So as I’m digesting the changes from survival to marksmanship, one of the things I took for granted was that I’d have to re-gem and re-enchant. Agility used to be king, but surely attack power would be for marks right? Apparently not!
So my last post about relative strengths of different attributes was based on a survival spec. In short, hit would give you the most DPS per point, followed by agility, AP, crit, and armor pen. Having calculated the new table from the elitist jerks DPS spreadsheet, it turns out that it’s the exact same order! The numbers are different, of course, but the priority remains the same.
The main difference is agility. For survival, agility is very close to hit rating in terms of DPS per itemization point. For marksmanship, it’s much lower, but still slightly higher than attack power. Here’s the new table, exported from the DPS spreadsheet.
| Attribute | DPS | Per Item Budget |
| Agility + 1 | 1.36 | 1.36 |
| AP + 1 | 0.61 | 1.23 |
| Crit + 1 | 1.05 | 1.05 |
| Hunter Hit + 1 | 1.53 | 1.53 |
| Pet Hit + 1 | 0.27 | 0.27 |
| Int + 1 | 0.71 | 0.71 |
| ArP Rating+1 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Haste + 1 | 0.49 | 0.49 |
| Stamina+1 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Mp5 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
Please bear in mind that this is unique to my character’s gear and spec- to calculate this for yourself, you need to import your character into the spreadsheet yourself.
Now you’ll notice that armor penetration is creeping up- it’s much closer to crit than it was for survival- this is partly because as marks, we do more autoshot damage. You may have heard that some of the top end hunters are in fact gemming only armor pen- this is a very tricky plan though and you probably don’t want to.
Basically, they posit that if you can get a certain amount of armor pen (which will increase your DPS per point more if you have a lot of it) and rely on the armor pen proc trinkets, you can get amazing results by firing steady shots for the duration of the proc. The problem here is that you’re waiting for a proc, and then not moving. What happens if you happen to be forced to run during this time? A lot of Ulduar fights are movement intense. Unless you’re in mostly hard mode gear, the theoretical DPS against a boss that doesn’t require movement won’t be much higher anyways, so stick to the basics. Enchant and gem for agility and hit.
Posted in Hunter, Marksmanship, Survival, World of Warcraft Tagged: agility, ap, armor pen, arp, attack power, crit rating, DPS spreadsheet, enchant, gem, hit, marks, Marksmanship, minmaxing, mm, raiding, stat weights, Survival, sv
