Hunter Raiding Tips

[Thraice]

Due to professional responsibilities, I haven't had the opportunity to raid as much as some of the other Hunters in the guild have but in the short time that I have and through reviewing the World of Logs Raid parses from the nights I've missed I've seen a few things I wouldn't to bring up for discussion here on our class forum. In doing so, I do not want anyone to think of    this as things anyone is doing wrong – it's more along the lines of the things I'm doing that appear to really be working for me. My goal here is to help all of us put up the top numbers our class is capable of with the least amount of trouble.

Stat Priorities
When it comes to putting up the large numbers I think a large part of it is properly prioritizing your hunter's stats. I think with the state of where Hunters are today, it's safe to say our number one stat priority is Agility. Agility is our main source of both Attack Power and Critical Strike rating (CSR) – two key stats that directly affect the amount of damage (and thus DPS) we do.

To go along with Agility though, we have a couple key wickets that we should try to meet to ensure that we're maximizing our opportunity to actually do that damage! The first one is making sure that your hunter is at the hit cap – which is 8% for raid bosses. Nothing is worse than reviewing a raid parse and realizing your numbers aren't as high as they should be because you fell below the hit cap (or were never there to begin with). There is plenty of heroic (item level 346) gear that will put you at, and even well above, the hit cap so this shouldn't be a problem. The second, especially for Survival (SV) Hunters, is to be at the haste "soft cap" of roughly 6.27% haste rating. By doing so, your Cobra Shots will have a 1.667 second cool-down between each cast and it works out in such a way that if all your other shot priorities are on cool-down you can squeeze in three Cobra Shots during each Explosive Shot cool-down period.

Close behind Agility in importance is CSR as a secondary stat. This is the stat that you are going to want to re-forge your gear to as long as you've met the important wickets mentioned above. Keep in mind, though, that 1 point of Agility continues to be better than 1 point of CSR. This means when it comes to gems, unless you're going to get a bigger benefit than the +40 Agility through the socket bonus, you're going to always want to use the Delicate Inferno Ruby for your sockets. For instance, if your socket bonus is +20 Agility and you have a yellow socket you're going to want to gem with a +20 Agility and +20 CSR. If you simply put a +40 Agility in that socket, you're losing the +20 CSR and you're not gaining the socket bonus.

Oddly enough, Mastery's one of the lesser important stats for us. It's more important for Marksman (MM) Hunters but when it comes to Beast Master (BM) and SV Hunters, we're more worried about getting the critical strikes in the shots we fire! So, Mastery can be a source of points for re-forging if you're struggling to make the hit and/or haste caps. Obviously, if you've got more than 8% hit or 6.27% haste then your best bet's to re-forge one of those two. Mastery is still important enough and applies a bonus to not simply throw it away when you have other stats being wasted.

Quick recap: The key wickets are Hit (8%) and Haste (6.27%) – anything above this is a waste. Stat wise, Agility > CSR > Mastery > Haste > Hit

As you continue to get upgrades you're going to have to juggle the stat priorities depending upon what your new gear has and where it puts you in terms of the caps. However, by taking the time to do so, you're giving your hunter the best opportunity to perform in a raid!

Raiding Consumables
I'm not going to talk long about this – mainly because it should be pretty straightforward and easy to understand. For all hunters, our raiding consumables of choice would be the ones that give us the most Agility in a single source. So, for flasks we want the Flask of the Winds, which provides +300 Agility. For food, it's the Skewered Eel at +90 Agility and +90 Stamina. Last, but hardly the least – for bosses, you're going to want to use the Potion of the Tol'vir. That potion right there is the source of +1200 Agility for 25 seconds! That is HUGE. For fights where you have a good feeling of the encounter and when the ideal times to use your cool-downs, you can actually pop a potion a couple seconds before the tank pulls which gives you approximately 20 seconds at the beginning of the fight with +1200 Agility, allowing you to use another potion during the burn phase! Like I said, for your damage done – this is HUGE!

Initial Tank/Pull Threat Generation
Having a tank myself I know how hairy initial encounter pulls can be. Your DPS are just itching to use their abilities and just light up the Recount DPS charts with their amazing numbers! Sure, the DPS should know to reduce their DPS to limit their threat generation until you have enough of a lead but if they don't have to then it's all the better for everyone! The tank would get and keep the threat and the DPS can unload and begin wailing away on the boss – which is what brings the encounter closer to being complete. We can play a huge role here in helping both of them! We have to be a bit wise, though, on how we choose to do so!

Once Misdirection triggers and for the next three seconds, all threat generation we do is transferred to your misdirected target. So, in order to get as much threat on them as possible we're going to open up with our big abilities from the get go. When I'm starting an encounter as SV and the initial pull has occurred, I'm going to open up with Explosive Shot, followed by Black Arrow and then Serpent Sting. What this does for both the Tank and me is that it opens up with my biggest shot and allows it to tick the entirety of the three second misdirect – big damage, and thus threat, up front. I then follow that up, less than a second later with Black Arrow and begin its ticking. Finally, with that last second of threat transfer, I launch Serpent Sting. With the Improved Serpent Sting talent, I get the upfront initial damage and happily hand that off to the tank. Now, that alone is usually a pretty big chunk but when you add in that I'm also doing it with nearly +1600 Agility (Flask, Food and pre-pull Potion) this is big numbers and even bigger threat!

Aspect Dancing
With the introduction of the Aspect of the Fox, Blizzard gave us the opportunity to utilize one Aspect, Aspect of the Hawk, while standing still and simply unloading which gave us a +600 Attack Power boost and another Aspect for when we had to be on the move – allowing us to shoot our Steady or Cobra Shots while relocating. Then, they turned around and in a hotfix they gave us the ability to Auto-Shot on the move regardless of which spec the hunter was in. With only a +600 Attack Power buff, though, it was actually pretty effective to just stay in Aspect of the Fox for the entire encounter, allowing us not to have to worry about ever clipping our Cobra or Steady Shots.

Next week, though, Blizzard's going to tweak the Aspects even more by increasing the aspect of the hawk buff to +2000 Attack Power. How much of a DPS boost is this going to be? "Proc" and encounter dependent it can easily be another 2000 DPS on top of what we're already capable of doing! Very cool. We are still going to want to be in Aspect of the Fox whenever we're moving so that we ensure our Cobra Shots are going to fire properly, but anytime we're going to be standing still – we will want to be in Aspect of the Hawk, no doubt in my mind.

How you manage switching between Aspects is up to you. Some people enjoy using a macro such as:

/cast [aspect:2]Aspect of the Hawk
/cast Aspect of the Fox

This macro will put you into Hawk if you're in Fox and vice versa. Handy if you're into using a keybind for your aspect dancing.

You could also write your shot macros as follows:

#showtooltip Explosive Shot
/cast !Aspect of the Hawk
/cast Explosive Shot

This macro will put you into Aspect of the Hawk before every time you launch an Explosive Shot. This will ensure you get the most DPS out of each Explosive Shot but if you're going to continue to be on the move you're going to need to hop right back into Fox to shoot a Cobra Shot next.

Personally, I use my mouse wheel combined with the left CTRL key. If I hold CTRL and roll my wheel UP, I go into the Aspect of the Hawk. I actually have it defined so it casts it as "/cast !Aspect of the Hawk" so that it doesn't turn off my Hawk aspect if I get a little over zealous in attempting to switch. Then, CTRL and down on the wheel will put me in Fox with the same spell declaration "/cast !Aspect of the Fox."

Whichever way you find works best for you it should be a quick and near effortless transition for you to go between Fox and Hawk so that you're not having trouble being in the right Aspect during a boss encounter where a lot of other things are going on which need your attention much more.

Clicking versus Key binds
It's a proven fact through hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of various testing. If you use your mouse buttons to click on each individual shot your DPS is going to be lower than someone who uses key binds. Now, If you're not in the raiding scene or you just don't care about maximum DPS output then this might not really apply to you. For the rest of us that are looking to do our DPS job well, we have to make the switch if we haven't already.

So, what should we key bind and what's ok to click? Regardless of what spec you're in, you absolutely want to have your normal shots key bound. After that, abilities used more rare are better suited for clicking such as the Trap Launcher or the Traps themselves. Personally, I also have all of my crowd control (CC) abilities on clicking buttons vice key binds to open up my key bind options to damage producing abilities. Again, the preference and assignment is truly up to you but you want to make sure whatever method you go with you're able to quickly and accurately launch the priority shot you intended to use.

Pets
Blizzard was kind enough to give hunters the ability to bring most of the raid buffs with us through the means of the different pet families we tame. Gone are the days where you have to have another certain class in the raid if you've got a hunter in the group – that is, unless the hunter has failed to do his job and prepare those pets! What do I mean by prepare? Well, it should be your priority to get the necessary pets to bring the different possible raid buffs; short of those restricted to BM. If you don't have each of these pets in your arsenal and at level 85 already, don't be too worried – I'm in the same boat. It's just another thing we have to all work on to be the best choice to bring in future raids. Flexibility and performance are huge when you're only looking at 10 players we can bring to any given raid.

SV versus MM
Which spec is the best to bring to the raid? The answer's pretty simple, in my opinion. Both. MM, as of some of the latest hot fixes, hot fixes is now the top performing single-target hunter spec. There's no question about it. With the HUGE buff to Aimed Shot (even with the upcoming hot fix slight nerf) combined with Careful Aim, MM can see HUGE critical shots in the 40000 and 50000 range. Also, with the fact that Careful Aim is active for the first 20% (100 – 80%) of the boss' health and that in the beginning of the fight you're popping a potion before hand followed by a pair of Ready Fires, since you have Readiness to reset it, your damage is going to be through the roof! SV isn't without its place, though. Heavy movement fights and AOE necessary fights, SV's going to top a MM any day.

The only way you're going to have both specs be viable options for you in a raid, though, is to go ahead and spec them ahead of time and practice them through the means of 5-man heroics and Training Dummy time. If you go into a raid without practicing your MM rotation, since most of us have been SV since the release of Cataclysm, it's going to show through the (lack of) numbers on your part.

Macros
Macros have their place. I use a variety of macros depending on a given encounter, the spec I'm playing, or the gear and enchants I'm using for a fight. Hell, I've got an add-on called Macro Bank which allows me to save MANY more macros then the Blizzard default interface to later recall and use on the fly. They have their place but make certain you're not hindering yourself through the use of them. What do I mean? Well, take a look at the one below:

#showtooltip
/cast Kill Shot
/cast Explosive Shot
/cast Black Arrow
/cast Arcane Shot
/cast Cobra Shot

Yep, that's a macro. It even has all of the SV hunters prioritized shots in it – in order! Awesome! Not so fast, there. The way this macro would work is when pressed it would attempt to fire Kill Shot. If the target wasn't below 20%, thus triggering Kill Shot, it would move on to Explosive Shot. If you had the focus for Explosive Shot and it wasn't on cool-down, it would launch the shot for you. It would continue to do this for each of the spells in the list in the order they appear. Initially, this might sound like a good idea but let's say that Kill Shot's not available, Explosive Shot is 0.5 seconds from coming up on cool-down and Black Arrow still has a short while. This macro would then fire your Arcane Shot, using that focus you would have had available for Explosive Shot causing you to have to fire Cobra Shots to replenish your focus before you can use your next Explosive Shot. So, Explosive Shot's cool-down is up but you don't have enough focus. Cobra Shot's at the bottom of your list so you fire the macro again – accept you had enough focus for Arcane Shot (since it's cheap). Well, now you have used even more focus, not regained any focus from Cobra Shot and now you have an Explosive Shot standing by and Black Arrow has just come off cool-down. This, is just DPS being lost.

The way I bind my shots, since I don't have any "On Use" trinkets at the moment is that I put the spell itself on the Action Bar – no macro needed. This way, I'm the one making the conscious decision which shot to cast and when to cast it vice hoping my macros will be smart enough to fire the proper shot for a given situation.

Conclusion?
Yeah ... I have a tendency to write a lot. I'm hoping, though, that through this information we can all help each other get better. If there are any questions about anything I covered here, don't hesitate to ask! If you have some tips not covered, add them through a reply! I'm far from perfect and I know there are still ways I can improve to!