Well, I did it. Got into Naxxramas as Survival. Unfortunately it was a 10man and not a 25man, and furthermore… the raid was kind of a giant failure. Yay PuGs, right?
It had one thing going for it though. The raid decided to do Patchwerk first. So that’s what I did. (And all I did in Naxx, actually.)
I felt really in the zone. I had super rhythmic music playing in the background, I was firing my shots in the correct order, my latency was low, my FPS was high, I was watching Quartz like a hawk and hitting my buttons and hotkeys the split second I was able to. Perezvon was Furious Howl’ing up a storm and I felt like I had finally nailed Survival and that there was absolutely no way in heck I wouldn’t beat my previous 10man Patchwerk high score.
So when it was all said and done and all the dust settled down I whipped out Recount…
I was a thousand DPS higher than second place.*
…I was 400 DPS lower than what I usually do as BM. (3333 as SV compared to 3700ish on most of my BM attempts. My personal high score on 10man Patchwerk is 3980, as Beast Master.)
/tilts head to one side and scratches scalp
And so I leave it at that. See, I am going to be working evenings the rest of the weekend so my chances of getting into another raid before I continue with the project and move on to Marksmanship are slim.
The verdict? Well, to be honest with you guys I am convinced I was using the right glyphs, spec, and rotation. And that screenshot I posted in my last post was a bad example; normally my pet is only doing about 15% of my damage, he was doing an unusually high amount in that last screenshot due to the mechanics of the fight, but I know I was pulling my weight this time.
So why did I not see this big DPS increase? Why did I wind up failing the Patchwerk test?
My guess is that it’s a gear issue. The vast majority of my gems are +hit gems, and I couldn’t exactly afford to lose those so I couldn’t re-gem to Agi. On top of that, I am puttering around in a mixture of Heroics blues, Naxx10 stuff, and a couple of Naxx25 and badge lewts. My guess is that at a lower gear level (like mine), BM simply scales… better.
And honestly I can’t help but think the fact that the Beast Mastery playstyle feels like it’s simply a natural extension of myself helps too… =P
Survival was an interesting experience, to say the least. I have gone from absolutely and utterly disliking the playstyle at the beginning of the week, to a sort of jovial handshakey acquaintanceship. I can appreciate the complexities of the shot rotation (even if staring at Quartz and my action bars made me feel horrifically claustrophobic) and the big Explosive Shot crits were pretty fun to watch– when I could see them out of the corner of my eye while staring at the action bars, anyway.
…but it wasn’t quite “home”. I have heard it said that playing a hunter spec is just pressing buttons in a different order… we will have to agree to disagree on that one. *nods*
—
* The second-place contestant was a very good Death Knight friend of mine who is normally neck-and-neck with me in the DPS department. He later expressed his befuddlement to me at how very poor his DPS was that round, and I’m starting to wonder if the group makeup was just horrible somehow and if that had something to do with my own performance. Guess I’ll never know, though. Not having a stable raid group sort of made it rather difficult to do a decent analysis of specs, really.
SV and MM both are really reliant on a good raid buff structure to really show off their power. Where I normally do 2800-3000 on raid-level dummies by myself, I can shoot above 5000 if all the right buffs and debuffs fall into place.
I think you’ll find MM to be less frenetic than SV, though – less debuffs to keep an eye on, and our cooldowns are rather predictable (especially if you get the Chimera glyph, which I heavily advise). It’s fairly crit-reliant, though.
Well that’s interesting. I didn’t think there would be any point where BM would be higher than SV, it could be down to the buff make up. Do you know what you had with BM compared to SV?
SV vs MM: SV is meant to scale better with gear until you hit Ulduar 25 gear at which point MM is slightly higher so I would expect you to do lower as MM. Saying that I would have thought you’d be lower as BM but you weren’t so who knows?
Maybe you were unlucky with your Lock n Load procs? Did you /pat your pet for extra luck before pulling patchwerk?
Raidbuffs? If you had a feral druid as BM and none as Surv, it explains it. (If the paladin gave you mana regen, it also explains it)
I believe your guess about gear is correct Pike, along with Rilgon’s observation regarding buffs.
If you can get to the hit cap mainly through gear and not gemming, you’ll definitely see a DPS increase from AGI gems as Survival scales so well with Agility. Then add in the proper assortment of buffs (you definitely want Kings and whatever that Druid buff is that ramps up your Crit) and you’ll experience a marked improvement.
Like Rilgon says, my Marksman DPS is hugely dependent on buffs. At the training dummies by myself I do in the 2500-3000 range but with the right buffs I’m usually in the mid to high 4k range on average, and last night I broke 6 (it was Thaddius, but still, this is evidence of buffs playing colossal role in Hunter DPS not a DPS boast) so you really need to look at what buffs you’re getting and how your DPS corresponds.
Also like Valilor points out, you may have been unlucky with Lock & Load. In my forays into Survival and in watching the other Hunters in my raid group (who are all Survival, I’m the only Marksman) Survival DPS is wildly varied and I suspect that has to do with LnL procs and other RNG-related SV mechanics.
Unfortunately one run at Patchwerk isn’t going to give you a good idea of Survival DPS. It sounds like you’ve got the rotation down, so really you’d need to address gearing and buffs to further test.
3333 is really low for a survival on Patchwerk. Even for a 10-man. I’m gonna be doing that fight tonight with my guild and I’ll keep an eye out for the numbers.
But, as Rilgon has already said, we depend heavily on the raid to be able to get that kind of damage output. Especially in a 10-man there are mana issues to be considered, even with the maximum replenishment uptime possible.
Besides that, I believe your guess might be right. I recall hearing that BMs tend to have a more specific gear than SV (AP instead of AGI and so on). Perhaps that might be helping keep your dps low.
@ Gevlon and Noah – the ironic thing is, I had a feral druid as SV and very rarely as BM…
Though to be fair I did have a feral druid the one time I hit 3900 (as BM).
I think the last point you made way be the most relevant: The DK in second place, which you demolished, is really good, but his DPS sucked too. Yeah, you had a really bad pug and the length of time in that fight hurt both of your DPS. Actaully, if you use the DK as a yardstick, then you are often even iwth him as BM but way ahead of him as SV…..
Well, from all my experience, I can definitely say that the main culprit is your fail pug that produced an extremely low raid dps and hence longer length in combat. I dare say if you were BM in the same raid, you’d probably have trouble breaking 3k dps.
Personal dps on a fight like Patchwerk is inversely proportional to the time spent killing him, or more accurately, the proportion of bloodlust/hero/cooldown buffs uptime to the total time spent in combat. Given a well geared raid that can clear “Make Quick Werk of Him” by a wide margin, you can actually pull pretty competitive dps as BM, since there’s no better hunter burst damage than lust/rapid fire/bestial wrath/call of the wild/kill command combo.
It’s most likely a combination of fight length and buffs missing.
Some large dps buffs you may have been missing, ordered by dps increase:
1. Blessing of Might
2. Sunder Armor
3. Trueshot Aura / Abomination’s Might / Unleashed Rage
4. Strength of Earth / Horn of Winter
5. Blessing of Kings
6. Earth and Moon / Ebon Plaguebringer / Curse of Elements
Also, Longer fight = less of the fight with heroism/trinket buff = lower DPS.
Hmm….
Well, if it isn’t broken, dont fix it. It seems that BM maximises your potential. Just raid BM. It’s more fun anyways.
You’re good at BM dps – some aren’t and spec different.
What I learned from hunter dps is that it’s probably one of the most buff-and-debuff-dependant classes in game. Especially as SV, where AGI, INT and STA increase your AP plus you are mana dependant and armor plays a role in your damage output, you benefit from pretty much everything there is.
So there’s no “absolute numbers” to be compared, really.
In my opinion: As long as you’re within the top 3 of 10 (or 4 or 25) of similar geared people, you’re doing okay.
Oh, and don’t, ever, look at “overall dps” (this goes for any class, really). Look at boss segments, and at boss segments only. Those are the fights that count and the only way to compare yourself to other players. Last weekend, for example, my Naxx25 PuG wiped on Gluth 3 times. All three times, plus the kill-attempt, I was on kite duty in the back. Stuff like that really messes with your “overall” stats 🙂
Don’t worry Talldar, I was looking at the Patchwerk fight numbers only =P