More on hunter ammo

I was a little shocked to hear how much ammo hunters use in raids. I had always assumed it was maybe 1000 arrows/bullets for a full clear on Naxx. Once I read the comments on how much hunters are spending on ammo, I decided to do a little math to support their assertion.

Assuming that 1 shot of ammo is used every time a player clicks an ability that causes something to fly out of the end of their bow/gun and (for the sake of simplicity) an auto shot speed of 3 seconds, we can calculate the burn rate of ammo as (t/1.5) + (t/3), where the first number is ammo used by hunter spells and the second is ammo used by auto shots. That also conveniently works out to be 1 round of ammo per second as we can reduce the formula to Burn Rate = (.66t + .33t). Math is fun! And you thought algebra was dumb and you’d never have to use it after high school.

Let’s assume also that it takes 5 minutes to down a boss in Naxx and since some bosses have an enrage timer of 5 or 6 minutes, your hunter won’t be using ammo face down in the dirt after an enrage wipe anyway. Sure, a well geared raid can burn a boss down in less than 4 minutes, but we’ll just use 5 minutes as a hypothetical median. There are 18 bosses in Naxx and sometimes there are wipes and always trash to clear, so we’ll go with 20 bosses worth of ammo consumed.

Here are the numbers:

300 seconds per boss = 300 units of ammo used * 20 bosses = 6000 units of ammo used in a full clear of Naxx.

That’s 3 crates of ammo for one raid.

I was shocked that my original assumption of how much ammo a hunter uses was so low. Some of the commenter’s numbers are probably a little conservative too. Even if the hunter were to buy stacks of ore to give to a miner/engineer to make ammo, he’d still be spending about 90 gold on saronite ore to make 3 crates of ammo. Add on top of that the costs of repairs, flasks and buff food and it can be very expensive to be a dedicated raiding hunter.

It almost makes me feel bad about making money from ammo sales. Almost, because I’m sure Blizzard will nerf engineering/change hunter ammo soon and I’ll lose a major source of income. Because Blizzard hates Paladins AND Engineers.