Spider BRK, Spider BRK
“Dear BRK, I am trying 41/20/0 (after seeing a lot of more progressed raiding hunters switch and from your long standing advocacy) now from my 0/45/16 marksman build, and need some advice from an experienced BM hunter. My guild can clear Karazahn and are trying to setup runs for Gruul’s, Magtheridon, and possibly BC outdoor world bosses so I want to be able to step it up a notch.
“When should I pop Bestial Wrath? As a MM hunter the closest I had to this was rapid fire for a long cooldown ability. If I pop bestial wrath should I pop the bloodlust brooch and rapid fire too? It hardly seems worth doing on normal mobs or am I mistaken? Gorgor & SpiderPig”
There are three keys to the effective use of damage-enhancement spell and items:
- Do not overload yourself with attempting to execute a memorized script and then freaking out when the battle diverges from what you expect.
- Do not allow your trinkets and spells to cause you to overtake the tank on the threat list.
- Do use them for maximum effect during the battle-sequence by paying attention to DPS-interruptions.
You’re fighting Shade of Aran and you know what you want to do; pop Bestial Wrath and a haste trinket and start beating Aran’s @ss. Wham, Aran casts Blizzard as soon as you walk in the door. Start running, don’t worry about your plan. Don’t allow this unforeseen event to frustrate you into inaction. Go with the flow, get through the Blizzard, wait for a Flame Wreath and then pop your trinket. Beat his @ss.
You’re fighting Gruul and you’re ready to tear him up. The fight begins, you pop Bestial Wrath, your trinket, Rapid Fire, and a leatherworking drum. Your DPS rocks the house! You grab Gruul’s aggro, you get crit for 102,000 and are punched so hard you come out on the other side of the WoW universe. Bad hunter.
Allow your tank to get aggro and don’t go DPS-insane right off the bat. Use Misdirection and an Aimed/Steady/Arcane salvo to help him establish aggro. It shouldn’t take too much time before he’s solidly in control of the threat list and then you can give Gruul what he deserves.
You’re fighting Nightbane and your Rapid Fire spell’s cooldown is up. You’ve been watching your cooldown bars and are salivating to jam your attack speed through the roof. You pop it just in time for Nightbane’s Fear bomb to hit you. Not good, you just wasted almost the entire Rapid Fire bonus.
Pay attention to the raid warnings and the sequence of the fight. If you know Nightbane is about to drop his Fear on you, hold off on the Rapid Fire until you can extract maximum benefit from it. This means paying attention to your environment and the battle, not just your macros and your cooldown bars.
As for popping Bestial Wrath with your trinkets, our opinion is that you should use Bestial Wrath by itself and combine a trinket with Rapid Fire.
Bestial Wrath decreases the mana cost of your specials by 20%. Extract as much benefit from that as possible. Get off as many Steady/Arcane/Multi combos as you can without interrupting your Auto Shot. If you pop a haste trinket or Rapid Fire during a Bestial Wrath, your Auto Shots will come much faster and you will clip them frequently with your specials.
Pop Bestial Wrath, take advantage of the mana-savings and get as many specials in as you can. Once Bestial Wrath fades, slam a haste-trinket and Rapid Fire and let those Auto Shots flow. When they crit, grab the Kill Commands as they become available.
Don’t interrupt the Auto Shots, don’t clip them, by trying to insert specials during this phase of your DPS. You just got 20% mana-savings for specials during the Bestial Wrath, now let the super-fast Auto Shot damage accumulate and your mana to regenerate during the trinket/Rapid Fire session. Greater mana-efficiency leads to higher sustained DPS.
Say it with us, “The purpose of a Hunter is to provide massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS”. Notice we chose the word ’sustained’ not ‘burst’. Always use your trinkets, Rapid Fire, and Bestial Wrath to maximize your sustained DPS, not your burst-damage.
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12 Responses to “Spider BRK, Spider BRK”
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/rofl @ “Spider BRK”
I just read this a couple of times hoping to find something I could take exception to… but alas, I can’t!
That is a great breakdown for those fights. The not popping rapid fire while in BW is a friggin fantastic piece of advice.
One thing you didn’t mention — it *is* good to pop Bestial Wrath when you know a fear bomb is imminent, because it will protect you and your pet from the fear.
(also as a hunter, you shouldn’t get feared in nightbane anyway, as it won’t affect you at max range, even without Hawk’s Eye)
If you’re worried about tank aggro, misdirect the first few hits of the fight — it helps everyone, not just you, by raising the threat cap all the more. Be careful, though — if you have more than one Hunter, you can’t stack misdirects; wait for the other hunter’s to finish completely before you apply yours.
Another thing is to be careful with your shot weaving when hasted. It may cause you to clip autoshots. You may want to make a macro that doesn’t use Kill Command with your Steady Shot macro, too, as it adds a hidden 0.5 second delay on your next shot, which can mess up the beauty of Rapid Fire or trinket haste. You can then time KC manually and do it at the beginning of a shot instead of the end, and it should weave in smoothly.
Thanks for answering my question BRK, I’ll make sure to be aware of the state & pace of the fight.
I think you’ve covered it before, but just to be certain SpiderPig won’t trip flamewreath right?
Love the picture too
Great advice from BRK as always. I only joined a raiding guild two weeks ago and frankly I’ve been so afraid of OMG noob huntard grabbed aggro GG /gkick that I haven’t been popping BW anywhere near as often as I should until I get a good feel for how mad it makes things. It’s nice to have guidelines to start from.
Slightly off-topic–speaking of Nightbane, does he deliberately Scorched Earth in melee range around himself every single time I use BW just to bug me? Cause that’s my theory. I usually leave Lassie in anyway as long as I can so as not to waste the cooldown but getting burned up makes her a grumpy kitty
Nice *and* informative post! Kind of missed those lately!
We will attempt to keep the Mean and Informative posts to a minimum.
@Chip Turner
On your comment about not being feared since the hunter should be max range, what distance is max range? I’m worried about that comment because when Nightbane is in the air, if you are too far away from him, he will pelt a random person every second with a fire ball that hits for 3k-3.8k until all raid member are again “within range” to him. I’m just not sure if running out to max distance during his transition from flight to land would count and he get a few fire balls in.
He doesn’t Fear during the flight phase either, though.
Until now i had been doing BM + AP trinket + Rapid Fire, but i know i was clipping shots while RF ran. Still, isn’t it taking even more advantage of BM and the 20% mana reduction if you’re firing faster and using -more- specials (even if you’re clipping a little, which is hard to quantify)?
Yes, this front-loads your damage, but wouldn’t it be making the most of the bonuses to squeeze in as many shots as possible during BW?
Then again, Feign Death can be resisted… hmm.
Maybe for the second BW of the fight.
Feign Death can be resisted…
As a warlock I know that the more +hit I stack the less likely my Shatter will be resisted. Is it the same with Feign Death? or is it base on “magic” +hit?
I can’t believe I didn’t know that BW gives you a mana cost reduction on your specials ::face palm:: that said I’m pleased that I was instinctively doing what you recommend here BRK - popping rapid fire + trinket but just using BW on it’s own. I’ve found that works for me anyway
There are some things missing from this post that are worthy of mention.
1. Popping an AP trinket like Bladefist’s Breadth or the Bloodlust Brooch increase not just your AP but your pet’s AP too, because of scaling. Therefore you could argue that BW + Trinket is more *efficient* use of the AP since the % damage increase from BW scales the AP increase of the trinket more.
2. The CD on BW + your trinket are the same. So if you want to rinse and repeat your cycles its easier to do it with BW + trinket. Rapid Fire has a longer CD so after the first cycle when you pop them together you’ll be leaving your trinket unused whilst you wait for Rapid Fire to CD, or you’ll just pop the trinket without rapid fire.
3. The duration of the effects aren’t the same. Rapid fire is 15 seconds whereas BW is 18 seconds. Bloodlust Brooch and Core of Arkelos last 20 seconds. With the global cooldown you maximise the time you have 2 abilities concurrently by popping Trinket 1st then BW second. Once you’ve factored in latency you’ll find that both effects end at pretty much exactly the same time. Rapid fire + trinket is combining abilities that have 15 and 20 second durations - which means that one finishes significantly before the other does.
Its for these reasons that I usually pop BW with my Bloodlust brooch. 1. to keep the CDs in sync. 2. to maximise the effect of the trinket on my pet’s DPS too and 3. to ensure that both abilities are applied to my character for the longest duration.
Rapid fire I just pop on its own.
Same with Troll Beserking.