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.

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.

for raiding, wolves are 100% the best pet, AP bonus or no. furious howl generates more raid DPS than any special attacks. i actually don't even turn bite on for my wolf (and i'm probably going to respec him to get rid of it) because it's not worth the energy that could otherwise be used for howl.

our last patchwerk kill, i think my pet did about 23000 damage just autoattacking and howling.

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.

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.

More than likely that hunter has no clue how ap works sock, wouldn't surprise me.

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