Being unfair to myself or just bad?

[Squall13]

Hello Hunter community

I rarely post here but I lurk hunter forums and dps forums. I need a little help hopefully from top guild hunters out there.

As any hunter worth his salt, I try maximizing my dps as much as I can. I research a lot and pretty much have a good idea on how to squeeze as much dps as I can. May it be macros, priorities, pet food, pre-potting, refreshing stings at best times, stacking cooldowns, watching internal cooldowns, never missing an auto shot even at movement, all that jazz. I also think my raids have all the buffs and debuffs I need (although sometimes our Fury warrior gets lazy on sunders...).

I usually hit around 13k to max 14k on a lucky night when stars align on a "almost Patchwerk" boss. Every night after raids I compare my performance to WoL Hunter top 200 dps. People there usually go 17k - 15k dps (even 18k on Rotface). Although some of these parses are padded ( Tricks, Hysteria ), a lot of them aren't. I even use CompareBot to compare my parses to some to see the amount of shots I fired etc etc.

I've been finding ways reach those numbers. Gear is one thing of course since a lot of those people are already decked out in 277's but I doubt gear makes a 3k dps difference. The only thing I haven't really min - maxed on my toon is being a troll/orc and being a blacksmith. Though I doubt this is game breaking since I see Night Elves and Engineers (such as myself) on that list. Raid DPS also contributes but some of these people don't even get to use 4 Rapid Fires because their fights go too short.

My hypothesis as of right now is

1. My crit rating is killing me (damn Deathwhisper trinket won't drop). It would help a lot 'till i get more 277's and get back to H: DC

2. My FPS (9 fps on 25man. Yes I bought my PC from Fisher Price),

3. And of course, the usual "learn to play".

So, asking help to solve hypothesis #3.

Am I just being unfair to myself in trying to compare and compete with the top end of the hunter dps curve? Any other tips or secrets that I don't know you guys can sell me. (I actually learned the "use-Rapid-Fire-after-your-instants tip from Paragon forums).

Unfortunately, I can't post links since apprently I'm a forums noob. My hunter's name is Âlethea on Azshara server. My guild posts parses in WoL if you want to look at it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Criticize away . It would improve me and my guild too probably (9/12 Heroic 25. Working on Putri. We're not that great).

Thanks in advance for all the help. I'd appreciate it.

[Toas]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...n=%C3%82lethea
http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/5717/

Your armory and WoL, for future posters' reference ^^.

Right then. I just scanned through your armory quickly and saw one thing that caught my eye - your accuracy enchant. I found two quick ways to fix this.

1) Switch the Accuracy enchant for a Massacre enchant and gem 2 Glinting Ametrines, one in your belt (in place of the deadly), and one in wodin's/rep ring. This is a very minimal dps gain, but a dps gain nonetheless.
2) Switch the Accuracy enchant for a Massacre enchant. Now then, you say you're 9/12 heroic25, meaning that I'm going to assume you have a fairly consistent, properly stacked raid comp. I imagine that you probably have a consistent raiding blood DK or enh shammy, meaning that you can afford to drop the 1 point in TSA. Move this 1 point into 3/3 Focused Aim. This nets about a 40-50 dps increase for you, so it's pretty significant.

Oh also, BS is a pretty big dps upgrade when you get to the upper levels of ArP. So if you have the gold spare, I definately recommend training it.

I'll let others analyze your WoLs. I just did a quick scan.

[Squall13]

Thank you

The accuracy enchant is there for the Sindy 10man Hardmode neck I got. It has no hit. Sadly, our Blood DK is our third-wheel tank get only gets brought in when he needs gear and HM. Putricide. So yeah I have to take TSA since we don't have an enhance shammy either.

I do believe that BS is a good DPS gain but like I said, it won't give 2-3k dps. And some top parses have hunters in varying professions.

Thanks for the help nonetheless. I appreciate it.

[Steakums]

Thank you

The accuracy enchant is there for the Sindy 10man Hardmode neck I got. It has no hit. Sadly, our Blood DK is our third-wheel tank get only gets brought in when he needs gear and HM. Putricide. So yeah I have to take TSA since we don't have an enhance shammy either.

I do believe that BS is a good DPS gain but like I said, it won't give 2-3k dps. And some top parses have hunters in varying professions.

Thanks for the help nonetheless. I appreciate it.

Could drop a point out of Imp Barrage for that extra point of hit as well, which still allows you to keep TSA. I would wager that your FPS is hurting you more then you realize, and if your doing as good as you are atm for dps, one could wager it just comes down to skill and overall raid dps then it does fixing anything with you overall.

[Squall13]

one could wager it just comes down to skill

Yeah that's what I'm trying to fix. Need to find out more tricks to improve my game

Thanks for the input

[Scripts]

Your general machine performance is probably your biggest issue. Beyond that, another place to shift a point instead of imp. barrage could be Imp. Steady, or rapid recoup for FA, if you need to keep TSA.

I'd recommend playing with Femaledwarf.com or the spreadsheet from EJ, spec wise, to figure out which would be the bigger dps gain.

[Sylv_]

FPS is killing your game.

If everything was smooth for you, your rotation would be a lot more refined to a perfect rotation which yields high dps.

I'd say you're doing just fine, just find a new machine to play on or do some upgrading.

One last thing; Do any of your friends have a killer machine? Or know anyone with one? You should put WoW on there and see where the performance of a high end machine puts you.

[Squall13]

Believe it or not, sadly I'm the one with the best computer among my friends. Lol most of them don't play wow and like me use it most as a work machine.

I think my video card is fine (GeForce 9800GT) and so is my ram (4 gigs) but I think WoW is CPU bound so maybe my processor is killing me (Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ 2.3 GHZ)

I didn't think WoW would need a "high end" PC or my CPU is just really shitty

[Maleficious]

I believe you do everything right from what I've read, used to have a bad computer too and believe me that if your computer preformance was better your DPS would have been better too.

[Gotjuice]

FPS are huge trying to maximize your dps. 9 FPS aint gonna cut it, improve that and your dps will increase a lot.

[Shelly]

Turn down your graphics settings and shut down anything that might be sucking up resources in the background that isn't needed. My money is that it's your graphics tuned up high and possibly stuff running in the background.

I mean I've got a similar card, but I'm only running with 2gigs of RAM and an Athlon 3000 and I get better FPS than that.

[Squall13]

I got all settings at the lowest level. Only one checked is Projected Textures. The only program that I'm running in the background is Vent.

Believe me, I've read and tried almost every fps improvement guide out there. Even the ones on Technical Support forum of Blizzard.

Thank you all for the responses btw.

[Kibu]

:-)...While some of the parses might be padded with hysteria's tricks , its the nicer to beat them without :-). Although most of the high parses come from obscene amounts of t10. procs....anyhow to the subject:

1. Know what you will be doing in every second of the fight. Know when or whether you will have to move and why.
2. Prepot
3. Refresh your stings.
4. Is the fight going to last 3 minutes and your guild uses Heroism at start ? Then dont be a lemon and waste your RF with it.
5. Dont miss out on steady shots, waiting for 1 second before you fire your next Chimera isnt really productive.
6. Generally , regardless of what people say or do you want to end your night with a 4:1 Steady to AS / CS ratio (deducting one for each use of Readiness)

Then well encounter specific things you could do:

Marrowgar - not really much, if he WVs towards you first, lay trap, disengage sideways.
DW - A mouseover macro for Kill Shoting adds is always nice
Saurfang - i personaly stand at min range of saurfang, lay explosive traps on cooldown, damage done >>> 1 missed steady shot
Rotface - Stand inbetween two slime pool spawn spots, as in the exact middle - the movement will be limited to a single strafe left and right.
Festergut - bribe a priest for guardian spirit
Bloodprinces - tell your RL to go fuck him self, and go eat a pizza.
BQL - dont stand in the fires doh.
Sindragosa - you have to know when and whether to volley tombs, place a trap before she lands, place a trap when she is about to iceblock people, place a trap when you reset your debuffs. Have Kill Shot glyphed for this ( Yeah guys get your spreadsheets out and figure out why its shit when your fights start lasting 2 minutes ). Dont be a dumbo and spend 8 seconds meleeing blocks , you have 2 seconds to reset - 1 run in, trap, 2 run out.
LK - w/e...

[Maljce]

Having this difficulty as well before, not knowing what seperates these high end MM dps'ers from the average,... It took me some time to figure it out. Yet eventually I did figure it out and I managed some high ranked spots on several bosses over the last few weeks/months, even in the top 10. From a raid done a few weeks ago, these were some of the higher dps values:

Saurfang: 16111.3 dps (first time I actually was allowed to dps without having to lay a trap every try!)
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3m...?s=4499&e=4734

Putricide: 13930.6 (still ranked #24 in wol!)
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3m...?s=6497&e=6898

Rotface: 15518.4 (which is actually quite weak considering there's almost nothing going on in this fight)
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3m...?s=5990&e=6193

Festergut: 14616.9 (which is by far the worst on festergut in weeks.. but I just had to stand my ground when our warlock just decided to mess up my dps by standing on my spot again, gassing up all over me during the first few seconds of the fight. )
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3m...?s=5442&e=5677

So what's the thing that made the difference for me in reaching average to high end dps? Gear ofcourse, but often forgotten and equally as important:
1) you need to get as many autoshots in as possible (biggest damaging ability, ca. 27% of my overall damage)
2) you need to get as many steady shots in as possible. (second biggest damaging ability, ca. 20% of my overall damage).

People know about 1). For this purpose hunters often use the quartz swingtimer. I personally also use another swingtimer, "ACB swingtimer", which allows customization and allows being repositioned.

What people often don't fully understand is the importance of part 2, the amount of steady shots you end up casting. With the hunter globalcooldown being capped at a minimum of 1.5 seconds it often happens that its impossible to chaincast your steadyshot, leaving big parts of time in which you dont cast any steady shot at all. This is the reason why many people say that they do more dps when they spam their steady shot button harder, which will in fact result in less downtime between casts and a higher damage output. Of course, you can also go by this the smart way and find a way to spam your steady shot button more easily. What some people do is use the scroll button to spam steady shot.

It's kinda sad, but eventually, at the end of the day, the person who spams his steady shot button the hardest, will do the most dps as a marksman hunter. As survival it was much easier to be top DPS without spamming any button at all . It has to be said, of course, that there are other things where you can min max on, but that would obviously take it to far.

A simple comparison from previous logs proves what I just said. I've compared the amount of steadyshots/autoshots fired on previously linked putricide fight with the two other hunters in the raid:

Me: 130 steady shots // 185 autoshots
Hunter G: 73 steady shots // 141 autoshots
Hunter T: 51 steady shots // 142 autoshots

All these things such as talents, they are of course all very important, but if you're not spamming your button hard enough one way or another, you're not going to get the max out of your character's potential.

On a side note, It's in fact my opinion that engineering is far superior to blacksmithing if you consider yourself in an actual raid environment. Imagine the amount of autoshots and steady shots gained when you have to move from point A to point B using rocket boots, compared to when not using rocket boots.

[rinkx]

I think my video card is fine (GeForce 9800GT) and so is my ram (4 gigs) but I think WoW is CPU bound so maybe my processor is killing me (Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ 2.3 GHZ)

Hi there! I'm not a hunter, but I had a geforce in the past that was killing my FPS for no reason at all. So I googled around, and I found a page that suggested turning off forced anti-aliasing, forced vsync, etc. My FPS shot up 30+ fps. Check your video settings (you should have the geforce icon next to your clock) and see if these aren't "forced", and if they are, make them so the game chooses or force them off.

[Theophanu]

Bloodprinces - tell your RL to go fuck him self, and go eat a pizza.

This is pure win. *lol*

[Gotjuice]

New video card dude, 100 bucks.

[Ravendill]

Unfortunately, people like us Squall (with old computers) will always have the FPS boss killing our DPS slow and steady like :'(

The only thing you can do is min/max your gear the best you can and crank out as little movement and as tight a rotation as possible.

Sucks being limited by hardware doesn't it? If only i could shell out $500 to $750 for a new setup. One can only dream...

[Squall13]

4. Is the fight going to last 3 minutes and your guild uses Heroism at start ? Then dont be a lemon and waste your RF with it.

Thanks for the suggestions Kibu. I do most of the stuff you put in there except the Saurfang fight (Max range on {star} duty with a lock).

I've read countless and countless of thread debates about the stacking cooldowns strat. Some people swear by stacking every single thing on the Bloodlust (Kripparrian, Starfairy) and some are totally against it (Kruf, you).

My guild usually pops BL on the first 5 seconds of the fight. So I usually pop double RFs on that time span since all trinkets and prepot is ticking down during that phase. Then pop double kill, aimed, chim, RF by the end of the fight when trinket are 1 second from proccing again.

Besides the FPS issues that people here are pointing out that contributes to my fail dps, I try to fix everything I can in my playstyle and thank you all for the tips.

Hi there! I'm not a hunter, but I had a geforce in the past that was killing my FPS for no reason at all. So I googled around, and I found a page that suggested turning off forced anti-aliasing, forced vsync, etc. My FPS shot up 30+ fps. Check your video settings (you should have the geforce icon next to your clock) and see if these aren't "forced", and if they are, make them so the game chooses or force them off.

I know what you mean. Which of these settings (if not all) should I force off? Just these 2? Can I bother you of linking that site if you still have it? Thank you very much.

P.S I do have the money to upgrade (having a full time job) but I just need to pinpoint the exact problem before doing so

[Kibu]

Whether you pop in on the start pretty much depends on whether you are going to use it a 2nd time or not - and more important WHEN ? As the fights more and more approach the 2 minutes mark, sans Sindragosa and Putricide, if you pop Heroism at the start, you dont need Kripparian to tell , that its better to use it later in the fight, eventualy geting an extra Kill Shot.

As for hardware upgrade - you rather invest into a better cpu, a good LAN card then a new GPU.