Two of my guild hunters just hit 4/8 Cryptstalker, and they were discussing in vent the benefits of using a faster pet to take better advantage of the 4 piece bonus (50 ap for you and your pet). Is my understanding of attack power in some way fundamentally flawed, or am I correct in thinking that every pet, from a 1.0 to a 2.4 attack speed will benefit from that extra 50 ap exactly the same?

I think their logic is that if the pet is hitting faster, it is taking better advantage of the 50 ap, but based on my current understanding of ap, I can't see any advantage of using a faster attack pet with specific regards to the 50 ap bonus provided by 4/8 CS. If the bonus was say, 5 extra damage per hit, then I'd understand, but as it is, I can't imagine why a faster attack speed pet would benefit more.

And yes, I realise the numbers involved even if they are correct are infinitismally small, but pet dps on a fight like Patchwerk constitutes a small but significant portion of our hunter dps.

You're correct, the benefit from attack power is equal among all attack speeds.

Well, it depends what the primary source of pet DPS is I guess...if it's just from auto-attack, then yeah 50 AP for a 1.0s is the same as 50 AP for a 2.4s attack speed.

Bite and claw and all that are just flat damage values right? As long as they aren't "weapon damage" or whatever attack speed won't really matter at all.

The only thing I can think of is if you have a cat pet, the first attack from stealth is double damage, so a slower attack speed benefits more from that.

Other than that, I have no idea what pet attack speed would have to do with that bonus.

I don't know how they got to 4 pieces of Cryptstalker without understanding how attack power works. Claw and Bite have nothing to do with attack power, they're just flat damage. The only thing is the cat stealth damage mentioned above.

Let me guess-- one of them is using Toxin Injector?

This isn't 100% true. If the howl is only affecting you and your pet, it's more beneficial to turn on bite as well. I haven't run the numbers to find out how many extra people it would take for bite to be not worth using, but i would suspect it's only 1 or 2. So if your raid leader puts you in a melee group bite wouldn't be worth the focus, but if you're in a caster/healer group, it would be.

The only advantage to using a 2.4 speed pet (like a bear) is burst opener dps. Other than the initial hit, it doesn't matter what the speed is of your pet over a few hits.

That said, a Wolf with Howl Rank 4 is the best pet for raiding.

Comparing a normal DPS pet, such as a cat, with a wolf requires a bit more than furious howl vs bite/claw. You'd have to compare the difference in pet autoattack DPS as well. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the two.

I've used both on Patchwerk-- a Cat with Claw/Bite, and a Wolf with r4 Howl in a group that regularly consists of: 2 Hunters, 2 Rogues, 1 Fury Warrior, and 2 Hunter pets.

The Wolf won hands down.

Yeah, I use a wolf with Furious Howl, and in our last Patchwerk kill, our group happened to consist of the three hunters, a shaman and a combat daggers rogue, who ended up topping the damage meters. I have no doubt that a wolf is the best raiding pet because of Howl, but even then, I honestly can't see how a hunter with 4 piece CS will see more pet dps with a 1.2 attack speed wolf over a slower attack wolf.

I got into a discussion about this with one with one of the 4/8 CS hunters earlier and he insists a faster attack speed pet will benefit more from the 50 ap bonus, and reckons my misunderstanding of the mechanics is due to my overthinking the factors involved, but as far as I can see, it's a straight 50 ap, regardless of speed.

Yeah, I think it's just a misunderstanding of AP to be honest. I thought I was going mad though, because I could not for the life of me understand their logic, and they're both significantly more experienced than me.

well, i make our DPS groups, so Rayder's howl doesn't go wasted :)

There is an entire thread about the value of furious howl for RAID dps, you can find it here
Perhaps that facilitates the math for you a bit, it contains quite some info.
I'm pretty sure however that Elendril is talking about his wolf in a melee group, since that was the definite conclusion of the aforementioned thread.

People are really really really underestimating how much screech does.

The way the caps work out, if you you demo + screech on patchwerk not only do you reduce his melee dps by 30%, but due to the cap you can use cor rank 3 with absolutely no ill effects.

If you're a guild that doens't use cor on patch, screech will beat anything since now you can. If you do already use cor, then screech will reduce patch dps by something stupid like 12%. The petdps loss isn't big either, my bat did 96dps (34.5k), though I guess alliance is kinda cheating with motw + bok + bomight + battleshout + tsa.

Thinking often clouds matters.

Yeah that guy just doesn't understand WTH he is talking about. It's not worth debating with him if he's the type that doesn't want to hear it though.

I would like to comment this is one of the best threads ever :)

man, 3 hunters with furious howl with one rogue would be amazing for the rogue. eventually you'll get the +50 damage added to a backstab, and thanks to damage modifiers that is somewhere between 90 and 2xx added damage :D

Hey, new poster, been reading for a while. This discussion caught my eye so I thought I would toss some of my knowledge out.


One thing people commonly miss with pet DPS is that fact that Claw is on a global cooldown while Bite isnt.

I am currently specced pure PVE dps, with a spec of 20/31/0, which includes the extra crit rate on my pet. I use Broken Tooth with a 1.0 atk speed with 120 shadow/fire/frost resistance and claw.

My reasoning behind just Claw and no Bite is the same idea rogues with with Energy Generation. After the very first Bite a cat will never use the skill again because of Claw being on global cooldown. A cats Energy(or Focus) only refreshes enough to sustain Claw, which makes Bite a useless skill on a cat.

But anyways... Using claw on my cat, with a crit rate of about 22% talented, he is hitting upwards of 60-110 damage more every global cooldown based on crit, while a wolf, without the ability to use Claw, is not able to sustain that extra DPS with Bite, which uses a 10 second cooldown.

The only thing I am unsure of, and actually planning on testing soon, is the debate as to whether a cat's Claw with global cooldown would sustain higher DPS then a Wolf with Bite and Furious Howl. But of course I will assume that the obvious answer to RAID DPS would be the wolf because of Howl giving about 25DPS each(according to a post I read earlier).

But you know, I am a Hunter and I have to respresent on DPS so we can still get raid positions, which is why I am debating about MY DPS and not RAID DPS.

-Renato, Phase 3, Blackrock US

Excuse me if I'm wrong, my hunter has been retired since before AQ release, but back then, screech didn't stack with demo shout(demo overwrites it). Did they fix it? I used to have screech instead of claw on my pet( zg bat cause back then the speed was bugged so it would move at fast speed), and yea the dps loss from going from claw to screech isn't much, but I'm sure it wasn't stacking with demo. It was useful in group pvp tho, it would randomly pop rogues out of stealth and just nerf overall melee dps, for a really small loss of dps.

For a while Screech stacked with Demo Shout, and even with itself. I'm not sure if it still does, however, because on Patchwerk I seemed to have a very hard time keeping it on. I'm not sure if that's just because of an extremely low debuff priority, or because it only got on with Demo Shout slipped off.

Not as to revive an already dead topic... Patchwerk damage here from tonight.

Broken Tooth - level 60, normal raid buffs, GOA/SOE/Battleshout/Strength4scroll/Agi3scroll



And here is my total damage for the fight.



I still stand by Broken Tooth being the best pet for a hunter's DPS... As to it being best for RAID DPS, that is still under discussion.

Any comments on preferred pets would be greatly appreciated, mabye someone who can show a all out Wolf dps with howl calculated/without it calculated?