Useful Resource: Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

Today I am going to talk about a VERY useful tool for figuring out all sorts of things about your hunter.  It's called Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer.  This website helps me make all sorts of decisions, like gear selections, gemming, enchanting, reforging, etc.

The first thing you do when you go to the website is to upload your hunter's information.  Normally this would be a pain in the ass because you would have to manually input all the information about your hunter, which is quite a lot.  Luckily this spreadsheet can draw everything about your hunter from the WoW Armory.  To do this, click on the "Armory Import" box:

Fill out your information as shown above, then click "Load From Armory".  At this point the spreadsheet pulls all your hunter's information from the WoW Armory and automatically inputs it into the spreadsheet.  From here you can change anything about your hunter that you want to see the DPS change reflected in.  The first thing you should do before making any changes is to find out your base DPS.  Since I mainly use this for raiding, I turn on the best possible raid buffs for my character.  To do that, all you have to do is go to the "Buffs/Debuffs" section and click "Enable Best Raid Buffs" and "Enable Best Raid Debuffs".

Now after setting your buffs and debuffs, now you can get your baseline DPS for your hunter in it's current state.  Go down to the bottom of the page and click "Update DPS".  This will calculate your hunter's theoretical DPS.  After your DPS is calculated, all sorts of information is displayed.

The first thing you notice is your total DPS.  Next to that is your stat weights, as in, the list of your DPS stats organized by priority.  As you can see, the best possible stat increase for my hunter (and probably everyone elses) is Ranged Attack Speed.  So that means if I had to choose between getting a 0.1 increase in my ranged attack speed, or any other 1 stat, I would want the increased speed.  Next to the stat weights is the gear comparison section.  I don't really use that section, but the top part lists possible problems with your gear.  Like for my hunter, it says I have too much hit, which is correct because I just recently got new bracers that had hit on them.  It will list all sorts of things that would be problems, such as if you aren't taking advantage of your professions' DPS bonuses, or if you don't have all your talent points allocated.

Under that is your Final Stats.  These are literally the stats your hunter has with all the setting you have set.

Now is when you would make any changes to your hunter to see how it would affect your DPS.  For example, as you can see, I have way too much hit, so I am going to try to change my enchants, gemming, or reforging to try to change my hit into other more beneficial stats.  I would scroll up and click on the "Gear" section.  Since my gems are specific colors to meet the set bonuses while simultaneously making my meta gem work, I'll leave my gems alone for now.  I have a lot of haste turned into hit via reforging, so I'll just revert some of my gear that is reforged back to its original form, thus turning the hit I gained from reforging back into the haste that was there.  Haste > Hit when you are hit capped because the leftover hit is useless.  So I would make the changes and hit "Update DPS" again.

As you can see, an extra box appeared under the DPS section, this shows what the last configuration's DPS was, and the change in DPS between your last configuration and your current one.  Also as you can see, I no longer am over the hit cap.

With a little bit of fine tuning, you can pull out quite a bit of extra DPS out of your hunter, and Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer is a great way to do this.  If you are interested in raiding seriously, these changes and attention to stats can mean the difference in raiding with a really good guild, or with a bad guild.