BRK Gets a Little Uppity
“BRK, Big question. Just got my Wrathfire Hand-Cannon (shiny!) and started blasting away. Noticed something funky in my shot rotation and then noticed the stats on this quad-barreled gun.
Wrathfire Hand-Cannon
90 – 168 Damage Speed 2.00
(64.5 damage per second)
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 10.
Equip: Increases attack power by 30.
“It has an attack speed of 2.0. When we combine Serpent’s Swiftness and ammo pouch bonus, it brings our attack speed down to a speedy 1.48 without any haste effects. Steady Shot has a 1.5 attack speed, meaning we are unable to weave Steady Shot between auto shots. That sounds like a serious DPS-deficit right there. However, a little research on WoWwiki ( http://www.wowwiki.com/Steady_Shot ) brings us this tidbit:
‘Steady Shot is affected by Haste bonuses including Quiver/Ammo Pouch and Serpent’s Swiftness. It is also affected by ranged attack speed bonuses including Rapid Fire and Bloodlust.’
“Based on this data:
Steady Shot Cast Time = 1.5 * 0.85 (quiver) * 0.8 (Serpent’s Swiftness) = 1.02
“Which means I should be able to weave a steady shot in between autoshots, but not much room to spare. Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Ahoni & Almandaragal”
One of the Big Problems we have with shot rotations is the slavish devotion people have to them. Have you seen some of the macros people have come up with? 127 shots all pre-programmed, pre-thought out, totally inflexible to the changing environment.
For all hunters, but especially for BMs, we want you to break your dependence on shot rotations.
“But BRK! I have a macro that will launch a Kill Command when it procs, eliminate the error messages, fire every shot exactly when it’s necessary, and make you a Raspberry Latte at the right temperature with a biscotti on the side!”
Sigh. That’s wonderful, we’re happy for you. Really we are, no foolin’.
What we want you to accept is the fact that you don’t need a shot rotation to do outstanding DPS. When one changes ranged weapons, especially to a really fast b@stard like the Consortium Blaster or the Wraithfire, your attack speed is going to be so machine gun-like that if you’re trying to weave a perfect Steady Shot every 1.48 seconds, you’re going to miss things. Not Kill Commands necessarily, but stuff happening around you.
Yes, you’ll get your Kill Commands with a hacked-up macro, but what about Pet Mends? What about your Scorpid Sting or your Freezing Trap or your Intimidation or your Bestial Wrath or your Growl which you need to switch off and on to save your healers squishy little neck?
What happens when Improved Aspect of the Hawk procs, or you slam a haste trinket, or your haste meta gem decides to play nice and fire off at a good time? When your attack speed varies during a fight, do you have a shot rotation to accompany each and every combination of possible attack speeds?
You can’t possibly, so don’t cling to a shot rotation like a life preserver.
Squeezing every little ounce of DPS out of every single encounter comes at a cost. BRK espouses that that cost is rarely worth the result. We don’t use a shot rotation, a shot-sequence macro, or otherwise attempt to conform to a “The Only Way to Max-DPS is to X” theory.
To answer the original question; Can you weave a Steady Shot with a BM build? Yes. If you screw it up, should you worry? Nope. If you find that Arcane Shot is easier to weave, should you use it? Yes. If you don’t want to weave anything, but would rather concentrate on outstanding chain-trapping or formidable pet off-tanking, should you? Yes, d@mn it, yes you should.
BRK loves his DPS, but knows that DPS isn’t the Only Thing. If you don’t think there are very knowledgeable players who value being the best d@mn chain-trappers you’ve ever seen, you’re wrong. If you don’t think there are very advanced guilds who heavily recommend that some hunters spec Survivalist because of their tremendous crowd-control capabilities and don’t give a cr@p about Steady Shot Weaving, you’d be wrong again.
Don’t break crowd-controlled mobs, don’t grab aggro, don’t drop aggro on a squishy, don’t melee, and don’t run out of ammo. Learn to kite, to chain-trap, and to work with your tank. Follow these rules and you’re OK in our book, shot rotation or not.
/”Hacksaw” Jim Duggan thumb and wink
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18 Responses to “BRK Gets a Little Uppity”
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I’m one ‘a dem Surv hunters that loves to chain trap. And I’m one a’ dem hunters that uses a macro for tank and spank fights like Attumen, Maiden and Shade. But those macros don’t suit me well against Curator or Moroes, when my focus is split and shots aren’t streaming.
It’s all situational. But I agree w/ BRK (because it’s his blog and the cool thing to do), becoming too reliant on a macro will eventually gimp you as a hunter.
While shot rotation isn’t the end all be all, I like having some clues as to what will maximize my dps, so I do use shot rotation, but not at the cost of other things, like most things in life this isn’t yes or no, but something in between, use it whenever you can, but if the need arises, you can forget it for a moment.
your ranged weapon has a base speed of 2.0?
Sounds like a good problem to have imo..
Do scopes gain you more DPS on faster attack speed weapons like the straight math would lead you to believe or is there some hidden nerf formula I don’t know about?
For example (round numbers for easy math):
3.0 attack speed, +10 damage scope
10/3.0 = +3.33 DPS
2.0 attack speed, +10 damage scope
10/2.0 = +5.0 DPS
I’ve just been curious and big brother won’t let me look it up at work.
Try starting your shot rotation with Auto Shot instead of Arcane or something else. It will help set your rotation up enough to be able to squeeze in your Steadys. Also, try running a good timer like Quartz, which shows your latency on each shot, allowing you do get every little bit of your shot rotation.
Hmmm …. I guess I should have re-written that email before I sent it. I am not a shot rotation Nazi, nor do I use a shot sequence macro. My question was basically just “should I worry that I can no longer perfectly squeeze Steady Shot in between my Auto-shots.”
On boss fights, I like to be able to squeeze those Steadys in for maximimum DPS, and have found that relying on the visual graphic of the shot, or even the audio of the shot will usually leave me a little off. I will have to give quartz a try …
Haha I totally knew who that was in the article graphic right away… good times when I was a kid. Watching the floorshow.
Hmmm oh, shot rotations? Last couple of group runs I’ve done, the mage and rogue have been doing so much DPS I’m lucky to get three shots off in between chain trapping on various sundry mobs.
Then again if something goes wrong with the traps I take it personal that the mob is no longer under control, which tends to lead to more kitchen sink efforts that I would ideally like, especially in Botanica. Not sure what is up with that place but it freaks out my trapping mojo.
Shot rotations and chain trapping are great when they happen, but if you’ve been asked to trap then in my mind, that takes over everything else. If the almighty damage meter doesn’t look good and people are complaining, request a reset before a boss fight and compare after… or offer to stop trapping.
My personal favourite solution to this “problem” is, find a Warlock who’s good at PvP and go do Mech… crowd “controlling” by fearing everything, and I mean basically everything that could be feared. Had the pleasure of doing this a month or so ago and I cannot describe how much fun it is, when you have a group with ridiculous DPS and a tank that seems to have aggro stored in his back pocket.
/hacksaw
* You raise your hand above your head and scream Haaaa-oooohhh.
ok…. i give. what is kill command? I’ve looked and looked- is it like quickshots? some proc that is impossible to find until it happens? i’m lvl 44… is it to early or am i just dumb? /sigh
Well, shot rotation does not equal macro. So I agree with shot rotations. You need to know what you can get out of your weapon. Macros I disagree with. At least for shot patterns. Mashing a button will make you exclude other things. Doing it manually allows other things to be done. Raid/Instance bosses… Misdirection, arcane, auto, steady, scorpid, auto, steady, auto, steady, replacing steady with arcane as mana and aggro allows. I use multi for pvp cause it’s fun to nuke multiple people. Or in conjunction with misdirect. Linking to the other post today, I think turning yourself to try to use multi w/o breaking cc is useless risk. Just dont use it unless there’s only a single target or the tank has pulled away from cc mobs. But back on topic, you NEED to know a good shot rotation imo. That’s how you maximize boss dps. For the original poster, if you can’t manage to add in steady every other shot, I would get a slower gun. If your latency is excellent and you can maintain auto/steady shots, then it’s a good gun for you.
Kill Command – Level 66
Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly attack for an additional 127 damage. Can only be used after the Hunter lands a critical strike on the target.
Can crit nicely if you have the talents for it
What we want you to accept is the fact that you don’t need a shot rotation to do outstanding DPS.
This is the worst hunter advice I have read on this blog.
If wrathfire is too fast to weave steadies, the answer is simple, don’t use it.
Not weaving steadies between each and every autoshot? Might as well wear all greens, because you are severely limiting your DPS. Srsly.
Chain trapping and pet off-tanking is stuff you do when you aren’t required to DPS down bosses.
What is the point of all the gear and theorycraft on your blog if you then tell people not to worry about their shot rotation?
Shot rotation is THE single most important thing for hunter DPS.
Yes, you’ll get your Kill Commands with a hacked-up macro, but what about Pet Mends? What about your Scorpid Sting or your Freezing Trap or your Intimidation or your Bestial Wrath or your Growl which you need to switch off and on to save your healers squishy little neck?
That’s the whole reason you have macros. So you can do all the other stuff, because you only need to spam 1 button to keep your DPS up.
With the given gun, weaving is limited anyway. Isn’t the global cooldown at 1.5s?
Now even if you spam steady and the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun at 1.3s, global cooldown will prevent any action during the remaining 0.2s.
This means the autoshot is granted to happen, but the 0.02s (1.5s-1.48s) are essentially lost, compromising 1.3% of the base DPS.
Personally, theres very few macro’s I use. Pull macro’s and hunters mark/pet attack are obvious. The only other ones I use are focus macro’s. One to set it, and another 2 for either agro gaining, or mis-direction.
As for a set must use, shot rotation, I don’t really bother. Same as trinket, racial and spec cd’s. I prefer to save them, for the harder pulls, boss fights, or when something goes horribly wrong.
I know most of you hunters out there will be screaming about TBW, rapid fire, etc. must be used whenever you can, but I disagree.
You should find your play style, spec, and what works best for you, while your out there playing. Its good to take on board others tips, tricks and the like, but remember, just cause it works for them, don’t mean it will work for you!
As for maximum dps, coming high, if not top of damage charts is easy. Being a good, reactive, able to deal with any situation,agro controlled kinda player, is a very different story.
So, back to the must use exact shot rotations, its up to you. Personally, becoming a simple button masher, or almost bot like takes the fun out of the game for me, so its something I will never be.
Nergal,
EU Kul Tiras.
I have looked into the whole Shot Rotation thing and that actually lead me here to this blog, but I found especially with my guild and how we play if the boss is dead at our feet and the end and the raid is still alive who gives a flying F$@* how much DPS you did or the Mage who just kept spamming Fireball or the Rogue who kept slicing and dicing? It is dead. You don’t have to beat the dead horse any longer.
For people to say like a certain someone up further in the comments said that you would seriously gimp your DPS if you did not use a shot rotation. People need to realize that this is only a game and needs to be enjoyed by the people playing their characters. My guild/Raid will never ask someone to respec to a certain way to join the guild/raid. We will find a way to beat the boss with what we have. That makes the game more fun. We will never adhere to the cookie cutter mold of raid partys that most people post. Yes our progression in the dungeons will be slower because we have to make our own strats but god damn we will have an awesome time doing it.
Sorry for the wall-o-text just felt like adding my two cents.
Fathgar & Fenrir
Good luck making a strat to beat an enrage timer if DPS is not a concern.
The fact is that on boss fights, some classes don’t offer anything EXCEPT DPS.
Warlocks, Hunters, Rogues and Mages might have the odd buff or two, but their primary function is DPS.
People need to realize that this is only a game and needs to be enjoyed by the people playing their characters.
Why would you play a game with the intention to suck at it?
Do you let your mages in raids just sit there and wand with a full mana pool? Hunters not using a shot rotation is the same thing.
Spec is irrelevant, shot rotation is everything.
Wow, the dead horse comment made me laugh. Odds are, if you don’t have at least a couple people in your group who are dps junkies and constantly trying to top the meters, then you don’t have enough dps overall. The game IS about fun, yes. But raid content is about determination and striving. regular 5mans are for the people who don’t care about dps, not raids. Take two or three good dps classes in with crappy players, wipe 15 times, say it’s all about fun, and see if you have the good players around next week. If that’s your deal, cool beans, but don’t knock the gamers who strive to better their characters and who WANT to succeed.
And shot rotation is important. I can’t tell you how many other hunters I’ve played with who were equally or better geared then me during my progression. They ask me, how are you out dpsing me? And I tell them shot rotation. I still chain trap, switch targets and fire a concussive shot on a cc that broke early to keep a priest alive, turn on growl and send pet after an errant mob etc while dpsing and staying on the top of the charts. I don’t use macros either. If you aren’t firing auto/stead/auto/steady, I wholeheartedly agree with the poster who said it’s like a mage with a full mana bar wanding. That made me LOL.
I do not and for sure will NEVER use a damn shot rotation. I fire my shots when they are off cooldown and I do well on those supposed charts when they are posted.
The whole point of my post was to say that adhereing to a strict protocol is the key to success. I know all about the Rage timers my guild was doing Kazzak back before TBC.
All you are doing with a shot rotation is making yourself out to be an extension of the game mechanics. I guess that can be commendable since you can use the game to make your character do a series of shots in a sequence that leaves no error. You could almost set up one of those water birds next to your keyboard and just let it hit your keyboard in time to your macro, and go get a drink like the Hunters of old going AFK and leaving their Hunter on Autoshoot in MC.
No thanks I would rather focus on which shot I want at that time and press it when I want it.
Fathgar
I do not and for sure will NEVER use a damn shot rotation.
Then you will always do lower DPS than a hunter who does.
You could almost set up one of those water birds next to your keyboard and just let it hit your keyboard in time to your macro
Yep. Welcome to WoW.
No thanks I would rather focus on which shot I want at that time and press it when I want it.
I would rather contribute to the success of my guild by not sucking.