There is all this talk of using Silencing Shot in your standard rotation to increase your DPS. Many people are saying you should simply macro it into all of your other shots so that it fires whenever it’s up. There are people asking if they should Spec into Silencing Shot for this purpose.

Let’s take a closer look at Silencing Shot.

Silencing Shot: A shot that deals 50% weapon damage and Silences the target for 3 seconds.

50% Weapon damage in this instance means half of what your average Auto Shot might do. For me, that’s about 1,780 total damage for an Auto Shot, so approximately 890 damage per Silencing Shot.

The cooldown of Silencing Shot is 20 seconds, double the length of an unglyphed Chimera Shot. However, Silencing Shot does not share the Global Cooldown (GCD), so it can be fired while your other shots are taking that 1.5 second break.

Like Kill Shot pre 3.1, you can macro Silencing Shot so that it fires immediately before or after another normal GCD shot. Because of this, many people are of the belief that it would benefit your DPS to do so with all standard rotation shots.

There are several problems with this theory.

Firstly, if you play Marksmanship and did not already have Silencing Shot while raiding Ulduar, you are too focused on your personal DPS and not focused enough on the rest of your raid and the strategies at hand for the majority of bosses. Silencing Shot is our utility, and there are countless mobs and bosses in Ulduar that require constant silences and interrupts. You should be helping, end of story.

I have said this many times, and I’ll say it again: Topping the charts is worthless if you do not contribute in other ways as well.

Forgetting that fact, let’s look at exactly how much DPS Silencing Shot would add to a standard boss fight.

My last Kologarn fight was 4 minutes, 30 seconds long, which is a total of 270 seconds. We’ll use this fight as an example. If I had used Silencing Shot every 20 seconds as available, it would increase my DPS by about 42.

In a fight like Kologarn which requires no Silences, I could see how you may want to weave Silencing Shot in for a bit of extra damage. However, keep in mind that during Kologarn, you’re going to be interrupted from your standard rotation very often, whether it be Stone Grip or Eye Beams. Those are times during which you cannot fire your Silencing Shot or any other shot, and so that extra 42 DPS will go down.

Now let’s say you’re running Razorscale. My last Razorscale fight DPS uptime was 5 minutes, 43 seconds, for a total of 343 seconds. Before Razorscale comes down, you’re fighting the smaller mobs. If you have macroed Silencing Shot into all of your other shots, you may end up with an extra 44 DPS, including downtime. HOWEVER: If you’re fighting a Whirlwinding mob, then move to a caster, and that caster is casting Chain Lightning, how will you stop that spell if your Silencing Shot was just used on the Whirlwind mob? What if the other folks in your raid who can silence are paying attention to other things? Maybe your rogue has to move away from the blue flames and misses a kick. Then your entire group gets pelted with that Chain Lightning. In return, those people will need heals, or they may go down due to being hit with a fireball. Therefore, it sucks healer mana and healer focus away from their other duties, and could even cause a raider’s death if they’re unlucky.

Your actions directly affect EVERYONE IN YOUR RAID.

Do not think that adding ~40 DPS is important enough to sacrifice everyone else’s time, focus, and resources. You have the potential to help everyone. Make that potential a reality.

My suggestion to all of you is this:

Do not macro Silencing Shot into any other shot. Simply keybind it and use it with discretion. If you are fighting ANY NPCs which can be silenced, do not use Silencing Shot to increase your DPS. And not having it macroed will allow you to gain better reflexes, which is never a bad thing. It will also force you to focus more on what’s going on around you than just your personal rotation.

Spreadsheets and running numbers are all well and good in theory, but when it comes down to a real-as-corn Raid, do what’s right, not what makes you look good on charts. Please don’t be a huntard, be a knowledgeable, efficient, contributing raider. Anyone can stand around and DPS. Good players bring utility.