Hunter problems

In the spirit of helping out Taura and posting all the Hunter help posts, I have been levelling Loeria (my own hunter) and managed to hit 79 yesterday in Icecrown. I have been having issues though. My main problems have been managing my mana and managing my pet.

I burn through it so fast, I have to drink every pull and sometimes even pop Aspect of the Viper in the middle - and lets not even talk about boss fights. How are hunters supposed to manage their mana and still generate respectable DPS? Maybe things are different at endgame...

The other major problem I have is managing my pet. Following my own advice, I went out and got myself a wolf. And he is great: does a ton of dps, buffs myself and my group (no raids on Loeria yet), and even occasionally takes a bullet for me. But in a group situation, I have trouble using him effectively. Does anyone have any advice in this respect? Are there any macros you use that maximize pet dps uptime? How do you keep him alive? I find that Nighteyes (my wolf) spends more time dead in dungeons than anything else.

Any help is welcome. Thanks,

Elk

EDIT (June 29th): I have been playing and raiding with Loeria a fair bit and her gear has improved markedly as well as my skill with her. Mana seems much less of an issue in raids with a replenishment buff going and I have become a lot better with practice at keeping Nighteyes alive. So, I think the moral of this story is "stick with it: practice makes perfect."

Hunters 101 - part IV: Haste and beyond

In previous installments, we've talked about threat, hit, crit and attack power as well as pointing to some threads on pet selection. Today we are going to look at Haste and how to fit all the information in the other sections together.

HASTE

At its very basic, haste increases attack speed. However, as with most things, it is not nearly as simple as that. There are abilities and talents that increase your attaack speed by a certain percentage and haste rating, found on certain gear, which also increases attack speed.

Abilities like Auto Shot and Rapid Fire and talents such as Improved Aspect of the Hawk and Serpent's Swiftness provide an increase to the speed of your ranged attacks. The precentages provided by these abilities and talents are multiplicative, not additive. For example, a hunter using auto shot has a 15% increase in his ranged attack speed (115%). If he is using rapid fire and has proc'd 5/5 improved aspect of the hawk and has 5/5 in serpent's swiftness, his ranged attack speed is increased by 222.18% (115*140*115*120). This increase applies to the hunter's auto shot but does not modify casting times or the global cooldown at all.

Haste rating stacks additively with itself (i.e. if you have 35 haste rating on a helm, 65 on a weapon, 40 from a food buff and 35 from an elixir you have a total of 175 haste rating) and is then converted to a percentage that stacks multiplicatively with any other haste percentages as I described above. The important thing to remember here is that at level 80:

32.79 haste rating provides a 1% increase in attack speed.

Haste rating has a couple of advantages over flat haste percentages. Firstly, it modifies melee attack speed as well as casting speed by the same percentage, so the cast time on Steady Shot goes down and secondly and most importantly, it progressively decreases the global cooldown from the normal 1.5 seconds to a minimum of 1 second (you would need 1639 haste rating to reduce the global cooldown to 1 second. This is actually unachievable with currently available gear.)

So what does this mean to beastmaster hunters? Unfortunately, not much. While talents that improve haste are very nice and convenient (a full 30-45% of personal BM dps comes from auto shot) haste rating is the least important of all gear modifiers.

When choosing which gear to wear, a beastmaster hunter should look at the following stats in this order:

1. Hit Rating (up to 263 or 8%)

2. Attack Power considering that 2 AP is equivalent to 1 agility

3. Agility

4. Intellect

5.Critical Strike Rating

6. Stamina

7. Armor Penetration Rating and, lastly

8. Haste Rating

In the next installment, we'll be talking about specs, glyphs and shot rotations. Still to come: controlling your pet and more.

Hunters 101 - part III: pet selection

This is more of an impromptu post. Pet selection is not something I planned on tackling this early in the series, but Jessica Klein over at WoW Insider made a brilliant, concise and accurate post regarding pet selection for raiding so I decided to link to it from here as a part of this series.

During her post she refers to a dps spreadsheet made by Shandara over at Elitist Jerks. I will be talking about how to use this spreadsheet and others like it at some point in the future. They are an a amazing tool to help maximize dps.

For now, though, enjoy Lyssana's excellent post on hunter pet selection.

Hunters 101 - part II: hit, crit and AP

In the last installment I covered the concept of threat and tools a hunter can use to manage it. It is impossible to understate the importance of understanding and properly responding to threat issues that arise while in a raid.

In this installment, I am going to talk about some more concrete numbers that affect hunters, their pets and their raids.

HIT

The base chance to miss while striking a mob is 5% for 2-handed and ranged weapons and 24% for dual wielded melee weapons. This assumes that you and the mob are of equal level and that you have the maximum allowable weapon skill for your level (400 at level 80). For a boss level mob (the ones with the little skull where their level should be, technically level 83) that chance goes up to 8% for ranged and 2-handed weapons and 27% for dual-wielded weapons. That means that during a boss fight, a full 8% or more than one twelfth of your shots will miss. That is a lot of lost damage, time and mana.

There are two major ways to mitigate this. The first is through talents. Most classes, including hunters, have talents that increase their chance to hit with weapons or abilities or some or all of their spells. For hunters, Focused Aim is a three point talent in the first tier of the marksmanship tree. When maxed out, it increases the hunter's chance to hit with all weapons, shots, skills and abilities by 3%. That cuts down the miss chance on bosses by more than a third and can significantly increase your DPS.

The second way to mitigate the base miss chance is by stacking +hit rating on your gear. Hit rating is not the same as hit percentage though the two are directly related. At level 80, every 32.79 hit rating you have on your gear will increase your overall chance to hit by 1%. Since our goal should be to not miss at all, we need to have a total of 263 hit rating to mitigate all 8% of the miss chance on bosses. If we use this in conjunction with three points in Focused Aim we only need a total hit rating of 164 to never miss.

But what about Fluffy? A hunter's pet doesn't wear any gear. Since a good portion of a hunter's DPS comes from his pet, it behooves the hunter to make sure that his pet does not miss much either. Fortunately, a hunter's pet gets a portion of the stats from his master's gear: the more stamina the hunter has, the hardier the pet, the more attack power, the harder he hits. Pets also get 100% of the hit percentage of the hunter, with a couple of caveats: it is always rounded down. So if you have stacked your hit rating and managed to get your hit percentage up to 7.97%, Fluffy's hit percentage is 7%. So she still has a full 1% miss chance, even though yours is only 0.03%. Here is another caveat: your pet ONLY gets your hit rating. Talents like Focused Aim do not translate to your pet and there are no talents in the beast mastery tree or in any of the pet talent trees that increase your pets chance to hit, so your only recourse (if you want Fluffy to hit that boss every single time) is to stack hit rating up to the magical 263 mark.

The term "hit cap" is bandied about a fair bit. If you have read and understood everything in this post so far, you already know what it is. The hit cap varies depending on what talents they have and what other buffs they are receiving from their race and their raids (draenei have an aura that increases hit chance by 1%, shamans have totems that increase hit chance, etc). At it's most basic, the hit cap is the amount of hit rating after which it is wasted. I.e. if you have 280 hit rating on your gear, 17 points of that offer you absolutely nothing. So while it is important to get your hit as close as possible to the hit cap, it is actually detrimental to exceed it by too much since you are forsaking other stats that may help you in other ways.

CRITICAL STRIKE

Every time you make a physical attack with either a melee or ranged weapon there is a base chance of 5% that it will result in a critical strike, commonly referred to as a "crit". Crits deal double physical damage.

So crits are a good thing, right? You betcha! We all love seeing those massive numbers scroll across our screens. Four things affect the chance we have to get a critical strike. First is the difference between the attack rating of the attacker and the defense rating of the defender. For PvE, this isn't very complicated: your weapon skill is probably 400 and, if the defender is also level 80, his defense is also 400. So it cancels out. Of course, boss level mobs are considered level 83, so their defense is 415. When attacking a boss, your crit chance will be lower by 0.2% per point of difference or 3%.

The second thing that affects critical strike chance is agility. This one is pretty straight forward: as a hunter, for every 83.3 points of agility you have, you increase your chance to crit by 1%.

Next we have critical strike rating. At level 80, every 45.91 critical strike rating increases your chance to crit by 1%.

Lastly, talents. There are a slew of talents that increase your pets or your own chance to critically hit. Lethal shots, Ferocity, Master Marksman and others increase your overall chance to crit. Equally importantly, there are talents that proc (proc is an abbreviation that harkens back to the MUD days that refers to a weapon or item activating with the "Chance on Hit" or "Chance on Use" effect) from crits. For example, Cobra Strikes increase your pet's damage in response to your own crits.

When considering all these options together you can see how important critical strikes are as a part of your DPS arsenal. So what is more important? +crit or +hit? That question is a little more tricky. You cannot stack +hit ad infinitum without crippling yourself. On the other hand, if you focus exclusively on +crit, you will be missing so much, your DPS will suffer considerably. My suggestion would be to gear up to 164 hit rating and put 3/3 in Focused Aim. As you become better geared, keep increasing your hit rating to 263, and gradually remove the points from Focused Aim, moving them to Lethal shots.

ATTACK POWER

Your base dps (before haste or crits or special attacks) comes from your base weapon damage, its speed and your attack power. Every 14 points of attack power increase your dps by 1. Most special attacks like arcane shot, serpent sting and others are modified by your attack power. So the higher your attack power, the higher damage your shots and other special attacks do.

Unlike hit and crit, there is no maximum your attack power can reach and no diminishing returns from increasing it. Other than pure attack power modifiers on gear, your ranged attack power is modified by your agility (1 agility = 1 attack power). There are also a number of abilities and talents that increase attack power: Hunter's mark and careful aim for example.

In the next installment, I will cover Haste and probably delve into some of the nuances of shot rotations.

As always, please leave me a note if you found this post interesting or helpful and especially if you find anything inaccurate and/or blatantly wrong. I try to be as informed as possible, but hunters are not my forte and I have been known to make mistakes.

Hunters 101 - part I: Threat

I am going to use these first installments to talk about concepts and statistics that affect hunters: threat, attack power, hit rating and percentage, crit rating and percentage, agility, haste, etc. These are numbers and concepts that may seem somewhat nebulous to a hunter that has gone through the leveling process, simply questing away, shooting mobs without worrying about how much damage he/she is doing and what affects it.

First of all, something that is probably more familiar to hunters than to other classes, and likely the most important concept of all to anyone who intends to do any kind of raiding: Threat. Every mob (any computer-controlled attackable monster, creature or NPC) in the game has what is termed a "threat list" or "aggro list". On this list is anyone that the mob is negatively disposed towards: the hunter and his pet, their group, the entire raid, the random healer that walked by and healed you while you were fighting, etc. Whoever is at the top of that list is the one the mob attacks. Behind the scenes, there is an absolute threat number associated with everyone on the threat list, i.e. George the hunter has 1000 threat, while Snuggles, his pet bear has 1300 threat, therefore the mob is attacking Snuggles.

Pretty much everything anyone does affects that number by a certain amount: damage done to the mob increases it by the amount of the damage, damage done to the mob's allies increases it by a smaller amount; healing (NOT overhealing) increases by half the amount healed; buffing someone on the threat list increases threat by an amount dependent on the buff. Certain classes have threat-generating attacks: for example warriors have heroic strike and druid beartanks have maul, which generate more threat than the damage they do would normally indicate; other classes have ways of reducing their threat: every hunter knows what happens when they feign death. Some classes have an innate increased threat (warriors have a +30% threat built into defensive stance, for example and paladins increase threat generated by holy damage by 90% with Righteous Fury) while others have an innate decreased threat (rogues only generate 80% of their damage as threat). Certain abilities, only possessed by tanking classes: Death Knights, Druids, Paladins and Warriors, enable them to force a mob to attack them, regardless of current threat. These abilities, normally called "taunt" - after the warrior ability - instantly bring up the threat of the tank to whatever the mob was attacking at the time it was taunted. It is important to note that hunter pets' growl does NOT work this way. Growl instantly applies a large amount of threat to the mob but does not force the mob to attack the pet. There is an ability that tenacity pets have called taunt, but it has a 3 minute cooldown and is not nearly as useful as the PC tanking family of abilities. It is also important to note that many mobs in raid and 5-man dungeons including most bosses are immune to taunt-like abilities.

So beyond all these complicated threat mechanics the most important numbers to remember are: 110% for melee and 130% for ranged. What do these mean? Well, if you are in melee range of a mob (the way a hunter's pet or a rogue usually is), it will switch aggro (i.e. stop beating on it's current target and switch to you) when your threat reaches or exceeds 110% of the threat of it's current target. If you are at range from the mob (i.e. NOT in melee range, as most hunters will usually be) you have a little more leeway: you have to reach 130% of the threat of the mob's current target in order to pull aggro.

So what can a hunter do to manage their threat? Well, first of all, you need to know who has aggro (i.e. who is holding the mob's attention) at any given moment. Within the default UI (user interface), there is an option to show the target of your target. Under the Combat section of the Interface options, click on the "show target of target" option and from the drop down menu, select "always". This will put a small frame underneath the frame of your target showing whom it is targeting at any given moment. That gives you an immediate indication when the tank loses aggro, which still happens from time to time, but is much less of an issue now than during BC or vanilla WoW.

Another thing that you could do is install a third party addon threat meter. The threat meter of choice these days is called Omen. Upon downloading and installing it in your Addon directory, you will have a bar-chart on your screen showing relative threat for the mob you are targeting (or the one your target is targeting, if you are targeting a friendly toon like your pet). Most raids and even most 5-man groups these days will expect you to have some sort of threat meter installed.

So how do we put all this together? Well, a good rule for all kinds of raiding and group activities and even soloing in WoW is to be aware of your surroundings. Know who has aggro on what. Is that what is supposed to be happening? Do you need to use your pet creatively to pull that extra mob off your healer? Do you need to wipe your own threat by using feign death? Make sure you lay out your key bindings to give you quick access to feign death, misdirection and other abilities such as your pet's growl. One of your most powerful tools for managing threat (your own and your raid's) is misdirection. You can use this to increase your tank's threat when the your raid's DPS is creeping upwards on the threat meter, you can use it to pull a wayward mob running through the raid onto it's proper tank, you can use it to jump start an encounter and pull to a tank, giving the rest of the DPS a buffer while the mob or boss is being properly positioned. If you are creative, it can save your raid multiple times. With only a 30 second cooldown it is the "go-to" threat management tool.

I think that about covers the concept and management of Threat. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please put them in the comments so I can address them in the main post if necessary.

Some Hunter Love

As many of you know, my wife Taura plays a hunter. She just recently hit 80 and has been itching to come to our raids. She's been to a Sarth kill with no drakes up and the other day she went with us on a heroic Naxx run. She doesn't know the fights, but that's not a huge problem since we sit in the same room and I can give her instructions as we go. Overall, it was a pretty poor Naxx run. We had several undergeared raiders with us in addition to Taura and had some avoidable wipes (Gluth was especially problematic).

After the raid, Taura asked me what she could do to get better. Part of the problem was that she is a BM hunter with a level 75 pet. That will of course change. There are several other problems that I could see: a distinct lack of +hit on her gear, a preponderance of her damage coming from Auto Shot and things like that. I pointed her to a couple of sites like Elitist Jerks and The Hunter's Mark since I still play a hunter on a pretty superficial level and BRK is no longer with us.

She read for a bit and then got frustrated at how much of the nomenclature she lacked and how much of the underlying workings of the class she was ignorant of. She told me that while she loves to play the game, reading all the math and the theorycrafting is boring to her.

So I have resolved to help her. I am going to educate myself in the ways of the hunter and write a few posts that will help Taura (and other hunters with similar issues) to get better at huntering without wading through the amazing breadth of information that is out there. I am going to talk to some of my guildies and see if I can get some of them to write some guest posts for me.

Also, if someone has anything that would be helpful, please put it in the comments and I will try to incorporate it into the posts as I go.