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shot rotation (WoW)  

At higher levels, shot rotations for hunters are the single most important way to focus their damage output. Although used less-extensively in PvP, a shot rotation is necessary during any instance or raid to be as effective as possible.

Although there were shot rotations before Burning Crusade, known as the 9-second and 10-second rotation, based on the cooldowns of Aimed and Multi Shot, these rotations no longer function or are important. Current rotations depend almost exclusively on the level 62 ability Steady Shot.

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General Sources of Hunter Damage

There are three places hunter damage stems from:

  1. Auto Shot
  2. Special attacks
  3. Pet damage

For the entire rest of this article, we will ignore pet damage. From the hunter's personal DPS, about half of it comes from auto shot and about half comes from special attacks, if the hunter is doing a decent job. What is unique to hunter difficulties is that they have to both "cast" their main abilities and work around the timer of their auto attack. Melee classes have strictly instant abilities, and casters have no attack they are using alongside their spells. With the exception of maybe an enhancement shaman, no other class faces the difficulty that hunters do.

Steady Shot and Clobbering

Steady Shot is the single most important ability hunters have for dealing damage. It has no cooldown and is very mana efficient. However, it comes with one very severe limitation that other hunter shots do not -- it has a cast time. The reason this cast time matters is because if you are in the middle of "casting" Steady Shot when your next autoshot should fire, the auto will wait until the steady finishes.

So suppose this is what all hunter abilities look like on a timeline:

In a really bad scenario, where your bow (or gun or crossbow) would normally shoot every 2.0 seconds, if you use a steady shot as soon as it finishes, it will fire 1.5 seconds after autoshot finishes, and then keep your hunter occupied and not firing another auto shot until the 3 second mark. (See picture below.)

In this example, the hunter is firing an auto shot only 2/3 as often as they could be. If auto shot is half of the hunter's damage, losing a third of that is like losing 15% of your total damage!

On the other hand, let's suppose a similiar shot speed and the hunter waits to cast steady shot until the next auto shot finishes.

In this situation, where the hunter fires auto every 2.1 seconds, they are only getting a steady shot every 2.1 seconds. However, steady shot could be fired as fast as every 1.5 seconds. This time, the hunter is losing damage from their specials, which are also half of their damage. Although the loss isn't quite as bad here -- only about about a quarter of their time firing specials is lost -- that's still over 10% of their damage out the window.


Have you ever sat on a bus while it was raining, and watched the two windshield wipers? Unlike a car, bus windshield wipers don't work together. Since they work on two completely separate areas, this is ok. They don't overlap at all. But imagine if your car were like that, and every once in a while one of the wipers would have to wait for the other one, or else they would hit each other from time to time.

This is what hunter shot rotations are like. The auto shot and the special attacks have to be used in harmony, or else they will "clobber" each other.

Solution #1: Controlling Shot Speed (1:1 rotation)

There's one very obvious situation where these two cycles -- auto shots and special attacks -- can line up. If you can only ever fire a steady shot (or any other shot because of the Global Cooldown) every 1.5 seconds, can you make it so your auto attacks go off every 1.5 seconds?

With the exception of Barrel-Blade Longrifle, all end-game weapons have a shot speed no faster than 2.7 seconds. If you can get enough haste to drop your shot speed down to close to 1.5 seconds, you'll be in good shape.

Suppose a hunter uses a Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle or another 2.7 speed weapon, a 15% quiver will speed up his shots to every 2.35 seconds. That's a start. If the hunter specs Beast Mastery, they have access to Serpent's Swiftness, which gives them another 20% haste. Now the hunter with the Wolfslayer has a shot speed of 1.96 seconds.

In fact, 1.96 is fast enough. Because of latency, which is the combined effect of your connection speed and your reaction time, you're going to need an extra few tenths of a second to be able to get your special attack off anyway. About the fastest you would even consider wanting to shoot is about 1.80

This pattern, which would involve shooting one special attack, (usually Steady Shot,) between every one auto shot is called the 1:1 rotation. It works tremendously well for Beast Masters. However, other specs have difficulty getting the sort of haste needed to be able to consistently use a 1:1 rotation and need to find a different solution. See discussion on haste below.)

Solution #2: Fire Other Special Attacks (1:1.5 rotation)

Marksmen and Survivalists are forced into going to a different extreme. The issue with Steady Shot "clobbering" Auto Shot is only an issue with Steady Shot, right? So why not just use a different special attack when it would be about to clobber?

The result is that they use a different rotation that involves firing three specials between every two autoshots. However, the middle special attack, which would normally block out the second autoshot, is either Arcane Shot or Multi Shot to avoid that happening.

Notice how in this version, at the end of the steady-arcane-steady in the third row, the auto shot almost ends at the exact same time? This is what an MM or SV hunter strives for. After using Arcane shot, it will be on cooldown, so the second time through, they use multi shot instead. (If the picture continued, you would see one more auto shot and one more steady shot, and then they would meet up again.)

Note: The creator of these pictures, lythyrdskynyrd, has a slightly unusual picture for Multi Shot because of the way the shot behaves. See behavior of shots below.

This type of shot cycle, typically called a 1:1.5 rotation, relies on having a very slow weapon instead of a fast weapon. A faster weapon won't actually hurt anything, but the autoshots won't hit nearly as hard as they could with a slower weapon. (See damage.)

Behavior of Shots

-Steady Shot affected by haste
-2.4.2: auto shot delays triggering of special attacks while not delaying their cooldown
-Multi isn't a truly instant shot
-Arcane uses more mana

Solution #3: Steady Shot Spam (3:2 rotation)

Comparison of Rotations

-mana usage

Important of Weapon Speed

Discussion on Haste

-passive vs activated/triggered haste
-list of common sources of haste

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This page last modified 2008-06-09 11:16:32.