Heigan, Hunters, Hit Capping

Kvasira's post made me wonder about hit-capping again. I mean, I know it's important, and I'm told I should stack it above everything else, but ... how much am I really missing by missing? I wanted to do the math myself.

Looking at the web stats, I can calculate the following --

Even with a draenei in the raid, I missed 1.6% of my auto shots. 0.1% was mitigated, but let's just ignore that, because it's too small of a percentage to work with. This means, since I landed 317 shots, 5 of them missed. Average damage was 859 on non crits, and 1682 on crits (14%). This means I missed on average 3694 non-crit damage plus 1177 crit dmg.

For my steady shots, I missed 0.5%, with 0% mitigated. This means out of 201 shots, 1 (JUST ONE) of them missed. Average damage was 1167 on non crits, and 2571 on crits (18%). This gives a probable damage for this shot of 1173.

So we have...

• Auto Shot: 308,597 done, and 4871 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.
• Steady Shot: 284,060 done, and 1173 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.

Now, what my Cheeky's (now Shandara's) spreadsheet tells me by modeling my gear and buffs from the exact raid setup I had then, is that Poached Northern Sculpin will buff my pet DPS by 5 and my hunter DPS by 12, as opposed to using no food at all. My pet was useless in the Heigan fight, so let's ignore the 5.

My time in the fight dps'ing was 706 seconds. My DPS was 928. Adding 12 dps to that and multiplying by my time in the fight gets me 8,472 that I could have gotten by eating AP food. Getting to the hit cap gives me 6,044, or 8.5 dps that I could have added.

• Eating cheap BC Hit cap food: 8.5 dps increase, or
• Eating mammoth 60AP food: 9 dps increase, or
• Eating expensive 80AP food: 12 dps increase

So missing only 1 steady shot and 5 auto shots in a 14 minute fight is roughly equivalent to 60AP lost!

Once again, the clear conclusion is... get ye to your hit cap, hunters. A little bit of hit is worth a lot of DPS.

(The postscript is, hug your local draenei.)

Hello! And Heroic Halls of Stone

Posolutely invited me to guest blog here, and while I don't have much to write about in WoW, occasionally I do feel the need to vent or chatter about specific events in the game.

First off... this is me --

Neshura. Dwarf, hunter, beastmaster, always and forever. I have a gorilla named Daffodil and a dino named Petunia. My pets are always named after either flowers or horrifying diseases. With that out of the way....

Tonight, we ran another heroic, new to me: Halls of Stone. Now I've only been to Halls of Stone on regular once before. This seemed just a touch more difficult. For one thing, the tank hadn't been there. Not Posolutely, but our guild's other tank, Balendin. I pounced on Balendin the moment he logged in and berated him til he agreed to come along. "But I haven't done heroic Halls of Stone!" Haha... "Neither have I! Neither has the healer! It'll be fun!"

I wouldn't say that I lied, as I was fully expecting that it would be fun.

IT.

WAS.

NOT.

We wiped at least 15 times if not more. We one-shotted the big rock boss, the Gruul's lookalike who does the shatter. The other bosses though.... ouch. 

Maiden put us all to sleep and then killed us, over and over. We finally got her down with just a few people still standing. Balendin worked the hokey-pokey trick of jumping into the black circles to get the dot that would cancel the sleep spell, and after he got the hang of it, it was just enough to get us through that boss.

At the Tribunal, I stood on the stairs and dropped frost traps to pull mobs into consecrates, but we still died. Wave after wave of angry short dudes pummeled me and Petunia -- we died a good bit, even though Bale was tanking and Iceravens was offtanking. Around the fifth or sixth try, we all died--again--right at the end of the last wave. The mobs went straight for Brann Bronzebeard, but he somehow managed to pull off his "computer hacking" and they despawned before they ever touched him. So, we finished that boss AND got the achievement -- even though everyone was dead. 

Our pug warlock had to leave at that point, so we headed out to summon a guildie mage. Aaaand... died in the respawns. Complete wipe.

We cleared the mobs, and headed for the last boss. Spell-stealing the lightning shield made a HUGE difference. The adds weren't easy, they had about 26k+ health each, but with a mage and a hunter both on add duty, we one-shotted the final boss.

It took about two hours, and it felt like it was twice as long. But we all learned the fights pretty well from doing them over and over. I do prefer the shorter instances offered by wrath -- a slog in Burning Crusade was a 3 or 4 hour affair. I can survive a 2 hour slog, but after that point, my eyes start to go crossed from too much time at the computer.

I was starting to feel like I was doing pretty well on getting starter-geared for raiding, until heroic Halls of Stone. Now, I feel like a n00b all over again. No loot for me tonight, but some loot for guildies, so yay.

Now, it's time to go do my evening meditation on "Why Do I Always Forget To Put Petunia Back on Passive".