New Shot Macro

I picked up the 2-piece tier 13 recently, and I've been staring at my focus bar again, watching it sit way too full and debating what to do about it.  The obvious answer is to use more focus, but I couldn't cram in enough Arcane Shots in to burn off the excess without losing my haste buff or Serpent Sting from missing Chimera.

Enter Kill Command.  I wanted to maintain my ~10 second rotation (Chimera's unglyphed cooldown) but burn more focus, which meant using a focus dump that wasn't Arcane Shot.  Kill Command is a lot of focus, it hits hard, and it doesn't disrupt my existing rotation.  When I get the 4-piece bonus and have to deal with haste procs, then I'll have to reevaluate the rotation again and what it's most useful and feasible to squeeze in with the extra time in the ten seconds between Chimeras.

For now, though, the cast sequence looks like:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Kill Command, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

I wanted to maintain the pairs of Steady Shots before and after Chimera Shot so that when moving through the rotation, I keep the haste buff up, I'm keep Serpent Sting up by having enough focus for Chimera, and I have some focus to do something with after Chimera.  The biggest problem I had was on target switching if I happened to be at the Kill Command point in the macro and my pet was still running over, so I'd hit some other buttons and reapply Serpent Sting if needed in the meantime.

The result on LFR Zon'ozz:

Not the most amazing of numbers, but a personal best for him.  He's a nice, easy, stand-and-shoot fight in LFR, so he gives pretty numbers to start with.

More thoughts on the /castsequence

I'm running with a spec that looks something like this.

Since actually raiding Tol Barad (three times now), I've dropped one of the Arcanes from my macro, due to focus starvation outside Rapid Fire, and finally realized that dude, I can pop Aspect of the Fox during Felfire and keep my rotation going during all the running around.

No, other than the opportunity to raid-test the macro and tweak for focus consumption, my thoughts on the cast sequence have been centered around two of the other Steady Shot-centered talents: Piercing Shots and Master Marksman.

Ignore, for the moment, that Marksman is bottoming out raid DPS rankings right now. We play Marksman because we love it, right? (There is some irony, I think, that the hunter specs are sandwiching that list.) Besides, 4.0.6 will bring us some changes that will help with that. Aimed, Arcane, Chimera, and Kill Shot are all getting damage buffs. We'll be able to Auto Shot while moving.

Aimed Shot is one of the main things I've been thinking about regarding the cast sequence. We really only use it on proc, and the proc is reliant on Steady Shot and the RNG. The only way to really get more Aimed Shots in is to get more Steady Shots in. Add to this the bleed damage both Steady and Aimed (and Chimera) can inflict. If Aimed Shot hits harder, the target is going to bleed harder. Add in a bleed debuff from an Arms warrior, Subtlety rogue, Feral druid, or one of our own pets (I favor the hyena for this when needed), and we're looking at some nice little boosts.

But again, we need more Steady Shots to get more Aimed Shots. If we prioritize Chimera to be every 10 seconds (in a normal rotation; if you use Kill Shot or Rapid Fire or Readiness, the spacing will vary slightly), that means we've got 9 other seconds of global cool down to work with. Getting Steady down to a one-second cast requires amounts of haste that are more or less insane. How insane? Not quite 9000. Yes, with the two hunter haste talents (Pathing and Improved Steady Shot), you need 8817 haste rating to get your Steady Shot down to 1 second with no other haste bonuses.

No, a 1.5 or 1.6 second Steady Shot cast is probably what we're sanely looking at most of the time, without extra haste boosts - that is, for most of our normal rotations. That means that the two bundles of two Steady Shots makes sense, and pairing it with two Arcane Shots will make sure we're not sitting on buckets of Focus.

What about that extra second or so of GCD? We could add another Arcane Shot, but raiding Tol Barad - a fight that is, more or less, the ultimate in stand and shoot fights for 98% of it - has shown that 3 Arcane:4 Steady will leave us Focus starved at points. 2 Arcane:4 Steady makes sure we have enough Focus for our next Chimera. 2 Arcane:5 Steady, however, pushes us past the 9 second mark, towards an 11-second rotation.

At this point I'm going to stick with the 2:4 Arcane:Steady ratio. The half a second is useful for flexibility when you need to pop some extra shot (Kill Shot, Tranq, etc.) or a trap, or perform some other utility action. If you've got the extra time or Focus, another Steady or Arcane can be added, but with the upcoming changes to Aimed, I would lean towards the Steady Shot.

So for now, the macro remains:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

PTR musings

I haven't been on the 3.1 PTR at all. I haven't felt motivated this time, since the changes aren't as big as the 3.0 PTR (we're not getting two new tiers of talents, and whatnot).

The changes that have been put forth for hunters, though - not the ammo changes, or the pet changes, but the tweaks to the Marksman talents - they're going to require some spec and rotation tweaking.

Why? Daze, Chimera, and Steady Shot.

I'm using a Chimera, Aimed, Arcane, Steady x3 or x4 rotation. I'm looking at this spec. So I'm going to want to switch things up - probably Arcane, Aimed, Chimera, and then my Steady Shots, however many I can squeeze in with Haste. (Three or four.)

This hinges on the changes to Concussive Barrage - Chimera and Multi will have 100% daze chances. PVP change? Oh, no. This is to buff MM hunter's Steady Shot damage in PVE. (Okay, maybe not, but it's how I'm going to use it.) Add onto that the bleed from Piercing Shots which Aimed, Chimera, and Steady will add...

Yeah, bosses are immune to the daze. This rolls Concussive Shot's effect into Chimera and Multi, though - which means you have a multi-target daze. For non-boss situations, this is going to up Steady Shot damage, as well as give a hunter more kiting options.

Oh, right. Who still kites nowadays?

Patch Notes Update, and more about shot rotations

There are some tasty new changes to the PTR patch notes for 3.0.8 - nothing removed, but three new bullets:

• Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
• Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
• Tranquilizing Shot has had its cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, down from 15.

The Arcane Shot change is going to be awesome for me. I've posted my shot macro here already, and Arcane Shot has always been part of my rotation. It hits and crits hard, and I'm talented to buff it. Pulling the mana cost down to the level of Steady Shot justifies its even more.

The Explosive Shot change doesn't affect me since, well, I'm a marksman hunter. The Tranq. Shot cooldown reduction is great, though - Gluth was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that. It'll just make it easier to keep things dispelled so that it doesn't pressure the healers to do it.

Going back to my shot macro, I've been thinking about the math more, and there really isn't much I can do to improve it. The criteria for it (my criteria, anyway) is that it use my 3 hard-hitting instant shots as often as possible, in the priority of Chimera, Aimed, Arcane. I want to be getting to my Chimera Shot in the rotation every time it's available, within the limitations of a 255 character macro, in order to keep my sting up. It's a free sting refresh. (I was not initially sold on Chimera Shot when I originally saw the MM tree, but like Silencing Shot, which I didn't spec into until probably 4 months after hitting 70, it's grown on me.) Manual weaving would actually be the best way for me to utilize those three instant shots, but I've had to admit to myself that my focus is, well, problematic. I get distracted by movement on the screen. (I had to turn off both the in-game screen flashes and the ones from Omen.)

So... the maths. The hunter Global Cooldown (GCD) is 1.5 seconds. That doesn't change. Every shot in your rotation has to budget a minimum of 1.5 seconds before you can do any other shot (besides autoshot, which is now in it's own happy little world of constancy). Steady Shot has a 2 second cast time until you start adding haste. I don't know how the haste numbers work in relation to Steady yet - i.e., how much haste pulls Steady down to a 1.5 second cast. This is my next area of research. But with basic GCD numbers, you can get in 7 shots in 10.5 seconds; you have to wait till 10.5 because otherwise you're sitting at a 9 second rotation, and your Chimera and Aimed aren't ready yet. 10.5 is your number. Three of those shots are dedicated to your instants - Chimera, Aimed, and Arcane. Chimera hits the hardest and refreshes your sting, so you can sacrifice optimizing Arcane for that (or manually weave... I used to be able to...). Those three shots are 4.5 seconds of your rotation, leaving you with 6 seconds to fill with Steady Shots. You're only going to get 3-4. Three with no haste; four with optimal haste.

If you hit optimal haste, though, Rapid Fire, Improved Aspect of the Hawk, and such become mostly unnecessary; you can't get any faster. If you're spec'd into these, it may make more sense to manually throw in an extra steady when you're proc'd into one or more haste effects (OMG Potions of Speed, seriously). Haste doesn't need to be the first stat you stack - your haste-buffing abilities and those of your group (Bloodlust, etc.) will help; you might find out what kind of gap you need to close between those abilities and reaching optimal haste to squeeze in an extra Steady and go for that, though. Haste will always speed up your autoshot, and if you do hit optimal haste, you can move those talent points around (and re-glyph!) to get more bang (or twang) for your buck.

I have considered rewriting the macro with /castrandom, to see if that will solve the rotation problem:

/castrandom [Chimera], [Aimed], [Arcane], [Kill Shot]
/cast [Steady]

I don't know if that will really work, though, or if it'll just pop Steady and ignore the instants that are available. (I didn't sign up to raid tonight, so maybe I'll remember to test it.) I would hope what that macro would do is pop an instant when there's an instant available, and then pop Steady when everything else is on cooldown. I kind of doubt I'm going to be that lucky, though. I don't really care what order the instants go off in most of the time (I don't have the Hunter's Mark related talents... I've been through that story, right?), as long as they're all getting used as often as possible.