Some months ago my guild split amid various disagreements about guild philosophies. I left the old guild and joined the new one, comprised of almost everyone I had known for years from the old guild. Arust, being the stubborn sort resistant to change that he is (he’s been Marksman since day 1 - never BM for its glory days, never SV during it’s brief reign) stayed in the old guild.

As things continued to get worse and most of the people he knew moved over to Drop Bear Clan, he finally, finally decided to move over. And I gotta say, it’s really nice opening up the guild list and seeing Arust’s name pop up.

It’s good to have him back.

Arust and I have conquered nature, and I was delighted to return to the world of the internets to find a lot of great feedback about what you guys would like to see on the WHU. As a small matter of self-indulgence, I’m going to speckle this post with some pics I took of our camping trip — but I’ll be talking about WoW (mostly).

First of all, I should note that when I returned and was going through my pages of emails, I was deleting the various spam that I receive. I tend to select a big chunk of it, and then permanently delete it. At the last second I realized that I was deleting an email from Arthemystia — so if you’re reading this Arth, please resend the email. I haven’t actually read it, and never will at this rate. Now I just hope I didn’t delete anything else.

So, on to the suggestions!

Addons

Good eatin! Red potatoes with salt, rosemary, cooked in bacon grease makes a nice addition to breakfast of bacon and eggs scrambled with onion, pepper, and garlic.

One of the pretty unanimous votes of yea was an addon guide. I am putting this on the to-do list. I’ll probably just include what I think of as the more essential hunter addons, and some brief instructions of how to use them. I probably won’t include things like addons to customize your UI, since that’s more a matter of taste than need.

Jump-Shot / Kiting

I’ve been collecting footage from various fights for a jump-shot / kiting guide. I never really included this on the site originally because it’s something I usually just assumed all hunters knew. But then I grew up in a time of kiting Drak in UBRS, and doing the hunter epic quest. Young hunters these days probably never actually had to kite anything in their lives. Actually, they still don’t. But still, it’s a skill you should have.

There isn’t anything hard or secret about it; however, you do have to move with your mouse and shoot with your keys.

Forums

I am pleased and relieved that several of your share my opinion that WHU forums would, at least for the time being, be more of a detriment than a benefit.

I feel like there are plenty of other places that have good forums, and that those inevitably devolve into mean-spirited name calling and trolling. The effort to moderate it would be significant. And while I’m sure plenty of people would volunteer for the task, from a more selfish perspective — I don’t want to spend my time answering tons of “here’s my armory, tell me what’s wrong” questions.

PVP

This one is probably not going to happen. Simply put, Arust and I are just not experts on PVP. Sure I play the occasional battleground and I used to Arena, but the opinions I would give on PVP are probably not going to be terribly useful.

However, when I get emails about PVP and respond with “I’m not an expert” the next question is always “Okay, then where should I look?” I don’t have an answer for this one, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to keep an eye open for intelligent PVP hunters and offer them a spot on the WHU, where we can put together a series of PVP-related guides in the WHU style. Not promising I’m going to find this person, just that I will look!

Other Classes

The most dangerous mob encountered. Apparently bees do not like it when you put a lens 1" away from them.

There were a handful of comments about wanting to keep the WHU hunter-specific. Do not worry, that is what it will remain. I’m not sure how that concern got started, maybe my comment about trying to force Hrist into writing a hate tank blog.

But again, I do get a decent amount of email from people who want to know if there is a WHU-like site for their alt class. I understand the desire, and I have to say I don’t spend a lot of time on other classes’ sites (other than TankSpot occasionally, to further my understanding of tanking for the sake of my pet tank). However, again, I’m going to keep an eye open. I’ll talk to some people and try to narrow down to a list of one good site per class and then toss up a blogroll.

Extreme Soloing

We had thunderstorms all the first night. The next morning we gathered soaking wet firefood and started a roaring fire with just one match, thanks to leet theorycrafting skills.

An extreme soloing section was probably fated to happen in any situation except everyone responded saying they hated it.

I also feel there is a significant extreme soloing segment to the hunter community, and I haven’t seen anyplace that covers it really well.

Actually, Arust and I had some significant hunter extreme soloing conversations this weekend. I’m really excited to try out a couple of new ideas to solo new instances - however first I need to get the hunter soloing secret weapon: two pieces of T5 gear! I think I’ll try to lure some guildies into TK/SSC runs by promising them achievements and mount drops. Yeah, that should work.

Boss Strats

We’ll have to see about this one. Frankly the main reason I’m resistant to this is that I’ve only made it about halfway through Ulduar. So I can only give an informed opinion on what you want to be doing for the first half of the bosses.

Raid Gear Guides

Probably not going to happen. By the time you get into raid and end-game gear, your gear choices are going to vary heavily depending on your exact build (and sometimes even based on what your other gear is!). You’re better off using EAP based on your situation to see which piece is an upgrade.

There just isn’t any one clear choice for every hunter. Heck, there isn’t even one clear spec for every raiding hunter - as MM surpasses SV at a certain gear point.

More of the Same

And of course the WHU will still have everything that it has now. We will continue to update the guides as new patches and new information comes out. I’ll continue to relate amusing anecdotes of Hrist hate and raiding shenanigans, and periodically philosophize about WoW-related stuff.

And, of course, we’ll continue to pursue dps with all our efforts, to become the death dealers that we should be.

Arust and I are going camping this weekend, assuming we find a campsite (some wrenches thrown into the plan at the last moment) where we’ll no doubt tell tall tales of slaying dragons and conquering undead hordes around the flickering light of the campfire.

One area of discussion that always comes up when we hang out is the WHU, and what the top priority guides are that we need to get done.

Since we first started it I’ve had a list running in the back of my mind of the guides that I need to get written, and suddenly I find that I’m just about done with the list. Don’t get me wrong, there’s tons more on my want to do list, but I feel we’ve finally reached a place where all the basics are up here.

So while we’re out conquering nature, with our down sleeping bags and coolers or booze (yeah, it’s that kind of camping - the wussy kind) I’d like to ask you, the dedicated members of the Warcraft Hunters Union, what else you’d like to see us tackle on the site.

To Get Things Started

Just to get things off the ground, here are a handful of ideas that I’ve been kicking around, or that people have suggested to me:

• An addon guide
• Jump-shotting / kiting tutorial video
• Boss strat guides from a hunter perspective (and if so, bother with naxx, or just Ulduar?)
• Extreme soloing guides - section focusing on gear, spec, etc just for extreme soloing
• Moar Frostheim Boss Hunter vids!
• WHU Forums (I keep getting requests for this, and I keep resisting)
• A Hrist the Hate Tank spin-off blog
• More achievement guides
• Guest bloggers
• More Arust blogs
• Just plain more blog posts
• More WoW news reporting (I usually only post hunter-specific news, and only if it’s pretty significant, figuring that most people use other news sites for the latest info).

And that’s just what I have sitting on the top of my head — so you tell me, what of these would you like to see? What that we haven’t thought of would you like to see?

Actually camping in Minnesota looks more like this. But we're gonna try to find a river site. Well honestly we're just gonna try to find any site at all without having to drive 3 hours away from the cities.

Some very, very clever people have developed elaborate excel spreadsheets to model every aspect of hunter dps. There are several different ones (all of which give different results) but the most well-known and heavily reviewed is Shandra’s Spreadsheet, and it is a thing of beauty.

The way it works is you enter your gear, your gems, your enchants, your talents, your pet, your pet talents, your glyphs, your shot rotation, and all the buffs that you would have in a raid, and the spreadsheet calculates what your theoretical dps could be against a raid boss.

The spreadsheets tend to be particularly good at determining which gear is better than other gear. I think the most valuable use of the spreadsheets is determining EAP values.

However, these spreadsheets have given rise to an unfortunate beast I call Spreadsheet Theorycrafters.

Spreadsheet Theorycrafters

Basically what happens is someone sits down and changes talents (or glyphs, or rotations) around one by one on the spreadsheet and looks to see how each changes the dps result, and then figures the one with the highest dps number must be the highest dps talent build.

I’ve even seen hunter sites where this is the entire basis of their theorycrafting, testing, recommended builds, rotations… everything. They just post spreadsheet results. It’s so… it’s just unfathomable to me.

Needless to say, I don’t approve of spreadsheet theorycrafting.

The Problems

First of all, again, these spreadsheets are things of beauty and they are shockingly good at what they do, especially when it comes to gear or stat comparisons. They provide an excellent data point — but it’s still just one data point.

Here are some of the flaws with spreadsheet theorycrafting:

• There are several different spreadsheets, and all give different results. Each one says it’s not perfect, but it’s the best. They can’t all be the most accurate.
• Flaws are often found: the hunter community is constantly finding errors and these are constantly being corrected (at least in the best of the spreadsheets). The errors are found when someone does their own theorycrafting, or in-game testing, and finds some discrepancy with the complicated formulas in the spreadsheet.
• They model a perfect world: all theorycrafting models some kind of ideal where you don’t make mistakes, or fights last a certain length, or you don’t have to run out of AOEs, or you never get stunned, you aren’t losing seconds and debuffs to switching targets, etc. The problem with just putting info into a spreadsheet is that since you aren’t doing the math, you aren’t necessarily aware of which elements will be strongly affected by real world situations (like the Chimera Shot glyph) and which will be only mildly affected.
• They overweight some things: back when I was SV before the mana regen nerf, I would generally always be at full mana in 25-man raid boss fights. I regened more than I spent. However the spreadsheets all thought I would run out, and so they way overvalued Int, Spirit, and mana restoration stuff - meaning the spreadsheet said that mp5 would increase my dps, which was factually untrue.
• They’re only as good as their input: I’ve gotten several emails now from people using spreadsheets and getting strange results. Turns out they had incorrectly entered some of the raid buffs, or duplicated a shot in their rotation. A single mistake in the data you enter can significantly skew all of your “theorycrafting” results.
• Ultimately you need controlled, repeatable, and falsifiable in-game testing to prove results. And if that testing is substantially different from the spreadsheet results - well, I can assure you that it’s the spreadsheet that’s wrong. The damage that you do in-game is, in fact, the damage that you would do in-game. In other words, you need science!

Theorycrafting and Testing

In the world seen through Frostheim goggles, any kind of theorycrafting is useless without testing. But people don’t like testing because it’s a pain in the ass — it takes forever, and it’s super expensive. The problem is that most anything you’re looking at — a talent build, a glyph, etc actually changes your dps by far, far less than the difference in RNG (random number generator).

For example: I test out my shot rotation on the target dummy. I do 3,300 dps. I do it again, and I do 2,900 dps. Nothing has changed at all, that’s just RNG at work. So now I’m testing a glyph that theory tells me will gain me 30-50 dps. How will I know that an increase or decrease is the glyph, vs RNG?

The answer is that you have to fire your shot rotation over literally thousands of shots (ideally you’re using cheap vendor ammo for this). And that’s just to test one glyph, or one talent build. Then you do it all over again. As Party Girl says “You’re always in Ironforge. Are you at the target dummy again?”

How I Make DPS Choices

Here are the Frostheim steps to evaluating talents, glyphs abilities, etc:

1. Sniff Test: first thing is just to look at stuff and determine which ones won’t make the cut. If something increases my health by 10%, I know that won’t have any impact on my dps. This is also the stage where I sit around for a while and try to think up clever ways to take advantage of abilities, or combinations of abilities.
2. Paper Napkin Theorycraft: the next step is I do some crude and simple calculations to see approximately where things stand. If there was something that was on the fence on the sniff test, I’ll go ahead and eliminate it if it sucks at this stage. Mostly I’m determining what order to test in. This step is often done while driving.
3. Collect Data: next step is a whole ton of target dummy testing to collect my baseline data for stuff like glyphs (dps totals without glyphs, percentage of damage from each shot, stats of each shot, etc.)
4. Theorycrafting: Then I sit down and do the number crunching. As I’ve said before, the math here isn’t hard. The hard part is setting up your equations to take everything into account. The most common theorycrafting errors come from people who just set up their equations wrong so they double up on something, or leave something out. This is Data Point 1.
5. Testing: Next is the really really painful part of actually testing in-game. I do testing on the target dummy, because it is the only perfectly controlled environment we have (assuming no one else is attacking it). I usually do this with raid buffs. This is Data Point 2.
6. Spreadsheet Checking: I also plug the data into a spreadsheet and see what it has to say. This is Data Point 3.

Now I have three data points to compare. If they all agree, then it’s easy to smile and say my work is done; however, if one of them disagrees, then it’s time to go back and try to find out why one is wrong. I could have made an error in my Theorycrafting - it happens. The spreadsheet could be wrong - it happens a decent amount. The in-game data could actually be wrong too! Perhaps the presence of raid buffs would radically alter the result, rather than scale it across all options evenly. That also must be investigated.

The point is any one of these data points could be wrong, and you won’t know without more data points. And actually, let me stress something else here: if you raid ulduar and do 4k dps on XT, then change glyphs and do 4.9k dps the next week. That is not a data point! That is just a change, and you have zero way to know that the change is due to your glyph. You’ve now got RNG spread across 10-25 players and their buff/debuff procs, performance, etc. not to mention how often you have to run, switch targets, etc. If it’s not controlled and repeatable, it’s just not science.

I’m not trying to bash the spreadsheets here. They’re valuable, and especially valuable for comparing gear and generating EAP values. But they get less and less accurate the farther you stray from gear, and are useless at modeling a running fight.

So that is how our guides are made, for the most part. This is also why it takes me a while to get new ones up when a major hunter change happens. And this is also why I get annoyed as all heck when someone responds to a guide with something like “No that sux look at mai build I did 4.7kdps aimed glyph roks.”