Lessons Learned

Marksmanship Week wraps up with a VoA10 yesterday where I did a pretty dang good job– I was in the lead on Recount by a large margin on both Archavon and Emalon, and some of my long-time friends who were in the group commented on my sudden noticeably big jump in DPS. Yes, where Survival failed to bring the increased numbers, Marksmanship delivered– a lot.

And so we reach the end of this great Spec Experiment. Things I’ve learned?

– Marksmanship is definitely replacing Survival as my dual spec. I don’t need to be the raid group’s emergency replenishment bot when I don’t have a raid group anymore. >.>

– I was using my wolf this whole time as part of my experiment to really try to min/max this as much as possible, but I miss my raptor so much that I will probably go back to using him full time. Furious Howl has a cooldown, but Raptor cuteness is forever <3 - I was sort of expecting to spec back to BM and suddenly flail around feeling like I had nothing to do and everything was "easy" after playing specs with a lot more buttons to push. But in all honesty, the reverse was true. For me, Beast Master feels very difficult to play well, and I think a lot of it has to do with perception. With Marksmanship, topping the DPS chart feels smooth and near-effortless, whereas with Beast Master, it feels like I'm prancing on a rather precarious position and one misstep will cost me. So I really really have to try to coax what I can out of it, merely to reach the lower level of what I got as MM. The result is that, oddly enough, BM has suddenly become sort of a more stressful spec to play o.O It’s kind of weird and I’m not sure what that will mean for me in terms of playstyle. Though lemme tell ya, I can’t wait until BM gets this supposed buff that we’re supposed to get… and hopefully still will… /crosses fingers

(Note: I don’t mean to offend anybody here; I know the idea of “which spec is the most challenging to play” seems to be a really touchy subject, with most everybody clamoring to claim theirs as the most difficult to play. I think first of all a.) it’s subjective, and b.) I haven’t found a single hunter spec thus far to be boring to play– awkward, yes, *glances at Survival* but certainly not boring– and to me, that’s what counts. They are all challenging in their own way. /nods)

In the end though, I don’t really aim for giant DPS numbers so much as I aim to be competitive; so long as I am somewhere in the top 3 or 5 (depending on whether it’s 10man or 25man) then I am content. This experiment has been an awesome and eye-opening experience to me, but I’m glad now I’ll be able to close Recount for a while and not worry about it.

/leans back and streeeeeeeeeeetches

17 thoughts on “Lessons Learned”

  1. Guess my comment didn’t post. You’re making Marks sound very enticing. A guildmate runs as Marks all the time but I always out-dps him as Survival. I didn’t think it was a matter of skill, but I don’t know anymore. You’ve got me considering a dual-spec into Marksman, but then I would lose access to two of my pets. 🙁
    Anyway, I’ve tried to get back into regular updates on my site with progression updates and whatnot. If you’re bored and want to look at pretty screenshots and awesome videos, stop on by. I plan to post more videos as the weeks go on, and I try to keep them straight-forward and informative (and pretty).

  2. Congrats Pike on getting through your 2 week experiment! I applaud you for sticking it out.

    I’m sure Wash is glad its over. Those stables get really cramped sometimes.

    One thing I do dislike about the hunter community as a whole, the “which spec is the most challenging to play” arguments really drive me nuts. Pike, your note said it perfectly. It is a subjective argument. It comes down to play style of the player. (hunter community…can we please stop arguing about it now? :P)

  3. Here’s a real kicker, sweety. Try creating an off-spec that stricly provides raid buffs. You’ll be surprised how competitive you can be.

    Spec to Bestial Wrath on BM, and Trueshot on MM.

    Its an interesting hybrid spec to play with. Reminiscent to vanilla WoW’s version of MM/SV hybrid.

    You’ll definitely be quite the support system.

  4. Absolutely looking forward to BM buffs in 3.2. 😀

    Pet Expertise scaling with hunter Hit Rating? Oh, yes please! That alone could be a 3-4% overall damage buff in raids.

  5. Glad to hear the vague summary of your experiments! One thing I was wondering, and am browsing your archives for, is perhaps a “kindergarten Overview” of each spec?
    I’m jsut bringing my hunter out of retirement, hit 80 this week, and am considering trying out a different spec (currently Bm pet-tank talented) just for a bit of variety.
    Since I’m abso-frikkin-lutely loving the fact I can misdirect and gather up 6-8 mobs on my Warp Stalker and bring them to an explosive trap, then go AFK or loot the corpses while others are dying…. yet in heroics I am horrid and would like to improve my own DPS slightly to help out my guildmates (not to top meters, mind you).
    So, what would you say about a brief blurb like: “BM priority seems to be X>Y>Z and gear for ABC”, “MM priority seems to be Y>Q>Z and gear for RAP”, “Sv priority is BLackArrow>X>Z and geat pure Agi”
    (granted these summaries are intentially wrong-ish)

    Might help us unretired and hunters-in-training relearn the basics in one easy to follow place. De Loas know that the EJ forums are not nearly so clear, or friendly as Pike is. 🙂

  6. I’ve decided to try my alt Hunter out as Marksman for tonight Naxx10 Alts run. He’s been Surv before, but I am attracted by some of the things you wrote about MM. Just wish there was a spec that would let me use a different pet than a Wolf.

  7. It was great reading your thoughts on each spec, Pike! 🙂 I tried a similar thing, and ended up falling in love with MM. I am also really glad it’s made you happy that you stuck with BM!

    “Furious Howl has a cooldown, but Raptor cuteness is forever <3" <- Great line 🙂

  8. I am glad that you enjoyed your self!

    I play a ret pally (see link), and I sometimes wish I had a little more wiggle room in my talent tree to do some different, or “unusual” builds.

    Glad to see you had a blast with the little experiment!

  9. I decided to give MM a go this week after running with Surv for this hunter (I had a BM hunter to 70 before rolling this one), and I seemed to have the opposite reaction to you in terms of ‘ease’. I found MM far more awkward in terms of shot rotation than Surv, although I feel I was doing something terribly wrong, as autoshot became the largest percentage of my damage. I did more damage as SV.

    One of the issues perhaps was that I was used to standing still, and needing to stand still for Sniper, so steady shot didn’t feel quite so “zomg, I can/must move!”. As MM, I found myself not having a clear idea of what cooldown came next, as the shots all had close refresh times so after the first rotation, it got a bit finicky as to what to pause for and what to hit. SV had a much more clear delineation between the shots I felt, as there were fewer with a cooldown and you could easily pad with SS.

  10. @Wobin MM does require you to watch your cooldowns a little more, more so than other specs, since depending on your glyphs you have multiple timers. All I can give you is a shot priority list. Hunter’s Mark up, Serpent Sting on, Chimera, Aimed, Arcane. Steady Shot becomes far less important and fits in after all of these shots and only between cooldowns. Depending if I have any haste procs, I get one maybe two steady shots before returning to one of the cooling down shots. It’s not a set pattern really, just a priority list with a vague pattern but the different cooldown lengths for each shot usually mess up any real rotation. However I was BM for ages and then fell in love with MM. I love having all kinds of buttons to push and working in Rapid Fire with Readiness cooldowns to get the most Rapid Fires for one fight.

  11. Wobin, you can’t make a spec change and expect to have a grasp as to how it all works. Of course you did less damage than your familiar Survival spec, you know that spec, the rotation, how the talents work and so forth. The same is not true for Marksman, especially when you aren’t comfortable with a shot rotation or priority plan (using the addon OmniCC is highly recommended as it shows a numerical value indicating how long an ability has before it’s off CD, it’s a countdown on your button bar).

    It takes at least a few days to begin to get familiar with a new spec (this is true for any class), and any new spec is going to seem far more complicated than the one you know. I had the same reaction in switching from BM to Marksman, but now I can’t imagine going back to BM as it is, I find, far more complex and challenging than a basic Marksmanship rotation.

    On that note, I have serious respect for BM Hunters who can pull of massive DPS these days. Managing both your own shots, trinkets and cooldowns along with keeping your pet up, healed, properly positioned, out of goo, void zones, fire walls and so on is, to me, an incredibly complex process and requires the player to be watching carefully many areas of their screen at once and responding immediately. I don’t find MM or SV to be nearly as challenging as BM, personally (I wish I was good at BM, I miss my Loq’nehak and I’d love to have a Silithid!).

  12. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed MM so much Pike. As a BM hunter that went MM and just kind of stayed there, I have to say it’s an attractive spec. At first I was a little guilty to leave my Devilsaur Kawaii out of the action, but BM felt right, and MM felt right. ‘Fraid I’ve never had much luck with SV…. I wasn’t bad at it, I was doing about equal DPS, but the playstyle just felt so wrong.

    I am excited about dusting off the ‘ol BM spec for raids in 3.2, giving Kawaii another raiding go. (I miss him >=( ) I think the biggest thing they could do for BM hunters is make secondary stats carry over to our pets, and maybe make our pets a bit more survivable. (I’ll be danged if I know more than one healer in the guild that bothers to heal pets) That’s really the big difference between BM and MM. Pet damage is fully 40-50% of your DPS as a BM hunter, but pets benefit DPS-wise from your AP only. (Unless you count your crit as something that enhances their DPS by giving them extra Focus) The cooldown reduction on Kill Command will be nice, but that’ll only fix half the problem. While other hunters can receive the full benefit from added Haste, ArP, and Crit, BM only receives half sadly.

    Now to be fair, yes, our pets can receive the same raidbuffs as us, which will increase performance, but only ~if~ you can convince other raiders to buff them. I forever have the problem where I use my pet to save a healer, or pop BW on something that WWs so that the melee are safe, and get my pet demolished, and then go for 30 minutes with my pet unbuffed.

    I guess one of the main reasons I went MM and then just stayed there is because of how Blizz has set up the BM hunters for failure to start. It irritates me, but then, I’m an irritable guy. Who knows though? Maybe Blizz will do a lot of fixing in the near future. I hope so, because I’d like to visit that spec again. I miss Kawaii.

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