From the comments here, it’s clear that most of us know how to find out what our dps is in a given situation: install the Recount addon (found Here), make sure it’s set to merge pet and owner data, and pew pew away. When we’re done, it tells us our dps.
But.
If you say that your dps in a 5 man is X, or in a 10-man is Y, the only person you can compare that to is the other people who were in the same run. You can’t even compare it to your own dps from another 5 or 10-man run.
Your dps is hugely dependant on who is in your group. What kind of buffs did you have? Did you have a ret pally or shadow priest or the good hunter totems or did you have to spend more time in viper? What instance were you running? Instances with lots of AOE will make your dps higher, moving fights will make it lower, etc. My dps can vary by hundreds of dps depending on who’s in the group with me.
Science demands that we have a consistent unit of measurement that is reproduceable and will yield the same results whoever does it. This is where the boss target dummies come in.
How to Measure and Report Your DPS:
- Go to one of the major cities (IF, SW, Darn) and go to the Level 83 Heroic Target Dummy (not one of the others)
- Make sure you have no buffs from anyone else. Only your own buffs should be up (Aspect of the Hawk, Trueshot Aura, Kindred Spirits, etc.). You can dismiss other buffs by right clicking on them.
- Send your pet in and shoot the boss target dummy in your optimal cycle until you run out of mana, then stop and check recount to get your dps.
- Do not use cooldowns like Rapid Fire or Beastial Wrath.
- Repeat this at least 5 times, and average the results. Your dps can vary by over 100dps from one go to another just from lucky or unlucky crit streaks.
- Important: Make sure no one else is applying armor reducing debuffs to the target dummy! If they are, you cannot trust your results. Wait for them to leave, or go to a target dummy in another city.
So if we all follow these steps, then we can be comparing apples to apples. If I say I’m going 1700 dps on the boss target dummy and you say you’re now doing 1800 dps on the boss target dummy, then our only variables are gear and talents — which gets us a lot closer to making intelligent analysis of different talent builds post patch 3.0.8!
So you want us to report our DPS to you or?
I tested my dps like you said. After 5 tries, I averaged 1500 dps with BM. Then I went to survival and did the same thing, averaged 2k dps.
Survival is the new raiding build. Enough said.
I agree with survival being the new raiding build, after about 3 straight days of testing with multiple builds from each tree. Survival, once you figure out how to play it, gives you tons of criticals, and when raiding, with all those raid buffs, a survival hunter seems to benefit from being in a 10 man or 25 man more than a BM or MM hunter would.
As for this post, I do agree that this is a good way to find base dps, but not using bestial wrath or rapid fire seems to be defeating the purpose. Yes I know they’re not sustainable, but many talents in BM and MM are directly related to these two abilities and so I think that leaving them out of the equation will distort your results for those two trees. If anything, you should try several times using or not using bw or rf to get a clearer picture for what you’ll be able to do in a raid regardless of buffs.
That’s sounds great, but should Kill Shot be in the macro while testing? On the Heroic target it will go every CD but on a boss fight it is only use for 20% of the fight.
umm whats a good rotation for survival to amp up my dps im lvl 76
That totally depends on spec and your glyphs. Post some Infor and I’m sure we’ll be abloe to help you
Wow I so should have spell checked that.
I am really having a hard time producing good DPS using SV. Im in pretty good gear and in 5 man heroics I am doing 2200 easy in BM but in SV Im doing about 200 less or worse sometimes. I have read ALL the info on spec. and shot rotations and am prioitizing the right shots I think and I am weaving in a steady shot in between the explosive shots when lock and load procs to try to get the most out of the explo. shot ticks. Im hit capped thru focused aim tallents so I shouldnt be missing. My toon is Rhinochaser on the US Aggramar server. Just feel like Im missing something? I put serp sting on, then Black arrow > Explosive> multi if more than 1 mobs> aimed> and ALWAYS give priority to kill shot when it procs. I use volley if three or more mobs. Any thoughts??? HELP
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Aggramar&n=Rhinochaser
Here is my toon. Any help and thoughts on how I might improve on my SV DPS / rotation would be appreciated.
I have a new question about Shandara’s spreadsheet. This is very important for gear selection in raids.
If we measure our dps till the time we OOM, using high AGI, AP items we could for e.g. do 2750dps. Swap some gear for less AGI more Int and produce less dps, say 2500. But you took longer to OOM and within one mana pool done the same overall damage for the same spec with different gear.
How would this scenario translate to raids? Do we expect ro recieve enough MP5 from buffs in 10 man to cover our lack of Int?
This then poses a new question for Shandara’s spreadsheets. It uses a boss fight of 6min, so you’ll ineveitable go into viper at some point. However if we drop that time down to 1min we don’t oom. This will significantly change PAWN strings and gear selection. For e.g. modelling the full boss fight with full 10man replenshment buffs (expected from my guild) Int has a weight of 0.9 in my PAWN string. If I use the same buffs for a one minute fight Int has a weight of 0.6. Other stats weights change aswell which can vastly affect which gear is optimal.
For eg I’m MM spec (WHU’s 7/57/7) and wearing Eaglebane bracers. With my current gear and no buffs on a full 6 min fight they are better than Naxx 10, Ulda 10 and H ToC according to spreadsheet. If I add 10 man buffs the H ToC leather bracers just edge out Eaglebane bracers. If I reduce the fight to 1 min so my mana pool doesn’t play a part, the H ToC bracers become a massive upgrade.
So I’ll do more dps with the H ToC bracers but will I do more overall damage in a raid?
If we base our raid build on the dps from one mana pool are we possibly short changing ourselves on overall damage from lack of mana? If we do base our best builds on testing one mana pool, should we not theorycraft with the one mana pool; i.e. force Shandara’s spreadsheet to never go into Viper by reducing the boss time to below our time to OOM. Therefore ignoring MP5 alltogether and Int is only valued for increases to AP through talents.
This is something that is vexxing me, so apologise for the length of my vent!
For Rhinochaser,
You can’t put AP gems in your gear and expect to DPS in greater numbers for Survival. Agility all the way. IF you are going to gem for AP, your builds have to be MM and BM. You need to start running the daily every day to get Triumph badges. There is good 232 gear to get just doing that. Also, in a perfect world, you will have two pieces of T8 gear and two pieces of T9. You need better rings and a new trinket. If you don’t 25 man raid much, even normal, you will have a hard time improving your gear very much. You can still get a decent setup of gear without running 25 man raids.
Now, will my tips help you do 9k dps, hellz no, but you should pull over 4k in a 25 man raid consistently. Until you get better gear, I’d stick with the 0/15/56 build. I still use it and I’m better geared. There is nothing wrong with the build you have, if you have a good raid group with all the buffs accounted for, or at least a lot of them. Then use the shot priority KS->ES->BA->SrS->AiS->SS on non bosses, MS in place of AiS on groups of 3 or more, and if it is a boss, put RF in first priority slot. You should do well.
If you do not want to change your gems, and that’s perfectly fine, I would change to a BM spec instead of SV or you won’t ever do enough damage to make you happy.
Good luck
Krushing: Thanks for the input. I run BM nearly all the time as I have found my DPS is more consistant so that why my gear has all AP gems. I have begun to accumulate a 2nd set of gear for SV & I use SV in PVP. I did Onyxia 25 yesterday and did 4940 DPS which Im ok with considering my gear and the number of tail swipes my pet looses DPS to. Thanks again
I’ve only been playing WoW for about 2 years now. Its taken me a while to get used to my character and all the things that my hunter can do. But, for the longest time, I was asking other hunters on my server how they are specced, shot rotation, glyphs, etc. Finding this site a month or so ago answered most of my questions and then some. I almost went broke 4 times in the past week respeccing and glyphing to produce a 3.8k hunter at max (so far). I know its not the avg. but still I saw that number and was happy. I’m starting to be more scientific about my hunter and researching the Specs, glyphs, pets, and Testing them all. Getting my shot rotation down and tweaking here and there. Its saved me lots of headaches (created some in the beginning with all the new thinking..OWW) saved a number of heroics and raids at times with this new found knowledge. Damn this is a great site. Thank You!
yup same here…. ever since i found this site my dps changed significantly especially after i copied the mm talent build.. i am always on top of dps raids.. beating geared peeps (yes, even mages).. Although, today I’ve made the biggest mistake yet.. Most hunters that I see gem ArP and some really geared people are telling me to gem ArP (although, i beat a lot of hunters that gem ArP and have more GS than i do.. today i changed all my gems to ArP and my dps dropped 1k+ on dummy (Trueshot Aura and Aspect of Dragonhawk Normal Buffs). On VoA i normally do 7-10k DPS but now i only did 5-7k+.. I’m really confused since theory crafter sites indicate that ArP should (theoretically) give me more dps..
Meanguy, ArP’s value doesn’t really kick in untill you hit the softcap. If you are at the cap, you need either the Grimtoll or Mjonir trinket. Gemming ArP really only makes sense if you are near the cap. If you are not close or don’t have one of those trinkets, stick with Agility. If out check out the EAP article under the Hunter Guides, there’s a good set of values that will show you which stat offers you the most benefit.
p.s. your shot rotation could have something to do with it too. ArP benefits Aimed, Steady and Auto the most.