Hey all,
So as the title says… how do pumpers pump?
I get the mythic/raid tier lists but ive seen examples of say a a ilvl 475 hunter or mistweaver (most common classes i see this with) topping dps meters?
So i was helping a friend doing +2s and hes a 493ish BM hunter doing 160-200k dps and then we see some people in thr ilvl 470-480 range beating him on damage. Like is this sort of stuff down to gear stats?
My hunter friend done his 2k in s1 and s2 but he then got a bit of anxiety around mythic+ presumably wotried about getting flamed for his dps etc.
Like any advice i can give because on discord yesterday i could hear it in his voice he was getting disheartened when lower ilvl people where beating him in dps.
Is there a way i can check for him what dps he should be doing compared to the rest of his class?
But going back to my original question, when i have done raids i have seen other ret pallys lower ilvl than me doing a decent amount more dps than me. I compared talents and we usually have the same build and i without sounding egotistical i wpuld say i have my rotation down pretty well? Ive been told to enchant my gear and gem my gear but personally ive never seen a massive increase when doing this (not enough to justify the gold it costs sometimes)
Disclaimer - i have just woken up so sorry if i am waffling a bit in my post lol
People just learn how to play the class tbh. YouTube, wowhead, rotations and stuff.
And if they’re not good at it, just change class.
Easy.
I know people in my community who keep playing the same class (mage and warlocks especially) and doing abysmally low DPS and I’m always asking myself… why don’t you play a bloody hunter if you’re that bad?!?
People always think: oh it’s fine, i shouldn’t get better because I’m here to have fun.
But forget that 4 other real people in the group are not having fun wiping in dungeons and raid because that person can’t help.
There isn’t a single straight answer, there a lot of factors to consider.
Especially if you look at people in higher parsers (95/99%) they play in a different way, they maybe ignored certain mechanics to reduce the dps loss, some raid cooldowns are used in a way to benefit their personal dps.
Not only that, there is a mastery of the class that goes beyond the common information that you can find in guides.
Also the real big factor is simply confidence, if you friends starts already worried about his performance he will probably play worse than usual and that’s not worth it especially when the most negative outcome is just depleting a key or wiping on a raid boss.
The best way to check for raids is to compare logs. warcraftlogs has tools for this and then you can see basic stuff like what buttons do the most damage and compare how many times a good and less good player pressed them.
You can also see more detailed things like exactly what buttons they pressed in what order to see if you’re doing it right and look at things like did you constantly overcap and thus waste resources.
M+ its a bit more tricky. It comes down to understanding when to pop your CD’s and realizing that meters don’t always tell the whole story. A balance between ST and multitarget is always needed but padding on lashers or whatever doesn’t really finish a dungeon faster, killing the big mob that spawns them does.
Ellipsis would be a great person to point to this thread, they are someone who gets great numbers and would have a good understanding of the difference between themselves and us mortals.
Finally, its possible that your friend isn’t keybinding. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that if you aren’t thats the single biggest thing you can do to improve. As a bm hunter you could almost get away with 3 and then add more as you get comfortable.
It comes down to understand the class and the content.
It also comes down to stat and item optimisation.
If we take the example of a paladin.
1 actually using wings on cd every 1 min and not holding it for longer than 15 seconds in huge.
- also not wasting holy power. Wow analyser is good at spotting some of these rotational errors
- the same can be said for trinkets. I like to macro mine into wings if it is an on use
2 Lining up cool downs with big trash pulls
3 Understanding when to swap between their aoe and st spenders
4 Knowing how to abuse bubble and bop to keep DPS up time. Especially on big pulls
5 actually haveing a good weapon. For melee classes specifically having a good weapon even if the rest of their gear is a little lower makes a big difference.
6 stat optimisation gearing and sockets.
- There is a lot of power in a socket it varys per class but can be worth up to 5 I.levels on an item. So someone coming in with 7 sockets is going to do more damage than someone without.
- The same goes for correct stats and cantript / trinket effects. It’s why simming your character is so important and you can’t just look at I level
- I noticed you don’t have 4 set. SIM your character using your old 2 set with the new one and see.if it is more damage
- your trinkets are awful. An elementium pocket anvil will give you easily another 20k DPS on single target patchwork you can run top gear sims and upgrade.finder some to see where your weakest items are. Bloofmallet is also good for trinkets
7 consumables.
- Rank two pots are 6g each at the moment yet so many people don’t play them I don’t understand why, buy a bunch macro it into wings and forget about it
- using the right flask and critically also using defensives to make sure it dosent kill you. There are weak auras that track the effect and let you know when to use a defensive
- you can SIM the power of enchants to see.excatly what the increase is. You may be surprised wow has a habit of compounding power. And with regards to gold cost just use a rank 2 they are so cheep and better than none
8 ABC always be casting. If you are in combat you should be pressing dps buttons. I can’t count how many times I’ve come across players obsessed with their gear or stats and actually they only have a 80% activity time in combat and that’s why their damage is low. You can look at activity time on logs. Compare to the other players in your party and if there is a big difference try to aim to minimise that difference. Even if it might mean sending an ability you wanted to hold. You would be surprised how fast those abilities come back
9 beware supports. Don agonise over why some beat you if they are getting a pi or there is an aug evoker in the group. This is so much shinanigens with aug and pi that it’s very hard to get much meaningful feedback
10 confidence and positioning. I’m going to use an example here of a friend of mine. They were so worried about their performance that they decided they were going to focus on not dieing because dead people do no damage. So anytime a big mechanic happened she would. Stop attacking. Move to a safe spot. Start casting doubt her self shift slightly. Start casting cancel it move again…shuffle start stop shuffle and all the while her position was fine. She lost 20 seconds for DPS time to second guessing and doubting herself. Don’t fall into that trap and if you are going to fall into that trap remember ABC
As a DPS you should always be thinking how can I maximise my damage. And what is coming next and how do I maximise my damage there. I call it ethical padding. You should always be looking to pad within reason
I just want to add that this advice applies to mythic raiders as well as high key pushers. It dosent matter how good you are at the game.the tenants here will always help you improve and you should always be aiming for improvement even if it’s only 1 %. 1% faster 1% more damage 1% anything it all adds up over time
It depends on a lot of factors, ranging from the content you do to player skill, so it is very hard to pinpoint it down to specifics.
The most common errors I see people do is to either mis-manage their cooldown windows or do not use them when they get the most out of it, to missing global cooldowns by not doing anything other than moving.
In a low-ish key like a +2 it is also up to your class. Some like Windwalkers have large frontloaded burst which means that when encounters last for a long time some specs do not have the time left to ramp up on damage before the pack is already dead.
Usually the only outlier piece of gear that has a big impact on performance are trinkets. The difference between an average world quest trinket and your Best in Slot (bis) raid trinket can be huge.
Outside of checking logs we cannot say for certain what is the cause, though you can try to narrow it down to specifics to an extent. It may sound like a silly question, but does your Hunter friend does damage on the move, or does he only resumes casting again once he stopped moving?
I did not play BM since late BFA, but I recall that for them it was important to keep high uptime on their DoT, Barbed shot, and I remember some of my guildies mentioning the importance of using Kill Command on cooldown. It is also worth checking in guides if you still require a macro for your pets as the pet attack in previous expansions were cast with a frequency delay, so hunters had to macro their pet attacks on their skills to make the pets use their basic attacks more often.
Thank you everyone for responses
I just want to clarify i dont think my friend is a bad player, other classes hes played he tops dps charts and on his hunter he usually top on interrupts (just as a point he can play)
As his hunter he definitely moves when doing dps as its one of things he likes about BM hunter.
I was asking him about ‘call of the wild’ last night as i noticed after the first pack/pull he usually top of dps but then drops off.
I think for him he may not be utilising it at the right times as someone used the pally wings as a example.
He does pretty good in ST stuff, like where my ret pally falls in ST in a mythic he is pretty consistent with ST if anything thats when he climbs the dps meter a bit but he is using a mythic aoe build of icy veins lol
Just wanna say thanks again for the input guys, i really dont want to pug another season on my lonesome haha
That says more about the rest of your group than him since his CD on interrupt is longer than any melee interrupt.
Haha i know that wasnt a strong argument to say he isnt a noob but i hope you get my point… i did forget to say he does keybind his spells and uses the mouse to move where as i use keyboard to move and a mix of clicking and keybinding for spells
They press Buttons ?
I mean if your friend Has problem with aoe as BM its most likely he doesnt understand how multishot works .
Tell him to read the tooltip of ability
Paradoxaly its very common issue with bm Hunters 
Other thing tell him to go to wowhead and copy / paste bis talent build from there
Some pump the music, some pump up the tires.
People mostly said what needed to be said but it also just takes practice. Be it experience in games or wow, these things give you an edge. If you keep doing your ABC(always be casting) you’re already better than most. From now on you have to optimise your positioning(gets massively better as you learn encounters better, that massively increases your damage too. If you care about logs, check how first kills for many are grey logs. There’s a reason for it and it’s not just gear. Practice and experience.), get comfy with a class. It also helps knowing multiple classes, you gain more experience knowing how things work, it’s also an excuse to do the content more often.
Stats, enchants, trinkets and timing change things massively too. My demon hunter’s weapon from amirdrassil gives her a really big damage bump, for example.
Consider the fact that your friend is also way more aware of interrupts than the others. Simply that makes them more valuable to a group as the difficulty goes up. Also please understand that dps is not a 0 responsibility role. It’s also just an option to point them to healing, for example. Last season I couldn’t dps for the life of me but healing worked out so well.
Huh, I can do 150-160k dps as the healer if people don’t get me too occupied with healing.
He has some serious rotation issues most likely.
Holy priests are broken at the moment. More news as it happens.
The secret to pumping is uptime, correct use of cooldowns and padding on multiple targets.
For healers, snipping as well. But the idea is the same. Kill/heal things harder before others can.
But healing also depends on the damage intake. You can’t make damage appear if the dps and tanks are good at avoiding it. 1 shots are not useful either. So, you dps instead.
Is this overall for the whole dungeon (including bosses) or where he peaks when doing larger pulls?
He should do a little more overall, but the cautious way many tanks pull in +2 isn’t ideal for all specs. If we’re talking peak AoE damage, especially if tanks pull larger, he definitely should do a whole lot more as a BM hunter (Stomp is only soft-capped at 20 targets).
edit: Also, if he frequently has the issue that he gets the “target is dead” or “I have no target” etc message because he no longer has a target, it can help to enable Action Targeting. He should still tab-target or (better) manually target, but this will help. It can be enabled in Options > Combat > Enable Action Targeting. This requires a bit of extra care.
In my experience, the number 1 mistake people do, especially in lower keys. They always seem to save their CDs to bosses, not realising they could have used them 3 or 4 times before getting to said boss…
CD management is a big one, so many people loose so much dps right there.
Edit.
A good idea, if you dont know the dungeons and pulls, just use your cds everytime they’re up, dont worry about saving for the boss… most people are on 2min cds, they’ll come up during the boss fight
Really good point!
The same applies to defensive CDs where people keep sitting on them for “emergencies”, and then take lots of extra damage while “real” emergencies never happen, so they often don’t use the defensive CDs at all.
Indeed, use defensives when you know big dmg is coming out… not when you accidently stood in something, its to late at this point anyway…
he should do way way more not a little more.
200 k should be ok for pure ST at that itlv .
on big dangerous trash pulls with all cds up he should be doing 1-1.5mln dps especialy this week with bis bow aviable.