At every possible level of gear and experience, there are some rules that will help you choose where to go next. This post will go over some of them.
Assuming you are interested in doing as much DPS as you can, you’re probably survival spec. Survival is terrible at soloing and questing, but awesome at raiding. Whether you’re just getting started, or trying to make the jump from Naxx to Ulduar, you can always count on a few things when you’re trying to decide on gearing changes.
In general, most of your choices will be in the area of enchants and gems. You have complete control over this part of your gear. To a lesser extent, you need to make similar, however less frequent and more complex, decisions when gear drops that you can roll on. It all ties together into a big old complex monstrosity of a “priority list” for the lack of a better term.
Lets go over the basics. In order of importance:
- Hit rating is the most DPS per point until you’re at 8%, at which point it becomes useless. If you can get gear with hit on it, this will allow you to gem and enchant for agility. Hit is worth so much DPS because of our 8% chance to miss bosses. This reduces all of the output across the board- you hit less, so you crit less, and you can miss long cooldown moves that are integral to our performance.
- Agility is close to hit in terms of how much DPS you get per point. According to the DPS spreadsheet, my DPS per point is 0.1 less for agility than it is for hit. Your results will probably be different. Agility does not cap, nor suffer from diminishing returns. It’s worth more than attack power to us because of expose weakness. This gives you 25% more attack power from your agility than normal. Agility also increases crit.
- Attack Power is next. Generally, two items with the same iLvl, quality, and stats that differ only in whether they have attack power or agility will have a ratio of two to one AP to AGI. Two AP is worth quite a bit less DPS than one AGI to us, however it’s clearly third. If you can’t get hit or agility, AP is a good third choice. Like for your leg enchants.
- Crit is capped at 100%, and be aware that there are glyphs and talents that increase your chance to crit while fighting. That’s why the spore buff on Loatheb is a real slap in the face to SV hunters. 50% bonus to crit? Pshaww. Don’t choose this over the above stats- it will come naturally with your gear.
- Armor Pen is no longer a waste of itemization points. Blizzard released the way they calculate it internally, and buffed its effectiveness by about 25%. Unfortunately, it doesn’t effect our explosive shot, which is kind of a big deal for us. Still, its new effectiveness on our DPS it does effect makes this a decent stat. It caps though, so don’t stack it and again, like crit, you’ll get enough of this on your gear that you won’t need to add it with gems or enchants.
- Intellect gives us mana and a little attack power through careful aim. No cap on this, however with all the mana regen flying around these days, I haven’t seen aspect of the viper on during a fight in a long time.
- Haste continues to underwhelm. It will reduce the cast time of your steady shots until they’re below 1.5 seconds (the global cooldown) but after that, is effectively capped because it will only effect your auto-shots. People talk about a 500+ cap, however in a raid, you’ll never need anywhere near that amount to get your steady shots below 1.5 seconds. If you have the choice of trading haste for anything but stamina, take it.
- Stamina gives us a tiny amount of DPS by increasing our AP through hunter v. wild, and increases our survivability. Don’t stack this, it will come on your gear.
If you’re hit capped but you have enchants and gems dedicated to hit rating, hit on a piece of gear is as valuable as the gems and enchants that will be replacing your old ones. If you are hit capped through gear and can’t get below 231 (263 for the non Draenei), then hit rating on a new drop is a waste until you are able to replace some of the older stuff you have with non-hit gear.
If you can’t decide between two pieces of gear, you can either get a definitive answer, or you can just wing it and get a feel for what things are worth. I’ve given you the order of how important things are, so the only time you’ll need the DPS spreadsheet is if you need to compare like 30 hit to 35 agility or something.
Once you have your gear selected, you need to gem and enchant it. As I mentioned above, always make sure that if you can, you have 8% to hit. That hit rating will return more DPS to you than any other stat. After that, gem and enchant straight agility, where you can.
I wrote this in one big run, so if I missed anything or you want clarification, ask away in the comments.
Posted in Hunter, Survival, World of Warcraft Tagged: agility, armor pen, armor penetration, attack power, auto-shot, cap, careful aim, crit, diminishing returns, dps, DPS spreadsheet, enchants, expose weakness, gear, gems, haste, haste cap, haste soft cap, hit cap, hit rating, hunter v. wild, intellect, loatheb, loot, naxx, pve, raid, raiding, stamina, stats, survival spec, ulduar
