He Knows Everybody’s Sister!
“Dear BRK, let me say that your blog and columns have truly helped me to be a better Marksman Hunter for my guild. That’s why I’m coming to you now.
“I’ve hit 40 and am having a bit of a crisis now that delectable mail items are in my range. Last night my guild ran Scarlet Monastery, and someone tried to foist the Gauntlets of Divinity on me. I happily replied that I had the Shadowskin Gloves. The mage running the show was flabbergasted and took them for disenchant.
“That got me thinking that my crits-and-agility build may be a bit misguided. Now I’ve already hit the message boards, seen equations that looked as though they could summon demons and seen definitive guides that never actually defined anything for me.
“I need guidance. Where should I go from here? Should I look for attack power items or keep going with agility and crit stuff? Does it all even out in the end? Any light you could shed on this would be appreciated. Anake”
Most gear analysis is done at level 70 as, until then, most gear is an obvious upgrade or not. But sometimes confusion can kick in and a reality-check must be run. Let’s do that now by making some extremely casual generalizations about our talent trees.
Beastmaster Hunters want a balanced set of stats. No overemphasis on agility, stamina, or intellect but a gradual inflation of them all.
Marksman Hunters want a high ranged attack power. They want to emphasize burst-damage and powerful crits so they go for attack-power first and foremost.
Survivalist Hunters want agility to boost the frequency of their crits and maximize the benefits or their Expose Weakness talent.
Yes this is very simplistic and much can be amended and modified, but for the purpose of answering this question it’ll do.
Our friend is a level 40 Marksman hunter, currently equips a pair of homemade leather gloves and gets a mail-gloves drop. Let’s look at their stats:
Shadowskin Gloves
76 Armor, Leather
+6 Stamina
Equip: Increases your critical strike rating by 14, (1.6% at level 40).
Gauntlets of Divinity
168 Armor, Mail
+7 Stamina
Equip: Increases attack power by 32.
Turning 40 in the hunter-world is a Big Deal because it means you get to equip mail armor. WooT! However we have frequently reminded you that just because you can wear mail doesn’t mean you must wear mail. There are many pieces of leather gear, even at 70, that are tremendous for hunters. Running to the Auction House once you hit 40 and loading up on Shammy healing mail armor isn’t the way to do it. Doing quests, instances and PvP is the recommended method of acquiring mail that is better than your current leather.
Anake, we’re sorry to have to break it to you, but those gauntlets just happen to be the perfect example of Level 40 Hunter Dream-Mail Gear. That’s exactly the stuff you want.
When you’re level 40 the leather gloves give 1.6% crit. However when you level up to 41, that percentage goes down. And at level 42 it goes down more, and more, and more, until at level 70 those gloves only give 0.35% crit. Crit rating scales downwards with level. Meanwhile, those mail gauntlets give 32 RAP at level 40, 50, 60, and even 70; RAP does not scale and, as a Marksman hunter, RAP is your raison d’etre; your reason for being.
As you level your Marksman hunter you’ll want attack power, agility, intellect, stamina and crit. Because the crit-rating to crit-percentage formula scales as you level, trying to build your crit at the expense of the other stats while leveling is not recommenced, especially if you’re tempted to sacrifice attack power.
“But BRK, at level 70, +1.6% Crit is huge!”
Yes it is huge at level 70, but at level 40 it really isn’t. Your crit rating at level 40 is, what, 7-9%? Bumping that to 10% is not that big of a difference; you’ll still only get one crit on every other mob. If you equip the mail gloves you’ll increase your armor, your pets armor, your attack power by 10% - if your RAP is in the low 300s - and your pet’s Spell Damage Bonus, too. The tradeoff at level 40 to keep that 1.6% crit is most definitely not worth it.
Now go back to SM and get those gloves, pronto! Andale Andale Ariba Aribe!
Comments
17 Responses to “He Knows Everybody’s Sister!”
Leave a Reply
-
Got Something To Say?
Email icon provided by Nexodyne. -
-
-
BRK's Site Meter
-
BRK License Agreement
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
-
BRK's RSS Feeds
I just spec from BM the 41/20/0 spec and was wondering is there a good BM arenas build. I when 5/41/15 for all the hp and love the huge crits But when i raid my dps droped a bit is there a happy middle group for the raid/areans hunter?
Herro young huntersan Anake!!
BRK is giving you some pretty good advice here. He is barking up the right tree stating that the 32AP is not going to degrade as you level while the 14 crit rating (1.6%) is going to. But this isn’t the big reason to swap.
Well what is it?
Armor? Heck no, 10 armor one way or another isn’t going to make you or your pet useless or gimp you for leveling.
What is it then tusk?
Its pretty simple, Not only does crit rating decrease in effectiveness as you level, the bonus given by critical % scales.
But tusk what the hell do you mean?
Well lets say this was the good old days before combat ratings and those leather gloves just gave the wearer 1% critical strike. And the shiny mail ones still give 32 attack power. Lets figure you’re specced into mortal shots for 30% crit bonus. So first off what do the 32AP mail gloves give you?
Well they give you AP/14 dps ranged, plus some little stuff like pet spell dmg and special dmg but they basicaly give you 32/14 = 2.3 dps increase. Not bad at all!!
So what does 1% critical give you? Well the answer is…. It depends because crit scales. The easiest way to estimate items is your autoshot and 1% critical gives you Crit%*1.3*(YourAutoShotDps/100) increase if you have mortalshots
Crit%*(YourAutoShotDps/100) if you don’t. So at level 40 your autoshot is probably 80 DPS netting you 1.04 dps increase for 1% crit. Now if you were a 70 this would be difference. For me, my autoshot is 349 so I would gain 4.54 dps from 1% critical.
See even you youngins gotta math it up once in a while.
The basics are still right, since you’re a youngin and not toting massive purple wepons of destruction your autoshot dmg is not high enough to take full advantage of things like crit. In this case get the gloves and get to grinding!
Shifttusk
My Beastmaster hunter got the Gauntlets of Divinity before he turned 40. When he dinged those gloves went on, and he wore them well into his 50s.
And they look good too!
What would be great to see is a 1-to-1 comparison on what an “ideal” stats ratio should be for each of the major builds.
That might make a great guide.
Show the ratios of agi vs int vs sta vs ap , etc. for the builds. That would help us youngins a lot
@ anon, it was more like 100 armour. That does help a bit at that level…
espcially with the AP gain they had. 
Thanks for the math, Shift. We try not to scare people off with it and are very happy this blog has BRK Helpers to add Da Maths when necessary.
and perhaps, would it be possible to show how to mod that addon that gives the gear info on rollover (whose name I can’t remember), to modify it to show the critical stats for BM, MM and SV hunters?.. (it seems slanted towards MM hunters now)
@karl - Yep 100 armor for you and like… 20 or 30 for your pet. But a big hunter No No is getting hit in pve. Yes your pet will be but the gain he’s getting won’t make a huge difference. And in pvp sure more armor is nice, but, well not all the dmg you take is physical anyway.
As far as item values, it’s a huge pain I know the website for theorycrafting that BRK has linked has some decent math, but most of the time you’re going to need to just math it one by one, I for one don’t have enough time to put everything together in one big sheet like that cheeky guy did.
@BRK - :P~ You bring them in I’ll make them do their homework! I think its really good you put this email up since many players aren’t 70 and don’t have the multitude of items to chose from and probably have tons of questions as to what works best at low levels.
@ Karl - Again you sneaky man! I’m not sure a mod has the capability of reading the base dmg and spec. So much of itemization depends on level, base dps and spec that the mod would need to be able to factor that in.
Anyone a mod maker? Up for a challenge, we provides the maths you provides the mod?
Pease? My calculator is geting worn out!
Shifttusk
Anyone else miss pre 1.7 days when MS was 50% bonus? As to the anon at the top the 5/41/15 is a good build for arenas but if you get a BM hunter in full 300+ resil gear i think the 41/20/0 is a fine build. I use my daily to spec to and fro BM and MM but that just me. also if you have a good team you may want to try a BM/SV build if you have a team in the 1800+ range as crit dont make or break you i would try a 41/5/15 all the HP of the 5/41/15 but with bigred(instert you pet type here):
holden:shadowmoon
Symond:deathwing
I think the real thing to learn here is that if you’re unsure about gear, take it, especially when your party members offer it.
I passed on Shade’s cloak at least 3 or 4 times when we started Kara because the one I had was better. Then Blizzards buffs the cloak and now it won’t drop.
I don’t advocate being greedy, but I would recommend keeping and banking sidegrades versus sharding them.
Don’t trust Shift, he’s a troll!
He’s been in the voodoo too.
I think BRK’s reasons were good enough reasons with out all the math brought in. +stamina +AP and +armor overrides the bit of +crit you have.
@Shifttusk
I’m talking about that mod that BRK (and I suspect you as well, since even I am using it) that shows the +/- changes to your crit or apor whatever. Thing is, I don’t know how to mod it, nor am i completly sure on what I really need it to show for a BM spec. Right now it shows only crit and ap for me, which I know is only part of the story.
BRK… I think arenas and hunters should have a post that everyone can respond to…Perhaps some people could send their arena experiences to BRK so he could make a post dedicated to it
I’m not sure I like 41/5/15, but this is from the guy who’s using 7/41/13 atm
I’ve been trying all sorts of spec divisions, because my gear is sort of stagnating atm, so it’s easy to give a fair comparison. I think the crits are almost essential in arena, unless the rest of your team is uber. Silencing shot will only hold for 3 sec. Can your team kill that person before a combined silencing shot and scatter shot wear off? If you have big crits you can.
/dead priest
And, I have 13 pts in SV becuase
A) Deterrence = healed through anything
B) Improved traps + Snake traps + Scorpid poison = pwnyou
/agree a post about arenas BRk!!
An addon the I’ve found useful for comparing equipment is Pawn http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/8214/
It lets you set up a formula for evaluating gear and then it does the math for you in-game. The nice bit is that you can customize the formulas and have multiple formulas up at once - e.g. BM PvE, BM PvP, Marks and so on.
as a former marksman, I agree with BRK… AP, NOT CRIT is ALWAYS the way to go for a MM build.
why? look at the talents… you get a bonus 10% to all AP, before I swapped to BM for this test, I had 2100+ AP, every hit is big, and the pet could still hold aggro and do damage… but a crit would blow you to the top of the aggro list every time and require feign death very quickly…
BM can handle more crits, and crits are awesome, because they are smaller, won’t steal all the pet’s(or tank’s) aggro, and gives you a juicy kill command(with a huge% to crit) every time the cooldown ends… but even that isn’t all about crit…
I only look for “crit gear” for pvp, or if my crit% seems low… like when I swapped to BM, my crit% went down a little.. so I started wearing a few items I was holding onto because they had crit, but less AP.. I swapped some of my gems to be +8 crit too
I think around 24-25% crit is very good for BM, but too high for MM, and probably way too low for SV.
I’m at about 23% with 1600 AP now…
Actually, I think RatingBuster does account for talents, because for my Hunter, it doesn’t give me the standard 1:10 Stam ratio, but the 1.05:10 ratio from Endurance Training.