Shots

Shot rotation seems to be a big source of contention for hunters. You've got one school of thought that says you should build a complex macro that eeks out the most mana efficient and DPS maximizing rotation of shots for your specific weapon speed, and you've got another school of thought (BRK's an advocate of this one) that says you should understand your shots and manually fire them and adjust your rotation to the circumstances.

And I suppose there's a third school of thought, but I hesitate to call it "thought". Those of us who more or less randomly manually fire our special shots, with no real attention to mana efficiency, or DPS, or much of anything at all besides pressing buttons.

I've more or less grown up in that third school of thought, with just a drop of attention paid to not clipping my auto shots, but not a whole lot more than that. Hell, I've even fired shots sometimes because I wanted to see a different color fly by (ohh, purple arcane shot, oooooh, green serpent sting. its like the 4th of July).

To improve my DPS, especially in longer sustained fights, I've got to learn a bit more about what this shot rotation stuff means to me.

In a comment to my post about Kill Command, Kestrel offered a simple macro that just does Steady Shot/Auto Shot, with a call to Kill Command whenever its available. Papewaio offered an alternative, with a bit more sophistication surrounding the error messages that'll pop up while spamming this guy.

I tried a hybrid of this puppy out wednesday night.


#showtooltip Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

I put this guy in place, headed over to Netherwing Fields to do the daily quests, and sat down on one of the floating islands to do the Not So Friendly Skies.

Having no idea what to do with the macro, I just tried hitting it like I would to weave my steady's in with my auto's manually. Didn't really work, with steady shot not really firing other than the first time I hit it. But it was proc'ing my Kill Commands, so happy me.

Then I figured I'd try spamming the key, litterally hitting it again and again, knowing full well that it wasn't ready while steady shot was casting, but with the nice error message suppression, no real problem other than my Cooldown Timer addon animation bar for Kill Command would sort of enlarge to indicate to me that KC was still on cool down. Ok, I can live with that.

Initial thoughts on spamming the key...(1) sort of silly, but ok, lots of life is silly if you think about it, and (2) holy DPS batman.

I didn't do anything quantitative to measure my output, but intuitively, the transporters were dropping like flies. I was just amazed at how fast they'd go down, and how long my mana lasted with Aspect of the Viper turned on.

Just simply from Steady/Auto shots in a 1:1 ratio, spaced as close together as I could get them. I was only slowing down at times to allow my pet to keep aggro.

Thinking of next steps. Firstly, spamming the key is going to become boring in a hurry, so I'm gonna have to think about that part and see if there's any options that allow a bit less spamming and a bit more variety. Secondly, I've got to figure out where people go to for ideas on what they consider to be more optimal rotations. I guess I'll have to dig around, and maybe find out how to do Dr. Boom so I can measure this stuff.