I got this from a friend who ive known for a few years and played in the same group as him a lot. his usual dps ws 12-13k with 15k on bosses. We were still gearing up for heroic at this point

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Hey Guys, thought I would do a quick post about hunters specs stat allocations.

Key to shortened words:
dps - Damage per Second (How much damage you do per second, an important factor, but in todays instances, your better having a slightly lower dps and keeping up Crowd Control)

CC - Crowd control (Taking a target out of the fight for a set period of time)

As a hunter, you need to know a couple of things

5ft Deadzone: You have a 5ft melee deadzone, you can use melee attacks and a couple of melee oriented abilities in this area, but apart from that you will not be able to use any other ranged attacks (apart from Scattershot), you want to keep out of that zone, as your dps will drop and you will be getting hit in the face more than likely.

Hunter Glitches: There are a couple of weird hunter glitches at the moment, that make playing a hunter a little annoying, I will detail these more in a little while.

Pets: Pets Contribute to around 1.5k of your total dps at level 85, and thus are important, they take 75% less damage from AoE attacks, all pets have the same statistics apart from Health and Armour. A tenacity pet and a ferocity pet without talent will do the same damage. Also certain pets come with raid buffs, try to tailor your pet to match up with a missing buff with your raid.

Crowd Control: Hunters are perhaps one of the greatest Crowd Control classes in the game, if done correctly, we can take three mobs out of a fight for 30-90 seconds. on top of slowing abilities and misdirecting onto takes, makes us a good class for any instance.

Stats

Agility - You want plenty of this, it increases your attack power and critical strike chance.

Hit - You are aiming to hit the cap of 8% to get to which is 961 hit or 841 for

Critical – This in my opinion is the next most important stat, as almost all of a hunters moves Critical for 200% damage

Mastery – This is as close to important for hunters if they are Survival or Marksmanship, if you are these specs then you want to have almost as much mastery as Critical.

Haste – Not that important at this time for hunters, but may well be after the next patch, I tend to reforge this to hit or crit.


Abilities Roundup

Explosive Shot This shot is one of the survival hunters most damaging moves, it ticks 3 times over a 2 second period, once when it hits, once a second later and again a second after this. You want to use this ability whenever it is off cooldown.

Black Arrow Another survival hunter shot, again an important shot that you should keep using as soon as it’s cooldown runs out. This move also procs Lock and Load which is an important Talent for hunters if you have (and should) TNT specced into your build.

Serpent Sting This is the baseline move for hunters, you should only need to fire this once as Cobra shot should keep it up, therefore it has no damage cap and will always do damage until your target is dead as long as you fire 1 Cobra Shot at the target every 15 seconds.

Cobra Shot This shot does Nature Damage (therefore ignoring armour) and refreshes 9 points of focus, you should be firing these when your other moves are on cooldown.

Steady Shot Same as Cobra Shot, but Physical damage, also doesn’t refresh Serpent Sting, this move should only be used by Marksmanship Hunters as Survival and Beast Mastery are better using Cobra Shot.

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Survival 4.1 PvP: Shoot the dude with big red arrow on his head. Yes, that dude.

All jokes aside, turns out the group that downed Ragnaros in firelands in 25H had survival hunters. 4.2 yes but maybe a message from the gods......... of warcraft?

Hello Guys,

Just to give you some more information about hunters next to the basics above, please read these guides for everything you need to know:

MarksMan Hunter
Survival Hunter

The above sites contain valuable info such as hit and haste caps, talent and glyph specs, ratings, gems and enchants, rotations and more !

Also Check out this site: Petopia For all the info you need on pets and where to get them.

Pet's
I recommend for every MM hunter who is with us and willing to raid to get both Wolf and Cat pet for the buffs:

Wolf: +5% Crit to all raid members.
Cat: +549 Strength and Agility to all raid members.

I recommend for every SV hunter who is with us and willing to raid to get Wolf, Cat, Dragonhawk and Ravager Pet, why the dragonhawk and ravager because cunning pets are the best for SV since you dont have 2x rapid fire thus a focus boost you could use the extra Roar of Recovery in order to burst. Why not these pets for MM, Call of the Wild seems to be a better buff for you then roar of sacrifice accoring to the guides above

Wolf: +5% Crit to all raid members.
Cat: +549 Strength and Agility to all raid members.
Dragonhawk: Applied to target +8% magic dmg taken.
Ravager: Applied to target +4% Physical dmg taken.


Note that these pet buffs do not stack with their original buffs e.g. Winterhorn for dk etc.. or with each other. to maximise the use of these new hunter buffs is for every hunter in raid to have a different pet.

As an SV and your the only hunter in Raid it would be best to still use the Wolf as this buff will benefit everyone, except off course if there are druids (feral / moonkin) who already applied this crit buff.

Talent builds I use:
Survival
You could also choose to take those last 2 points in MM into Carefull Aim instead of Sic'em! which will give your Cobra shot a 60% increased crit rate on the first 90% off boss health. I went for Sic'em! As that first 90% is finished fairly quick as everyone is popping specially in normal dungeons. Sic'Em! is a nice way to boost your pet's DPS in combination with Wild Hunt which lasts at all times.

Marksman
The guide above has an example build that is similar except I changed one thing instead of having 2 points in Marked for Death I took one and got Silence Shot for this, the reason is when your in grp or raid with others specially now in these heroics i find I use silencing shot quite a lot specially on those mobs that heal as everyone seems to be always waiting on another to silence those and the figh takes 3 min where it could be finished in 30 sec. 1 point in Marked for death instead of 2 gives you still a good 50% change to apply hunters mark as this talent is only used when pulling grps of mobs (bosses you apply the mark before you attack anyway) So the effective DPS that you will lose on this are the times you have to switch between mobs in a group and not by your first but your second arc/chimera shot (in theory) they will be marked. It could take longer but then again instead of shooting 1 shot you could also apply the mark manualy
If you Use silencing Shot you can also change one of your Major glyphs into glyph of silecing Shot which gives you a nice 10 focus everytime you use it. I find that one better then some of our other major glyph option as most of those are for pvp.

Pet talents:
Ferocity
This is how I skill my ferocity pets since Wild Hunt has been boost a lot compared to Wotlk, I found my pet almost always having more then 50% focus aspecially of the talents in your tree for mm such as Bestial Discipline, Frenzy, Go for the Throat and Sic'Em! to me Wild hunt seems the better choice over Shark Attack.

Cunning
This is how I skill my Cunning pets Here is same as for Ferocity with talents such as Go for the Throat and Sic'Em! and the pet's own talents Such as Owl Focus and Roar of Sacrifice Wild hunt will boost your general dps quite a bit. This cunning pet has the disadvantage that its not really good for solo'ing this way as your pet has no charge or way to speed up

Hope this info is of any help to you and if you have any questions please contact me in Game !

PS: Uru both me and Trueshot are SV specced at the moment