I’ve been on the other end of the stick. I’d been playing my hunter in a number of pugs and starting to get frequent re-invites from people. While trapping or not I was managing to keep my damage quite consistent and figured I knew my stuff. I wasn’t topping the dmg but was keeping pace (checked after each instance).

Till one shocking day … managed to have a second hunter in the group and his spec was nearly the same as mine.

He destroyed my dmg by a substantial margin. I outgeared him by a fair margin but he made it look like I was throwing pebbles rather than fiery arrows of death. Turns out I was getting re-invites because I was a consistent trapper.

That infamous day prompted me to go back to the drawing board on all my chars. Start from scratch and re-evaluate the skills I use, the order I use them in and how I use my trinkets. The end result? Some chars I made no changes to how I play, some minor corrections (like my bear tank in ZA) and some were a complete revamp like my poor hunter. Changing how I played him nearly doubled my dmg.

Some sites have wonderful guides on how to optimize my rotations such as what I found on this site. Others have the information hidden inside 60 or 70 pages of posts. While others are nearly impossible to find (Retribution gets no love).

While some players in pugs may have low dmg for their gear because they are lazy, bored, chilling out or drunk, there are players who don’t know how to play and need to be pointed in the direction of useful guides. I was one of em.

So now I prowl around the blogs, looking for guides of various chars and various specs for me and my guildies. It’s not constructive to say “lrn2play”, but I wish someone had told me “Check out BBB’s guide on making things angry at you”. I need more guides like yours BBB that I can point people at (and maybe glance at myself).

firstly you have the fact that t5/t6 spends some of its itemization points on high amounts of stamina so when you have those raid bosses that will drop your health 8k and be totally unavoidable you can survive this.

secondly you spend alot of your itemization points on hit rating, bosses are ranked with a skull which is 3 levels higher than your current level so raiders need more hit rating for raids than they do for instances, wasting alot of their stat points in an instance to an under used hit rating and lets face it hit rating is quite an expensive stat in comparison to raw dps.

and you ofc have the already stated possibilities that some high end raiders can’t play for love nor money they just have friends in the right places or the fact that when you have that level of gear you don’t need to focus in instances, you’re trying to have a bit of fun and not relive those 12hrs+ a week that you spend dedicating every moment of your concentration avoiding constructs, watching out for tainted cores etc…..

Sometimes it’s cruise mode, sometimes it’s suck mode. Checking Talents and rotation can often tell you the difference.

When I was younger as a hunter I cared a great deal about dps meters. Now I don’t. They don’t mean too much. And those people who are always demanding a meter? Avoid them. They are looking to stroke their e-pen and not focused.

If people in your same class and gear level are doing way more dps than you (ie more than 10%) then you are doing something wrong if it’s a progression attempt or T6+ raid. If the raid is overgeared for the effort, then it really doesn’t matter how much dps you do (to a point, obviously you want to do more than 200 dps. Usually when i don’t try i do 700-800 dps).

So yeah, totally agree w/ your philosophy BBB. Further, WoW is all about fun. When it’s not fun, time to stop. I did my last BT raid Tuesday, and it wasn’t fun, and I decided I’d rather do things that were fun, so I’m done raiding after a year of serious 3-4x a week raids.

You’ll never be able to control how people will interpret or react to your writing. Such is ze life of a blogger, or any writer really.

I can say that in reading the post originally, the story you thought was awesome, I read and hovered over the comments link thinking ‘someone will jump on that’. I don’t think the things you’re saying are ‘stupid’, even the PvP gear stuff – it was a rant that invited conversation all over – you just have to not be so quick to flare up if someone doesn’t get it or doesn’t agree.

One comment you made “Oh holy heck, they are all serious raiders”. Wearing t5/t6 implies certain things “to me”. (the rest being t4/ZA min).Being a “serious raider” implies certain things “to me” (researched their class). There are exceptions for sure, but to me they “are” the exceptions. i.e very few and far between.

From “i hate damage meters”, the bit that stuck out to me when i read it was the paragraphs around “The hunter, on the other hand, is running around trapping and retrapping targets”. (see above “Your actual damage done during the run was higher than some of the other DPS classes.”). If you have 2 cc and one is a reliable mate you use them (i have a hunter friend i often use to chain trap in preference to a pug mage). DPS hit. i.e that meters don’t tell the whole story.

you originally stated “You’ve got mostly blues and maybe a badge reward or rep reward Epic or two”. mostly = 65-75%ish for me. So with 17 slots, there is about 12(11.1-12.75) blues, + 1(2) badge/rep reward leave 4(3) green. Not trying to use math to argue, rather showing my interpretation. For that scenario, blues/greens is not too much of an exageration. You then changed to “you have all blues and a few epics”. To me they are different (1 or 2 does not equal few and “mostly” should have been “all but” 1/2…). gotta love english. In my mind there is a huge difference to pre-kara (where i thought the hunter in this example was) to well post-kara (where i thought the others were). quite different if you meant “epics (of unstated quality)”. also i interpreted t5/t6 as starting/running t6 content and part way through upgrading gear, which as i see it is a t6 raider (i.e. me on my mage, even though with only 3 t6 equiv gears). Sorry if this offended you but maybe you can see my reasoning now.

Note you ignored my threat limited dps, and that i actually agreed but only within limits. The comment to me that stuck out was “even on single boss fights where it was straight ‘do massive damage to burn down the boss’”. This bit i disagreed with. Unless it was a boss that favoured ranged and you beat a melee. I can understand how you can win on trash. Fast reaction and focus really make up a lot, multishot, traps on aoe etc. But in my experiaence on single target bosses the higher dps tend to come out on top. (on trash you make up damage while they are inactive. it all adds up, but on a boss only a small amount of inactivity at the start, then they should pull way ahead). Its funny how when people read the same thing you take different bits out of it.

To me the focus of my comment was when in 5man cruise mode is often used. And this is okay. You done the hard yards, your gonna go through easily, with no wipes, why not? It is a game after all. Your just hanging with mates, and the pug gets first crack at everything. So win win.
And that skill can make up a lot, but if the gear difference is too high then the dps was because other must be an ebay player equivalent.

cheers

I hope this makes more sense (really hope). Note also the comment about t6 players, the more i raid and the opportunities i have been given to go to higher instances, has almost convinced me that gear is a HUGE indication of skill. The number of noobs i have met with good gear is in fact 0. Kara epics yes. T6 no, and that many comments are suggesting the opposite. I should be more specific with my feedback.

Scaling for a Combat Rogue… lvl 68 – 300dps, 70 with greens – 350dps, 70 with decent blues / pvp gear – 600dps, All kara/gruuls epics – 950dps, Brutallis with Windfury, Battleshout and Ferlol Drood buff – 2400dps Brutallis in a tank group (like a hunter normally gets) – 2000dps

Rogues are way more situational then hunters… and if they arent getting everything, they will not perform as well as a hunter in the same gear…