I have a small question for Zurai or whoever know. It doesnt really concern mechanics, so please forgive me ;)

I just read on thottbot in a comment, that the complete ebon netherscale set (patterns) is available from a vendor without any rep. Can you confirm that as true? Also, does someone have a nice quick leveling guide for leatherworking? I have one that took me from 0 to 300 in engineering in just 45 mins with about 150g spend, without having any mats upfront. I think atm there is no way around that set as its the best you can get before maybe T5.

Ebon Netherscale is available from the Dragonscale trainer, no rep required. There's no quick and cheap way to level LW past 350, though; at that point, everything requires primals and heavy knothide, and most things require rare skins.

Ok, I understand. Do you maybe know a good guide for 0 to 300?

Aldor: 30 AP + 10 crit rate
Scryer: 20 AP + 15 crit rate

So, 10 AP vs. 5 crit rate (0.225% crit) (I'm getting Aldor's as being just slightly better with my current gear at 70. Does this continue to hold true, or does the crit on Scryers eventually become better once you hit a certain level of attack power?)

I'm currently using a 41/20 Beast/Marks build. Now that I'm 70 I was thinking of switching over to a Marks build, but I'm not sure how to optimize points.

I have a 7/41/0 Base, but I'm not sure where to put the remaining 13 points to maximize dps.

+20% pet damage (8 points to get), +10% pet crit (additional 5), picking up Monster Slaying + Hawk Eye + maxing out Imp. Barrage + Combat Experience (or Efficiency), or some other combination.

Going off my gut, I was thinking that taking Unleashed Fury (8 points to reach and max out), filling out the rest of Imp. Barrage (2 points) and then picking up Hawk Eye (last 3) would be the way to go. Or am I underestimating the Slaying Talents (or Ferocity?) and overestimating the boost that Unleashed Fury gives?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...14733438&sid=1
Post #8 for leatherworking

Thanks, thats exactly what I was looking for. Whew, that looks expensive. Now I got to find me one for 300 and up.

Thanks for the numbers Zeboim, those numbers should prove very valuable.

On a different note entirely, has anyone tried beast mastery in a heroic instance? I was more wondering about the viability of a BM pet to offtank in a situation like that. I just finished getting all my keys but have yet to enter a heroic instance and am told repeatedly about the difficulty heroic instances can prove to be. I haven't had a single point in BM for well over a year and a half now instead choosing marks but if it could help out in heroic instances I'm willing to give anything a try.

Regarding specs in Heroics, I'm curious how viable a traditional MM build with Barrage+Imp Barrage is. Can you often set up CC so that the DPSd mob is multi-shottable without breaking sheeps/shackles? Or are things just too hectic with resheeps to use Multi?

Apologies if this is ground already covered elsewhere:

Has anyone done any solid math on Master Tactician to see what sort of crit/dps benefit it provides over time? I spent some quality time (about 4000 rounds of autoshot with a GM bow) with Dr. Boom the other day and came up with ~3.5% crit above paper doll, which struck me as singularly unimpressive for a 5-point talent that far down the tree. Unfortunately, I'm sort of at a loss as to where else to drop the 5 points to provide a significant increase in either DPS or instance utility. I'm specced along utility/CC lines right now (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=mZVxbRVzZ0GAMkf0uAzV) and increased crit is what's keeping my DPS acceptable, so I hate to lose any crit at all, but I also can't shake the feeling that the points are better spent elsewhere. Any thoughts?

Isn't Master Tactician pretty easy to model?
Uptime = 1 - (ChanceNotToProc^Attacks)
Unless I'm missing something very obvious here.


In other news
It's ugly, it's still a work in progress, it's not documented at all, and it's not cleaned up.
The shots per second stuff is meant to be tweaked by the user, no fancy formulae for rotations / priority lists.
Who cares, right? ;)
http://files.filefront.com/HICS_30xl.../fileinfo.html

Yup, it is one of our simpler procs. EW and Hawk are the two messy ones.

Ouch, I thought I fixed that already... I'll sort it out when I get back from work.

Well i went thorugh Lactoses spreadsheet and mine looking for errors to certain discrepencies between the two and it seems mine was wrong. Anyways these are the relative values between agi, crit ratina, and rap with 1900 ap marks specced and 20% crit.

1 rap = 1 crit rating / 1.45 = 1 agi / 1.75

So 1 agi isn't better than 2 rap and wont be until your at around 3.3k rap.

I think now would be a good time to make a seperate thread for discussing / QA / development of spreadsheets, instead of throwing all this in here as well? =)
That goes for me as well :P

I for one am fine with discussing spread sheets in here, since its on topic.

But I have another question which I dont remember being answered before:
Is the hidden 0,5 second cast of Autoshot and Multishot affected by quiver and other haste effects?

Is the dps table on the top right an accurate portrayal of the two weapons you input?

By adding the GM bow (1.8 speed) with my hunters stats, I output 930 dps, which is much greater than any other weapon, such as many epic 72+ dps weapons that output around 800 dps. Obviously this cannot be right as autoshots are hitting for 400 while with a kara epic they're hitting for 800 which is reset after every steady shot.

Is that portion of the chart not accurate?
Is it based off auto and steady only?

EDIT: http://img506.imageshack.us/img506/6623/excelgk3.png
SS details: gm bow 55 dps 1.8 speed vs steelhawk xbow 72 dps 2.8 speed

Am I completely missing the mark?

Anyone interested in talking Pet trained abilities?

I'm

currently carrying 2 main pets:

Wolf with Furious Howl
Wind Serpent with Lightning Breath

those are the two staple abilities, but what about stamina, natural armor, dash/dive, etc?

I currently have my wolf with maxed stamina, max dash, max bite and armor filling in the rest.

and on the windserpent I was playing around with maxed fire and frost resistance (cast mobs have been nasty for me) max dive and the rest in mediocre stamina and armor.

I'm currently 67, so still grinding. Any thoughts or philosophies on this?

Relevant talents:
2/2 Go for the Throat
1/1 Bestial Swiftness
2/2 Bestial Discipline
4/5 Endurance Training
1/2 Animal Handler
5/5 Serpent's Swiftness
5/5 Ferocity
5/5 Unleashed Fury

Hmm. I've been trying to tweak the "shots per second" stuff to model a rotation which tries to put 2 steady shots between autoshot pairs when arcane/multi aren't on cooldown, and don't think I can by just tweaking the "seconds between steady shots" field, since the period isn't constant (0-1s between the steadys in one pair, 0.5-1.5 between the 2nd in one pair and the first in another pair, who knows what in the case when a multi cooldown is up and you want to fire a multi instead of your second steady).

Realistically I don't think that kind of rotation will work too well, but I still wanted to see it play out with all the neat stuff you have built in :P

Modelling choice between the 2nd steady and arcane multi is probably best left to a simulator, but the option to squeeze 2 steady's between autos should be too tricky to code for should it?

As it stands the sheet seems to show much higher DPS for faster weapons simply because there's no concept of screwing up your timing when using a fast bow (e.g. Toxin Injector gaining 147 DPS on Gladiator's Xbow, but doing less damage before OOM). But asking for that to be considered is probably asking too much without a field to input "mean and SD delay due to latency/reaction" and applying values from that distribution to your autoshot/steadyshot values :S.

It's nice to see that, as suspected, from a minmax point of view I was wrong to choose the scryer enchant over aldor, but the decision doesn't cost me a meaningful amount of DPS :)

I currently have my wind serpent set up with Lightning Breath 6, Dive 3, lvl 70 Growl, full fire resist, full nature resist, and a tiny bit in health and armor. That's not an "all-purpose" setup, though; it's a primal-farming setup. I need 41 primal fires and 17 primal airs (ebon netherscale set + lunar crescent axe + riding crop) as my most-needed primals, so I specced my pet to cover that.

In normal circumstances I'd recommend health over armor for training; my philosophy is that armor is fine versus physical attacks, but it does nothing versus magical attacks, and at least half the attacks the pet's gonna suffer in end game situations are magical. Health doesn't help as much versus physical as armor does, but it has the benefit of helping against both types of attacks. That makes it superior in my mind. I didn't take Thick Hide for the same reason.

My "all-purpose/raiding" setup would be LB6, growl, 1 full resist, 1 partial resist, and as much health as I can fit in. If there's any left over, either add it to resists (if there's additional resist concerns) or add it to armor.

I've always had the opposite take on the health vs armour abilities, since while true that armour doesn't mitigate magic, it offers a scaling mitigation against physical, whereas health only offers a static one. And armour keeps mitigating, while the extra health is gone once it's gone (from the first magical attack). If I expected some magic damage, hoping I had the right resists trained seemed a better bet. I can't say I've mathed out how much an incoming attack needs to hit for for 1600 armour to mitigate more than the extra 500 (or 600?) health absorbs though.

edit: i like the idea of speccing my pet for the primal farming I need to do. Although with no resist talents, I've been spending enough time travelling/searching between elementals for pet health to not be a limiting factor to the farming. I guess I need to find out where Zurai farms :S

I've always taken the basic stance that Armor is for 5-mans while health is for Raids. The biggest thing a pet can bring to a 5-man is that extra tanking body. Armor keeps them alive longer while tanking mobs. Health is better in raids because they won't ever be tanking and all the damage they take will either be periodic effects, timed abilities, or damage spikes(cleaves, breaths, chain whatevers). Period effects and timed abilities can be micro-managed, but the pet, especially for a BM hunter, must be able to survive the damage spikes or they're screwed, therefore stam is better. I put priority Stam/Armor, Specific Skills(Howl, Lightning, Dash/Dive, Bite/Claw), Resistance. Resistance sucks because it is generally dungeon, or maybe even Boss specific, and therefore the least useful. I would hate to have Pet A for Arcane Boss, Pet B for Fire Boss, and Pet C for Nature Boss. Insert gripe about stable slots here. It's far more useful to have a generalist pet whose good against every boss, and that means armor, stam and pet abilities win out over resistances.

As far as I can tell it isn't Breaker but it is obviously very difficult to tell. I have done some pretty extensive testing with Dr. Boom and so far it seems impossible to land an autoshot faster than about 500 ms after another. If you get the timing perfect you can land an autoshot before another shot by less than 500ms but if your timing is even slightly off you delay the auto.

I'm leaning towards it being animation related at this point. My thinking is they didn't want your toon to stand there with your weapon raised, stuck in the last bit of the firing animation while you pumped out bullets/arrows.

Edit:

At lvl 70 with 12000 armor your pet will have 53.197% mitigation.

With 1920 more armor (1600 * 1.2) your pet will have 56.868% mitigation.

For incoming 1500 melee hits (about what you see in lvl 70 instances):

12000 armor = 702 dmg
13920 armor = 647 dmg

Receiving one hit a second the pet will survive for:

12000 armor and 7704 life (7000 + (640 * 1.1)) = 10.97 seconds
13920 armor and 7000 life = 10.82 seconds

The harder your pet is getting hit the more valuable armor is, but not drastically so. In my opinion if you consider extra health keeps your pet up longer against non physical damage types it is the superior ability overall. If you are trying to minimize downtime then obviously armor comes out ahead.