So we went to Dr. Boom to figure out, for our gear, which ranged weapon we should be using. The contestants are:

Tuskbreaker

Barrel-Blade Longrifle

Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle

And we’ve run into a snag. But first off, here’s the setup.

We went to Dr. Boom with 200 bullets in our ammo pouch. Nothing in our bags, just 200 shots. We equipped Tuskbreaker, used Aspect of the Hawk, but used neither Rapid Fire nor trinkets. We popped Fel Mana potions when necessary to maintain our shot rotation.

For that rotation, we used a variation of the popular 1:1 Auto/Steady macro:

/castsequence reset=2/target !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

We recorded our combat log, then parsed it to WoWWebStats. Here’s a link to that report.

The report says we did 746DPS. OK, that’s great. Small problem, though; the report says we only shot 177 bullets.

Wha?

We logged out, trashed our combat log, relogged WoW. Went back to the bank, grabbed another 200 bullets, equipped the BBL, recorded our combat log, and repeated the experiment. Here’s the WWS link for that.

755DPS for this gun, how nice it is. 2% more crits, both Auto and Steady shots. That translates to more Kill Commands and more Focus via Go For the Throat. On the surface, it sure looks like we need to put Tuskbreaker in the bank and keep the BBL for fun and profit.

But we only shot 140 bullets, according to WWS. /boggle

Log out, trash log, re-log, bank, 200 bullets, Wolfslayer, start combat log. WWS link. 711DPS and only 151 shots fired.

Where is our ammo going?

For kicks, we did the entire process over again, this time using Tuskbreaker and manually Auto/Steadying. Cr@p on a stick, but we killed Dr. Boom with 19 bullets left. That doesn’t ruin our data, but it affects it.

Regardless, here’s the WWS link. We clipped the bejeezus out of our Auto Shots, sheesh. 727DPS and only 139 shots fired. Same crit-rate as the other Tuskbreaker run, thankfully. Had we done a better job with our shot rotation, the DPS would’ve been more similar, as well.

But on every experiment, WWS “lost” 13% to 30% of our shots. This we cannot explain and we have a hard time reconciling any “this gun has more DPS than this gun” statements until the missing shots are identified.

Any ideas?

Five bosses in SSC down in three hours, eleven minutes, including a wipe on Leo the Blind. Huzzah!

We wore our old T4 leggings, leaving our new Void Reaver Greaves in the bank, ’cause we screwed up Outfitter. Huzzah!

The Tier 5 bonus so that 15% of our total damage goes to heal Hobbes wasn’t affected by our Outfitter Idiocy. Phew.

Health Link is the “spell” that does the pet-healing. Look at that; that’s just nuts, that is. Heck, we were #10 on total heals! Hobbes only died one time the entire night, right after Leo the Blind died and we couldn’t damage anything to keep Hobbes alive through Leo’s Bleed.

The entire anonymous report is here, we are Phobos and Smidge.

And if you would kindly allow us a modicum of back-patting, we are really happy with this one stat from the WWS report:

Five million total damage. /drinks it all in

We employ a manual 1:1 Auto/Steady shot rotation with alternating phases of pure-DPS and mana-regeneration. No shot-rotation macro here. Can you use one? Sure. Do you Need one? No you don’t.

Get into that anonymous WWS report we linked. Poke around, think big thoughts. Come up with some questions.

A hunter’s job is to provide Massive Quantities of Sustained, Ranged DPS.

What are you doin’?

First off, it’s a bitchin tabard. Best since the Scourge Invasion, no doubt. We’re still a jumble of colors, but that’s to be expected.

And this is the necklace a hunter can purchase once he reaches exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive, the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might (SSPoM). You’ve got to be exalted with Aldor/Scryers to make the proc work, though. Don’t bring your newbie 70 to MrT, run your rep to exalted with the Sun O, and expect to get this necklace working right away.

What’s going to happen when it procs? Well, it looks like this:

For us Aldor folks, the buff it gives is called Light’s Strength and it increases RAP by 200 for ten seconds. Want to see it working in a raid setting? Well, here ya go:

No trinket-popping, our RAP is a purty, sweet-smelling, raid-buffed 2496. Jenga, beyotches!

We one-shotted Morogrim in a little less than 10 minutes. Personally, we were sent to our Watery Grave one time. That took us out of combat for, what thirty seconds? In 9 minutes 30 seconds of pure, unadulterated DPS, how many times did our SSPoM proc? Well WWS has got that covered:

Light’s Strength proc’d twelve times in 9 1/2 minutes, which is the same frequency as Improved Aspect of the Hawk. That’s a pretty healthy proc-rate, and thus we don’t mind dropping our Hit Rating to 125 to keep it.

We Missed one shot against Morogrim in 9 1/2 minutes and gained 120 seconds - we’re assuming the LS-procs more than likely didn’t proc on top of each other - of an extra 200 AP. We’ll take it, cuddle it, and feed it puppy-treats. We likes our new necklace, we do, we do!

The SSPoM gets the BRK Growl of Approval.

And because we just can’t let a good epeening moment go by, here’s the WWS report from the Tidewalker kill. We are Phobos.

We would be remiss if we didn’t give props to the mages, especially Crucio who brought the Murlock-Smashing, AoE-Ban-Hammer in the form of 2001 DPS. Dude, you’re all uppity, and you earned it.

We are Io, Hobbes is Figaro, this was Serpentshrine Cavern and the killing of Hydross, Lurker, and Leo the Blind.

We out-DPS’d a warlock on Hydross and nothing could make us prouder than that. /mega-preen!

After Hydross dropped his Ring of Lethality, for which we lost the bid, the quasi-Hunter-loot PvP ring, the Band of Vile Aggression was auctioned. We could’ve taken it, but didn’t want to waste the points. However, we equipped our PvP gear to make a RatingBuster comparison of our rings against the BoVA and forgot to swap our raiding gear back on until after we saw a Steady Shot whiz past a trash mob. +Hit FTW, yes?

Oops. We are a noob.

Lurker has no hunter-loot, so bah on him. Hobbes behaved perfectly by himself, though, and that rocked.

We took three tries to get Leo down, but then wiped him out at 8 minutes, 55 seconds and everybody standing with no combat rez’s used.

Our DPS on Leo is always below our traditional level, but that’s because we don’t use our pet during his humanoid-phase. Hobbes is much more valuable to us against our Inner Demon than losing him against a Bleed. Double Champion tokens and a Tsunami Talisman that made a rogue very happy was the best loot of the night, by a long, long shot.

This leaves SSC clear for us to take out Fathom-Lord and learn Morogrim on Sunday!

/happy little dwarven dance of joy!

So we saw a comment where WWS reports were requested. OK, that we can do.

First up, here’s our latest SSC run where we recorded Lurker and Leo, we are Dione. It may seem like we’re slacking against Leo, but we don’t use our pet against him during his humanoid-phase; his Bleed will destroy our pet and we want Hobbes up the entire fight.

Not using our pet causes us to lose 30% of our DPS and, of course, that’s going to be seen in the WWS report. The first 85% of Leo is easy and MQoSRDPS isn’t the Answer to beating him. Raid Discipline is the solution to the Leo fight.

Next is a four-boss clear in Zul’Aman, we are Io. Our 1047 DPS against the bear boss made us smile. Our warlock guildie laying down a 1208 pisses us off, but in a good way.

DPS competition among raiders, channeled properly, is very healthy.

Our pathetic excuse for DPS again Jan’alai was the result of a pet mistake. We accidentally only trained Avoidance Rank 1 and not Rank 2. Hobbes died on almost every bomb attack because of the extra 25% AoE fire damage he was taking. We spent so much time rezing and healing him that our DPS tanked. We are a noob.

Finally, let’s show a Void Reaver one-shot kill, we are Lapetus. Do you want to see some happy rogues? Put them in a group with a BM hunter, an enhancement shaman, and a ret pally.

A ret pally? How the heck did he get in the raid?

When you open the report, look at the DPS Time for the Void Reaver fight. See the rogues are going 100%? That means they didn’t grab aggro, stayed up the entire time, never needed a rez, and did a tremendous job. Proper positioning for melee is crucial and Doom and the gang have totally mastered it.

We did Maggy in our PvP-spec. Late to the instance meeting-time, we didn’t boggie to Ironforge and get our traditional 41/20/0 PvE talents and just rolled with our arena-build. We did fine, still doing massive DPS. We were a cube-clicker, so we weren’t surprised when we were below a warlock who didn’t have to click. No biggie, no problem.

In ZA though, against a full-bore DPS target like Nalorakk, we won’t be denied our prize of Top DPS. But we thought we could save a little gold and still have fun in our PvP setup. The raid did take down Bear and Eagle bosses without much hassle, we didn’t feel bad at all.

But then we published the WWS report. Lookie at this, our little squishy friend got all uppity and cracked the top spot. We’re Titan in that report and clicking the pic itself takes you to the anonymous report). Very good work on his part, we’re pleased and happy for him!

Not.

Next raid, we’re bring the proper 41/20/0 BM-spec and plan on retaking our place. It’s not a matter of pride, just pure, unmitigated epeenery. Top spot is ours! /grabby hands!

Note: A big BRK Shout Out of Thanks to TJ for becoming a BRK Author and posting stuff for us when we could not. Thanks so much!

“Dear BRK, hello, Lossendil here and I had a quick…”

DUDE!!! WoWWebStats rocks our world! It’s all you, you know that, we just blog here!

“Well thank you, you’re gonna make me blush…”

SERIOUSLY!! WWS is the single greatest raiding tool since the invention of the Skull mark. What do you need, man, we’re all up and excited to even hear from you. WooT!

“OK, your enthusiasm is a little scary, but appreciated…”

ZOMG!! Can we blog this exchange? We totally want proof that you’ve descended from Programming Valahalla into our decrepit little shack of a blog.

“I don’t have a problem with that…”

YES!! We get to talk with the WoWWebStats superhero! /dance-machine!

“Wow. I didn’t know a man’s hips could do that…”

Hunters are naturally flexible. It’s why we eschew plate.

“But more than 180 degrees… that’s a little out of the ordinary.”

PvP Jumpshotting requires some ligaments to be surgically severed. Thought everybody knew that.

“Dude…”

No, really! It’s like Cher’s rib-removal, but they just snip some things in there that let’s us coil like a snake, and POW!

“WoW. Web. Stats. I’m looking for suggestions for improvements. Have any thoughts?”

Gotcha. Well, we have the same 40 people who raid and every time we do a WWS actors pull, we have to manually correct 25% of the name and 50% of the pets. Can you make a local cache of names and pet association on my computer so we don’t have to correct the actors list every time?

“Well I’m surprised. The WWS client is supposed to save the actor list automatically. If it’s not the case on your computer, I’ll investigate to see what’s wrong. In the meantime, you can use the “Export list…” and “Import list…” buttons to save and restore the actor list.”

Export List and Import List… never saw those features. That sounds like we could make a huge, master list of raiders and import that list for every raid and WoWWebStats run. What a cool idea.

Well, can you get Shatter damage out of the totals for damage on Gruul?

“It’s done already! If you make the sum of the abilities on your own page, you will see that the sum differs from the “total damage dealt to foes”. It is because damage done to your guildmates don’t add up to the totals. This includes shatters, or damages done while your MC’d. The same is true for healing done on foes, they don’t add up to the totals.”

OK, so this is turning into more of a Teach Noob-BRK How To Use WWS than a list of our suggested improvements.

Can you somehow get Mages and their Water Elementals matched? And Priests and their one-name-only pet? We think this isn’t possible but it’s on the list.

“Hmmm, that’s hard… I’ve thought about splitting the damages done by water elementals between all mages, but that won’t be an accurate solution. Anyway, on this topic, I’m waiting for WoW patch 2.4, the combat logging mechanism will be totally revamped, and maybe it will be easier to assign pets to their masters.”

Sweet. Gonna really look forward to that, we bet all those frost mages and shadow preists are to.

Can we have a Mass Delete function so we can get rid of the 80% of all our “dead” hosted-WWS reports at one shot?

“Yes, definitely. I put this on my to-do list, and it will be implemented soon.”

Can we do a cross-raid comparison? Let say we wanted to see how all the hunters in the past two days have performed against Gruul. The query would look at all the WWS reports in the database, extract all the Gruul kills, pull all the hunter-data for those fights, and make a report.

“Yikes! This is no small feat, dude! Well I’ve thought about cross-raid comparisons for a long time, and it would surely be useful. But I’ve never be able to make up my mind on how to implement this. What would it look like? What kind of information would it present? If you have a clear idea on this, let me know, so maybe we can write a good specification of this feature. This will be a nice first step.”

ZOMG! We’re talking to Lossendil!! It still freaking us out. Dude, WWS is the single-greatest thing to happen to raiding since the invention of the 10-man instance. Thank you for ALL you do!

“/blush
/thanks

Thanks again for your comments. Do not hesitate to drop me any new ideas you could have, even crazy ones.

BTW, I’ve just upgraded your account “bigredkitty” to a “Guild Account” for 6 months. Enjoy!”

/sniff

Oh crap, now you’ve done it. Now we’re crying.

Everybody, say it with us: We’re not worthy!

*posted by TJ for Stuck-Behind-Company-Webfilters BRK.

Monday night, AC wiped Gruul off the map at exactly ten growths with a raid DPS of almost 10,000. In this anonymous WWS report, we are Thetys. We are particularly pleased with our 1056DPS on the Gruul kill.

And for you roguish types out there, we don’t think Doomilias will mind if we point out that he is Jion.

As for the real purpose of this post, check out the pets on Gruul. WWS anonymized our Wind Serpent’s name to, are you ready, Hobbes.

/freak out

Anywho, our Wind Serpent laid down the law with 283DPS. Cheshire (SV hunter’s cat) and Felix (BM hunter’s scorpid) were pretty far behind, as expected.

But the Lightning Breath was 7% of our total combined DPS and that’s about 1-2% more than Claw on real-Hobbes usually is. Our research is showing that if one can get a high enough RAP and get good crit-rate going, Go For The Throat and Bestial Discipline can make Lightning Breath a substantial bit more powerful than Claw.

We really are enjoying our Wind Serpent, now we just need to name him. It’s gotta be in the same coolness-realm as Spider for our boar, so this isn’t gonna be easy.

Saw this line in a sig on the WoW Forums. We don’t have a post for it, but it’s really good and we’ll forget it unless we write it down. This seemed like a good spot. This may develop into a post later in the day, but for now we’ll just call it a BRK Open Thread.

And remember, Captain Obvious says, “If you aren’t going to run your brain, you shouldn’t run your mouth.” So sayeth Capt. O, so let it be done.

And don’t miss Haggis.

Edit #1: From Velenorx and Lina comes this great WWS shot of hunters doin’ it for themselves in SSC. Do not doubt the power that is Hunterdomism!

Edit #2: How I got a Ghost Wolf, on Time Well Wasted.

So you’ve wanted to know, which is better: The Skyguard Silver Cross or the Crystalforged Trinket. Well don’t think that BRK hasn’t been listening or doesn’t care. We just got back from Dr. Boom and doing a little testing.

We did two tests, one with the Silver Cross equipped and one with the Crystalforged. For both runs, we cleared the area, cleared all our buffs except Aspect of the Hawk, put 100 bullets in our ammo pouch, turned on the CLSaver combatlog, did not use Hunter’s Mark - refreshing it could interfere with out test - and let the Auto Shots flow.

Here’s our setup and stats for the Silver Cross run:And here’s our Crystalforged setup:WoWWebStats does an amazing job as always. For the Silver Cross run, we didn’t do anything but allow Auto Shot and IAotH to proc. The Silver Cross has no “use”; it’s a static trinket.

So here’s the report for the Silver Cross:The Crystalforged trinket does have a “use”, so for this run, we popped the trinket immediatly at the start of the run and then whenever its cooldown was up. In the 100 shot-test, we were able to crank it up three times and that is shown in the Buffs & Debuffs section of the WWS report as Valor.

And the report for the Crystalforged Trinket:Would you like to easily compare the two reports? We can do that by taking screenshots of both and combining them in another screenshot, like this:What can we learn from the analysis?

1. We expected the Silver Cross to give 1% more crit and the testing bears that out.

2. We expected the Crystalforged to give more damage per shot and that also occurs.

3. The extra mitigation during the Crystalforged run decreased the DPS and total damage, but not by so much as to cause a massive concern.

4. Total damage difference is 120, easily within the expected margin of error.

5. The total time was exactly the same, 2 minutes and 58 seconds, for both runs. That’s pretty cool!

6. This test did not take pet damage into account. The extra 1% crit from the Silver Cross would mean one more Kill Command and 50 more Focus, which would be two more Claws.

7. The extra damage-per-shot from the Crystalforged is advertised at +7, but our testing shows it only as +3, (447 with the Silver Cross and 450 with the Crystalforged).

8. Our testing is incomplete. This is a single test of only 100 shots. Multiple tests should be run for more accuracy.

Our recommendations:

If you’re a BM hunter, go for the Silver Cross. The extra crit gives more Kill Commands and more Focus for your pet.

If you’re a SV hunter, you’re an agility/crit hoarder already and are cradling your Silver Cross with both hands.

If you’re a MM hunter, you have a hard choice. Your crit percentage is not any higher than a BM hunter but your damage-per-shot and damage-per-crit is much higher. That extra damage-per-shot and haste from the Crystalforged may outperform the Silver Cross for you, especially if you have a pet specifically designed to hold aggro and tank, not DPS.

We hope you enjoyed this little experiment and maybe even inspired you to try a test of your own.