that should be clarified, or any other missives you might want to send me. This isn't limited to anything I've already posted, either, I'd be happy to do a gear critique, address any leveling questions, whatever you might think of. Thanks for reading!

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!

So your hunter's finally 80, part 2

Update: this guide is out of date! I'll be writing a new series for Cataclysm.

(Previously: Part 1)

So with the first post in this series in-hand, you've started working on the list of pre-raid gear you're trying to acquire. You're ready to run heroics - and lots of them! - but you're unsure of your spec, rotation, and pet choice. Maybe you've heard that Survival is a good tree to spec into as a new 80, but what talents should you take? Which glyphs? What should you do when Lock and Load procs? All these answers and more below, in the

Survival Hunter PvE Primer!

To begin with, I'll expand a little bit on the notion that "Survival is a good tree to start with." This is true in one way and untrue in another. It's true because a SV hunter's primary damaging ability, Explosive Shot (or ExS), doesn't factor base weapon or ammo damage into its damage-done equation. This means that it's not as limited by weapon as Marksmanship hunters are; a SV hunter's damage output scales more evenly with their gear considered as a whole. It's untrue because the SV rotation is actually a little more complex and it has an ability proc to deal with. When Lock and Load (LnL) procs, you have to react to that proc correctly before resuming your rotation. And the word "rotation" isn't even really accurate any more, merely convenient! Hunters, like most DPS classes these days, operate by assigning priorities to various abilities and always using the highest-priority available ability.

More on that in a bit, though. First, the spec. For a new hunter just starting out and running a lot of heroics, I would recommend this spec: 0/15/56. Here's what you're getting with that spec:

• 5/5 Improved Tracking is a free 5% damage that all hunter specs should be taking.
• Trap Mastery and Survival Instincts are the only 2nd-tier talents that actually do more damage: the only thing that matters for a PvE hunter.
• Resourcefulness is required because it decreases the cooldown of Black Arrow (BA). BA not only gives you temporary free 6% damage, it's where you get your LnL procs, and those are an extremely important part of your damage. I think the reason you'll occasionally see hunters without this talent maxed out is because they didn't read the last sentence in the tooltip.
• Lightning Reflexes and Expose Weakness are defining talents for the tree. Survival hunters have truly insane amounts of agility, and a quarter of that agility turns into free AP. 2/3 Expose Weakness is, however, sufficient: even a hunter in poor gear will see something like 80% buff uptime with two points in this talent, and the remaining point is better spent elsewhere.
• Noxious Stings is another talent new and inexperienced hunters skip. The reality is that few other talents in any tree (or for any class) have returns as high as Noxious Stings'. A few moments reflection is good enough to see this. If you're pulling 2k DPS on a boss without Noxious Stings, you would be pulling 2060 with it. 3 points in improved aspect of the hawk, for example, will never get you 60 DPS, and Noxious Stings just gets better the better your gear is.
• 3/3 Thrill of the Hunt (TotH) and 2/3 Hunting Party (HP) are mostly good for hunters running a lot of five-man dungeons. A good tank/healer team that chain pull the instance (getting it done faster) can also run their DPS out of mana pretty quickly, so the efficiency from TotH and the replenishment from HP are good for everyone. Once you're regularly raiding 25-mans, you'll shift those points to other talents, but this is the best place for them for now.
  
• The talents from the Marks tree are required for every hunter spec, with the possible exceptions of Go for the Throat (GftT) and Aimed Shot (AiS). Beast Mastery hunters can choose to regenerate pet focus by other means and so may skip GftT. Aimed Shot is a matter of preference. I prefer to have an instant-cast healing debuff as part of my rotation. Many hunters, however, prefer to put that point into Improved Aspect of the Hawk (IAotH), and that's perfectly valid.
• The glyphs are fairly standard. Glyphing Serpent Sting (SrS) means you waste fewer GCDs re-applying SrS for the Noxious Stings benefit, allowing you to spend those GCDs on abilities that actually do appreciable damage. The ExS simply provides more crit for your most damaging ability. The Kill Shot (KS) glyph isn't ideal for 5-mans, but there aren't any really suitable replacements. Minor glyphs are matters of convenience and, in my opinion, the feign, pack, and mend pet glyphs provide the most of it.

Whew, ok! So that's spec and glyphs. Now what? Oh right, that thing about assigning priorities or whatever. Ok. Here's the thing: "rotations" have pretty much disappeared from WoW since the vanilla/BC days. No one just memorizes a sequence of abilities and uses them in exactly the same order for the entire length of a boss fight. How it works these days is that you figure out which abilities do the most damage, and then use your abilities in that order. The priorities for a SV hunter look like this:

1. Kill Shot
2. Explosive Shot
3. Black Arrow
4. Aimed Shot/Multi Shot
5. Serpent Sting
6. Steady Shot

What this means is that if, for example, KS had no CD and no restriction on its use, you would just mash your KS button the entire time, because that would do the most damage. KS has both a cooldown and restrictions, though, so if you can't Kill Shot, you use ExS. If you can't ExS and BA is off of cooldown, then you put BA on the boss, and so on all the way down the line. There are a few things that are possibly confusing about this priority, so I'll address each of these in turn.

The first thing that trips up a lot of hunters is that ExS comes before BA. "If I used BA first," the new hunter says, "won't my ExS do 6% more damage and wouldn't that be better?" The answer is that yes, that particular ExS would do 6% more damage but you're delaying the firing of that ExS by 1.5s (the length of the GCD) in order to do so. Over the course of an entire boss fight, you're going to lose several Explosive Shots if you try to set them up with a black arrow. Think of it this way: ExS has a 6 second CD and BA lasts for 15 seconds. Either way, you're getting in at least one ExS with an extra 6% damage. If you use BA before ExS, you're electing to get 6% more damage on a single ExS use instead of firing more total Explosive Shots. Firing another ExS will always do more damage than 6% of one.

The second possible point of confusion is the Aimed vs. Multi Shot entry. Aimed and Multi Shot share a cooldown, so this line is basically saying "if you've specced into AiS, use it now. If not, use Multi". The only caveat here is that if you're clearing trash or fighting a boss with adds or multiple components (think Grand Magus Telestra), then a Multi that will hit multiple targets will do more damage than an AiS. Against a single target, AiS will always do more damage, especially if you've been able to stand still long enough to get the Sniper Training buff.

The third and last thing to note is Serpent Sting. All this line means is that, if SrS has fallen off the boss, now is the time to re-apply it. Much like BA vs. ExS, the extra 3% damage is worth speccing for, and it's more important than another Steady Shot, but anything else is more worthwhile, because those things have cooldowns and SrS/Steady Shot do not.

A mod like Watcher (discussed in a previous post) and some time on a training dummy can help get used to the priority system. You'll find after a while that it's really not too difficult to maintain, except for one little problem: Lock and Load.

The thing that makes this proc interesting is that ExS is actually a 3-second DOT (Damage Over Time effect). The GCD is only 1.5s, which means that if you just mash your ExS button three times when you get an LnL proc, you'll overwrite the last tick of the DOT when the new ExS lands, meaning an overall loss of damage. A lot of hunters realize this and try to compensate by putting things like an instant-cast AiS in between Explosive Shots. The problem with this is that hunter shots have a travel time - they actually travel through the air before they land on the target and apply their effect.

The upshot is that you only need to wait half a second, a full second less than the global cooldown. That is to say, the correct way to deal with an LnL proc (where "correct" means "the way that does the most damage") is this:

ExS > wait half second > ExS > wait a half second > ExS

All of this, of course, sort of neglects one of the defining elements of the hunter class: the pet. Sadly, there's not a whole lot of choice between pets for raiding hunters right now. Most hunters you see in Dalaran will have a wolf at their side, and pretty much the sole reason for that is Furious Howl. In (if I remember correctly) patch 3.1, they changed things such that the AP gain from the wolf's howl stacks with other AP effects such as Blessing of Might. The free 320 AP from the wolf overrides all other pet abilities in most cases, although certain raids will have certain exceptions. For most hunters, though, your best bet is going to be a wolf. I would recommend speccing your pet like this. There is of course more to pet management in a raid, especially during bosses with lots of targeted AoE, but that's a subject for another post.

This almost brings this post to a close. The last things to consider are gems and enchantments. I'll address this in more detail in part 4 of this guide series, but your guiding principle is agility. By far your most numerous gem should be the Delicate Cardinal Ruby, to the point of ignoring socket bonuses. Very, very few socket bonuses will be worth as much damage as the 10 agility you would be losing if you used a purple or orange gem to get them. When choosing between enchants, if an agility option is available, you should take it.

That just about covers it! Don't sweat the little stuff too much - your damage will improve quickly at this stage, both with gear and with improvement in managing our abilities. Raiding guilds will appreciate the effort and research you've put into your class, and any competent mid-level raid guild would rather have a recruit with a gear deficit rather than a skill deficit. Have fun!

So your hunter's finally 80, part 1

Update on 11/11/2010: this guide is out of date! I'll write a new one for Cataclysm in about a month.

Alright, welcome to the first in a series of guides for new hunters! I thought it appropriate to start with a gear list, since that's often the most overwhelming part of a new (or especially a first!) 80. The list is arranged by item slot and within each slot items are ranked by quality, so that the best item for that slot is listed first. There are a number of items that require emblems or farming the heroic Trial of the Champion instance, so don't ignore the items further down the list! You can pick those up to improve your performance while farming emblems for the other stuff, or before you feel like your DPS is ready for the higher damage requirements of ToC. A hunter with a healthy mix of the items on this list would certainly be capable of between 4K to 5.5K DPS (depending on boss and raid composition) and could apply to many active raiding guilds with a clear conscience. And that is, after all, the goal of this gear guide: to help you gear your new hunter to a point where you can get started with raiding. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Head:
Conqueror's Scourgestalker Headpiece (Emblem purchase)
Truesight Ice Blinders (Engineer-only crafted)
Plunderer's Helmet (H-UK)

Neck:
Broach of the Wailing Night (Emblem purchase)
Ancient Pendant of Arathor (H-ToC)
Titanium Impact Choker (Crafted)
Necklace of the Arcane Spheres (H-VH)
Necklace of the Chrono Lord (H-CS)
The Severed Noose of Westwind (Icecrown quest reward)

Cloak:
Hammerhead Sharkskin Cloak (Emblem purchase)
Cloak of the Gushing Wound (H-VH)
Ice Striker's Cloak (Crafted)
Embrace of Sorrow (HoL)

Shoulders:
Pauldrons of Concealed Loathing (H-ToC)
Spaulders of the Abomination (H-CoS)
Spaulders of Lost Secrets (HoL quest reward)

Chest:
Conqueror's Scourgestalker Tunic (Emblem purchase)
Polished Regimental Hauberk (Argent rep)
Linked Armor of the Spheres (HoS)
Aviary Guardsman's Hauberk (BoE)
Assault Hauberk (Coldarra quest reward)

Wrists:
Slime Stream Bands (BoE)
Bracers of the Smothering Inferno (BoE)
Armguard of the Tower Archer (Emblem purchase)
Eaglebane Bracers (Crafted)

Gloves:
Gloves of the Dark Exile (H-ToC)
Rusted-Link Spiked Gauntlets (BoE)
Grips of the Beast God (H-Gun'drak)
Tear-Linked Gauntlets (UP)

Belt:
Belt of Dragons (Crafted with runed orbs purchased with emblems)
Sovereign's Belt (H-UP)
Vereesa's Silver Chain Belt (Emblem purchase)
Cord of Swirling Winds (H-HoS)
Giant Ring Belt (Sons of Hodir rep)
Belt of Tasseled Lanterns (BoE)

Legs:
Leggings of the Tireless Sentry (Emblem purchase)
Leggings of the Stone Halls (H-HoS)
Hollowed Mandible Legplates (H-AN)
Leather-Braced Chain Legguards (HoL)


Feet:
Boots of Living Scale (Crafted with runed orbs purchased with emblems)
Pack-Ice Striders (Emblem purchase)
Dragon Slayer's Sabatons (H-Nexus)

Rings:
Surge Needle Ring (BoE)
Ring of Invincibility (Emblem purchase)
Titanium Impact Band (Crafted)
Bjarngrim Family Signet (HoL)
Mobius Band (H-VH)
Signet of Bridenbrad (Icecrown quest reward)
Jagged Ice Band (Storm Peaks quest reward)

Trinkets:
Darkmoon Card: Greatness (Crafted)
Mirror of Truth (Emblem purchase)
Banner of Victory (ToC)
Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood (H-Nexus)
Incisor Fragment (H-DTK)
Figurine - Emerald Boar (decent trinket JCs can make themselves)
Mighty Alchemist's Stone (similar, but for alchemists)
Chuchu's Tiny Box of Horrors (Icecrown quest reward)

Melee Weapons:
Marrowstrike (H-ToC)
Staff of Trickery (H-VH)
Fang of Truth (Wyrmrest rep)
Ymiron's Blade (UP)
Whale-Stick Harpoon (Kalu'ak rep)
Icier Barbed Spear (100% More Chilling)

Ranged:
True-aim Long Rifle (H-ToC)
Drake-Mounted Crossbow (H-UK)
Sen'jin Beakblade Longrifle (Argent Tourney)
Titanium Compound Bow (H-OK)

How to make gear decisions

One of the most common questions on the WoW hunter forum is "I have items X and Y and I can't choose between them, which should I use?" Answering these questions for yourself isn't too difficult, and in my opinion is part of the fun of being a raider (yes, I'm a nerd), so I thought I'd step through it here. Maybe if a couple people read this, they'll have a little more fun looking through the upgrades for their own hunters. I'll use a real question from the forum's front page today for my example, since it's a pretty good one: Marrowstrike vs. Twisted Visage.

To start with, here are the two items in Wowhead's comparison tool. Right at the very top of the list you'll see that TV is an item level 232 item, while Marrowstrike is stuck at 219. At the very least, this means that if they had the exact same stats, TV would be the better item, since it would just have more of everything.

Unfortunately for the confused hunter out there, they're not itemized identically at all: TV has 70 hit and no sockets, while Marrow has no hit, 60 armor penetration, and a yellow socket with a 4 agility bonus. And this is where most people are going to run into trouble. They're going to start thinking about what gem they would put in that socket, if they'll have the bonus or not, how much does the reduction in crit from TV to Marrow cost them, and how much the gain in armor penetration is worth. Most of the time, doing all that may feel like the right thing to do, but it's just creating more of a problem for yourself than you need it to be.

Remember: more item levels on TV means that it just innately has more possible damage per second contained in its frame than Marrow, which means you only need to decide if you can make use of the majority of those item levels. So what you really need to ask yourself is this:

"With my curent gear, would TV put me way over the hitcap of 263 hit rating?"

If the answer is yes, then you're better off with Marrowstrike.

If the answer is no, then you're better off with TV.

Obviously this example isn't universal - sometimes you're comparing items with identical item levels - but the principle is going to remain the same. Reduce the complexity of the question you're answering and the question becomes much easier to answer. Most of the time, gear comparison between two pieces can be narrowed down to a single stat, or between comparing equivalent values of two different stats.

Take a look, for instance, at Hellion Glaive vs. Twin's Pact. The two weapons are very nearly identical, but the staff has 90 haste rating and the polearm has 90 critical strike rating. Everything a hunter can do can crit for more damage, but only auto shot and steady shot can benefit at all from haste. Therefore, you should always prefer critical strike rating to haste rating if at all possible.

"But wait!" the astute reader may say, "what if I put your two questions together? What if I've got two items where one has haste and a higher item level, but the other has crit and a lower item level?"

Your question brings me to the last comparison of the day: Twin's Pact vs. Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned.

This one is near and dear to my heart, as I'm currently carting around a Lotrafen and it seems quite possible that I could see the staff drop before Anub drops his polearm for me. Assuming a feral doesn't want the staff (I'll come back to the melee vs. ranged thing at the end of this), then it seems like a tough comparison. Really, though, we're just looking at another instance of that first comparison. The extra item levels on the staff really show: before you even count the socket, it has more agility, more armor pen, more stam, and more AP. More of everything just on its own, and it'll be even better once there's a socket in it. Sure crit rating is better than haste rating, but even there the staff has three more than the spear. A marksmanship hunter especially gets a lot of his or her damage from auto shot and steady shot: two things that benefit from haste. Considered along with the superiority of the staff in every other way, you would be doing your raid a disservice if you gave yourself loot tunnel vision and let the staff go to waste.

I almost did that once myself: when TV dropped the second time and our feral already had it, I didn't send a bid to the master looter because I really, really wanted Lotrafen. But the reality was that TV was a much better item than the Relentless Edge I had been using, and it would have been foolish to let the staff get melted. The ML rightly charged me a single point and looted the staff to me.

You'll notice, though, that in the case of both staves I mentioned feral druids. This caveat includes all the melee classes, really, it's just that ferals are the only ones that can use staves. There's this important stat on melee weapons that a lot of hunters seem to ignore, and that's the damage the weapon actually does when you hit something with it. Remember how, in the previous examples, the better item was the one with the fewest wasted item levels? Ok.

A hunter wastes every single item level spent on melee weapon damage.

You are hurting your own raid if you take a melee weapon away from a melee class if the weapon's actual DPS is an upgrade over the one they're carrying. Conversely, they're hurting the raid if they take a ranged weapon from you if it does more damage than your current one. The only time you should take a melee weapon over a melee class is if they already have a weapon with equivalent damage. The first time Lotrafen dropped for my guild, the feral and I both rolled for it because we were both DKP capped and we were both using Twisted Visage. The weapon was a very similar upgrade for both of us. If he'd been using a 212 DPS weapon, I would have passed to him without hesitation (in fact, the bid I sent to the master looter was actually "20 points, pass to melee").

So there you have it. If you can't decide if something is an upgrade or not, look for how you can simplify the question and remember: always consider the good of the raid first.