Multi-Shot - Ruh Roh!

In episode 21 of the Hunting Party Podcast we interviewed Kruf who was one of the hunters who got the world's first Lich King (25), and heroic Lich King (25) kills. In the interview he said the most important thing for hunters is to constantly be firing something and not sitting idle. I agreed with him whole heartedly - until today.

Before I start I'm going to give some benefit of doubt here and chalk this one up to transitioning from Survival to Marksman. Even with that there are some things here that are just plain ugly.

What you're looking at is a World of Logs timeline view from a recent Festergut (25) normal encounter. For more information on using World of Logs you can check out this post at OutDPS.com.

So where to begin? See the spell labeled speed? That's a haste potion. The hunter is pre-potting so he can use another one later in the fight. Good stuff, and something I don't do enough of.

Next we see an adjustment to his tracker. This is for the 5% damage boost from the Improved Tracking talent. The problem here is that this was entirely unnecessary since he was previously tracking undead. Tracking should already be in place when you enter the instance.

We also have Misdirection and Hunter's Mark. Both fine. When the fight starts he leads off with Serpent Sting, having macro'd Silencing Shot and Kill Command. Nothing bad about that.

Next we see Chimera Shot followed by Multi-Shot. Ruh Roh! Next we get Rapid Fire and Readiness, followed by Chimera and Multi-Shot. Ruh Roh! With Rapid Fire cooking the poor bastard gets hit by Vile Gas. Things move along and then we start to see some Serpent Sting casts - lots of them. Ruh Roh!

The second image is from end of the fight. Note, the two images do not comprise the entire timeline. What's notable in this second image is that only one Kill Shot was fired once the boss was in execute range, and there were no additional Rapid Fire/Readiness combinations. All at once, Ruh-Roh!

Let's talk a little bit about what's wrong here. First, Multi-Shot is not Aimed Shot; at least not for Marksman, and to some degree Survival. The following talents all affect Aimed Shot and not Multi-Shot,

• Marked for Death - Increases your damage done by your shots and the damage done by your pet's special abilities by 5% on marked targets, and increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Kill Shot and Chimera Shot by 10%.
• Piercing Shots - Your critical Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 30% of the damage dealt over 8 sec.
• Improves Steady Shot - Your Steady Shot hits have a 15% chance to increase the damage done by your next Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot or Chimera Shot by 15%, and reduce the mana cost of your next Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot or Chimera Shot by 20%.
• Master Marksman - Increases your critical strike chance by 5%, and reduces the Mana cost of your Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, and Chimera Shot by 25%.
• Sniper Training (SV only) - Increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Shot ability by 15%, and while standing still for 6 sec, you gain Sniper Training increasing the damage done by your Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, Black Arrow and Explosive Shot by 6% for 15 sec..

This is huge, especially Piercing Shots which is a big part of Marksman damage. Aimed Shot is second only to Chimera Shot in the MM rotation. It does more damage and costs less mana than Multi-Shot. That's not to say that Multi-Shot does not have it's place, it does. Single target boss fights are not one of them though.

I'm not going to go into the whole nuance of Readiness/Rapid Fire other than to say you need to monitor these closely and use them appropriately as the length of the fight dictates. In this fight you probably should have had at least three rapid fires if not four.

As for Serpent Sting, Marksman hunters should only have to recast this if it's fallen off (which shouldn't be an issue with Festergut), or you get a buff such as Exploit Weakness and want maintain a buffed Serpent Sting on the target. If you look at the end of the fight we see Serpent Sting followed by Serpent Sting, followed by Misdirection, followed by Serpent Sting. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Finally, Kill Shot is our biggest shot. It's priority should be greater than anything else we've got. This is true for Marksman, Survival and Beast Master. Once you get into execute range there's no reason not to be watching this and getting off as many as you can. Most fights I've seen, there is usually time to get off more than one.

So at the end of the day where does all of this shoddy huntering get you? Right smack dab in the middle of the pack. Almost 8K dps. Not the worst, but not nearly as good as it could've been. If you're on a progression fight and bumping up against an enrage timer, "not the worst" probably won't be good enough.

PS: Ruh Roh - Astro or Scooby-Doo? Debate!

Readiness and Rapid Fire

We're Marks now. We've been so for a while and we're loving it. Once of the great things Marks has to offer is the Readiness ability. Readiness will reset the cooldown on all hunter abilities except for Bestial Wrath. That means abilities like Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Feign Death, Misdirection, and more importantly - Rapid Fire!

The most common use of Readiness is to reset our Rapid Fire ability and allow us to use it multiple times during a boss fight. That's right we can use our Readiness ability to get anywhere from four to six depending on the length of the encounter.

There are two schools of thought on how best to use Readiness and Rapid Fire in a raid encounter. The first method has us synchronize the cooldowns of these abilities by performing the following sequence.

RF > Rotation and Wait for RF to end > Readiness > RF

The second method method focuses more and getting additional Chimera and Aimed shots off sooner, but you're Readiness and Rapid Fire cooldowns will not be in synch.

RF > Rotation > Readiness > Rotation and Wait for RF to end > RF

Some general thoughts. Don't just focus on Rapid Fire. If Rapid Fire has fallen off, but Chimera and Aimed are not on cooldown, you'll want to wait until you can get both those abilities on cooldown before using Readiness.

Also, you want to try and stack Rapid Fire with as many procs and abilities as you can. Using Rapid Fire at the start of a fight ensures that the majority of your procs will be cooking in conjunction with Rapid Fire.

After Readiness and Rapid Fire come off their three minute cooldowns, you'll want to assess things before repeating the process. Maybe it makes sense to pop Rapid Fire right then and there or maybe you've got some things coming off cooldown and it's worth waiting a few seconds. Whatever the situation, it's certainly not worth having one fewer Rapid Fires for the sake of stacking buffs.

There is a lot of nuance that comes with the Readiness ability, but we love it and we use it early and often. How about you guys, when and how are you using Readiness?