Thursday, May 22, 2008

What a Survival Hunter does for a raid

So, we tried Tempest Keep last night. just trash practice and such, no boss attempts. Fun for more than one reason. Shall I elaborate? Oh yes...I shall! :)

I have grown increasingly frustrated with my current guild as of late. Two main reasons: First, they glorify DPS and second, they ignore raid dps and proper group composition. Our group make-up is designed solely on the tank having an awesome group and our two officers (who happen to be dps classes) getting a nice group. Everyone else gets a random make-up. So, I decided to post on my guild forums about my concerns. Here is a piece of my post:

"The survival hunter is designed around RAID dps support. They sacrifice personal DPS for the sake of the raid DPS. Agility and crit are what matters. Every time the Survival hunter crits he opens an expose weakness which is 1044 agility = 261 attack power to all ranged and melee physical dps. So, if 14 attack power = 1 dps, then that is 18.64 dps for all melee and ranged physical dps classes. To put that in perspective, we had 18 such dps sources in Gruuls and Mags. That means 18 x 18.64 = 335.52 Raid dps added. This means that my total DPS contribution was 890 + 335.52 = 1225.52. Imagine if I was in the Shaman's group and the feral druids group.

What does 77 extra agility mean? It is 77 x 1.15x1.02 (from talents) = 90.32. 90.32 x .25 = 22.58 attack power each. 22.58/14 = 1.61 dps for our 18 physical dmg sources = 28.98 dps added to the raid (growing as his agility grows). So, the ideal make-up for a support hunter is a shaman using Grace of Air and a feral druid. "

I then went on to explain the other valuable group make-ups. So, raid time comes and our guild leader says "our main tank is out, would you mind doing the group make-up". Obviously I was quite excited to do this. So, I designed the groups trying to get our spell dps mana regen and our healers some mana regen. Also, focusing on getting the two physical dps groups together.

As a side note, I would like to let everyone know that Dranei retribution paladins are amazing for a dps group. They bring 2% more damage and 1% more hit for their party. So, I put two BM hunters and a rogue in his group. That hit is HUGE in that group (neither hunter is hit capped and both pets miss a lot as well as the rogue). So, I remind that Pally how awesome he is whenever I get the chance (tell yours thanks, i am sure it will be their first time hearing it!)!

So, the end of the night comes and our stats are posted for mags and we did 9900 dps as a group. Our two previous runs we did 8900. So, not to take all the credit in the world, but 1k dps is an amazing upgrade. I just hope when the main tank comes back that they decide to keep my services!

In the near future I will post some items about readiness and my different survival builds. I have discovered many things in the last few weeks!

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