Lower dps on AOE fights?

[Jayjayhey]

I seem to be doing good dps on fights where it's single target (thok, malk, sha, juggernaut), but fights with a lot of different targets my dps decreases. I am always in top 3 for single target fights (I pull around 350k or more at 569 ilvl as survival), and it decreases heavily as aoe fights. I am going to assume my rotation is wrong or something.

what is the general rotation for aoe fights as sv? when to spam multi shot and when not to?

what's a good addon best to track amount of mobs in order to know when to simply spam multi shot? does this exist?

on a fight like protectors as sv and we're only stacking rook and sun, best to stick to single target?

I go from top 3 to close to #9-10 on non-single target fights, especially spoils.

this is all heroic btw

[Azortharion]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-F-A-Q-Answers <- SV AoE/cleave guide there.

[eschatological]

You may be losing damage simply due to the fact that other classes do much better in AoE situations than single target. I'd say hunters DPS increases linearly with AoE (one more SrS ticking, one more MS shot, one more target for Barrage) but other classes increase exponentially. Also, as SV, it's more sustained AoE than burst. On a fight like Spoils where everything is dying very quick, SV is going to fall behind.

But afaik, for SV, it's just MS on 5+, Explosive trap on 5+, keep BA on something, Barrage on 2+, fire your free ES on LnL. If two targets, just do your normal rotation except fill with MS instead of AS. I may be a bit off, I play BM generally.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah, I guess I'm a bit wrong on the Explosive trap bit.

[Merlaine]

I've noticed the same problem, and after a fair bit of research have come to the conclusion that most other classes will always beat me in aoe fights. As the poster above stated, part of this is due to the linear increase of our aoe, the other is the way in which our aoe is designed (badly). To keep our focus up for multishot, we need to single target something with cobra. This isn't too bad with bosses like Protectors, where a boss is always up, but on other fights, things just die too quickly for hunter aoe to be effective. One thing you can do is make a mouseover macro for ss. This is helpful for fights where the adds are too spread out for ms to spread it. The only thing that surprises me about hunter aoe is that the forums aren't full of people complaining about how bad it is.

[Azortharion]

Maybe cuz hunter AoE is fine except for MM?

BM burst cleave/AoE is like the strongest in the game. Surv AoE isn't bad either.

[Illana]

you need to make a distinction between aoe and cleave

cleave is doing almost equal damage to a set number of targets, something arms warriors, dot classes and combat rogues excel at.

AoE is changing your rotation completely to do as much damage as you can to the number of targets available.

BM is good at both whereas survival is only really good at AoE.