Blue Post 1/3/12

Blue Post

  So Vial of Shadows was bugged. The problem arose and was addressed before I even was aware of it. I don't even have the trinket.

  More important was the other stuff. Highlights:

• Lock and Load not being [consumed] by Arcane Shot
• We also intend to make sure Black Arrow is used over Explosive Trap, probably by buffing Black Arrow slightly.
• We are looking a lot at hunter DPS right now.

  The LnL change is a nice quality-of-life improvement for anyone who doesn't care to watch BA ticks. One less aggravation to divert attention away from other, more important things, like staying alive. I also don't think this will change our LnL rotation. ES-AS-ES-AS-ES will be possible now, but it would have to be better DPS than ES-(slight pause)-ES-AS-ES. I'll test it for myself, of course.

   My current LnL proccing tactic is using BA on single and/or moving targets, ET on multiple targets that will remain in the trap for the full duration. I think that even with another buff to BA DPS, this tactic will remain the same. Also, Zehera points out that the real issue between BA and ET is duration and tic count.

  The issue with Hunter DPS is twofold. On the one hand, you had the players racing to the first kill, and on the other, you have the rest of the raiding population. These are two fundamentally different data sets.

  The first data set is the super best guilds (19 so far) racing for rankings. This is where you find a lot of swings in performance between the class/specs. So Hunters aren't well represented right now. I really don't care, as is has no real effect on my gameplay.

  The second data set of the rest of raiders can be observed in a variety of ways, and how you interpret the data is subjective. Heroic or normal mode? 10 or 25? Top 100 or all parses? Fortunately, there's a lot of consistency between these options, and we can see that SV is middle of the pack, MM and BM are low. More importantly, all the DPS specs are very close to each other, so other effects, i.e. RNG, latency, length of fight, group composition, bladder status, these all can and will have a larger impact on our DPS than the difference between Hunter's theoretical DPS and others.

  Our relatively low survivability is also brought up. I think this is a big issue, of course, especially since SV has the least survivability! Again, Zehera's suggestions are spot-on. I'm not going to hold my breath. At least Mists will change all this for the better.