Say you try to generate the mother of all threat jumps for the tank and send the tank a nice Aimed Shot followed by a distracting shot. Solid 3k threat jump hopefully. Then think about GCD, mana cost and actual damage done during that time span. That’s 3k damage if you’ve got a solid crit rating and some good gear and the crits go your way. 3k over the time span of 4.5 (latency and attention permitting) seconds is only 667 DPS. In that time span you could have tossed out 3 steady shots and 3 auto shots as 41/20 (this isn’t an arguement about spec but better DPS and efficiency) which worst case scenario with the same gear is 3600 damage taking a 600 average hit for auto and steady combined. That’s 800 DPS. Over a 100 DPS increase with the same mana cost as casting Misdirection.

No, I’m not trying to downplay the utility that Misdirection gives, especially to rage starved off tanks. But it definitely doesn’t qualify as the most useful hunter ability. Misdirection should never be spammed.

AotV comes close as does AotH (when talented for the improved effect) but it’s the use of feign death that allows hunters to go harder into mobs than any other class. It’s one of the reasons that hunters top DPS charts, it’s what gives hunters more survivability in AOE situations than most classes.

No offense to whoever said it’s the most useful, but it’s a waste of time. If your tank doesn’t generate 700+ TPS in kara gear then they need to step it up. If your pulling out more than 700 TPS as DPS, then you should start looking at ZA and t5. Scale this accordingly for other instances.

But Pike, what if the priest keeps going afk without warning? Or refuses to give us Power Word: Fortitude? Or any of those other priestly offenses to the class?

I was in a Gruul’s PuG where one of the hunters thought that Misdirection was used as a threat reduction ability.

So he misdirected to a rogue, because the rogue could Vanish, thus could permanently erasing the threat the hunter just produced.

And this was on the Gruul’s fight itself! Somehow, we made it past HKM without wiping.

To not use auto shot after one of your other shots, you’ll have to make a macro, like this:

/cast Arcane Shot
/stopcasting

The “stopcasting” line stops your auto shot from going off after another shot, like arcane, distracting, or aimed.

So, here’s my question… How do you keep an auto-shot from going off in between your DS, Aimed Shot, or ArcShot? If you can’t, then do you usually only use two of them, with an auto-shot going off in between?

Thanks,

Zwingli

<_<