Agility vs. Pure RAP

[NiteFox]

<span style="color:#009900">Sergeant Gordal of the Shattered Sun, <Hunter Trainer>

For some strange reason, I'm actually starting to get a little obsessive about tweaking my character out. Nothing too serious, I'm aiming mainly for some of the latter 5-mans (Arca, MgT, etc.), being generally heroic-ready, and maybe some Kara. I doubt I'll be up to scratch for ZA before the expansion, and I'm just not a 25+ man raider.

I'm actually fairly well aware of the weaknesses in my actual gear: The pants are just the rare PvP set that somehow made a great deal of sense when I had the helmet to complete the 2-part set bonus (+resilience), but I haven't found an upgrade since I got that hat. Ditto for the S1 gloves, which were paired up with the shoulders before I managed to get an upgrade for them. I could spend some time farming battlegrounds for S2 replacements, but... Ugh, I don't think my brain could handle it before shutting down, especially with the reported 25 minute WSG queues, and the two-hour long matches, and all that for a single battle token. And I'm just not an arena player, period.

Point being is that I'm trying to optimise the good gear I do have. It's with finding the right enchantment for my melee weapon (The infamous Sonic "Why the hell won't you drop!?" Spear). For this and the last weapon I used (Crystalforged War Axe) I had it enchanted with Savagery, which confers an additional 70 (Ranged) Attack Power. It's also a fairly cheap and common enchant.

I've been told by a few folks that the +35 Agility enchant would be a lot better, but personally I can't see how. With the Savagery enchant, I get a pretty hefty 70 RAP, but the agility enchant would confer a bonus of +35 RAP, +0.875 crit, and 1.32% dodge, unless my theorycraft is wrong on those last two. Dodge isn't a huge deal, I'm also hitting 20% crit unbuffed, so am I better off sticking with Savagery over Greater Agility?

And if so, why the hell is the cheaper enchant better?:)

[Pantalaimon]

OK, you caught me in a bored mood:)

Spreadsheets are your friend for "tweaking" in PvE: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t9816-hunter_s...--_development/

Looks like with your current gear and spec, agility on your weapon wins out by a margin of about ~0.5 DPS. Hardly game breaking:P

The reason - so-called scalability, but mostly BoK. It's the same for most classes: when given a choice between a statistic (str, agi, etc.) and its equivalent (AP), choose the statistic :lol:

Honestly, if you're looking for PvE tweaks, 41/20/3 nets you a gain of ~140 DPS versus your current spec. I'd start there :whistling:

Regemming and enchanting for PvE nets you another ~40 DPS (with the 41/20/3 build) if you have the cash to throw around. (Put delicate LRs in all slots except two yellows for your meta. Head, hand, boots, enchants changed.) There are literally tens of different badge rewards that add up to hundreds of DPS that should be available to you.

I'm no hunter expert:) If you're seriously looking at retooling your toon from what looks like a hybrid pvp/5-man role to primarily a raiding/PvE DPS toon, though, I can get in touch with some of my guild hunters and offer step by step suggestions.

[Lissa]

Since you're BM and don't have many epics, right now RAP and Crit will be better than Agi. Once you get more Epic items, you might want to start looking at Agi then or if you decided to go into Survival and take Expose Weakness (which means you also take LR by default). The majority of the time, for BM, you want to look more towards AP over Agi (unless you get a huge amount of Agi on the item along with some AP).

Now, if you were Survival, it's Agi over AP as the more and more Agi you pile on the more benefit you give to physical DPS in the raid. Likewise, you will out DPS a BM hunter personally (not counting in pets), but you also come with a large amount of Agro (Lissanna regularly puts out 1.1k to 1.2k threat in badge gear, crafted gear, and Kara epics filling in the remaining locations in raid situations).

[Jester]

Honestly, if you're looking for PvE tweaks, 41/20/3 nets you a gain of ~140 DPS versus your current spec. I'd start there whistling.gif

I suspect that people could pick up a whole lot of DPS with 64 talent points to spend. :rolleyes:

-Jester

[NiteFox]

I suspect that people could pick up a whole lot of DPS with 64 talent points to spend. :rolleyes:

-Jester

Hah, yeah. I suspect he means either 41/17/3 or 41/20/0.

The thing is, I really can't do without Hawk Eye. I like distance: It gives me time to react, gives me more room to pull, and I've been on more than several groups where I've been the only one still firing after a wide-area fear.

I also really, really, really hate Rapid Killing. Having used it for a while during my Marksmanship days (Not that long ago, post-pets proc it fix) in groups it just doesn't proc enough to be worthwhile, and even when it does proc it doesn't do a great deal. Rapid fire isn't used enough either, since I only break it out when I'm OOM and just need to keep up a steady DPS, and these days I'm rarely OOM. Rapid Killing is seriously broke in my mind, which makes me wonder why the hell so many talent builds are set up around it.

Another thing, I've never received BoK from the party paladin. I always get a Salv (Which, when they demand that I trap, I always dismiss no matter how many times they reapply it and how many times I tell them I just can't peel away with it) or Might.

Money is no object, so I suppose I can dig up a few better gems.

[Lissa]

I also really, really, really hate Rapid Killing. Having used it for a while during my Marksmanship days (Not that long ago, post-pets proc it fix) in groups it just doesn't proc enough to be worthwhile, and even when it does proc it doesn't do a great deal. Rapid fire isn't used enough either, since I only break it out when I'm OOM and just need to keep up a steady DPS, and these days I'm rarely OOM. Rapid Killing is seriously broke in my mind, which makes me wonder why the hell so many talent builds are set up around it.

Rapid Killing is not about the proc, it's about having Rapid Fire available every 3 minutes vs. 5 minutes. The Proc is just a bonus. You should also make a macro that involves Rapid Fire into a Steady Shot/Auto Shot Macro so that it fires whenever available.

[Pantalaimon]

Hah, yeah. I suspect he means either 41/17/3 or 41/20/0.

Haha... well, those numbers were the defaults that came with the spreadsheet I linked. I admit I didn't check to see if they added up, though :rolleyes: Why a spreadsheet would come with the default spec as some impossible "superspec" I'll never know.

]
The thing is, I (...) like (snip)

Ahh, there's the rub with trying to help people tweak characters. :lol: Despite all the theorycrafting and all the millions of players in WoW, people will always have some unique quirks or holdouts.

There's a lot of resources out there. Despite the cesspool of blizzard forums, stickied class FAQ threads are occasionally helpful for finding nice links, or, heaven forbid, helpful in and of themselves - although warlocks might be an exception rather than a rule in that regard. Spreadsheets are all over. Hunters are probably the hardest to TC with rotations and such, but hey, at the end of the day that just means you often have more wiggle room.

To go back to agility versus RAP in the absence of BoK, well, that's probably your call. Probably not worth regemming your reds:P Barring a survival spec, as Lissa mentioned. A quick jaunt around the internet seems to promote agility for BM, but YMMV and there's certainly no absence of dissenting opinions on the matter.

I would replace the blues in your breastplate with reds, socket bonuses generally just aren't good enough to warrant using blue sockets. The belt is iffy, replacing that blue essentially gives you +1 agility, -6 stamina - a tradeoff that one could certainly argue both ways. But before anything, I'd get the head, chest, hands and boots PvE enchants.

[Kirayla]

Yay for Hunter threads!

35 agility x 1.15 = 40.25 agility as a Survival Hunter
So 40.25 agility = 40.25 Attack Power
and 40.25 x 0.552 = 22.218 Critical Strike Rating = 1.00625 % Critical Hit
as well as 1.61% Dodge.

Also this will scale more with raid buffs as agility will scale up, but not sheer Attack Power. I would always run with 35 agility as the extra crit is always nice; and i find running with +40% Dodge in raid buffs very helpful at times.

Now that is survival, for BM i would recommend the 70AP enchant, until your gear is good enough to justify the agility scaling. Yet then again it is really only 35 AP difference. Although i am not BM, yet i do know that I respec'd for one day for BM for a Kara run and my stack of agility was amazingly good as BM too : D

Also you need to keep up the 9% hit requirement if you are going to be raiding, just as a side note.

Also for head enchant try the CE rep one: 16 Hit, 34 AP;
Next: 6 stats to chest and AP to gloves.

Yet you are still gearing up and maybe don't want to worry about re-enchants till you are have more epics.