The WoW.com article today goes over all of the hunter stats that can become capped (haste, crit, armor pen, and hit). This stuff probably isn’t new to WHU members, as it’s all been covered in the past in the detailed articles on each of these stats in the WHU guides section.

Hunters have a lot of stats to juggle — more than most classes. On any given piece of gear our DPS could be affected by attack power, agility, intellect, hit rating, haste rating, armor penetration rating, crit rating, ranged weapon DPS, and even stamina. Not only does each stat affect our DPS differently, but many of our stats have some kind of cap after which they become much less useful — or no longer useful at all… Read More.

Note — the hunter bet is over — we don’t need to fill up the comments for the bet anymore if you don’t want to

We’ve discussed the dps difference between BM and MM before. I think we can agree that most of the disagreements were philosophical. I’m of the philosophy that you should contribute as much dps as your class can for your progression raid — I’m all about squeezing out every last drop of dps that you can. Others have the philosophy that as long as you’re doing enough for your part to beat enrage timers, that’s fine — after all, if everyone did that, you’d win.  I can see the other point of view, I just don’t share it for a team venture like raiding.

Very few people argued over the facts — data gained from both spreadsheets and thousands of raid parses; however, some people did. The most common argument was that all of the best raiders were MM, so in theory those BM raiders pulling 9.5k dps were subpar, comparatively. Personally I don’t buy this — those top BM parses were from people in crazy good gear, and I suspect they knew how to play BM well, certainly about as well as those MM hunters knew their spec.

However, I’d like to present another argument about the data on behalf of BM hunters.

The parses and data we were looking at represented the absolute best geared hunters out there, both on the BM and MM side. This means that we were looking at hunters who were at, or darned near, the ArP hardcap.

Now both BM and MM like ArP and in a perfect world want to hardcap it. But MM gets a massively, massively better return from hardcapping ArP. Once they get close to the hardcap, MM hunters start seeing almost exponential dps improvements from it. So not only are they leagues above BM hunter, but they also pull far ahead of SV hunters.

The Question

So this brought to mind the question: how far behind is BM in more average level raiding gear? Not ArP hardcapped, not softcapped, but the sort of mid-level raiding gear that most raiding hunters are using?

This is a question that’s kinda hard to test via parses. The advantage of just looking at the top chunk of results is you can be pretty confidant that those were all players at very high skill levels, living through the fight, and with all the raid buffs. Once you start looking at the middle of the pack, suddenly you might be comparing a high buffed & geared hunter with a lower geared but better skilled hunter.

When you’re not looking at the top chunk, the raid parses become far less useful in comparing specs.

The Test

Fortunately I have access to a 25-man raid team. I’m at that middle-level of gear, with around 550 ArP rating. And there were other good and valid reasons for me to drag an entire 25-man raid team to the target dummies, so that’s what I did.

We hit the Ironforge target dummies with the entire raid team, all raid buffs and debuffs, for two tests. We had heroism for both tests. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to justify spending more time testing, though I’d have liked to. Also, I did not use Kill Shot for either test (MM Kill Shot hits a lot harder, and they’d get an extra one with the 2nd readiness. On the other hand it’s pretty RNGy, since there aren’t enough to really average out the crits. Figure kill shot would have given MM an extra percent or two).

Did the first run as MM and got the recount screenshot the instant we hit the 5 min mark. Then I switched to BM spec and glyphs and used the time spent waiting on heroism cooldown to regem my gear for BM (and damn that was costly — especially the regemming back). Did the test again with BM, and again hit the screenshot the instant we hit the 5 min mark. I used the specs here on the WHU, of course.

Now, I’m not the most skilled hunter in the world, but I do play MM and BM specs a heck of a lot. And I’m pretty confident in my ability to hit the proper rotations when I have nothing else to do but sit in place and stare at my cooldowns. In a perfect world I’d have run the test several times with each spec to even out the RNG, but I really couldn’t keep the whole raid out of ICC that long.

The Results

Marksman DPS. Badass mage is badass. Thank god he loses so much from moving in actual raid fights!

BM DPS.

Okay, so what we’re seeing here is identical raid, identical buffs/debuffs, exactly the same amount of time on a single boss target with no moving whatsoever. As close to a controlled in-game boss fight as we can create.

• Marksman: 9,701
• Beast Mastery: 8,255

So at this mid-level gear, we’re seeing BM behind by about 15% (not counting the Kill Shot MM advantage). Figure that the coming BM buffs will probably about balance out the kill shot factor.

Certainly this is closer than the 20% – 30% we saw with ArP hardcapping. And I didn’t need fancy BiS gear to go over 8k dps, well over the Festergut dps check (though possibly not Blood Queen, since your pet doesn’t get bitten).

But that’s still showing BM a long way behind.

Conclusions

I’m sure many people will feel that being within 15% of their potential dps is plenty, just as they felt 20% – 30% behind was fine. As long as they can beat the enrage timers, how far behind doesn’t matter if they can play the spec they love. To some people this 15% gap is “close enough to my max dps.”

I suspect I side with the majority of progression raiders who’d say “Christ! That’s 1,500 dps! That’s a LOT of dps to throw away!”

In the end I don’t think this is going to change anyone’s mind in either direction, but I do think it gives some very good data for both sides to argue their points.

Podcast is now done.  www.huntingpartypodcast.com

The podcast will be a 3pm central standard time. The online time converter suggests that this is 9pm GMT.

We’ll be talking about the latest round of BM tweaks on the PTR, the Cataclysm stat changes, examining and discussing some new data on how to handle Lock & Load procs, and of course taking your questions, both live and via email.

As always with the live podcasts, we’ll stick around for the postshow to talk more with you guys (this and the preshow are the parts that don’t show up on the actual recorded versions of the podcasts).

This is officially the 500th post on the WHU!

I remember when I was closing in on 100 posts I was going to do a special article about it, but then stopped paying attention until long after the 100 mark. So today I’m making a point of recognizing this milestone.

Frostheim back when WHU started. BC was a dark time in the Frost raiding career, hanging waay behind the curve.

500 is a lot of posts. At least one post every Monday – Friday for over a year. Well over 300,000 words dedicated to huntery goodness, with an extra handful of random unrelated words.

The WHU has come a long way since then. From starting out planning for the launch of Wrath to starting to speculate on Cataclysm. From a wish list of pre-heroic Wrath gear to guides on nearly every hunter topic in our guides section, covering every spec, all the key stats, gemming, glyphing, enchanting, soloing, tanking, raiding…

I still remember getting really excited the first time someone commented on the site who wasn’t a guild member. I mean truly disproportionately excited. And the first time I got an email from someone from the site, then the first time someone recognized me in game (that felt really weird the first time it happened). Of course now I’ll get a dozen emails a day, and it is a rare day when someone doesn’t pop onto Icecrown to ask me a question or send me an in-game mail.

We had the WHU in-game event last November with over 90 people creating level 1 hunters on Icecrown to take down Hogger and Ysondre. We had the WHU BBQ here in Minnesota last spring (and will probably do it again this spring).

I also remember being so thrilled when the WHU traffic had finally reached over 1,000 visits a day (over a year ago). Somehow reaching the 5,000 and 10,000 visits/day benchmarks weren’t nearly as cool as that one.

But certainly the WHU has grown from being a small hunter blog with a dedicated community of a thousand or so readers into something quite large.

Bigger isn’t Better in All Ways

I think it was was nearly six months into the WHU before we had our first troll in the comments. The trolls are still pretty uncommon, but are no longer such a rare thing.

I also now get to experience the joys of the anti-Frostheim rage. Other bloggers raging against an opinion, and people bashing me on Twitter (which as far as I’m concerned is another good reason not to be on Twitter). Things I say or advice I give is often taken out of context, twisted out of its meaning and posted as reasons I’m a talentless hack. I have hate-fans, who scour every post looking for a phrase they can pull and complain about. They say I’m wrong if my results don’t match the spreadsheets. They say I’m wrong if my results do match the spreadsheets.

Where disagreements in comments used to always be based around data and science – in other words valid things that could be discussed dispassionately – they are more and more often emotional and more along the lines of “if you think that then you suck dumbass.”

The BM article is a good example of this. Had I written that a year ago (assuming the data was the same then) most people would agree, and a couple would argue that the data could possibly be incorrect, and then suggest another viable method of collecting data. Now it was mostly just ROAR UR WRONG with really almost no scientifically valid counter-arguements.

On the other hand, I think had I written the same article about survival, the response would have been radically less hostile. There’s something about those BM hunters, I tell ya.

There are also the comments along the lines of “this blog has gone way downhill” or “I don’t care about that, tell us something useful for a change!” These comments have been cropping up for the last six months or so, and I suspect that the real source of this is that there are fewer guides being posted on the WHU these days. This of course is because the vast majority of everything that needs a guide already exists.

I call for suggestions for new topics every now and then, and where a year ago there were big obvious gaps that needed to be filled, lately there haven’t been any real guide suggestions from those calls (other than pvp, of course )

Writing a hunter blog is fun, but it’s also work. Never imagine that it isn’t painful and a burden at times. Sure, any given article maybe takes five minutes to an hour to write, not counting any research that needs to be done (which at times is many hours).

But make a list in your head of every single thing that you would write about for hunters. Every stat, every spec, ever piece of advice that you think at least 30% of the hunters out there would need to know.

Okay? You’ve now got maybe a month worth of articles. Probably less. Assume you’ve covered every one of those, and now try to come up with something else to write about. Every. Single. Day.

Bigger is Better Too

However, for all the crap that comes with the WHU being as large as it is, the good far outweighs the bad.

Mixed in with those dozen or so emails I receive every day are always a few people writing just with stories of how the WHU has changed their dps. Thanking the WHU for the fact that they are no longer a huntard. Screenshots from hunters who were on the verge of being kicked out of their raid now topping the meters. Hunters who read the BM info and rather than hating me for it tried SV or MM and saw gains of over 1k dps almost across the board. These email success stories and thanks far, far, far outnumber all negative comments combined.

You’d think that over time the number of these emails would decrease over time — but they seem to be increasing exponentially. More and more and more people are discovering the WHU and seeing massive dps improvements.

And the WHU community is growing as well as their dps. I can only imagine what kind of turnout we’re going to get for the next WHU in-game event.

Honestly, these comments and emails are what keep me posting on the WHU, and going through the chore of updating every single guide for every major hunter patch, and tolerating the crazies and their bitter attacks.

As long as it’s still helping hunters, or still entertaining hunters, then it’s worth it.

And at the end of the day, as much work as the WHU is, it’s also a heck of a lot of fun as well. And that’s all because of you guys. So thank you WHU for 500 posts worth of hunter memories, and here’s looking forward to the next 500!

-Frostheim

Frostheim today.

Today’s WoW.com article goes into detail on a question that I’ve been getting an insane amount of email on: hunter set bonuses. I’ve answered this email maybe 30 times now, talked about it here before, and on the podcast several times. So I’ve collected all the answers in one place so we can hopefully put this one to bed!

So today we’re going to run down the advantages of the tier 9 and tier 10 hunter set bonuses for each of the three hunter specs, and suggest which way you should gear your hunter… Read More.

So if you’re curious, go check out Hunter Set Bonuses for some definitive answers.

Greetings and welcome to what will likely be the lowest rated post on this site! I would like to serenade you all with a tale of failure and ineptitude!

Last night, we were on our way up to say hello to Glitter Queen when Frost was talking over vent about how they were going to announce the most viewed columns on wow.com. I could hear the excitement and anticipation in his voice which amused me and filled me with pity at the same time. It was obvious that none of his readers cared about his bet with the druids given the latest updates that were posted and the deafening silence of apathy that was produced from said updates. Even so, he never lost faith that the hunters could pull it off (dwarves, I tell ya!).

Frost started listing off the winners and sure enough the druids won. This wasn’t unexpected to me really, after talking with Euripides on the HPP and hearing his traitorous plan to aid the druids. It’s pretty hard to win when your own kind is working against you.

So I thought to myself, “Well, even though 2nd place IS the first loser, it will still be impressive to get the silver even with the evil draenei’s coup.” So when Frost said 2nd place was Mages I was utterly shocked!

You see, “Scattered Shots” (that’s the Hunter article name – I tell you this because clearly none of you could find it to post a comment since using the links on the WHU was likely too difficult) is given to us twice every week. The mage column (which, incidentally is called “So Easy, Even a Hunter Can Read It”) is only produced ONCE a week. ONCE! So the mages had half the articles to use to obtain their hits and were able to BEAT the hunter community who were specifically called upon to rally the troops and support the fact that the hunters had the strongest community out there!

Perhaps not all of the people who should have re-rolled to Death Knight in the expansion got the memo.

I stepped up production just for you all to able to wear these with pride. You’ve earned it!

==<FAIL>==

- Hrist

Our guild has started having heroic races, which is super, super fun. The guild bank puts up a pot, and anyone can put together a 5-man team to compete. We have a judge who chooses a random heroic on the spot (so no pre-knowledge) and we zone in, wait for the word, and go.

I love speed runs. Not just because they’re fast, but because they make heroics once again challenging. When you’re pulling several packs of adds as fast as you can, wiping suddenly becomes a possibility again. Mistakes are gonna be made and then you have to react and recover from those mistakes.

I recorded our run of Ahn’Kahet for fun. We screwed up the first pull badly — went far out of range of the healers (nitro boosts), causing both hrist and the mage to die before the healer even got there. So then we lost over 20 seconds to rezzing, not to mention how much longer the pack took. There were some other packs that we thought we could avoid, but turns out we couldn’t, so we had to double back for them.

Despite that, we still managed a time of 8 min 30 seconds, which isn’t bad at all for old kingdom.

Depressingly, we did not win that race. Someone had formed a team of all stealthers and they just walked past almost all of the trash. They beat us by about 30 seconds or so.

Also, AFK Rogue formed up a team to challenge, but amusingly most of them didn’t show up so he joined the stealth team.

For future runs the judge has declared stealth teams against the rules. I can’t wait for next week’s races!