Because if everything else is equal, the only variable will always be the only variable.

An example: If everything else is equal, your ring slot makes the biggest difference in your dps. After all, if skill, gear, knowledge, RNG are all equal and the ring is the only thing that changes, it does indeed make the biggest difference. It makes the only difference.

But, that doesn’t mean that the ring is the most important gear slot — it’s not. But this is the kind of faulty reasoning the “everything else being equal” redundant semantics leads to.

Certainly everything else being equal is good for comparing multiple options — for example we compare talents with the assumption that everything else is equal. But we can’t compare “less gear vs more gear,” or “less skill vs more skill.” As long as everything else is equal, more always wins. It’s the only variable left.

What’s more interesting to me is what happens when everything isn’t equal. Can more skill out-dps more gear? Can more gear out dps better raid buffs? What are the weights of the various variables that go into our dps?

Obviously the problem in establishing weights on all the various factors that influence our dps is based on degree. How much more gear? How much more skill? So while we can collect data on some of this stuff — the dps impact of gear and raid buffs — other things like skill is partially data and partially educated guesswork.

Of the various factors that influence our dps, here’s my ranking of most important to least important:

1. Basic competence: by this I’m talking about basic rotations, gemming, enchanting, and talent builds that make sense for your gear. The stuff you can learn by spending a few hours online.
2. Raid Buffs: buffs and debuffs make one of the largest contributions to your dps. Getting all of the right buffs is huge.
3. Skill: by skill we’re talking about more than just competence, we’re talking about movement management, knowing what shots to use on adds vs single targets, multiple target management, and good cooldown management. Skilled hunters can and do out-dps better geared hunters — sometimes much better geared hunters.
4. Gear: all the lovely dps boosts our gear bring us. Make no mistake, gear matters, and it matters a lot. More gear means more dps. But everything higher on this list will contribute more to your dps than gear will. If someone is ahead of you in any of the other categories more than you’re ahead of them in gear, they’ll beat you on the meters.
5. Boss knowledge: familiarity breeds dps. Knowledge of fight mechanics, familiarity with how fights work — and importantly thinking about the mechanics and figuring out how to best handle all the nasty tricks that each boss brings.
6. RNG: in most fights RNG is the least significant factor in dps. Don’t get me wrong, RNG can hurt. Vile Gas on Festergut commonly costs you many hundreds of dps… and when RNG turns against you — lots of bone spikes, mind controlled on Deathwhisper, etc — it can really hurt. But for most fights the effects of RNG from fight to fight are relatively small, over the course of the entire fight.

Ghostcrawler’s response is a bit lengthy, and you can read the whole thing Here, but this is I think the gist of it:

Subtlety, BM, Arms, Frost and Frost were so far down that it was unreasonable to expect players to raid with them. We buffed them where we thought it was safe without, as I said above, pushing every existing player into that spec or creating PvP problems.

I think this is a really interesting statement. Basically Ghostcrawler is saying that they don’t want to buff BM so that it’s clearly better than SV or MM this late in the expansion — they don’t want to force raiders to have to switch specs mid-raid. (Well, force is the wrong word… they don’t want to create a situation where it’s better for raiders to switch specs).

So they’re trying to increase BM raid dps, trying to get more BM hunters raiding — trying to make it feel like you can bring whatever spec you like to your raid. If you’re preferred spec is behind, it won’t be so far behind that you’re called a huntard for raiding in it. It won’t be a thousand dps behind — you won’t be turning those nick of time kills into wipes.

But they’re trying to increase BM dps without having it overtake existing specs. So it’ll probably be Cataclysm before we see BM up in the ranks with the other hunter specs, but we can hope to see BM moving closer — beyond just viable and into the same general realm as SV.

My prediction is that after a couple weeks of 3.3.3 we’ll see Blizzard making another small tweak to BM to boost them a bit more, because it seems pretty clear that the current buff isn’t going to accomplish the goal. I think they’re just moving in baby steps to avoid the risk of boosting BM more than they intend. Small tweaks are the safest way for Blizz to make changes without unintended consequences.

If you’re talking best possible gear, we think BM is pretty close to Survival in 3.3.3. Marks is ahead, and that’s largely a function of armor pen, but again you are talking about absolute best gear. If you aren’t in Icecrown 25 hard modes, then gear is likely to have just as much effect on your damage as spec. Ideally, things are balanced at all levels between level 1 and 80 with BiS gear, but there are going to be a lot of points along the way where that’s probably not true. We see Survival hunters beat Marks hunters all the time in what I would categorize as average (meaning not server first guilds but capable of progressing) raids. Hopefully we’ll see some BM guys up there too, but it may take higher gear levels.

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I would be pretty surprised if guilds doing hard modes w/ access to lvl 80 BiS gear have hunters raiding as BM, or would be happy with a hunter choosing a spec that isn’t min/max’d.

My suspicion is that the hunters with the gear you are describing will have a propensity to go Marks, because that currently yields the highest damage and raiders tend to play whatever does the highest damage. In a world without armor pen, that might not be the case (though I haven’t done the math lately).

Nonetheless, it is also true today that Marks can beat Survival, and yet there are a lot of Survival hunters raiding. Our hope is that in 3.3.3 that there will be as many BM hunters as Survival raiding, which would be a really nice bump for BM. Maybe the estimates (ours and those I’ve read) about the boost BM is getting are overly optimistic. We’ll see.

It’s possible the Survival hunters are only going Survival for Replenishment, though all 3 hunters bring some pretty solid raid benefits these days.

So, back when I did the whole “Can BM Raid?” article that caused such a fuss, I had some evil plans for a sequel. The idea was to show that BM can indeed meet the dps check of ICC with enough gear (thus technically viable) but also to highlight how much dps you give up to get there.

The original plan was to follow-up a week or so later with “Can Survival Raid?” This was the evil part. Because the general consensus in the hunter community at the time was the SV and MM were viable, MM was best, and BM was not viable. The idea was that if you define “viable” as able to meet the minimum dps requirements, BM was fine. But if your definition of “viable” was not giving up over 1,000 dps, then SV wasn’t viable either with good gear. For various reasons the SV article didn’t get written, and I’m thinking I probably won’t be doing it.

But back to these posts, I’m not really certain what Ghostcrawler is seeing from the PTR buffs that I’m not, unless I missed another update somewhere. So far the only dps buff to BM is a flat 9% damage increase to Steady Shot (since the 3% damage FI buff existed before with basically 100% uptime — even if you didn’t have a ret pally or arcane mage). A 9% Steady Shot buff translates into about a 1.5% overall buff to BM, once you factor in percentage of damage from hunter, and percentage of hunter damage from Steady Shot.

I don’t think there’s anyone out there — even the most fanatic BM hunters — who reasonably thinks that BM is only 1.5% behind. I’ve tried spreadsheets. I’ve tried looking at all the top raid parses (people in best gear pre-heroic modes), and I even took my entire 25-man raid team to the target dummies to comparison test with mid-level gear. I’ve literally tried to get BM to be closer in dps, but the closest I can come was 15% behind (behind MM, that is) with mid-level (250ish) gear.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen BM put out nice dps numbers. When my raid hit the target dummies I was in the top 5 dpsers as BM, but still over 1,500 dps behind MM. Of course what I didn’t test was how far SV was behind MM with that mid-level gear, but I do suspect the gap between SV and BM at mid-level is a lot more than 1.5%. We know it’s bigger at lower level gear. But I haven’t researched or tested that. Maybe that should be next.

I suspect that we will not be seeing a significant increase in the number of raiding BM hunters. The ones that raid as BM now will continue to do so. The ones that aren’t willing to give up over a thousand dps to raid as BM still won’t be willing to give up over a thousand dps to raid as BM. BM needs a bit more lovin’ Blizz!

However, the Stakethrower didn’t have as much raw dps as I remembered it having. So I was doing some calculations and discovered something disconcerting: Rowan’s Rifle of Silver Bullets is actually a DPS upgrade from the Stakethrower. Not a ton, mind you, only like 150 spreadsheet dps (which is lower in actuality), but an upgrade nonetheless. Despite the stat loss, Rowan’s has a lot more dps, and it’s a lot faster, which helps proc the T10 set bonus more often.

In fact, for me (as a proud dwarf), Rowan’s shows as only 37 dps (theoretical, so actually less) behind Zod’s with full raid buffs. We dwarves are just good with our guns.

So for those dwarves out there, Rowan’s looks to be the best gun in the game other than BRK-1000, and it’s boe, and available on the AH for a pretty cheap price. (Note: this is true for MM builds, which get more out of weapon dps — for SV it may not be the case.)

Hellscream’s Warsong and Strength of Wrynn now provide their bonuses to player pet health and damage, as well as the absorption amounts of Power Word: Shield and Sacred Shield.

Wooooooo!

We knew that the ICC raid buff, currently at 5% damage/health/healing, did not apply to our pets. For MM and SV this was annoying, and for BM this was pretty brutal. But as the buff climbs up to 30%, not having our pets affected was going to be a big deal, putting us hopelessly behind non-pet classes.

I am very, very, very pleased that our pets will now be inspired to further efforts by Wrynn as well as us.

With the right gear choices and the right gems hunters can reach the ArP hard cap, and with comes some truly impressive DPS — in fact the very best DPS available to the hunter class… Read More

The only real mistake we made was after Dred’s pen one of the dpsers starting attacking mobs that Hrist was pulling, and Hrist had to turn around and backtrack a lot to pick them back up and take them to the burn spot.

Also the second pull Hrist did was a bit crazy, but he pulled it off, despite his health dipping dangerously low.

After speeding through DKT, our next instance was Occulus, of all things. As we sat at the entrance I had an idea…

Frost: Huh, I wonder if we can run through all of the mobs in the beginning and just jump through the portal without having to fight any of them.

Hrist: Crap! I wish we could have tested this earlier.

Frost: Yeah, but if we can, that would save a huge chunk of time.

Hrist: And if not we’ll wipe and definitely lose the race.

Frost: Well, I’m a big fan of the philosophy of “Either win it, or lose spectacularly.”

Hrist: Heh. Let’s do it. Mount up.

As it turns out, the answer is no, you cannot. Looks like you can’t click through the portal while in combat, and we wiped horribly. And worse yet, that graveyard is far away.  For the sake of knowing what our time would have been, I reset my stopwatch when we got back in.

Not much in the way of tricks in Occulus — just solid execution and not flying into any avoidable drakes. We completed our run after the wipe in 11 minutes 18 seconds, which was also a personal best… though I kinda suspect we could get a bit faster with that (like, say, if I had any mana at the beginning of the fight, rather than having just rezzed).

Also, this will probably be my last speed run video for a while. Hrist is getting annoyed that I’m giving away our secrets to the competition.

The live listeners get to hear the scoop first (sometimes weeks earlier), ask questions in the live chat, and hang out for the post-show. Well also the pre-show, but that’s mostly just listening to music while we try to figure out the lastest technical difficulty. The post show is where it’s at.

The live podcast site is at: www.huntingpartypodcast.com

I have in my head (and on my gear spreadsheet) a handful of upgrades that I’m really, really looking for. For various and sundry reasons, I’m waiting to get at least one of three upgrades before going on a frost emblem spending spree and re-juggling my talents and gems. I’m this close to finally getting to check armor pen gemming…. and I’ve been there forever.

My 25-man raid team, Wyrmfoe, hasn’t been around all that long. We hit ICC for the first time about six weeks ago. We’ve been killing Saurfang every week, and that bastard has yet to drop Deathbringer’s Will at all (and Hrist is still threatening to take it for himself, just to spite the dpsers). And I keep hearing about every other raid in the world talking about how high the drop rate is, and raids that are giving it away to offspecs, of all things.

In fact, in the 6 weeks or so of raiding with Wyrmfoe, I’ve yet to get an upgrade. In all that time only one Frostheim upgrade has dropped — a total of 1 Protectors Mark of Sanctificaiton has dropped, which went (understandably) to Hrist as the MT. Every other week it’s been marks for other classes (the scum!).

Alas while Wyrmfoe is taking down the Blood Prince council, we don’t quite have Festergut down yet (combination of low dps and trouble keeping everyone alive)… and of course Festergut has my belt!

MNK, our 10-man, has been a bit kinder and the Blood Queen did drop my Stakethrower (and thanks to everyone who’s emailed me grats on that), but I’m still waiting on Hersir’s Greatspear from the damned Blood Prince Council. Ah, the irresistable combination of hit rating and armor pen rating, with a couple of sockets to boot.

We’re hitting ICC again tonight (and who knows, maybe we’ll go take down Festergut — we have the raid buff now after all). So wish us luck for our first Deathbringer’s Will drop… and send mental urgings to Hrist to award it to me. After all, the melee classes got ez mode in so many ICC fights anyway, they don’t need the help.

I found this a very exciting thing to read about. I’ve seen places advertising before how they can reduce your latency, and have generally assumed that they were some kind of scam; however, this simple fix to your computer looks to be the real deal.

The short version is that WoW needs an acknowledgement from your computer every time it sends data over; however, your computer bundles acknoledgements into pairs, essentially forcing every other request from WoW to time out.

So the conversation between you and WoW looks like this:

WoW: Okay, that mob just moved and is overe here now. Did you get that?

You: …

WoW: Seriously, did you get that info?

You: …

WoW: Screw it. Now the mob is over there. Did you get that?

You: Yes I did, and I got that first bit of information too.

This fix just changes your computer settings to tell your computer to respond to every acknowledgement request as they come in. I’ve tried it out, and the difference is stunning — I went from an average of 170 latency (on a good day) to around 60.

So check his article out!