It’s Wednesday and This Peach Has Zero Flavor
Seriously, we brought a peach to eat for lunch and it’s totally blah. What the h3ll? It’s a beautiful peach, it’s soft and smells nice, but it tastes like we’re eating a piece of tofu.
Anyway, it’s Wednesday and that means BRK on WoW Insider. Our login and password are working so it’ll be on time. Actually it’s done already, WooT! We have a new piece of art from Moony, so /cheer for that, too!
But now it’s Really Long Letter Time, so get something to drink and maybe a banana or a kiwi; the peaches stink right now, FYI.
“Dear BRK, about 9 hours ago a friend suggested I take a look at your site. They had just discovered WoW Insider and thought I might find it interesting, principally because in our guild Big Red Kitty is the term used to describe my cat, Amber. I honestly wasn’t expecting much – I really only looked because I told my friend I would do so.
“It’s now very early in the morning and I just finished reading from mid-April onwards. At first I stayed around because I was pleasantly surprised to find a kindred spirit. I too have been astounded at how many people couldn’t understand the mathematics behind Serpent’s Swiftness. I too have spent long hours doing elaborate calculations.
“It didn’t take long for me to realize that there were some lessons I could learn from you. Not long after that I realized that I was completely wrong; there were a *lot* of lessons I could learn from you. You took the same basic ideas and turned it into something wildly more successful than I ever imagined. I had never seen a hunter top a damage meter (admittedly, I rarely saw damage meters). Moreover, I never even talked to anyone who thought hunters belonged there.
“I spent my time this evening reading your blog, fiddling with talent calculators, using up tons of scratch paper, shuffling through the armory, all trying to digest as much as I could, because I have a problem. More specifically, I *am* the problem.
“On the damage meters that I have seen in Karazhan I am always 4 th or 5th or 6th. In your post of July 17th you express, and I am now beginning to understand, just how much of a problem this situation is.
“Identifying the problem is of course the first step towards a solution. Fortunately for me, in addition to helping with the former, your blog is filled to the brim with methods to achieve the latter. I certainly won’t begin to top damage meters overnight, but I can take some immediate steps, such as adopting your macros for combat, that will at least help make me less of a liability. Thank you.
“To accomplish this, I seek your aid. On Monday, July 16th you wrote that a list of enchantments is in the cards for the near future. My lack of enchantments is, by my evaluation, my single largest deficiency stat-wise. Given that the activities I enjoy in WoW consist of Raiding, Battlegrounds, Crafting, and Cooking, I don’t have much gold to spend. If you have the time could you devote a section of your enchanting guide to comparing the costs to the benefits? Every server may have different prices for enchanting components, but I would expect the rarity of said components to remain relatively constant.
“Fortunately I do not come to the table entirely as a supplicant. To your discussion on the importance of Stamina, I suggest that an important factor has been overlooked. Damage per second is itself a means to an end, specifically Total Damage Dealt, which is (for long enough fights) DPS x Time. In a successful attack on an NPC the distinction is irrelevant – the battle ends when the mob is killed, so Time depends inversely on DPS, and Total Damage Dealt will equal the mob’s hit point total.
“I observe that there are plentiful cases where Time is constrained by your own death, not that of the mob. *Any* time you are fighting in a group and you die Time is no longer dependant on your DPS, but rather on your Stamina.
“Suppose you take fatal damage spread out over time T. The length of T, and thus your Total Damage Dealt during this period, is directly dependent on (and in a 1-1 correspondence with) your Stamina. A 20% increase in stamina makes T 20% longer, raising your Total Damage Dealt by 20%.
“Realistically, unless you are fighting warlocks or some other opponent highly dependent on DoTs, you are unlikely to take damage over the entire length of the encounter. In this case a 20% increase in stamina would raise your Total Damage Dealt by 20% multiplied by the fraction of the encounter time during which you took the fatal damage.
“In a heroic instance where a hunter is likely to be dealt sudden massive fatal damage (a technical term), this direct damage boost from Stamina is accordingly negligible. Against Moroes’ garrote attack, however, an unfortunate hunter might get close to the full benefit from increased stamina. One-on-one versus a warlock a hunter will get the entire 1-1 benefit.
“Clearly this is still an oversimplification; uneven distribution of damage over time will either increase or decrease the benefit depending on if it is front-loaded or back-loaded. Healing will diminish the effect by adding extra hit points not dependent on your Stamina. The exact circumstances also play a large role. If you fail to kill the warlock one-on-one then doing extra damage to him is not particularly beneficial.
“The conclusion here is that stamina doesn’t just determine whether you live through, or die during, an encounter. It also has a direct, quantifiable (although perhaps incalculable), impact on your Total Damage Dealt should you fail to survive.
“This all makes good sense to me, but (especially at 3:00) I may easily have overlooked something and I would welcome a refutation. Thank you again for all your work examining and promoting the Beastmaster Hunter. I’m more eager now to play and progress than I have been since reaching 70. Sincerely, Xetheral and Amber.”
To answer the enchant/leatherworking question, here’s a nice and quick list of stuff you should go after:
http://hunterguide.wikispaces.com/Hunter+enchants
We link to hunterguide on our sidebar and they’ve got loads of stats, formulas and FAQs that have helped us enormously in the past. Of course, if you have more questions as a result of those answers, drop us an email.
You’re absolutely correct about your analysis of Health; a dead hunter is a non-DPS’ing hunter. However, Health is more than just a measurement of a stamina number. Your ability to control aggro and chain-trap is directly linked to your ability to provide your raid with massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS. If you have 1 health but never take a hit due to your ability to control aggro and chain trap, you’ll still be doing the same amount of damage as if you had 18,000 health!
Now we’re not advocating running around with no health at all, perish the thought. Naked instances, as we’ve been taught, should only be attempted by over-geared tanks. Except Kelmar; that sh!t would scare the dead.
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WOOT! Naked tank ftw! DcOE is lucky she wasn’t in on the run
As one of just a couple of feral druids in our guild (which has only two rogues who are keyed for it and who don’t always raid), i’ve been getting a lot of cat gear from Karazhan. My bracers, gloves, boots, staff, and some other pieces are from kara now. I didn’t originally go in there expecting to improve my DPS set, as i was going to be tanking, but there was nobody else to give it to. After i got Illhoof’s staff, i realized that my dps set was good enough for me to switch roles QUITE effectively between fights that need (or are easier with) two tanks and fights that need only one.
It appears that kara epics generally have a good dose of stamina on them as well as having high dps stats. I say this because in cat gear, i generally vie for the top DPS position with the other DPSers (as long as i’m not browsing the web and forgetting that we’re pulling) and also usually have the most health of anybody in the raid who isn’t a tank or a warlock. This doesn’t often benefit me, although the Curator is a little easier if the healers can ignore me for a couple of seconds while i’m getting blasted by chain arcane attacks.
Speaking of the curator, those flares put the hurt on melee. I didn’t have arcane resistance (we don’t need it on our melee guys) and i took the second most damage of anybody over the course of the fight, right after the tank and right before the hateful bolt soaker (a super-high-arcane-resistance warlock).
What does this have to do with enchantments? Well, i hadn’t thought about that, but i suppose it means something that i have no enchantments to increase stamina yet have high health for our raids. I expect the other kara-awarded gear has similar amounts of stamina to the rogue/cat gear, so i think you don’t have to worry about stamina-based enchantments. By the time you’re ready to take on Doomwalker (with his attack that does 8000 damage to everyone), you’ll probably have enough stamina without resorting to +stamina leg armor. Probably. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that.
Speaking of naked tanks, last time we went into sethekk halls non-heroic, i decided that to make things interesting i’d have to wear no pants, wield my terestian’s stranglestaff instead of my earthwarden, and pull groups without any Crowd Control. Things got kinda hairy on almost every pull, but it was a blast.
Off topic time! BRK, have you been doing the Shartuul event? The rewards are crap to a raider (except the badge of tenacity), but it’s quite a fun little event once you understand how it works.
ewww.. melee hunter..
Who’s a melee hunter? … anon? …. he said he’s a feral druid.
People who consider their DPS in terms of needing stam to stay alive and do said DPS.
These people may as well be Melee hunters.
Didn’t we discuss this just last week? Didn’t we come to the agreed upon conclusion that Blizzard has balanced the stats of gear you gain through progression so that you will have the appropriate stamina for the next encounter.
Don’t you understand, that while a dead hunter can’t DPS at all, saying a live hunter is worth more DPS discounts the effect of a healers mana pool.
If you can’t stay alive AND kill your target before the healer runs out of mana, then you just failed a gear check, good job.
Stam is NOT a key hunter stat. Understanding how stam effects you, your pet, and your encounter, is important. But I swear.. Only a melee hunter would think to look at stam in terms of “extra DPS”
yeah, i moo as a bear and everything
Indeed, it has been covered before and it was determined that, as long as you have enough stamina not to get yourself killed all the time by Aran (or whatever boss you’re on) and you do your job right, you have enough stamina.
In fact, my conclusion about enchantments in my post was that you don’t need stamina enchantments because you’re going to be getting enough stamina from the raid-obtained gear itself.
>> so i think you don’t have to worry about stamina-based enchantments. By the time you’re ready to take on Doomwalker (with his attack that does 8000 damage to everyone), you’ll probably have enough stamina without resorting to +stamina leg armor.
One point on Moroe, when he vanished FD. I have never been garoted since I started doing that
As a dwarf, we WANT to be garotted! We have Stone Form which cancels it. We’d rather have it than someone else; it saves a cleanse, or whatever it takes a healer to get rid of it.
Commercially grown fruit is rubbish. Plant a peach tree and in a few years you’ll have your own peaches. Well, at least during peach season anyway. Oh and you might need 2 peach trees to ensure pollination.
“Given that the activities I enjoy in WoW consist of Raiding, Battlegrounds, Crafting, and Cooking, I don’t have much gold to spend.”
There is so much gold just waiting to be picked up in BC that there is no excuse for being low on cash. Just do a few quests. Even if you are too lazy to locate the questgivers, there are multiple daily quests so you can just do the same few quests ever day - no muss, no fuss. I log in, do 2-4 daily quests before anything else, and I’m already up 20-40g for the day.
In BC, if you don’t have any money, it’s because you don’t want it.