How do they do it? They read of coruse.

I came across this post in MMO-Champion and it reminded me of all the times I have said the same thing.

Link to post.

Often I would see people claiming that they could do xxx DPS in the same gear I had basically and I was left to wonder how.  I tried everything I could from getting all possible buffs, eating, flasking, having heroism and rapid fire in effect and I would still come no where near the DPS they were claiming.

This lead me to believe, without doubt, they where completely full of crap.  They where of course.

However they are not always full of crap.  I was seeing posts a few weeks ago where people where claiming to be doing 16K-17K on bosses in heroics and I was wondering how they were doing it. 

Once I figured out they where survival it made sense.  That is why 14K-15K was my tops, I was MM.  MM, besides being the worse spec at the moment, is leaps and bounds harder to time and carry out then survival.  Doing 14K DPS as MM is not easy.  Doing 17K DPS as survival is easy.

See, I read the posts and I figured out what I was doing wrong.  I was in the wrong spec. That is the key to figuring out what you are doing wrong.  Actually reading.

This guy is saying he is having problems when he answered his own question within the question.  He mentioned his rotation (problem #1, there is no real rotation, only a conceptional one) and his haste being 3% (problem #2, his haste is dreadfully low for trying to do that rotation).

This person is the definition of the average hunter.  I will not say a bad hunter.  A bad hunter is one that does not take the time to even look up rotations or to post asking for help and would not know their haste even if you told it to them right before you asked them.  So he is an average hunter at best.  Perhaps some day, being he is putting in effort, he might be a good hunter.

This person is the average player and this is why the average player does okay.  He can continue to do 14K and no one will ever complain.  14K is fine for a heroics, hell it is better then fine.  In his own circle people might even look to him as a great hunter. 

Heck, 14K would still make the Hunter the superstar of the run.  I rarely, if ever, see anyone even break 10K besides me.  Overall data of my Stonecore daily yesterday had me at 12K over all, a Mage at 6K and a Ret Pally at 5K.  This is your average run.  Remember, most people suck.

What separates him (the average hunter) from someone doing 19K (the good hunter) is the ability to understand why that is the suggested rotation.

He quotes the suggested rotation and even says he fires three cobra shots.  This is all fine and dandy but he does not seem to grasp the concept of why three cobra shots was suggested. 

It was suggested because with the appropriate haste rating you can squeeze in three cobra shots perfectly between explosive shots.  Being his haste is not the appropriate level each time he casts that third cobra shot his DPS is going down, not up.

It is one thing to read a rotation and another thing to understand a rotation.  This is the reason why I suck at playing a rogue.  I only read enough on it to know what I should do and not enough to know why I should do it.

Once you understand the why of how your rotation works then it becomes easier to make it work.  I am no theroycrafter but when I switched to survival I played around with my stats some and figured that having a cobra shot of 1.64 seconds would be exactly what I needed.  A week later I read a post saying 1.65 was needed.  Hey, I was close, as I said I am not a theorycrafter and not even half as smart as those guys that figure out all these little numbers but I was able to figure it out. 

Do you know how I did that?  I did that because I understand why I needed to get the cast time of my cobra shot down. 

I understood that if it took to long I could not fire off three without pushing back an explosive shot and I knew if it was much quicker I would have a wait time while I waited for explosive shot and that extra haste could be used to up my critical or mastery instead of being wasted on haste that was not needed.

I did not just read someone say 3 cobra shots and go blindly ahead and follow the 3 cobra shots rule.  I knew why they were doing 3 cobra shots.

It is not enough to know your rotation.  You need to know why that is the rotation.

You do not need to be a theorycrafter, you only need to understand what is going on around you.  That will allow you to figure it out on your own or read it on the forums some other time.  Just make sure you actually read it.

Reading it is the difference between being an average hunter and a good hunter.

For that person, as soon as I got my cobra down to 1.64 cast time I was able to pull 19K without a problem in heroics on some of the easier fights.  Before the 1.64 cast time I was not much more then 17K.  That is how much of a difference it was for me.