Cause they boost your damage. Eh? Eh?
Okay, cutting to the chase because I just had this blog post almost finished when Firefox decided to eat it for breakfast so I’m starting from scratch. Let’s take a look at some of the shots available in your Beast Master repertoire:
Steady Shot: Once exulted on high as your best friend, now your filler shot that you press when nothing else is available. You’ll still be using it a lot, though, and you’ll want to boost its damage up from “abysmal” to “mediocre” as much as possible, so keep a Glyph of Steady Shot on you. For great justice. And yes, this means you’ll be keeping Serpent Sting up. Anyways, when you can, you’ll be wanting to stick to Shots That Aren’t Steady Shot™ as much as possible…
Arcane Shot: Your new bestest buddy, you’re going to want to use Arcane Shot as soon as the cooldown is up. Ferocious Inspiration and Improved Arcane Shot are both mandatory talents– as if FI’s super-buff wasn’t awesome before, this talent now also increases your damage with Arcane Shot. Combine that with IAS and get ready to /giggle at your Arcane Shot crits, especially after Mirror of Truth procs.
Multi-Shot: I’ve had good luck with this one on the Training Dummies, it’s a reasonable damage boost that isn’t Steady Shot. This is one of those situational ones, though. You may not want to use it if you’re having mana issues (are solo or in a group without Replenishment); and you don’t want to use it when there’s CC about or there’s a chance you might hit (and aggro) another mob with it. I know CC and aggro and all that is kind of a non-issue right now but I feel that this is a piece of hunter lore that we should remember in case it becomes important in the future. Don’t Multi-Shot CC.
Aimed Shot: Most Beast Masters don’t take this unless they dabble heavily in PvP, and I don’t blame them– the damage increase is small these days and the mana cost is pretty prohibitive. Still, it’s a Shot That Isn’t Steady Shot™, and I find myself wondering if it would be worth it on a DPS dump fight (like Patchwerk) with lotsa mana Replenishment going on. I haven’t tested this one myself but I’d be curious to know if anyone else has and what they think.
Kill Shot: Use it when you can! Now that the cooldown is a lot shorter than it was before, you’ll probably be able to use this more than once on most boss fights. Take advantage of that fact!
And moving on…
What is my Shot Rotation, Pike?: At this point I don’t know if it’s a true shot rotation as much as a shot priority.
1.) Is Serpent Sting up? If yes, go to the next step. If no or it is about to run out, apply Serpent Sting and go to the next step.
2.) Is Arcane Shot’s cooldown up and ready to go? If yes, use Arcane Shot. If no, go to the next step.
3.) Use Steady Shot.
Basically every time you are ready to fire a shot you are going to mentally ask yourself those three questions and go from there. If you’re going to be using Multi-Shot and/or Aimed Shot, insert them appropriately between Arcane Shot and Steady Shot. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it looks– you’ll be watching cooldowns and managing your pet, yes, and it can be a little difficult at times if you stink at multitasking like I do, but you’ll get it. Oh, and when I say mentally asking yourself those three questions– you don’t have to, uh, literally do that. But you get the picture, right?
In closing this might be sorta semi-offtopic but I’ve been seeing a lot of comments left lately on some blogs I read that involve people of various specs talking about how their shot rotation/cooldown-watching/whatever is bigger and as such their spec is “harder” and hence, superior. May or may not be followed by quoting Ghostcrawler. And it all kind of bugs me because it’s twisting the complexity of hunters down into one oversimplification and assumption.
Here’s my own take on this, and you’re free to (respecfully!) disagree if you wish of course, but this is my opinion– shot rotation alone does not equal skill. Pressng more buttons does not make you a better hunter. Having more cooldowns does not make you a better hunter.
Being able to trap indefinitely, kite indefinitely, spec your pet best for whatever job he is doing, not break crowd control, know what shots to use and when, know what gems/enchants/stats you want, know when to bend those gems/enchants/stats rules, popping your “big” cooldowns at the right times, know to listen to the raid leader when he or she says “melee do this” cause you have to apply that to your pet… all of this combined with being able to pull off your shot rotation, regardless of spec, is what defines a skilled hunter to me. You can’t base skill or difficulty level off of one aspect of the class alone, especially when said definition of “difficulty level” is so dependent on opinion and an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
And while we’re on the subject, let me also point out that you don’t have to be a traditionally “skilled” raiding hunter to earn my respect; if you’re having fun with the class you’ve got my respect. Period. Hunters are for fun!
That’s all for today, and remember:
Test everything and come to your own conclusions! Don’t take my word for it (or any other blogger’s)– we’re a guide, not a rulebook. ^_^
(P.S. I promise this ramble wasn’t directed at any blogs that I read. Much <3 to you all)
Nice post Pike. I wasn’t sure we were going to be hearing from you as much after hearing that you are a little sick of WoW at the moment in twitter. Are you still having WoW downtime?
Last night I was doing … MD on Tank, HM on the Skull, Multi-Shot, then unloading with steady/arcane, keeping serpent sting up. Seemed to work well – I never pulled aggro and I believe was second to the survival hunter in the group.
Good post though. 🙂
I love your blog because it helps me understand how to play BM. If you remember my previous comments, I’m a MM hunter, but I just love hunters so much I decided to make a baby BM hunter (pre-patch 3.08), and obviously, everything in BM got messed up, and now I know that it’s a no-no to spam Steady Shot on my BM hunter. 🙂
That being said, I play WoW because it’s fun, and I like to go my own way (even if it means going against the crowd) – so I understand what you mean by what makes a hunter good (not spec, gear, or shot rotation alone). 🙂
What I’m saying is… great post! 🙂
Thank you so much.
Honestly, my hunter used to be one of my favorite alts to play (my main is a Warlock, go figure), but the great 3.0.8 shakeup nixxed something for me, and I’m not sure what it was. I moved her to Northrend, talked to her new profession trainers, and then… wasn’t “feeling it” anymore, somehow.
She’s been languishing in SW ever since, logging in every now and again to run between the mailbox and a stove whenever my warlock is running low on spellpower food.
Suddenly I’m itching to play my hunter again. Not sure if anything will come of it, but I think it’s high time I ditched the 4/5 Beast Lord’s she’s been wearing since who knows when. (Yet another reason I hate the new Kill Command, actually. It used to be somewhat cool, especially with the Beast Lord’s set buff, but now it’s just a boring cooldown to pop alongside BW. Yawn.)
Thx for the article!
Does multi-shot remove CC? I remember reading that they changed it but some searching found it in the 2.4 patch notes but people claiming the game did not match the patch notes. My hunter is a BM alt so I avoid instances, not that anyone does CC anymore. So it would be easier on me to just ask you rather than set up a test. 🙂
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/03/25/hunter-changes-in-2-4/
Great post, Pike.
As a BM Hunter, I wish we had more options in a fight. Spamming SS was never my idea of fun. But, I enjoy my spirit beast to much to go spec differently.
I’m sorta glad that SV is still topping the DPS charts, but not so much to discount FI when you’ve a chance to take a BM Hunter. Hopefully, this will mitigate the, “You’ve gotta take X-spec” on a raid to the negation of others. We can only hope.
I also want to encourage any non-raiders out there to become casual raiders. Reason being, there is some great end game content that is a pleasure to see. I’m somewhat of an RPer, so the narrative means a great deal to me.
Thanks Pike!
Z
I hope you didn’t read my latest post as being based on skill. It’s point was the amount of effort required to do consistently well. Effort heralds and maintains skill, no matter what your spec is.
@ Neggles – it 100% was not directed at you, or any other blogger. It was directed at comments that I’m seeing everywhere (mostly at BRK’s blog, right now).
As far as breaking CC: at 2.4 there was a whole bunch of abilities that were going to become ‘smart’ about not breaking CC, including multi-shot. The only one that made it off the PTR was the paladin shield toss, because nobody cared what protection paladins tried to do in the arena.
Two of the new 3.0 talents also avoid CC’d targets: another protection paladin ability, Hammer of the Righteous. Same reasoning as the shield. The other is the DK wandering plague, because you can’t have a DK without diseases and if you’ve got the talent, the only way to avoid using it is to not apply diseases.
If all the CC (stuns and silences) that they’re talking about pushing onto protection paladins goes live, you can expect wandering plague to be the only one left shortly after 3.1.
Wait what did I miss.
I’ve been using Steady Shot and I’m not killing as fast as I used to but it’s still pretty darn respectable and better than I was expecting given the nerfs? You sound pretty categorical about it =o
@ Mister Adequate – Your drop in Steady Shot damage is sorta gonna scale on gear. Better geared/higher leveled hunters saw a bigger drop. Hence why the nerf wasn’t particularly huge for me strutting around in my blues/heroics stuff, but was a big deal for super end-game folks in the sets. It is a shot you should still be using it a lot anyway, but just use other stuff when you can, if you want to maximize DPS!
This is exactly what im doing although i sometimes get the timing out and not get the best out of the shots.
BTW that cat looks identical to my cat! Gonna go check with Softi to see if she’s been posting pics of the cat again.
Thanks,
this gives me a better understanding, why playing hunter. it is not hard to play a class i think. its hard to get the motivation to play the class the right way.
I have had great success with this macro:
#showtooltip
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast !auto shot
/cast Kill Shot
/cast Kill Command
/castrandom Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
With this, you can bind it to a key and just spam away. Kill shot will always cast when available and arcane and multi are on cooldown about as much as manually using them (it will sometimes cast steady when these are ready, but not too often), and the only thing you really need to worry about is keeping your sting up. If you’re in a group using cc you can just remove the multi-shot part and manually trigger that when needed.
Phiil – Thanks for the tip, though I maintain my stance that the day I start using a macro, is the day I quit playin’ hunters ^_^
Not sure I can agree with ya that Improved Arcane Shot is mandatory. I can understand why you say it as Arcane shot is needed to maintain dps now but I’ve never specced into it and still haven’t at this point. I find that some talents in the BM tree are a bit more worthwhile to me than that talent. And steady shot is still a big mainstay of hunters in between cooldowns.