What they’re really asking for is the number given by a mod like “recount,” which calculates the actual damage you dealt over a period of time–typically quite different than numbers you’d pull off of weapons or spell descriptions because of your actual rotation of attacks and various downtimes.
People who are hung up on your DPS numbers don’t understand cooperative play. A mage buddy of mine was upset that a hunter was out-DPSing him on the meters. I had to explain:
The hunter was pulling. This means that the mage didn’t start casting the first spell wasn’t cast until after the pull. When the mage pulls, the first cast starts a couple of seconds before the battle starts.
The mage was doing crowd control on every pull, and sheeping takes time away from dealing damage. A good mage will keep a close eye on crowd-controlled targets and be ready to re-sheep when required, which takes away more time.
The hunter could pull aggro and feign death. The mage was backing off when he got too high on the thread meters.
The mage was using counterspell to stop the mob healer from getting off a big heal. Again, this doesn’t show up on the damage meters.
The mage pet (water elemental) is only out for 45 seconds at a time. The hunter pet stays out until it gets killed.
When our healer pulled aggro, the mage frostbolted the mob to slow it down, then frost-novaed to freeze it to the healer could move away, then kited it back to the tank.
And so on. Despite being lower on the damage meters, the mage was a much more important contributor to the overall success of the run than the hunter.
Well, its not a big deal but I have an axe to grind with the Khan Hrathaquest. In that quest you have to kill Hratha, a centaur leader and take some mumbo jumbo thingie from his corpse. In order to face him you have battle centaurs all the way up to a big ass horn on a bluff, and one of them, will hopefully drop the mouthpiece so you can blow the horn.
Fine. I did it last night. I lost. No big deal, so far. You see, when you blow the horn 2 centaur warriors will arrive first. When you beat them 2 more will come. After them Hratha and another will arrive. Hratha is level 42 the others were 40.
Today I tried again, with my lvl 42 hunter. I beat the first four, barely having enough time to regain any mana between fights. When Hratha arrived I beat him and then desperately fought off his mate with my remaining mana and health. I won. But before i could loot Hratha’s body IT FUCKING DESPAWNED! Quickly, too…it wasn’t like I had more than 30 seconds to loot him (and I was still fighting!)So angrily I went back to my corpse, waited for the guards to respawn (so that I wasn’t outnumbered badly after blowing the horn…plus, I needed another mouthpiece drop…they only can be used once :mad:), and killed them again. Used the horn. Beat the first four warriors. But this time Hratha showed up with THREE henchmen! Ounumbered I tried to beat them, but failed.
Rinse, Repeat. But this time I went for Hratha’s corpse as soon as he fell, and looted the quest item. I knew I was going to die, so I figured why not get the item and then rez at the graveyard?
It only bugs me because the body of Hratha despawns quickly…I mean really quickly. If you don’t loot it as soon as he dies, you’ll lose the chance because he’ll despawn before you can beat his henchmen and get to it. I’m wondering if its a bug of some kind or purposely made that way to frustrate players.
Oh well, its not a showstopper…but it sure did tick me off a bit. MJy advice if you solo this mission is to kill his henchies first and then kill Hratha, if you can survive the beating they’ll give you long enough.
I should have added the other thing that happened. As I was killing centaurs on my way to the bluff a lvl 38 horde rogue showed up and followed me around. I was about to ask him if he was on the same quest and if he wanted to team up for it when he sent me a request for a duel. I declined and then was engaged in another fight. He sent another during the fight. (The first ome was when I was fighting, also). I was thinking if he sends another he goes on the ignore list. He didn’t, but he followed me around and would jump into my fights. i noted his name…“Drizztdadrow”.
Glad I never asked him to team. He was annoying enough, but I cannot stand Drizzt clones in any game.
Folks will sometimes answer that question with something like “I do 2k dps self-buffed,” which is a good gauge of your minimum capabilities, or “I do 4k dps on Patchwerk,” which assumes full raid buffage and is a pretty straightforward fight that doesn’t require dpsers to do anything besides loldps.
DPS values are important to hardcore elitist retard raid guilds because endgame fights occasionally involve a timed element. This means that a raid needs to deal out max damage in a short period of time. Malygos/Eye of Eternity is one such fight - you have 10 minutes to kill the boss or he basically destroys everyone. Patchwerk and Thaddius are also very damage dependent fights since the bosses enrage at a specific time during the fight and squash the raid.
You can figure out the amount of dps needed for a specific boss by dividing his health points by the fight timer, and then dividing that by the number of dpsers in the raid.
Patchwerk, for example, has 13 million hit points and you have 6 minutes to kill him before he goes into “Berserk” mode and kills the raid. This means the raid as an entity needs to do at least 36k damage per second to beat the timer. Divide that by the number of dpsers in the raid (17ish) means it takes roughly 2k-3k damage per second per person to kill him.
This is why guilds in general will try to optimize their raid by bringing the highest damage dealers, so they’ll ask new recruits for their numbers. We want to know the player is actually making a significant contribution and doesn’t have to be carried by the better players.
Recount is a decent in-game mod to track dps, but it’s a memory hog. If you can stand having it enabled for short periods, go to one of the target dummies in one of the major cities and just go all out on it with your standard rotation, and see what kinds of numbers come out. Then just disable the mod for normal playtime.
It can’t hurt to know your numbers in case someone asks for legitimate reasons (i.e. if you apply to join one of the hardcore elite retard guilds), but to most people it’s really just another reason to stroke their e-peens. It can also inspire a healthy level of competition. My husband and I are pretty competitive so it’s fun when I beat him on the meters
No, I thought I made it clear - my machine will not support such a mod Gather, for example, crashes my WoW. When I go on raids I have to turn off the ingame sound and tweak other stuff just to avoid so much lag I’m useless. There’s just no way I’m going to be able to use a “memory hog”, and if I was so foolish as to try it would give wildly inaccurate numbers. Even in normal play.
There’s no way I’m joining any sort of hardcore guild. Even if my machine was up to it, raiding is a SMALL part of why I play WoW.
Actually… I’m not a very competitive person. Frankly, being in that sort of numbers competition makes me throw up a little bit in the back of my mouth. But if you enjoy it, more power to you.
It does occur to me that in closely timed boss fights I may be better off not getting involved as I do tend to lag in boss fights and that’s not good.
I’m still a bit of a noob when it comes to details in WoW, and I have a question.
I geared up my hunter with mostly “green” items, and last night I got a drop ogf “blue” armor that does have a higher rating, but only by about 10 points in armor. It has a lower strength bonus than the green one thoigh. I’ve been told that blue items are better, so should I wear the blue one instead?
I try to use the armory to find what items will be best for my characters, but a lot of times I outlevel them, and have to get something else before I get any real usefulness out of them. (at least what I consider good use…maybe I’m cheap).
Does the gear make that much of a difference in most cases? Weapons, I’d think so. The more damage you can cause, the better. I also will have to look to see if theres any gear that can improve mana regen on a hunter. Its not that much of a problem unless I get mobbed, but any improvement helps.
Hunters’ main attribute is Agility, not Strength, so a lower strength bonus really doesn’t matter. For hunters and rogues, agility determines your critical hit rating, so you really want gear (both weapons and armor) with +Agility. All else being equal, yes, a piece of blue gear is superior to any piece of green gear (at least until you reach Outland, where some of the green gear is far superior to any of the mainland WoW blue gear).
In other words, “it depends”. What are the bonuses on the old green and the new blue?
I have a related armor question. How much armor should I be willing to sacrifice to get an increase in +AGI (on a hunter)? Since dinging 40 I’ve been replacing my leather gear (which was all green/blue) with mail gear. Often the mail will have significantly more armor but much lower stat buffs. Some have been no-brainers but others are trickier.
For example, my current leg armor is a blue leather piece with 96 armor (reinforced +24) with +13 AGI (and +12 STR) - it was a RFK drop, IIRC. How much of an armor improvement would I need to be willing to sacrifice the +13 AGI? Is there even a standard conversion for these sorts of questions?
When I was leveling my hunter, I never even looked at armor values. Unless you’re Survival (aka “melee hunter” or “munter”), if you’re doing things right you shouldn’t be getting hit that often. Your pet should be tanking for you while you’re a distance off killing the mobs with your gun or bow. I know it doesn’t always work out that way in practice, but overall, I would say offensive power is more important than defensive power for a hunter (plus all the Agility will help you dodge melee attacks should you get drawn into them). Others might think differently, but this philosophy worked well to me all the way up to 70 (my hunter was an alt and I switched to Death Knight as my main alt after WotLK). He had a mixture of mostly mail pieces with a few leather that had better offensive stats, and it worked out fine.
I’m not sure but I sold the old green one since I hate having a lot of stuff in my bags. They always fill up while I’m playing and then I have to start dumping things. But looking at the Armory I noticed that a lot of my gear doesn’t give AGI bonuses. My Defkin Belt and a ring together give me an overall AGI bonus of 7 which I imagine sucks. I might have to look for better gear I guess.
What benefit is Stamina? I have several itemsd that give a bonus to that.
(For that matter how does intellect and spirit factor in? I know they are probably more important to mages and magic users, but in my noobness i never figured out how)
Stamina and hit points are directly proportional…the higher your STA the higher your hp. Intellect and mana have the same relationship, higher INT=more mana. Spirit has a more subtle relationship with both hp and mana. The higher your SPI, the faster both hp and mana regeneration goes.
As winterhawk noted, if you’re playing your hunter right, you shouldn’t even really need to worry about either direct armor rating or maximizing your hit points, because you shouldn’t end up being on the business end of any mob. That’s what your pet is for. The paramount thing to maximize as a hunter is AGI, hit rating and damage. Not only does AGI make your shots more accurate, it has a direct effect on your critical hit ratios. Some gear also give bonuses to hit rating and damage.
Stamina is possibly the simplest stat the game has. For every point of Stamina, you get 10 HP. I’m not sure how it translates to your pet, though.
Every point of Intellect gives you 15 mana, plus it increases the effectiveness of your spells. As a Hunter, you do use mana, so it’s not something you want to wholly disregard. Still, it’s not nearly as important as it is for Mages, Warlocks, and Priests.
In terms of priority as a Hunter, I’d say you want to put Agility first, then Stamina, then Spirit, then Intellect, then Strength.
Stamina increases your hit points/health - so it’s useful for all classes, though much more useful for tanks and melee classes in general who expect to be hit more often than a hunter does. Intellect increases your total mana, and increases your crit chance with spells - also not totally useless for hunters - I’m not sure if your crit chances with arcane shot depend on int or agi. Spirit increases the regeneration rate of both health and mana - even my warrior occasionally uses a spirit scroll when he’s off soloing.
Another thing you might want to pay attention to (I know that they changed hunter pets quite a bit after I stopped playing mine, so I can’t really go into detail about how to do it) is to make sure that when you’re leveling, your pet is of a type that’s decent at tanking, and give it the talents that will maximize this. You want it to be able to take a hit and also to be able to hold aggro on the mobs you’re fighting so it’s harder for you to overaggro with your greater offensive power, thus pulling the mob off your pet and onto yourself.
Guards are running to their posts as I approach the bridges, whereas before (I’m level 12 now) they were just standing there already.
Does that have to do with me levelling higher, or is that just a humorous way to indicate they might have been taking a piss?
Also, I’m looking for the body of one of 2 guards who were killed by those river things, but I’m being “triple-teamed” and killed. I guess I should back away and let one of them come after me rather than taking them all on at once?
I’ve tried circling the camp and sneaking in, but that don’t work, and I don’t think I’m high enough a level for the invisibilty potion.
All of that is kinda your call. There are valid reasons to do it either way.
A BeastMaster specced Hunter may have buffed his pets aggro so much, that the Hunter is rarely involved in melee combat. In that case, go for the stats. (And there are third party add-ons, like Omen, that have a threat meter, so that you can throttle back on your aggro so that you won’t “steal it” from your pet. Also, Blizzard has, in the latest patch, put a simplistic aggro meter of their own in there.)
More likely, some Horde player is going for the Explore Elwynn Forest achievement and just rode by on his epic mount; the guards ran off in chase and are just now returning to their posts.
And definitely, if you’re getting jumped by mutliple mobs, you’re going to need to learn to pull individual targets out of the pack. Even if you do end up pulling more than one, you’ll probably be able to run away before they stun you, so you can just reset and try again.
Uhh… what quest are you talking about? The one near Eastvale Logging camp?
I presume you found the first body, to the west of the river.
The second body is just a pile of bloody bones on the east end of the murloc village. You will have to figure out how to pull the murlocs away from the area, and kill them one on one as much as possible.
It just occurred to me last night that I’ve never seen a way to travel to Silvermoon City. Is it safe to assume that I need to buy The Burning Crusade to be able to go there (and to the Dranei territory)?
