My main reason for writing this post is a general dissatisfaction for the way some hunter theorycrafting is being dispensed on the Elitist Jerks forum, particularly in the MM threads. This isn't a complaint about EJ at all, but rather at how a poster or two dispense and advocate solutions. Ok I might as well say it: I disagree with Whitefyst (the OP of the MM and MM in 4.2 threads) and his assessment of how to achieve optimal results in a raid. I have nothing against the guy personally and I think he's fairly knowledgeable, I just disagree with his approach. You can take a look at two of those threads to get an idea of what I'm talking about, but my complaint that I am writing about today is perhaps even a bit more generic.
It's too rigid. It's too static. It is precisely calibrated to a model that, while very good, does not represent real raid play to a high enough degree to warrant such calibration. It does not account for movement (SimCraft does this these days, but a lot of other models still do not). I'll cover each of these in their own section, but first let's take a look at how things used to be and where this way of looking came from originally.
The World Before WotLK
If you don't remember the hunter playstyle before Wrath of the Lich King, good. At the time it was all I knew but in retrospect it was bad. It was incredibly simple yet incredibly unintuitive. Most of our abilities were awful which made the rotation (it actually WAS a rotation then) simple, especially for BM. Serpent Sting was awful, Arcane Shot was awful, Aimed Shot was awful. Steady Shot was the only decent resource-consuming ability. It also delayed the Auto Shot timer leading to a rather stupid but effective macro. Hit that macro all day long, hit arcane shot while moving, manage your pet, manage your pots/cooldowns, and manage boss mechanics.
It was a static system (and also rigid, but too short for that to really matter). Proper gearing thus doubled how effective it should be by filling the gap that would otherwise be in the form of skill required to finesse a delicate resource system. More work was done out of game looking at a simple system under a microscope because you were already skill capped on what buttons to press and when. (Outside of pet management which to be fair as become easier).
The Better Style in WotLK and the Way Better Style in Cataclysm
Some people still ask me if hunters still use a single macro. I think in most cases they are trolling (comedy gold) but I am also willing to concede that they are also bad players who barely understand their class, let alone others. Anyway, WotLK was a pretty big overhaul for some classes and notably one for hunters. Most of this came in the form if giving us more buttons to press and steady shot and auto shot being de-linked. We had to juggle some short (6s-30s) cooldowns, watch a DoT or two, and possibly make use of procs. Mana was a complete non-issue as long as we had judgement of wisdom on the target, so for all intents and purposes our resource system was a combination of time and cooldowns. Definitely an improvement all the rotation for each spec was still pretty rigid, proc or not.
In Cataclysm we obviously finally got a real resource in the form of focus. Aimed Shot went back to having a (long) cast time and Steady Shot and the new Cobra Shot also have cast times. We have abilities that are instant and consume focus with a cooldown: mainly each spec's signature abilities; Kill Command, Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot, and Black Arrow. We have abilities that are instant, consume focus, and have no cooldown: Arcane Shot. We have abilities that are instant, consume focus, have no cooldown, but have a cast time: Aimed Shot. Abilities that consume no focus: Kill Shot. You know what, let's make a table. Aimed Shot! with an exclamation point is the procced version of the "hard cast" Aimed Shot ability.
| Ability | Instant Cast | Consumes Focus | Generates Focus | Cooldown | Spec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steady Shot | X | All | |||
| Cobra Shot | X | All | |||
| Aimed Shot | X | MM | |||
| Aimed Shot! | X | X | MM | ||
| Kill Command | X | X | X | All | |
| Chimera Shot | X | X | X | MM | |
| Explosive Shot | X | X | X | SV | |
| Black Arrow | X | X | X | SV | |
| Arcane Shot | X | X | All | ||
| Kill Shot | X | X | All |
What does this change?
We now have a pretty rich resource system here. We want to consider each abilities DPS (damage per second) and DPF (damage per focus) and how it all fits into a much broader picture with focus, time, and CD balanced together. These things can also change dynamically. Wouldn't we want to develop a system that is not completely static, so that we can abuse resources at our disposal when the relative values change? When we get a haste proc and the cast time changes, shouldn't we re-balance? When focus generation or cost changes, shouldn't we re-balance around the lessened importance of DPF?
The static approach
I mentioned earlier that Whitefyst and others have advocated for MM a pretty static and rigid approach. Aim for exactly X% of haste, use this rotation, repeat. The percent of haste advocated is very strict and normally balanced around a 9s Chimera Shot cooldown (uses the glyph), with enough haste to fit steady shots and other focus consuming abilities perfectly into that 8 second window (1s for Chimera's GCD). Nothing very different is done during bloodlust, Termination (steady shot generates more focus when the target is below 25%), or various other external factors. Basically, these factors are held as constants as much as possible and decisions are made around them instead of considering them.
This isn't necessarily a bad approach. In fact, this is basically how it worked in BC and somewhat in Wrath. But with such a rich arsenal at our disposal it means one of two things.
1) The abilities simply aren't balanced. Ability X with a cooldown is so powerful that doing everything you can to increase its frequency trumps all other considerations (Explosive Shot was like and nerfed). Ability Y is so powerful that you want to do everything you can to use it more (Aimed Shot before it was nerfed). Or something like these; the theme here is that it's normally the result of an imbalance that either hasn't been addressed (early Cata) or won't be addressed at all (BC era of virtually no changes to anything but Aspect of the Viper).
or
2) The rigid and static rotation should perhaps be re-examined outside of Patchwerk fights. Hint: there are no fights this expansion with literally no movement or external considerations and there's a 99.9% chance we won't ever see a fight like that again.
If you couldn't tell, I am of the opinion that things are actually pretty well balanced now. Several factors come in to play every time you press a key these days and you need both the experience and the theory to play optimally. Static rotations throw a massive wrench into the works, which I plan to cover in some detail in part 2.
In part 2:
The Static Problems: Model imprecision, Haste, On-the-fly adjustments, Abusing shifts in power balance
The Solution: A granular, adaptive approach.
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