Class Mechanics 101 – Shot Rotations, Why Don’t We Macro Them Anymore

As I take a quick look over on the Official Hunter Forums I guess I see a good 2 to 3 posts per day minimum asking for a Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, or Survival Shot Rotation Macro. Well folks I hate to burst your bubble, there’s just not one.

Before you go get your pet to go and try to maul my face off, let me explain why.  There is some history as to why everyone is so hooked on the idea of a shot rotation macro.

See, prior to the great BM Nerf of 3.0.8, BM Hunters had a nifty little trick called a Spam Macro or the BM Macro. Basically, the faster you could press, click, spin the better because it would just keep on firing Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Kill Command whenever they were up and running.   The only time a BM Hunter really had to press anything else was when the I-Win Button was available.  Otherwise it was just spam away.

Honestly, this was probably the best thing since sliced bread for many Hunters. They could grab this macro, a cookie cutter spec and top the meters and get all the uber gear. But honestly, it wasn’t great for the class.

BAM! The Big Bad BM Nerf of 3.0.8 hit and Ghostcrawler told us all about how it was just wrong for any class to rely on a Single Shot macro for most of their damage.  It really made it too easy to play. 

(Well, “EASY” became a point of contention since BM’s do have to deal with Pet Management issues and such.)

But anyways, it didn’t really mater, the Blizz Dev team had spoken and now EVERY class would have to use a couple of different shots at least. Not a big deal to many players, especially ones that might have been MM prior to Burning Cruscade or SV providing the Expose Weakness buff.

But if you were a BM Hunter from the beginning or jumped on the Hunter bandwagon as we tore through the meters during BC, then you probably got hooked on spam macros and never really learned about Shot Rotations.

This isn’t meant to be a slap to BM Hunters, but just a very truthful statement.  At the end of BC so many people leveled up either a Hunter main or alt just to be tops of the DPS meter.  And the sad, sad truth is, for many it was all due to the cookie cutter specs and spam macro, and had nothing much to do with Hunters learning how to play their class well. Yes, folks, we have to come to terms with it, in BC BM Hunters were pretty much on easy mode.

But that’s the past and now we need to move on to the future.

See, Marksman and Survival Hunters have known this for a while now. (Yes, I know all about /castsequence, /castrandom, and /cast /cast ! macros.)  There is just no real substitute for manual shot rotations.  Keeping track of each shot’s cool downs and firing them off at the right moment at the right time maximizing every shot’s cool down effectively.

You’ll find a ton more benefit using add-ons like Quartz and ClassTimer to help keep track of when the next shot is primed and ready.  Even more if you’re a TrapDance SV hunter and not just an awesomely monstrous Crit machine.

No, I’m not going to post up a Shot rotation for you.  That’s because it so dependent upon your Spec, Gear, PC, and Lag.

Why? Because all of these affect your ability to track your shot casting times against the Global and Shot Cool downs.

My recommendation would be to use The Hunter DPS Spreadsheet and get a rotation tailored for you. And check back to make sure all is well with the world after achieving any set bonuses, major gear changes, etc…
If you don’t want to use the spreadsheet, just google Warcraft+hunter+”shot rotation” and you’ll get about 1,000 results or more.

But I’m not against macros either.  Combining some actions, even attacks into a single button.  And streamlining similar shots or combinations of actions makes sense and we’ll go over those in our Wednesday Macro an UI discussions.