Kill Command or Arcane Shot

[Xaladan]

i didnt find a thread on this, and id like to know what the census is.

Kill Command costs 40 focus and Arcane shot costs 25, KC dosent do 2x the damage of AS but costs about 2x the focus. is it really worth using in a BM dps rotation?
even with killing streak i dont think "you 3rd KC doing 20% more damage (if you last 2 crit)" is really worth it if i can pump out a few more AS instead.

Hunter comunity, your thoughts?

[Gildian]

I see my KC crits up to 15k and Arcane shot crits up to 10.5k as BM, use both. Are you using a ferocity pet?

[Xaladan]

i have my devilsaur, but with your numbers, you can fire 2 arcane shots doing roughly 21k dmg, or 1 KC doing 15k, why use both?

[Gildian]

KC will scale better up to and including 85. I'm highly certain of this. For right now, it's probly worth it to just spam Arcane but we also have less crit % than our pets (due to ferocity pet talents).

[Deleted]

i have my devilsaur, but with your numbers, you can fire 2 arcane shots doing roughly 21k dmg, or 1 KC doing 15k, why use both?

time my friend. casting 2 spells takes longer than casting one its dps ur after not minimal resource usage :P

[Xaladan]

time my friend. casting 2 spells takes longer than casting one its dps ur after not minimal resource usage :P

acrane sht hits harder than anything els i would be using as a BM hunter, so even if i went KC-AS its still 2 spells, unless serpent is up for refresh or KS is up

[Jazzism]

Kill Command, in my thoughts it scales with Mastery, so as you ram pup mastery as BM your going to get more in return from KC than Arcane shot.

It's something I need to test.

[Xaladan]

Kill Command, in my thoughts it scales with Mastery, so as you ram pup mastery as BM your going to get more in return from KC than Arcane shot.

It's something I need to test.

this makes sence, unfortunatly, unless you have a beta key you cant really test this

[harky]

Since when is 1.6x 'about double'?

Anyway, you can't do this type of analysis straight up. You need to consider the other implications. For instance 2x Arcane at low mastery will in fact do more total damage than 1 KC. However, 2x Arcane takes 2 seconds, while KC takes 1. KC has much higher DPS. Also because of the way Focus regen works by dropping KC from your rotation you would not be able to add 2 Arcane's in the place of each one.

This becomes a moot point if you have reasonably high Mastery. You'd need to model both to see the point as which KC becomes higher damage per focus. It's always higher damage per second. There may be an exception if for some reason you don't train Mastery and have very high end gear. Even that's pretty unlikely though.


Edit: Another way to think about it is this: Does Arcane x2 do more than KC + Steady / Cast time? If so then Arcane x2 might win. So if you Arcane for 10k, KC for 15k and Steady for 6k as long as your Steady cast time is 1.2 or shorter KC + Steady is better. That only takes 25% haste, so with Focus Fire and the 10% haste buff it's impossible to have less than this. It's also more focus efficient as the net cost is only 31 Focus. 60% cheaper than 2x Arcane.