I realized today while helping a Hunter figure out how to increase her DPS just how much work and information is required to make a Hunter viable for raiding and instancing at level 80. To be honest, I hadn’t really put much thought into it before; it was just something that came with the territory. But while I was talking to this Hunter, I discovered she knew mostly the basics of what the class needs, but seemingly not how to get the information necessary to theory craft or research on her own. Well, I have a blog, right? And it’s rather lacking in direction, right? Why not put this space to good use and look at Huntering 101 from a raiding Survivalist’s perspective?
And there’s so much to consider! Gear, enchants, gems, glyphs, pets, specs for both you and your pet, consumables, stats… The list just keeps growing the more I think about it! How I will ever get it all down coherently, I am not sure, but I feel it’s worth the try. And so, I shall begin with the bare basics: reading your stats on the Character pane (and deciphering the archaic setup on the Pet info pane).
First, we need to figure out what stats are the most important to consider, and where to find them. Here you can see how I have my display set up: it shows me my basic stats and my ranged stats. Here I can look at my Agility, Intellect, Ranged Critical Percentage, Hit Rating, etc. Basically, we want to know everything on this pane except Strength, Spirit, and Armor.
Agility is the most basic stat for Hunters, and is arguably the most important base stat for Survivalists. One point of Agility is equal to one point of Attack Power and a small percentage of critical strike. Agility also benefits your pet – the more Agility you have, the more he has. Likewise, your pet gets a percentage of your Stamina. However, without the talent [Hunter Vs. Wild] in the Survivalist tree, none of your Stamina counts as anything but health. 10 Stamina is equal to 100 health. Lastly, we want to know where our Intellect sits. Intellect gives you mana (10 Intellect = 100 mana), and thanks to the [Careful Aim] talent in the Marksmanship tree all of our Intellect becomes Ranged Attack Power. For me, that means I’m getting an extra 415 Attack Power.
On the other side of the stats pane, we have the Ranged Stats. Your Damage stat is a combination of the Damage on your ranged weapon plus the bonus damage from your ammo. If you mouse over it, a tool tip will pop up telling you what your attack speed, damage and damage-per-second (DPS) is. While this is the only way to see your base DPS, you can mouse over the Speed just below Damage to see both your attack speed and your haste. While I’ve never managed to find a reason to try to get more haste over, say, attack power or Agility, it’s a nice side stat that will show up on your gear. I consider it icing on the cake.
Moving down the line, we find our Attack Power. This number is a combination of all sorts of things: basic attack power based on your level, buffs, aspects, and stats from gear. Attack power is considered a bench mark stat for Hunters (along with Agility) in figuring out what your DPS potential is, but we’ll cover that later.
Hit Rating. This is the most important stat for a Hunter! I can’t stress enough how important it is to get near the hit cap (the point where you will no longer miss a boss) as soon as possible for raiding; every 1% of hit you gain, up until 8%, is equal to a 1% DPS increase. This is because you stop missing, thus all potential damage possible is being done to the boss. While you don’t have to be exactly at the hit cap, being within .5% is certainly what you should aim for. I myself am .02% under the hit cap, for example, but I’m not going to spend 500 gold just to “fix” that!
There are a few numbers to consider when figuring out what your hit rating cap is. All the numbers below is from a raiding perspective, where you will be shooting at a boss level (83) target:
Base Hit Rating Cap: 263
Draenei Hit Rating Cap: 230
Hit Rating Cap with 1/2/3 in Focused Aim: 197/164/132
Last on our list is Critical Strike Rating. This is something that, as you gather more Agility, will naturally increase. Also, you will find many items that include raw crit rating. Once you are hit capped, you can expect it to start creeping up to about 30% crit. Don’t stress if it’s low while you’re gearing up – just like your Stamina, the crit will come.
The last thing I want to look at this time around is the Pet screen. Blizzard has acknowledged that the current layout is both rather old and incomplete, but they haven’t said anything about fixing it up in the next few patches. So, we’ll need to make sure we can read the silly thing in the meantime. I’ve included the full panel because everything is rather spread out.
In the upper left corner is the happiness indicator. This changes colors to indicate your pet’s mood (and how much DPS it can do). Green is Happy, and your pet will do 150% damage; yellow is Content, and your pet will do 100% damage; and red is Unhappy, and your pet will do 50% damage. Obviously it’s pretty important to keep your pet happy! Doing so is easy – you can feed it (mouse over the indicator to see the tool tip that tells you what sorts of food your pet will eat), equip [Glyph of Mend Pet] and keep Mend Pet going until your pet is happy, or talent your pet to gain happiness. (We’ll cover these pet talents a bit later, though.)
Along the right side is your pet’s magic resistances. Currently, pets gain 1 resistance point per level, and can talent for more if you so choose. Honestly though, there’s no real reason that I’ve found to worry too much about these stats. They’re just sort of there for now.
Under the picture is your pet’s stats. This is set up in a simplified version of your character’s stats, with base stats on the left and “secondary” stats on the right. Since there’s nothing you can really do to affect these stats outside of your gear and talents, and your pet’s talents, all we really want to know here is where to find various statistics – just in case we get curious. Power simply shows your pet’s attack power; Damage shows DPS, attack speed, and base damage stats; Spell Bonus counts only for those pets with a spell attack, such as Wind Serpents and their Lightning Breath; and Armor is just that – how much armor your pet has and how much damage that armor will mitigate.
I should also note that the line of bubbles below the stats pane is your pet’s experience bar. If you’re leveling a pet and wonder how much longer it has until it gains a level, just open the pet panel and glance down here. You can even mouse over it to get a numerical indicator (such as “500/1500″ with the first number being how many experience points your pet has, and the second being how many it needs to gain a level).
Whew. That’s a lot of typing I just did. I think I’ll have these posts go in order of cost to change – there’s a few ways to squeeze some extra DPS out of your character without breaking the bank! – so Hunter Pet Talents will be next up.
