The Enigma Order

After our recent Ultraxion first kill, I had few doubts relating to hunters so I played a little bit with the logs to try and track down the source of difference in our dps.


Here's a link to the comparison. To my surprise, there's actually very little I was able to notice. Still, there's some smll room for improvement.

First, the basics. This is all assuming logs are in no way broken, which is usually a fair assumption, though for example the use of Deterrance makes me question it this time. Still:
- While being a simplification, a simple statement holds - ToDe and myself have equally good gear (since our abilites hit for equally much on average), while Maxilla is some 10% behind.
- The kill was lucky for ToDe. He had considerably higher crit chance on everything than Maxilla and myself.
- Call of the Wild. Maxilla and myself failed since we only used it once, while ToDe twice. In my case, the reason is that I have it macro'ed to Rapid Fire. Lesson learnt.
- Potion of Tol'Vir. ToDe failed, since he only used one, as oposed to Maxilla and myself.
- Hit per minute of just about any ability. Maxilla and ToDe have roughly one cast of everything less per minute than myself. This is to an extent explied by the fact, that I was lucky and got less Fading Light. Still, I would expect more hits per minute especially from ToDe, since he's gearing for haste, while Maxilla and me are after mastery. Push buttons harder and make sure you are using Glyph of Chimera Shot (and once/if you do, make sure to keep Chimera on cooldown, no matter what, time your steadies/instants so that Chimera never waits).
- Aimed Shot (hard cast). One of the main sources of difference. We used heroism at the pull, pre-poted and had all procs up in the start. Until the boss hits 90% either ignore Serpent Sting and Chimera completely (just don't use it) and spam 2x steady and hardcast Aimed without capping focus, or only use Chimera rare enough to keep Seprent up. This goes for every sane hunter, but even more so for those who are after haste. Meanwhile, I did more than 2 times as many Aimed Shots as ToDe and 250% of his damage from this ability. Below 90% it's less obvious, ideally time Rapid Fire with Devour, regardless - do hard cast Aimed with Rapid Fire. Even more so if you have Heroism and Rapid Fire up at the same time.

It's a pitty we couldn't fit Glubur in, since in late Firelands he was often landing between ToDe and me in terms of damage done. Would make the comparison even more interesting.

Overall conclusion - despite being low in terms of total damage done, we did reasonably well. This is both good (since we're not terrible) and bad (since we need to try harder than many other classes to remain useful). This is still early stage of this tier of content, but as it is now, I'm assuming between 2 and 3 hunters per raid on average. That means me and 2 other hunters in the raiding roster. Right now we have 4, soon to be 5. The performance, measured by dps and not messing up, will be the key factor to decide who gets to stay.