Hunters' skill-cap is too low ?

[Dracodraco]

Play BM, especially if your group lacks 3% damage like we do in 10man.
Coming from a pretty high ranking BM hunter on WoL.

Except that on a standard "Nuke" fight, which has BM and SV the closest (like ultrax), an equally skilled BM and SV hunter are going to see a difference of about 6-7K dps - meaning that in order to make up for that, the rest of your raid (not including yourself, mind you) has to do 200K raid dps before the difference in DPS becomes worth it.

Also, hunters are doing great atm - anyone stating anything else should really consider taking a look around. Fire mages can beat us with good RNG, and rogues with LEGENDARY weapons can beat us. There's not much else, really.

[Sunstreaker]

Easy to play, Hard to master

[Zeta333]

Well what if it was a group filled with legendary Rogues, Mages, Warlocks?

DUM DUM DUM!!!!!!!

But in reality it is fight dependent. I find hunter cleave is shite unless spec into Survival which is also shite. Fights with little movement favor classes like melee and mages while a hunter has oodles of tools to move and dps so it is very fight dependent. Also your ones may just be terribad

Yeh the highest dps spec for hunter is shit, sure shows you know what your talking about, Hunter can have one of the highest sustained aoe in all the class's, as well as amazing burst aoe [ mm ].

ps: and our hunter had a few problem competing with other casters/melee at the very begining of 4.3, but by the time we were farming the place in hc he was pretty competitive (ie not always first, but not last neither)

Thats due to hunters getting a buff shortly into ds to make us not awfull.

[eschatological]

u can avoid all of this shit and still get top dps. plus, my group would boot me out of guild for playing like such a huntard...play the mechanics right (i.e. spellweave), prepare for your target swaps and u can get top dps every time.

Not currently you can't. If I look at those fucking bloods in a funny way, they drop over dead, way before we need them to. That's how powerful SV AoE is at 408 ilvl and 25% nerfed mobs. I almost never spellweave cleave on H-Madness any more because they would die too quickly even from a single multi-short with ISS and SrSpread, unless absolutely no one else AoEd them, at which point you're playing against your group again.

I'm normally 2nd on DPS in my H-10 man, second only to our frost DK GM who gets fed tricks. I beat all our legendary casters (to be fair, legendary staff at end game isn't so legendary, and rather on par with H-Madness weapons imo, and I get two of them), including a legendary spriest being fed DI by a legendary warlock. If our DK is out, I'm top. And that's over our legendary rogue, unless it's a particular fight to his advantage (he smokes me on Blackhorn, which is like the worst fight ever for hunters and which I sat on during progression pre-nerf). H-Madness is the exception because I deliberately throttle to fit our strat where we keep the bloods around a long time to aoe on top of parasites.

[Paulosio]

Isn't it just a scaling issue ? Hunters have traditionally done higher dps at lower gear levels than other classes but as people gear up hunters don't scale as well.

That being said overall I normally 1st or 2nd on damage on my hunter. Our kitty sometimes beats me... but then again he seems to be getting ranked on most fights most weeks while I haven't been getting ranked often since early DS heroic. He also has vial of shadows while I don't. Overall survival dps seems pretty good compared to other classes right now.

[Tamonlol]

The whole premise of this thread is misguided and stupid, the OP says hunters have a low skill cap simply because hunters in LFR are top dps and in HM are not. I do LFR every week and I can tell you that usually at least half the people in there have no idea how to play their class and most aren't pve geared or hit capped. I've only done 3 heroic bosses because I didn't have a guild to run it with , but I've never been less than 2nd on any boss even though I only have 394 ilvl, which is much less than what others in the group had.

It comes down to knowing how to play your class and min/maxing, I see a lot of people use their cds at the wrong time on a lot of bosses and that's why they can't be competitive on DPS. Even when played at the highest level hunters are usually behind most classes for dmg in DS unless it's an aoe fight where survival is obviously really good. Unless you're playing with pros a hunter should be able to do competitive and top dps in most guilds/raids when played the right way.

[Baergrillz]

I know the answer to this, only a small percentage of hunters do HC, Thats it.

[Tehterokkar]

I know the answer to this, only a small percentage of hunters do HC, Thats it.

Only a small percentage of the entire player base do HC Raiding.

[ayashi]

Hunters have a high % of their damage that come from flat damage. From damage that does not increase, or very little, with gear and skill. MoP is supposed to partially "fix that".
Exemple :
Hunter mark and hawk aspect : same flat ~3500ap if your are fresh lvl85 in quest greens or in full hc t14. in MoP it'll be a %.

[belgicanofl]

Play BM, especially if your group lacks 3% damage like we do in 10man.
Coming from a pretty high ranking BM hunter on WoL.

Not that ranking as bm is a challenge, I can rank top 10 with my eyes closed as bm or mm.

[Gray_Matter]

Raidbots standard deviation doesn't reflect this because this is not how people play. Bad SV hunters cannot utilize LnL correctly, don't keep ES on CD and manage focus poorly on the low-end (ie, no focus when ES/BA is up). In a way, bad SV hunters are overcomplicating things to make it worse for themselves; I'm not quite sure how to describe it. It doesn't change the fact the penalty for focus-capping is very forgiving.

That's exactly what it does reflect. It shows the variation in DPS in the parses. Ultraxion shows that the spec is farily forgiving in a stand and deliver type of fight because the variation there is pretty low. It's the fights where AOE and movement are involved that you start to see the gaps appear. This would be partly because of RNG but also because of skill.

[Rorcanna]

Seriously, only extremely ignorant players would think that ANY class can be mastered without the player having skill. A mediocre/bad or uninterested player will never maximize dps, never combine great survival with the highest sustained damage output/healing/aggro and so on. Hunters are no harder to PLAY than any other class (any n00b can take a warlock into a dungeon and survive as well as put out damage) but they're at least as hard to fully master.

Hunters skill-cap is not too low in any way, players just lack skill and try to sound more pro than they actually are at their class and most people only see hunters in "Heroic" dungeons, never in a proper raid setting.

[Ashyarrows]

I think hunters are where they need to be for skill cap goes i'm always one of the top dps in my HM ds raids

[Rustjive]

That's exactly what it does reflect. It shows the variation in DPS in the parses. Ultraxion shows that the spec is farily forgiving in a stand and deliver type of fight because the variation there is pretty low. It's the fights where AOE and movement are involved that you start to see the gaps appear. This would be partly because of RNG but also because of skill.

No. My response was directed at the question "why doesn't Raidbots stddev reflect that focus capping isn't a big deal?"

[Arhippa]

Seriously, only extremely ignorant players would think that ANY class can be mastered without the player having skill. A mediocre/bad or uninterested player will never maximize dps, never combine great survival with the highest sustained damage output/healing/aggro and so on. Hunters are no harder to PLAY than any other class (any n00b can take a warlock into a dungeon and survive as well as put out damage) but they're at least as hard to fully master.

Hunters skill-cap is not too low in any way, players just lack skill and try to sound more pro than they actually are at their class and most people only see hunters in "Heroic" dungeons, never in a proper raid setting.

I think you missed the point. The point is, are these mediocre/bad/uninterested hunters doing much better than bad/mediocre/uninterested players of other classes.

[Bisso]

I can't talk about HC raiding, as I don't do that. But since BC (when I started raiding more seriously, on my hunter) I witnessed the direct opposite.

At the beginning of an expansion, in green and blue, you can see a dps difference between equaly geared hunters, as you do at the end, and I dare to say that the gap between 2 hunters (a good and a bad) is always bigger than other classes. It still feels like this in DS. Now, HC stats could also mean: Scaling issue.

I think you missed the point. The point is, are these mediocre/bad/uninterested hunters doing much better than bad/mediocre/uninterested players of other classes.

I love how you assume that a LFR player MUST BE mediocre or bad. I played along side heroic geared mages and warriors in LFR, that probably were just rolling for the heck of it. And I was with no suprise out dpsing them by a large margin. Not because I'm pro, but because they weren't trying. So you can't get a good picture of a situation by looking at your recount for 2 minutes and not taking everything into account.

[Arhippa]

I love how you assume that a LFR player MUST BE mediocre or bad. I played along side heroic geared mages and warriors in LFR, that probably were just rolling for the heck of it. And I was with no suprise out dpsing them by a large margin. Not because I'm pro, but because they weren't trying. So you can't get a good picture of a situation by looking at your recount for 2 minutes and not taking everything into account.

And I love how you make assumptions about me and skip parts of what I said to make me look worse. Why did you leave out the "uninterested" part ? Because it didn't sound that bad ? Good, then it served its purpose. They aren't necessarily bad players nor did I want to make it sound like that. Some just don't care or have no motivation/time/whatever to learn, thus me including those as well.

Also, when did I say that every LFR player was bad/mediocre(/uninterested) ? I never even mentioned the LFR. Quite a few people I raid with weekly run LFR on their alts or sometimes mains for valor points or gear or just to help their friends, and I don't think they're bad. Quite the opposite.

As for recount or other DPS meter addons, I haven't even used them for nearly 2 years now. Mostly because I agree with you, they do not provide accurate info on what is going on, but also because I just don't care in random dungeons/raids. For guild raids we run logs that I can check later on if I really feel the need to do so. So please, don't make that kind of assumptions based on so little info - just like it is with recount.

[Tarastarr]

Any class can be played "well" after some initial time is spent just reading about the rotation and practicing it. To generalize one class isn't really fair, from someone who predominetly plays dps roles across a wide variety of toons Hunters are in the middle of the pack and they feel just right to me.

[Taiknee]

A hunter who tops DPS charts most likely knows his rotation and/or does extra things to really improve his DPS, like saving cooldowns for specific phases. LFR is not really the best place to judge a class's DPS because a large amount of people do not put forth a lot of effort there.

[Bryntrollian]

Idk what you are on about but I always out dps other hunters with far more gear than I have in LFRs