Hunters: To drum or not to drum?

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werries2

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I have recently picked up leather working as a profession, especialy for the drums.
I have used the drums for a few raids and have to say I am a bit dissapointed and really confused on the results.

Firstly the 80 haste rating drums. This should be the best drums out there and boost dps a lot, but I have a feeling my dps have dropped since starting to use them. I am quite high on haste to start off with (125), and possibly the 80 haste messes up my 3:2 hunter macro so much it could be dropping a lot of autoshots??? Should I maye revert to the 1:1 rotation?
The 60 AP drums, for now seems to be worth more to me than the haste drums, and with those I do see some improvement.

We never have hunter friendly groups in our raid setup, so I am teamed with mages, warlocks, moonkin and shadow priests mostly. So they love the haste to bits, but I want to have something for myself as well :p

Any thoughts from other hunters out there, or some other leather workers that have played with drums before ;)
 
I have 2 classes that I can speak on behalf on with the haste drums.

First off, my pala, as a healer loves it, reduces my flash of lights to a 1.1 second cast, allowing me to "flash" heal a tank effectively for a while. No change in spell rotation is required here.

My shadow priest is an entirely different scenario, and like you, unless I notice the drums are active, I loose DPS. Haste definatly requires you to change your spell rotation to get the most out of it.

The hunters in my guild, when activating the haste drums, can achieve something in excess of 1200dps. Then again they are BM specced and need a one button spam (at least that what they tell us).

Here is a macro they use

/cast !Auto shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill command
/cast Steady shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

BTW, did you know, there is a guild (a name escapes me atm), that has made all their raiders take up drums, so they can have a haste rating through the raid?
 
Haste drums are the best !!! Its the key to 2k + dps, especially if you have multiple leatherworkers in your party. Look at mods like drummer boy.

As for your question its very easy to see why you are having issues with dps. Its that cursed chicken bow. Out of the box with no haste applied its great... as soon as you start stacking haste it just gets worse and worse.

The best times to use drums... is when your shammy uses his bloodlust + you use your rapid fire, haste pot or improved aspect of the hawk proc's. Its enough to drive your attack speed through the dreaded dps deadzone we suffer from as soon as you hit the 1.8's / 1.7's. On its own its not massive... but use it at the right time with the other dps boosting / speed boosting abilities and it turns to sweeeeeet dps gains. Also the 3:2 does claim to default to 1:1 rotation speeds when your AS gets to low, BUT thats not entirely true... to a degree it does yea, but since we also do some manual weaving as well from time to time, it will give you a massive dps loss. The best thing you can do is move to your manual 1:1 macro bashing habits, with NO manual weaving, and you will see the dps meter just rocket up again. Dont forget to default back to your 3:2 when your haste has stopped. But in general, try not to tamper with haste with that bow you have... haste is meant to be used more efficiently with a slower bow. Once autoshot timers are removed in WoTLk, you will be able to stack as much haste as you want without ever worrying about dps loss/ autoshot clipping.

I ONLY use my drums at the same time as my rapid fire, haste pots, shammy uses his bloodlusts etc. Thats when drums show its true power ;)

You should never use mana pots on bosses either, you should just be able to use haste pots. If you are having mana issues, tell your pallie's to stop slacking... that SoW / JoW is priceless on any boss fight ! I cannot run dry on mana if they keep that seal / judgment up. It allows me to chug haste pots and drums like crazy... The faster I shoot thanks to rapid fire, drums and all speed increasing abilities, the more mana I get back... never ending nuking dreams are made of :)
 
Speaking of macros and hunters, this is my farming tard, more survival than bm, and mostly kitted in welfares, bite me :P

http://www.armory-light.com/eu/Karazhan/Tehelfses/

and the current build

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...000000000000000000000033300012500302300530300

I am thinking of moving 1 point out of Thrill of the hunt to take wyvern sting

what macro(s) do you suggest i use if and when i raid with the nab.

Bare in mind my main is a holy priest, so it's not often that the tard goes out to play, and this build works just fine to plaas stuff
 
Timken, I strongly disagree with you about Haste sucking for a SP.
We're all about fluid changes to our rotations. If you can't do that you're nerfing your DPS to begin with.

I'm currently build a very haste focused gear set on my SP. I'm shoving out 1.3s MB and 2.6s MF at the mo and when I get Bloodlust it drops to 1s MB and 2s MF.

The key is just to shift your spell casts.

I've noticed a really big increase since I shifted to Haste gear.
 
@ d3th - You have a very very strange build, as you are missing all the good stuff in all the trees that can make the hunter class shine.

If you want to go the support class route and stay with survival build, you would need to respec to the classic survival build. Also the most popular survival shot macro is the 1:1.5 rotation but it relies heavy on multishot / arcane shot manual weaving. And with our latency its pretty hard.
Every now and then I am required to respec to survival if we do brutallis and our local survival hunter is off. If you want, I can post you the classic survival hunter build, but be warned, survival hunters are a breed on their own. You need sick agility stats before its even remotely worth your while to spec survival. Its all about agility and massive quantities of it.

For day to day grinding + raiding, the BM build > everything. You just dont have any downtime... if you run around grinding with aspect of the viper on, you NEVER need to stop for drinks like eg. a mage. Your pet's aggro generation is pretty good and if you FD in between your nuking sessions, you never need to worry about pulling aggro from your pet. If you wanna go the dps route look @ the classic cookie cutter BM build. 41/20/0

Your typical BM builds lives on two macro's 3:2 rotation and 1:1 rotations.
If you wanna farm with your hunter, seriously look @ the Bm builds. Farming will be a dream :)
 
Strange builds are what I do :P You should see my gw ranger/warrior :P

I would not mind looking at the classic survival build as out of the 3 trees that's the one I seem to enjoy the most, tend to play more of a support class anyways

so linkee plx
 
God all this makes loc spam bolting seem uber dull :(
 
This is the latest survival build thats pretty popular and manages to deliver some nice personal dps as well :

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...000505201205000000000033300100410322300510300

If you wanna go with the 1:1.5 shot macro here it is :

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Ps. dont tamper with the reset value... soooo many hunters think they need to modify that value with their weapon speed value... /facepalm
 
Pornolio said:
This is the latest survival build thats pretty popular and manages to deliver some nice personal dps as well :

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...000505201205000000000033300100410322300510300

If you wanna go with the 1:1.5 shot macro here it is :

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Ps. dont tamper with the reset value... soooo many hunters think they need to modify that value with their weapon speed value... /facepalm
Click to expand...

Thanks will give it a look over
 
Our raid's wws stats for those interested
http://wowwebstats.com/5jqbvfslqwzf1 (Me=Agsilver)

Pornolio, I agree the badge bow I have is a huge hamper on my dps at the moment. I have even considered dropping it for the S3 or S2 bow untill I can get my hands on some of the slower pve bows out there.
I will try and switch to the 1:1 rotation and move my drums away from my beastial wrath macro to my rappid fire one. Up to now I would have two booster macro's Nr1 Beastialwrath+beserker trinket+drums of battle, Nr2 Rapidfire+bloodlust trinket.
With my haste at about 125 I manage to do more dps than with the 1:1 macro even with hawk proc. My shoot speed is verry close to speed limit for my bow at 1.92, so maybe that is where the real problem starts.
 
You dont have to move your drums from your BW... I would almost advise you to keep them together ! Drums + BW + all trinkets popped + rapid fire is fun!!!! Just watch those threat meters... I tend to nuke till i am just under the MT on threat... then FD... if FD is successful and full threat reset is done... then I break out all hell loose with all the trinkets, rapid fire, drums, haste pots and pray my main tank keeps aggro on him as I rocket up the threat meters !

Ps. It helps to be religious because you will be praying you dont pull aggro off the main tank when you peak on 2500 dps for those few seconds. :D
 
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No no, was thinking of moving Drums over to the rapid fire macro.
But come to think of it, I can also just move rapid fire in with the BW macro (they can overlap right, have not done this in almost a year! :o ). Then I will have BW, RF, Drums and beserker trinket at the same time !

Just need to replace my second trinket (blood lust) with the BT exalted reward one, and I should be set on dps again ;) Though they are quite similar to me anyway
 
Yup all those stack wonderfully together.

Only thing that wont work, is the bloodlust brooch + berskerker trinket... they dont work together. There is a 30 sec GCD between the two of them if one of them is used. Other than that... all the others stack together. Its one massive sick DPS boost once all of them run together. :p
 
TheShogun said:
Timken, I strongly disagree with you about Haste sucking for a SP.
We're all about fluid changes to our rotations. If you can't do that you're nerfing your DPS to begin with.

I'm currently build a very haste focused gear set on my SP. I'm shoving out 1.3s MB and 2.6s MF at the mo and when I get Bloodlust it drops to 1s MB and 2s MF.

The key is just to shift your spell casts.

I've noticed a really big increase since I shifted to Haste gear.
Click to expand...

LoL

Dont get me wrong. I love haste.

Also I never mentioned anywhere haste sucking for an SP. As an SP we require to stack spell damage and haste rating. All I said is that with drums of haste activated, it is important to remember that ur spell rotations will change if u want to achieve a max DPS.
 
d3th_n1gG4 said:
Speaking of macros and hunters, this is my farming tard, more survival than bm, and mostly kitted in welfares, bite me :P

http://www.armory-light.com/eu/Karazhan/Tehelfses/

and the current build

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...000000000000000000000033300012500302300530300

I am thinking of moving 1 point out of Thrill of the hunt to take wyvern sting

what macro(s) do you suggest i use if and when i raid with the nab.

Bare in mind my main is a holy priest, so it's not often that the tard goes out to play, and this build works just fine to plaas stuff
Click to expand...
I am lvling a priest and a hunter myself.
Both lvl 54 but i dropped holy for shadow for now and use my hunter to get money for the priest enchanting and tailoring drained my money .

Hunter got skining and herbing makes 80% of the gold.
 
My hunter spends 100% of my gold ;)


I tried out the cobo macro as we discussed above, and manage to pass 2k dps consistantly for 30 seconds each time I pop the macro :D Hell I even averaged over 1.2k dps at Archi last night, that includes running away from flames 50% of the time ;)
 
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