With the number of hunters on raid teams, what makes one stand out from the next? A damage meter may possibly be the best tool any raid leader can use to distinguish who plays their class better than the next. There are those that believe that gear makes all the difference in the world for the amount of damage a hunter can do at any given time. There is something to this, but it’s more than just gear. One hunter who is in T4 or equivalent gear out damages a T5 or equivalent hunter. How is this even possible? I get asked this question on a reg basis by other hunters who raid with me. Generally in tells, which makes the most sense. It all comes down to shot rotation.

There are some hunters that purists and hand weave all of their shots. Some even just do it by feel. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it is impossible to make up for latency and the other factors that come with playing an online game. Some of those hunters will even tell you how boring it is to just spam one button. I don’t know about anyone else, but I press a lot more than one button during a 25 man raid. Once you start doing 1k+ DPS, you being to have to pay attention to your threat, add into that the BM aspect of keeping Sapphire alive as not to gimp your DPS, (The pet just being alive adds to your DPS), and suddenly you have all kinds of things to keep track of.

There are a number of different theories on shot rotation; the most accepted one for a BM hunter is the 1:1 rotation. This is very mana efficient, and will allow a hunter go never go out of mana even during a long fight. The rotation that I generally use is a 3:2 rotation, which clips, (doesn’t allow it to fire), every third auto shot. which normally is a very bad thing. In this case however the two steady shots make up for it. A hunter has to be very prepared when heading into raid and using this shot rotation. During our Mag fight last night, I went through 8 mana pots, (it was an unusually long fight), just to keep myself from going out of mana.

I use a macro to obtain this, and there are a number of sites where these macros can be obtained along with several other useful ones. If a hunter can keep a high level of DPS without using a macro, I still believe if it isn’t broke don’t fix it, but at some point you are going to make a mistake in your rotation lowering your DPS where as with the macro it does the same thing every time without any mistakes and gives you one less thing to worry about during the fight.

The two main macros that I use are:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto shot
/cast Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

And

#showtooltip Bestial Wrath
/cast Bestial Wrath
/cast Rapid Fire
/use Bloodlust Broach

The second one allows me to pop all of my cool downs at the same time, however I recommend using this part way through the fight after the tank has enough agro as you will build it quick, (Esp with 4 BM hunters and a shaman in the group … FI x 4 and heroism are a thing of beauty!).

I hope this helps some of the other hunters out there top their damage meters, just don’t forget to FD every thirty seconds as not to wipe your raid. You might also want to become friends with your local alchemist so don't go broke chugging Fel Mana Pots.

EDIT:

Upon skimming over some of the blogs, it would appear that many of us have the same thoughts at the same time. I could not, did not say this better myself, so I am going to quote the post from another blog today:

"I really think that players who enjoy the hunter class, actually thrive on difficulty. After all, it takes no skill to be a huntard. A hunter on the other hand, is a work of art in action. To accomplish our ballet of traps, crowd control, chaos management and MQoSRDPS, we need to constantly think outside the box. When we are wearing mail, with our pets to pwn face, we employ a multitude of different features to accomplish our goal. "

**Direct quote from http://gunlovingdwarfchick.com/ Post from 4/17/08 entitled We Haz Mail!