The Return of Hunter's Mark

So I've been using a shot macro since like, Karazhan or Wrath sometime, when I realized I was not effectively using Steady Shot in my rotation.  The macro has changed a bit over the years, as shots available changed, haste plateaus affected it, and so forth.

So, Steady Shot is gone for me.  I don't really miss it - I like having Arcane Shot back, on demand, free and on the move.  I do miss the Aimed Shot mobility, but that's just a matter of retraining myself to stand still for it.  I've got Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, and Marked Shot for core shots now, with Bursting Shot as an interesting kind of combination of Barrage and the old Scatter Shot.  I went with Murder of Crows for my regular set up, which I've been occasionally regretting when I go to farm old raids and forget that I can't just change it on the fly when I remember, after I'm there, that I kind of want it for that.  I love the crows, though, and it feels safer in raids and dungeons since my mastery increases my range now and I don't have as good a feel for how far back is safe to Barrage yet.

I went with Patient Sniper originally for its synergy with Sidewinders, realized that Sidewinders didn't feel safe enough for group use with the whole range issue (like Barrage), and switched it to Trick Shot.  Originally I had been using Steady Focus, but I felt like I was drowning in Focus with it, so I moved that over to Careful Aim.  Depending on how haste, gear changes, and such affect it while leveling, I may switch it back.

Since I can't just easily switch between two Marksman specs (I was dual-MM again for the last while of Warlords) to go back and forth between having Lone Wolf or not for various fights in raids, I'm not sure I'm going to use it much.  I've got Binding Shot slotted, but I might switch over to Camouflage for general use.  I miss Freezing Trap, but Binding Shot doesn't really replace it.

So what does all this mean for the macro?  Short answer: the macro is dead.  I could throw something together, maybe - Aimed, Arcane, Marked, Aimed has a decent chance of regularly applying and exploiting Marked Shot and Vulnerability based on how the proc rate for Hunter's Mark seems to work out right now.  It wouldn't be sure-fire, though, and it would get hung up on Marked Shot any time Hunter's Mark failed to proc.  I'd have to do a similar one for Multi-Shot, as well, for AOE situations.

So what am I doing instead?  Marked Shot already lights up when it's usable, and Multi and Arcane light up when Hunter's Mark application is ready to go.  This means I need to remind myself to use Crows, Trueshot, and Aimed Shot besides when Lock and Load procs.  Crows and Trueshot are easy Weak Auras, and I set one up for Vulnerability to light up Aimed Shot when my target is vulnerable.  Button glow works fairly well as a cue for me.  (Anything audio or flashing is bad for my sensory input issues.)  So this is what I'm looking at now:

I switched from Binding Shot to Camouflage by the time I got to taking this screennshot.

However, this isn't ideal for someone who uses the mouse for the bulk of their abilities - it means I'm watching the action bar a lot more.  I can't play with straight keybinds for abilities on the left hand in a raid/dungeon situation for more than about an hour without aggravating the joints in my hand (probably arthritis), so mouse is preferred for something I play a lot.  (Sadly this is why I don't tank more - I do play that with left-hand keybinds.)  For my priest, since she's usually focused on health bars anyway, it just means clustering everything in one area of the screen.  I've done a decent amount of raid tactical calls as a hunter, though, from add calls to doing things like the conveyor belts in Siege of Orgrimmar.  Hopefully I can adjust to the point I don't have to watch the bars too much.

All that said, I'm enjoying the playstyle of apply Hunter's Mark, apply Vulnerable, nuke with Aimed Shot (currently from 46 yards out). And I helped my mom tame an explosive sheep last weekend, even though I had to swap to Survival to do it because of the Freezing Trap changes.  I'll live without the macro.

Now I just have to figure out how to track Atonement in larger raids, and I'm good to go...

Warlords of Draenor Shot Rotation

Okay, we're a bit into Warlords now, and I haven't been entirely satisfied with the numbers my rotation was putting out.  Since I absolutely love the concept of Exotic Munitions (specifically, of fire arrows, which I've wanted since Vanilla), and I'm frequently the raid's battle rez with my crane, I'd been using this cast sequence still:

/castsequence Chimaera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot

But I've been drowning in focus.  Just drowning in it.  So I put together this cast sequence to work with:

/castsequence Chimaera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot

The difference on the target dummies, using Murder of Crows, Glaive Toss, and Poisoned Ammo, was a bump from ~15k to ~16k.  Moving in a positive direction!

But then I decided to try Focusing Shot, since I was frequently getting Glaive Toss or Crows in between my Steady Shots when I wasn't paying attention.  The first attempt went badly - I just shoved Chimaera, Focusing, and Aimed into a cast sequence, and I was again drowning in focus and clipping cooldowns.  Based on those observations, I put together this:

/castsequence Aimed Shot, Aimed Shot, Focusing Shot, Chimaera Shot

The results were markedly better than either of the Exotic Munitions tests: around 18.5k.  That's an improvement of about 3k on my average dps right now; with raid buffs that will likely be even better.

What I'm not sure about is movement:  Focusing requires not moving, and there are some fights where movement is important.  I won't get to test this in our raids again until Thursday due to work, but I might hit up LFR before then to see how it shakes out.

Either way, with or without Focusing Shot, this is the first major revision to the cast sequence in what, four years?

Times change!

Castsequence Macro Update

It isn't really an update.  I'm still using it; it's doing surprisingly well.  After 5.4's possible changes I may need to tweak the number of Arcane Shots in it, but until then, it's still:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

I still do Murder of Crows, Glaives, That Wolf Icon That Regens Focus, Rapid Fire, Readiness, and Army of Sporebats manually when they come off cooldown.  As a Marksman hunter, I'm still average on AOE packs, but I'm generally competitive against similarly geared folks for single target DPS.

Other things recently...  I've been trying to get my shaman up to the point she can be an alternate healer for our raids on nights we can't find one, and I'm liking shaman healing better than I did back when I last tried it: a.k.a., the Burning Crusade.  I still prefer my priest, but we have plenty of priests available usually.  I also like my baby druid healing more right now than I do shaman healing, but she's in her 40s, so that's going to take longer to do.

We're into Throne of Thunder!  Currently on Tortos.  My husband has done an amazing job both at finding us recruits, as well as finding us some casually allied guilds and friends who fill in when we're short two healers.  Perhaps somewhat ironically, the only thing we're missing post-exodus is a full complement of healers, and that's exactly who left us for a bigger server environment.  5.4 and Connected Realms can't come soon enough.

New Shot Macro

I picked up the 2-piece tier 13 recently, and I've been staring at my focus bar again, watching it sit way too full and debating what to do about it.  The obvious answer is to use more focus, but I couldn't cram in enough Arcane Shots in to burn off the excess without losing my haste buff or Serpent Sting from missing Chimera.

Enter Kill Command.  I wanted to maintain my ~10 second rotation (Chimera's unglyphed cooldown) but burn more focus, which meant using a focus dump that wasn't Arcane Shot.  Kill Command is a lot of focus, it hits hard, and it doesn't disrupt my existing rotation.  When I get the 4-piece bonus and have to deal with haste procs, then I'll have to reevaluate the rotation again and what it's most useful and feasible to squeeze in with the extra time in the ten seconds between Chimeras.

For now, though, the cast sequence looks like:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Kill Command, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

I wanted to maintain the pairs of Steady Shots before and after Chimera Shot so that when moving through the rotation, I keep the haste buff up, I'm keep Serpent Sting up by having enough focus for Chimera, and I have some focus to do something with after Chimera.  The biggest problem I had was on target switching if I happened to be at the Kill Command point in the macro and my pet was still running over, so I'd hit some other buttons and reapply Serpent Sting if needed in the meantime.

The result on LFR Zon'ozz:

Not the most amazing of numbers, but a personal best for him.  He's a nice, easy, stand-and-shoot fight in LFR, so he gives pretty numbers to start with.

Keybinds and Macros

I have an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, and I love it to death.  Literally: I think I'm on my third.

A lot of my macros use mouse:1, mouse:2, and mouse:3 for targeting the same spell, not just for my hunters, but also for my priest.  (Button:4 is bound to Escape, to stop casting, and button:5 is bound to, ahem, Fishing.)  Mouse:3 is also my Ventrilo push-to-talk key, and has been for five years.  This hasn't been a big deal; I don't use mouse:3 targeting much on my hunters, which are usually what I'm playing when I'm on Vent.

My priest, on the other hand?  Mouse:1 is generally @self; mouse:2 is @focus, and mouse:3 is the unspecified cast, which means whatever I target or whichever party member I hit the function key for or click on.  Most 5-man dungeons I can just get away with Atonement splash healing with Penances on the tank (@focus casting), but raid healing tends to require a lot more direct healing.

I didn't raid heal much in Wrath of the Lich King; maybe three or four times.  In Burning Crusade, on the other hand, my priest was just as geared as my hunter for most of the entire expansion.  She healed for Karazhan; she healed for Gruul's and Magtheridon's Lairs; she healed in Zul'Aman.  Other than the last 800 reputation for the Caverns of Time faction, I even did the reputation grinds to get her the enchanting and tailoring patterns from reputation.  I healed with a hybrid 33/28/0 Discipline specialization, and I actually found it relaxing compared to the pressures of maintaining DPS levels on my hunter.  Karazhan was the raid that pushed me to actually start looking at hunter mechanics and for which my shot rotation macro was born.  For my priest, though, she was one-half of the guild's first two-healer raid through it.

In Wrath we tried very hard as a guild not to end up in the same rut we'd been in Burning Crusade, mostly running Karazhan for three or four combinations of alts and never progressing out of the first tier or tier and a half of content.  This meant I didn't really raid on my priest much, and given how fantastically we progressed through the raid tiers in Wrath, I was content with that.  I missed raid healing, but I would rather see my guild progress.

So now we're running Firelands, and we had been running alt/main Tier 11 raids to get people later to raiding more up to speed.  I had mostly been running on Duskhawk for these when I went, since we had plenty of people wanting to heal, but I took my priest a couple times recently to make the raids happen when we were short a healer.  So my priest has about one and a half Blackwing Descent runs under her belt.  Raid healing is an entirely different strategy from Atonement healing for most fights; a few (Omnotron Defense System, especially, but even Magmaw if I'm tank healing) actually work quite well with it, but many fights end up Prayer of Healing/Penance/Shield focused.

A couple weeks ago we switched from Tier 11 alt runs (waning interest) to Firelands alt runs (more interest and, since we're clearing it in about two nights, more slots per week needed to get mains in).  Like I said, I have about one and a half Blackwing Descent runs under my priest's belt; last Saturday I ended up taking her to the alt Firelands run.

It was terrifying!  I had an awful time figuring out where to stand so I could reach both tanks on Shannox (but I managed not to stand in any traps, woo!), and on Beth'tilac, I was immensely frustrated by Prayer of Healing's party-based targeting.  We tend to run in three groups for her, with the Phase 1 Beth'tilac tank and his/her healer in Group 3 and everyone else over in Groups 1 and 2.  I just couldn't seem to manage Penancing the targeted tank in Phase 2 and to still do sufficient Prayers of Healing on the other two groups in three groups.

The main thing I ended up getting out of that raid (besides a staff) was that I needed to rework my Penance macro to handle tank swaps.  I use default raid frames while healing, plus Decursive, and everything is smooshed down in about a six-by-eight inch area of my screen, by the parts of the toolbars that I use for most of my healing.  My DBM warnings are also dragged down there, along with the timers.  So my set-up is pretty basic, and pretty focused.  My Penance macro, for the longest time, was

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @focus][button:2] Penance

This was unlike all my other healing macros, which look like

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @self][button:2, @focus][button:3] Heal

I really didn't need to target myself with penance; I have Alt set as my self-cast button, and I tend to just Shield and Alt:Renew myself if I need healing.  To handle a tank swap without changing focus targets or targeting my non-focused tank, I needed to change up something in that standard macro line.  What I ended up with was

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @targettarget][button:2, @focus][button:3] Penance

This lets me maintain the boss as my target for Atonement opportunities (because if I can sneak in some stacks to pull out Evangelism, woohoo!), and when I hit Penance with button 1, whatever tank is getting facemelted gets the Penance.  When we did Beth'tilac last night, I was able to manage just fine with the three-group setup.  There are occasional hiccups; I'm pretty sure I Penanced Baleroc at least once last night when I had a tank targeted.

Speaking of Baleroc and mouse buttons and macros:  this is what I actually meant to write about today.  So I got pulled into healing Firelands again last night, and you've seen my healing macro pattern now, and I've told you I use middle-mouse (mouse:3) for Vent's push-to-talk.

Baleroc is a healer rotation fight, at least the way we run it. You spend two cycles healing shard targets and then switch to the tanks on the third shard in your rotation.  Since this means hitting targets as they get the shard debuff (the little blue person icon, I know now - DBM puts marks on them, but as I've said, I look at a 6"x8" section of the screen while healing, and if it's outside that area it doesn't exist), it's a lot of mouse:3 healing.

Mouse:3 healing, which is my Vent key.

As this was my first time ever healing Baleroc, and fourth time this expansion raid healing at all, I was doing a lot of talking to myself and swearing.  About halfway through the fight, I realized:

"You all can hear me, can't you?"

They thought I was asking if they could hear me, because I got a, "You're cutting in and out," response.  I was more concerned that the swearing was coming through, but apparently the "F--- me," that came out during one of my "which tank is getting hit" panics didn't come across.  (I still use oRA2, and my target-of-target for it just creeps into my healing field of vision, so I started using that to pick my tank healing target.)  I temporarily remapped my Vent key for the rest of the raid. >.>

Random coda:  On the drive in to work this afternoon, I realized: Wait a minute.  Baleroc, who has fire and shadow attacks.  Balrog, a creature of shadow and flame.  /facepalm

More thoughts on the /castsequence

I'm running with a spec that looks something like this.

Since actually raiding Tol Barad (three times now), I've dropped one of the Arcanes from my macro, due to focus starvation outside Rapid Fire, and finally realized that dude, I can pop Aspect of the Fox during Felfire and keep my rotation going during all the running around.

No, other than the opportunity to raid-test the macro and tweak for focus consumption, my thoughts on the cast sequence have been centered around two of the other Steady Shot-centered talents: Piercing Shots and Master Marksman.

Ignore, for the moment, that Marksman is bottoming out raid DPS rankings right now. We play Marksman because we love it, right? (There is some irony, I think, that the hunter specs are sandwiching that list.) Besides, 4.0.6 will bring us some changes that will help with that. Aimed, Arcane, Chimera, and Kill Shot are all getting damage buffs. We'll be able to Auto Shot while moving.

Aimed Shot is one of the main things I've been thinking about regarding the cast sequence. We really only use it on proc, and the proc is reliant on Steady Shot and the RNG. The only way to really get more Aimed Shots in is to get more Steady Shots in. Add to this the bleed damage both Steady and Aimed (and Chimera) can inflict. If Aimed Shot hits harder, the target is going to bleed harder. Add in a bleed debuff from an Arms warrior, Subtlety rogue, Feral druid, or one of our own pets (I favor the hyena for this when needed), and we're looking at some nice little boosts.

But again, we need more Steady Shots to get more Aimed Shots. If we prioritize Chimera to be every 10 seconds (in a normal rotation; if you use Kill Shot or Rapid Fire or Readiness, the spacing will vary slightly), that means we've got 9 other seconds of global cool down to work with. Getting Steady down to a one-second cast requires amounts of haste that are more or less insane. How insane? Not quite 9000. Yes, with the two hunter haste talents (Pathing and Improved Steady Shot), you need 8817 haste rating to get your Steady Shot down to 1 second with no other haste bonuses.

No, a 1.5 or 1.6 second Steady Shot cast is probably what we're sanely looking at most of the time, without extra haste boosts - that is, for most of our normal rotations. That means that the two bundles of two Steady Shots makes sense, and pairing it with two Arcane Shots will make sure we're not sitting on buckets of Focus.

What about that extra second or so of GCD? We could add another Arcane Shot, but raiding Tol Barad - a fight that is, more or less, the ultimate in stand and shoot fights for 98% of it - has shown that 3 Arcane:4 Steady will leave us Focus starved at points. 2 Arcane:4 Steady makes sure we have enough Focus for our next Chimera. 2 Arcane:5 Steady, however, pushes us past the 9 second mark, towards an 11-second rotation.

At this point I'm going to stick with the 2:4 Arcane:Steady ratio. The half a second is useful for flexibility when you need to pop some extra shot (Kill Shot, Tranq, etc.) or a trap, or perform some other utility action. If you've got the extra time or Focus, another Steady or Arcane can be added, but with the upcoming changes to Aimed, I would lean towards the Steady Shot.

So for now, the macro remains:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

Of /castsequences and haste

So, due to my own mediocrity, I am the user of a /castsequence macro. During most of Wrath, with our 1.5 second global cooldown, there was only so much wiggle room in the rotation - you could do one Chimera, one Aimed, and a combination of one Arcane and two to four Steady Shots, depending on your Armor Penetration, talents, and haste.

In Cataclysm, our GCD has dropped to 1 second. One second, with instant-cast, no cooldown but the global cooldown Arcane Shots. Steady Shot still has a base cast time of 2 seconds. Chimera Shot's cooldown is still 10 seconds (since I don't glyph it).

Our goal is four Steady Shots to every Chimera Shot. Why? Improved Steady Shot. We want these four in bundles of two. With 1 second of the 10 second rotation given to Chimera itself (GCD), a maximum of 8 seconds will go to the four Steady Shots. With no haste, that gives you time for one Arcane Shot, preferably between the bundles. When haste pushes your Steady Shot cast down, however, you're looking at extra time in your rotation, and face it - you're probably carrying extra focus. Add in Rapid Fire and your Imp. Steady Shot haste and you're probably rolling in focus and GCD time.

This was what I noticed - my focus bar was always too full. My Steady Shot cast is down to 1.54 seconds - that's about an extra two seconds in my rotation, which is two extra Arcane Shots. Obsessively watching focus consumption in a heroic (the only of two heroics I have successfully completed) got me killed on Anraphet, so it probably wasn't the best idea. I had been popping an extra Steady Shot onto the end of my rotation when my haste procs were up, waiting for Chimera to cool down, but more focus doesn't do me any good. Arcane is a focus dump for a reason.

So! The /castsequence now looks like:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

With my usual lines for the engineering tinkers, tooltip, error clearing, and such, of course.

I couldn't leave it the way it was and manually add the Arcanes - I really want to be hitting two Steadies before my next Chimera to assure I have the focus for it. The flexibility comes between the Steady bundles. There's still enough room in this for Aimed procs without losing Serpent Sting, although the shorter Serpent Sting duration due to the glyph change does make things a little tighter.

I would say that my DPS did edge up afterwards, but that heroic was really not a good run to judge one's DPS on.

As haste probably continues to edge upwards, additional Arcane Shots will, at some point, be untenable to add - three in a row seems to be about the limit for the focus pool following a pair of Steadies. Further shots added to the rotation will probably be Steadies, depending how the haste goes.

Current Hunter Macros

So, 4.0 broke a bunch of my macros. It wasn't so much a change in the macro syntax as that abilities changed in function, so I've had to adapt or do without.

The biggest loss was my left click/right click trap macros - Trap Launcher uses a version of the spells with a different spell ID, so if I hit Trap Launcher, my traps grey out on the bar if I'm using a macro to stack them onto one button.

This is what I'm left with:

The Shot Rotation /castsequence

#showtooltip
/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

What changed: It's still not optimal, but this will keep your Improved Steady Shot buff up and get you back to your Chimera Shot cooldown with enough focus to use it, while not completely ignoring Arcane Shot. If you've got Rapid Fire up, you can probably squeeze in an additional Arcane or Steady depending on your haste and focus. Aimed Shot is now mostly used when Master Marksman procs (a depressing development, since it is our level 10 specialization shot, but our signature shot is Chimera).

With the changes to Kill Command and Silencing Shot, you no longer want to bind them to things. Kill Command you use but rarely, if ever, as Marksman, and Silencing no longer does damage, so you want to save the cooldown for when you actually need to silence. (Woohoo, Lessrabi!)

In other news, I still can't do the priority manually and not stand in fire at the same time. /shame

Misdirect

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, target=focus] Misdirection; [button:2] Misdirection; [button:3, target=pet] Misdirection

What changed: Nothing. Still works great. Add in the glyph of Misdirection, and you are good to go for soloing - or for picking up mobs in a hurry if the tank dies. (Oh, that Pit of Saron PUG... Luckily, I was leveling my turtle, and he was 79.)

Taunt the Deformed Fanatic for Kiting

#showtooltip Distracting Shot
/tar Deformed
/cast Distracting Shot

What changed: The mob will be different, but if you need this at some point, it still works.

Fire Traps/Frost Traps

They were:

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Explosive Trap; [button:2] Immolation Trap
#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Freezing Trap; [button:2] Frost Trap; [button:3] Freezing Arrow

But Trap Launcher has broken them. (Freezing Arrow is also gone, and Freezing Trap was renamed.) I'm going to try playing with them again and see if I can work in a fix - I really miss them.

Feed Pet (put the food in the appropriate slot)

#showtooltip
/cast Feed Pet
/use 3 1

What changed: Nothing! You're still good to go.

Mend/Revive

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Mend Pet; [button:2] Revive Pet

What changed: Nothing! You're still good to go.

Mount Macro: My mount macro is currently broken (pre-Azerothian flying) for all my characters except my baby hunter (ahem... Duskmoon; I have a new baby hunter) - I don't know why. Once flying goes it, it probably won't matter, since I can just drop my Nether Ray straight on my bar, but I'll hit up WoWwiki at some point and see if I can find a new one.

Random Pet (from WoWwiki)

/run DismissCompanion("CRITTER"); CallCompanion("CRITTER", random(GetNumCompanions("CRITTER")));

What changed: Still works!

With the changes to spells, the addition of the aspect bar, and the removal of such things and Scorpid Sting and Freezing Arrow, we have more room on our bars now, and less need for space-saving macros. I think my priest (and her focus healing, left/right click macros) is now the only one really short on macro space.

One day I will learn, and put my hunter macros in my general macros page, so that I can stop having to copy them over between each other.

Macros

For the longest time, I played with no macros. The first ones were things like /p /cast ones to tell people I was feigning or bandaging; it wasn't until we were hitting the later parts of Karazhan that I made something more useful - the first /castsequence I used. That macro was made because I knew I wasn't using Steady Shot enough, and it would reinforce me using it, along with (at the time) Aimed, Multi, and Arcane.

This is a consolidated list of my current hunter macros. You may notice that I'm fond of left click/right click/middle click macros for some things.

The Shot Rotation /castsequence (swap Arcane to a Steady if your Armor Pen allows)

#showtooltip
/castsequence Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot
/cast Kill Command
/cast Silencing Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Chimera + Silencing + Kill Command

#showtooltip
/cast Chimera Shot
/cast Kill Command
/cast Silencing Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Misdirect

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, target=focus] Misdirection; [button:2] Misdirection; [button:3, target=pet] Misdirection

Stings

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Serpent Sting; [button:2] Scorpid Sting; [button:3] Viper Sting

Taunt the Deformed Fanatic for Kiting

#showtooltip Distracting Shot
/tar Deformed
/cast Distracting Shot

Cheetah Pack

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Aspect of the Cheetah; [button:2] Aspect of the Pack

Fire Traps

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Explosive Trap; [button:2] Immolation Trap

Frost Traps

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Freezing Trap; [button:2] Frost Trap; [button:3] Freezing Arrow

Feed Pet (put the food in the appropriate slot)

#showtooltip
/cast Feed Pet
/use 3 1

Mend/Revive

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Mend Pet; [button:2] Revive Pet

Melee

#showtooltip Auto Attack
/cast Raptor Strike
/cast Mongoose Bite

Eat/Drink (put food & drink in the appropriate slots)

/use 3 5
/use 3 9

Mount Macro (adapted from WoWwiki)

/run C=CallCompanion if(not IsMounted())then if(((GetZoneText()=="Dalaran")and(GetSubZoneText()~="Krasus' Landing"))or not IsFlyableArea()or IsModifierKeyDown())then C("MOUNT",13)else C("MOUNT",16)end end
/dismount

Random Pet (from WoWwiki)

/run DismissCompanion("CRITTER"); CallCompanion("CRITTER", random(GetNumCompanions("CRITTER")));

Marksman 1-80: Level 10

I suppose you're all well past level 9 now. >.> Here's level 10!

Level 10

Level 10 changes the flavor of hunter-hood: Your hunter quests at level 10 will net you a pet.

Skills, Level 10

• 10: Aspect of the Hawk (Rank 1), Serpent Sting (Rank 2), Track Humanoids, Tame Beast, Call Pet, Dismiss Pet, Feed Pet, Revive Pet

When you talk to your trainer for your skills at level 10, you'll get Aspect of the Hawk, a new rank of Serpent Sting, and Track Humanoids. You'll be using Aspect of the Hawk a lot. You'll also get your first talent point - start with Lethal Shots in Marksman so you can get to Aimed Shot by level 20.

Your trainer will also give you quests for taming pets. If for some reason you've left your native newbie zone, the local hunter trainer may not have the quest for you. Taurens need to go to Bloodhoof Village, Night Elves to Dolanaar, etc. Your trainer will give you three successive quests to tame some kind of local fauna, and then you'll get the skills to tame your own pet. Make sure you talk to both the hunter trainer and the pet trainer so that you pick up the full gamut of skills - Tame Beast, Call Pet, Dismiss Pet, Feed Pet, and Revive Pet. A lot of hunters wander around confused about the feeding process initially; it's usually because they missed the quest for the skill.

A couple pet-related macros:

#showtooltip
/cast Feed Pet
/use 3 1

This will cast Feed Pet and select whatever food is in the specified bag slot. The location format is . Bags, from left to right, are numbered 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 for the backpack. The slots inside the bag are labeled from the upper left-most to the bottom right-most; in a bag whose slots aren't divisible by 4 (say, a 10-slot bag), the left slot in the top row of two is slot 1. Just keep whatever food your pet likes in that slot, and when you click the button, you'll be feeding that food. If you prefer, instead of using a bag slot, you can use the name of a food, but if you have a pet like a boar or bear that eats anything and are just using randomly dropped food, the bag slot macro will be less of a hastle.

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Mend Pet; [button:2] Revive Pet

This is a left-click, right click macro. I use a lot of these. This one casts Mend Pet (which you haven't learned yet) when you left click and Revive Pet (which you do have) when you right click. Even if you don't have one skill or the other, you can still use it for the other skill with the appropriate button.

Your pet is going to come with Growl, Cower, and some family-specific abilities. Petopia is an awesome source for browsing pets. Regardless of what you pick, you'll want to open your Spellbook, go to your pet's spell page, and drag Growl, Cower, and maybe some of his other abilities down onto your pet's action bar. Right clicking on an ability will toggle autocast; if there's a moving gold border around the spell, it's on autocast. You want autocast ON for Growl and OFF for Cower. (Note that in groups with a tank, the opposite is true.) Also keep your pet's basic special attack (Claw, Bite, etc.) on autocast. You can always left-click an ability to cast it, as well. Note that pet spells tend to be buggy and turn themselves back on to autocast if you don't leave them on the toolbar. This is why it's important to keep skills you don't want to use on the toolbar.

Post-3.0.9

Okay, after having several weeks of weaker Steady Shots, things have somewhat normalized. I'm not pushing quite the same numbers I had been, but I made some adjustments.

I had switched over to the Whale-stick Harpoon, for the +hit, so that I could re-gem for AP/crit. That served me pretty well for a while, but then I got the Lightning Giant Staff, which was, overall, an AP/crit boost, so I've re-gemmed yet again, back to +hit gems.

I picked up the PVP boots initially, but then the Dragon Slayer's Sabatons dropped, and they are, overall, a PVE boost over the epics.

I got the heroic badge neck, which was an upgrade. Getting revered with the Ebon Blade netted me new shoulders. Heroic Azjol-Nerub got me pants and a ring. Grobbulus had another ring. I also have the Bands of Anxiety off Grobbulus, but with my current gear set-up, I don't know that I want to swap out from my Eaglebane Bracers. I get AP from Int, so the Eaglebane have more AP for me, and I would drop under hit-cap with the Bands. That would mean re-gemming something again.

Basically, between re-enchanting, re-gemming, and the new gear, I've added about 700 RAP since pre-3.8. I'm still hit-capped, and still over 30% crit. It's amazing how many people I talk to who are good hunters (seriously, better DPS than I am) who have trouble buffing their crit - I think it's just because I prioritize it until about 30% over AP.

It wasn't cheap, but I'm cleared for all wings of Naxx under our raid guidelines. I'm hoping we hit Malygos this week. >.> Granted, I found Aces High! to be kind of meh, and finding out that phase 3 is basically that quest... well, I want to at least do the fight once, and then I'm okay with never going back.

The macro has ended up mostly unchanged, just shuffled - the cast sequence is now Chimera, Aimed, Arcane, Steady, Steady, Steady. When Hawk procs, I can probably get in another Steady, but that only matters on fights where I can just stand and shoot.

Oh, and I'm now riding an orange raptor full-time for my ground mount. Mmm, raptor.

Another macro concept

Adapted from the thread on the guild forums where I've been mulling it over.

Another possibility is:

/castsequence Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot
/cast Steady Shot

Logically it would run through the cast sequence first on every click; I'll have to see if it will actually go to the /cast line when those three are unavailable. (The downside of doing all this on lunch at work.)

I think the cast sequence would still choke, though, in terms of the 6 second/10 second optimization; the first two iterations would be fine :

Arcane shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, (1-2 Steady Shots depending on haste), Arcane will be ready so Arcane, Steady, Chimera, Aimed, Steady, Arcane, Steady, Steady, Chimera, (Arcane would go here except the cast sequence goes to Aimed) Aimed...

So the cast sequence will still eat a couple Arcanes. I'm actually not sure purely manual weaving would help, since there may still be times that Arcane is ready at the same time as one of the others.

It might, however, help the macro be more flexible for variable haste with regards to Steady Shot - since the hunter GCD is static at 1.5 seconds, and Steady Shot's cast can't be made faster than that, if you're not stacking haste to keep it constantly at a 1.5 second cast (and my gear isn't good enough to even try doing that yet), it's Rapid Fire and Imp. Hawk occasionally boosting your Steady Shot cast speed (plus Bloodlust, and I'm liking Potions of Speed recently - need to fish more for more pygmies). The current macro doesn't effectively take advantage of that in terms of the occasional extra Steady Shots, but if the /castsequence + /cast macro does, it might be worth switching to.

I'll try it out on the dummies when I get home if I can fish up enough pygmies to make enough potions to test out the haste effects.

Update: the /castrandom

The /castrandom doesn't work like I'd hoped, so I'm sticking with the macro I had been using. Longer macros trying to optimize the 6 second and 10 second cooldowns are getting snarled by variable haste, so I'm just going to stick with it for now. (1900 dps on 10-man Archavon and 2400 on 25-man seems to suggest that I'm doing fine as-is.)

Revised Shot Macro

Okay, Duskhawk has been 80 since Tuesday evening, and has had Chimera Shot since this weekend sometime. (And got the 3000 quest achievement done on Monday night. >.>) I ran Drak'Tharon Keep with some Daughters of the Horde on Sunday night, and about halfway through it, I determined that just plopping Chimera Shot into my current shot macro didn't work if I wanted it to keep refreshing Serpent Sting without having to reapply the sting. (Although if I hit extra buttons, like Feign or Readiness (followed by Rapid Fire), it still requires a reapplication.)

So now I'm running with this:

#showtooltip
/castsequence Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, Chimera Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom Kill Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Yes, I've lopped out an Arcane and a Steady - it has to do with getting a Chimera Shot off roughly every time the CD is up, in order to try to keep Serpet Sting up. There's something like 11.5 seconds of cast time and global cooldown in that - it won't keep Viper Sting up, but I couldn't do that, anyway. Scorpid's even longer than Serpent, so I should have no trouble with that. Kill Shot doesn't go off as often as I'd like it to (when it's lit up) - I probably need it before the cast sequence, but I haven't thought about it while logged in to change it.

I'm still pushing only about 1300-1400 DPS on bosses, but I'm still mostly in level 70 gear, and just got the gun off the last boss of the Halls of Lightning, which is where I last watched my meters. Once I'm not wearing a mix of level 70 arena and badge gear, I figure I'll start seeing my numbers creep up more. (And once my crit% is back over 30%, and my hit% is better than a measly, what, 6% with talents now? Meh.)

I still have 3 zones to quest in. Whee.

(Started herbing on my rogue - it has been disappointing so far. I've found... 2.)

PVE shot macro

Note, 1/18/12: If you're looking for a macro for 4.3, check here or here (the 2nd if you have 2 piece t13).

I don't use one of the standard shot macros. This is mostly because I have buttons to push, and I like to push them. I also don't have Chimera Shot yet (probably at 78), so it hasn't been reconfigured for that.

Originally, the macro looked like:

#showtooltip
/castrandom Kill Command
/castsequence Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

It basically cast Kill Command when it was available, and ran through the rotation I was doing manually. But after the Kill Command change, I took that line out. With the change to Aimed Shot, I also made a second shot macro. That one looks like:

#showtooltip
/castsequence Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

This basically replicates the order I was pushing buttons in, but compensates for that I'm easily distracted by motion on the screen. (So much so that I turned off all of Omen's and the in-game threat meter's aggro warnings - if I have to watch the whole screen, my performance suffers; it's better if I can focus on the lower... 1/3. This does unfortunately conflict with my health bar being in the top corner still, although that's generally more of a problem when I'm healing. Maybe this is why I find healing more relaxing - all I have to look at is health bars, and not actually pay attention to the fight. Even then, I still have problems with clicking between buttons.)

The standard macros I've seen are usually just Steady and Chimera; quite frankly, I'm a sucker for instant gratification. The more buttons I get to push, the better. Being a Hemo dagger rogue was never ideal for DPS, but Hemo cost less than Sinister Strike, so I got to push it more often. (The new thrill? Chain Ambushing. O. M. G.) So way, way back in Molten Core, when the whole watching the Autoshot timer theory first came in, my shot rotation called simply for hitting Arcane and Aimed every time their cooldown was up. I couldn't time them with Autoshot, largely because the only mods I was running at the time were CT Raid Assist and the SK list, and I can't distinguish Autoshot from the others. (I believe this was post un-linking the Aimed/Arcane CD, and before Aimed was reworked to reset the Autoshot timer.) I never topped the DPS charts (the mages and locks in our guild tended to trade that spot around), but I wasn't a liability.

Steady Shot messed with my habits. I like instant shots. It was a while before I settled into the alternating of Steady with my other shots that I liked to use - I have the Arena gloves, and both Barrage talents, so Multi was always part of my raiding rotation. I chewed through mana like there was no tomorrow - I raided almost exclusively in Viper (except for a few lucky occasions where I had a shadow priest), and I made heavy use of Mana Potion Injectors (and, after my rogue/potion-alchemist got the drop, Fel Mana Potions, which are amazing for a hunter). I was most certainly not as mana efficient as a BM hunter, who could, by and large, must spam a Steady Shot macro, and Serpent's Swiftness and pet DPS would carry them to great DPS numbers. (I realize BM could be more complicated, especially pet management, and non-macro BM hunters would actually have to time their shots.)

However... Even if I didn't top the DPS charts, I was often in the top 3 (competing with a warlock and an enhancement shaman, or sometimes behind a feral druid with good cat gear or one of two great BM hunters I've raided with regularly). But for overall damage done? I was basically competing with the enhancement shaman and the warlocks when they were there. On the last Gruul's Lair I went to, Duskhawk was 11% of the total damage done to him. I even managed to keep Scorpid Sting up on that fight. (Shots not in my macro I often zone out on and forget.) And I bandaged! At some point after I started running a damage meter (currently Recount), I realized that DPS and overall damage done didn't necessarily sort out the same. (I don't know why. The logic breaks down when I try to figure it out. Maybe because my shots are spikier than a BM spamming Steady, since I rely on the crit damage I'm spec'd for? No idea.)

So although I often topped out around 800 DPS (mid-700s was more common, as even with the macro I have focus problems), I also often did more overall damage than some of the people who had higher DPS. I suppose basically I felt as though raiding as a MM hunter was not a liability. Which is good, because BM just didn't appeal.

I still have the Multi-Shot version of the macro, but for the most part right now I'm using the Aimed Shot version. It's not for efficiency - soloing, I just can't burn through all my mana with Rapid Recuperation. I run around in Hawk or Beast anymore, too - I haven't needed Viper. Maybe for raiding at 80, again, if the fights are long enough, but right now, no. I just switched over to Aimed because I got tired of pulling the 2nd and 3rd mobs off my bear with Multi. :P (It's also useful in instances if CC is involved - which it hasn't been yet.)

I'm not sure yet if or how I can or should add Chimera or Serpent Sting to that cast sequence. I played with Chimera a little bit on the 3.0 test server, but not much. I don't know that I want to lock Serpent into the rotation, either, since some fights I may want to be using Scorpid or Viper instead. Automatically DOTing things that may subsequently need to be crowd controlled probably also isn't ideal.