AugustusTirion

I think the detail you're missing is that haste effects Steadies casting time.
Under full BM haste of 2.22 Steady will fire in .67 sec.
So, even with the .5 animation delay between shots, you don't 'clip' auto.

Now, the snag to that much haste is that the GCD is still 1.5
If you continue putting a special between every auto, you WILL start clipping significantly.
The simple solution is to only use specials between about 2/3rds of your autos.
I'll leave it up to other folks to do all the math on the effect that has on DPS.

My *guess* is that with RF up and skipping a special every 3rd auto will net roughly the same dps, but you'd be firing fewer specials, thereby saving a little mana.
Assuming I'm right, just think of RF as mana conservation while maintaining full dps

 

Kaelvanas

The Iron Colonel asks the question I want to know, too. How do we know "wtf we are doing" as a BM hunter? Having never been one, I don't really have a good idea how to guage my own gear's suitability, nor how to look at someone's armory and know that they're geared well versus poorly.

With Marks, as long as they have decent +hit, ~20-22% crit, and 2000-2300 AP, I figure they're un-noobish.
For Survival, I'm looking for ~25%+ crit (more as gear permits of course ) and a truckload of agility.
For Beast Mastery, how do I analyze this?

I think I have a handle on making a good BM spec vs a poor one, but gear is throwing me for a loop.

 

Howitzer

What about Efficiency VS Imp Hunter's Mark? If you're firing 20% faster with more Quick Shot procs and losing more mana is it not better to have your pet lose 110 AP so you can continue to fire off steadys?

 

Norwest

The thing about Mark of Conquest is that you are attacking very fast with low mana shots. a 2.70 with iAotH hits every 0.906 seconds on average. At an average of 15mana per hit (based on 10% proc rate) that's over 80mp5. It's more mana than Aspect of the Viper. I'd definitely Go with the Broach as well, since it will go so nicely with TBW.

Don't base your bow speed around a trinket. 2.6 is the best, 2.7 is ok. 2.8 and above has the disadvantage of only getting 7 hastened shots inside an iAotH proc instead of 8 and it will lose you about .5% haste. Also you will get in fewer steady shots.

 

Beerbaron

i think I misread your post as a dismissal of BM due to rapid fire's issues, not an isolated comment on rapid fire itself. by 1.4 being a good thing, i meant that it means you are near optimal for a replacement cycle for the time you are not using rapid fire.. which is more important.

rapid fire also mucks with MM rotations, however its harder to calculate to what degree. unfortunately the state of hunters right now is that no shot cycles really account for non-haste states and haste states without introducing clipping and/or 'waiting time' outside steady/auto casting states in at least one of those states.

if swapping range weapons doesn't initiate the global cooldown, then that may be the best solution for both specs.

 

Howitzer

I'm guessing BM is for low-latency hunters who are very good at twitch gameplay then? Since MM has a lot more wiggle-room for error. From what you posted above you're stating that the Gladiator Xbow would actually lose PVE dps in shot rotations over a longer duration, correct?

 

Norwest

I have the framework for a Pet DPS calculator. Is there a good resource kicking arround that has pet damage formulae like base damage etc? Petopedia has plenty of formulae but no DPS ones.


If that's true, it's really too bad. One of the hunter's core strengths is great burst DPS.

Ya, the leather is nicer for DPS no doubt. But remember that pets get 35% of your Armour, so leather is more of a trade-off than pre-2.1. I'll still be stacking lots of leather, but I'm not going to trash my mail.

Definitely a good idea in any burst phase like Curator. I need to test what happens when you swap bows mid-combat. Depending on how much it disrupts your shot-timer, this may be the way to use Rapid Fire properly as a BM.

 

AugustusTirion

I'm inclined to say it's the other way around.

A MM Hunter would probably be using a Auto,Steady,Arcane/or/Multi,Auto,Steady style rotation.
With a 2.9 weapon and no haste beyond 15% for quiver, there is zero 'wiggle room' when you're putting 2 specials between autos.

The BM spec would only ever be putting 1 special between autos, and most of the time he'll have as much as a half sec of 'wiggle room'.

edit:
Matter of opinion, I suppose, but I tend to think of BM as the steady dps spec for Hunters.
Less reliance on crits, more on stacking AP and high shot speeds.

 

Harwin

My understanding is that Mark of Conquest has a hidden cooldown timer of 19 seconds.

As BM, with a 2.6 speed bow and firing a shot (auto or steady) approximately every 1.95 seconds (ideally 1.88 but I've got some lag and I'm just spamming a macro rather than deal with the hassle of manually timing latency while also trying to watch my pet etc) I got about 31 mp/5 from Mark of Conquest. This was based on WWStats on a bugged Gruul kill, so it was pretty much a tank-n-spank.

 

Norwest

With BM, the X-bow is not very good. You don't shoot nearly as many steady shots. Rotations are all about designing good ones then finding the right bow to fit them.

Lag and wiggle room depends on your rotation and bow speed. I currently use a pretty intense MM rotation that I could never keep up without low lag and the /castsequence macros (yes, I use those). My BM rotation is going to be a lot easier. But it's nothing to do with the actual rotations themselves, it's how my bow fits into it.

My 3.00 clips my current rotation and it very tight, but that's because I should really be using a 3.10 or a 3.20. But I don't have any of those because I'm poor and lazy.

With a 2.70-2.30 and BM my future rotation will have good slack. But that's because there aren't any good 2.50 speed bows to choose from which would be ideal.

How tight the rotations are depends more on the bow itemization than the actual rotations.

 

Madscorl

I'd like to see more of this, It's not all that obvious which special you were using in between your autoshots. I wanna see the mob your damaging, and an swstats window for you dps, and group dps percentage. Then I could really make good use of that video as a comparison between MM and BM. Also, was your pet alive the whole fight? I assume you still have the original footage, maybe you could post another version of the vid.

Or maybe another BM hunter has some good footage of them dpsing a boss, or even just raid trash, I'd really like to take a look at exactly a BM hunter would do in game. This would be the best way for me to start comparing the dps differences of BM vs MM short of actually respecing and learning it myself.

 

Howitzer

It looks like he is just rotating Steady Shot and Auto Shot while managing the speeds of Quick Shot procs in between in addition to Bloodlust! Craziness, indeed. Seriously gonna try BM and come back with some SWStats and possibly WWS figures for you all.

Here's our most recent Fathom-Lord kill from last night with a 38/23 spec: http://netigen.com/kuya/wws-20070425-Karathress/
Then compared to Tidewalker, (where AOE is total king of course) http://netigen.com/kuya/wws-20070425-Tidewalker/

I'll post WWS results of these two fights next week with a 41/20/0 spec and see the difference. =)

 

Madscorl

I think he used Arcane shot and multishot too, but I really have to guess. I've got a BM version of myself on the test server, but there's no way I'd be able to take full advantage of Beast Mastery on my first attempt at it. So I'm looking for someone with plently of experience playing BM to show me a typical fight(boss fight, trash pulls, I don't care, just something so I can start to make some comparisons).

I personally don't like all the numbers people sometimes use to make the arguments for BM, maybe it's just because I'm a sceptic, but I'd much prefer either my own personal experience, or short of that, a visual representation of it to help persuade my own opinion.

 

Breakerone

If people are interested to see how BM hunters stand against other dps classes I can post my wws log from tonight, maybe you can take some conclusions out of that concerning rotations and pet usage.
It was a bad night btw, many deaths for nothing

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=mpizerirbwyta&m

Edit: Yes, the mage is bad...

 

Harwin

I decided to look at Shade since Curator and Netherspite have lots of things that cause your DPS to have high spikes.
Wow. I have to ask, what buffs group setup you're using.

Just looking at pet damage there's a weird disparity (and I'm BM too)
Sylvester had 29 non-crit hits for an average of about 434 damage.
Peerless (my cat) had 30 non-crit hits for an average of 237. This number is roughly the same across all 5 shade attempts (it was a bad night)

I was wearing some stamina gear, but not so you'd expect a disparity like that.
You're an orc, so you'd get some advantage there, but not that big.

I note you've got some elixirs up but the effect is much smaller on the pet.

Any ideas what could be causing such a huge buff? Does Windfury work on them?

(Your gear provides more DPS than mine but I have to make sacrifices for mp/5 because we have no shadow priest and I don't feel like chain chugging potions - but again this diff shouldn't be such a huge pet difference).

 

alienangel

Having spent the last couple of months raiding with a BM hunter, I've been convinced of how amazing BM is for quite a while. It's not a question of him outdamaging MM hunters, he can outdamage the mages and rogues too, if we give him a shadowpriest and TSA. Granted the mages aren't at the 1100+ spellpower levels, but at 800-900 damage he is quite competitive. I can't comment how good our other DPS classes are compared to your guilds, but I'd like to think they're fairly good.

I've stayed MM however, since I'm partly too lazy to regear myself for BM (he stacks AP, and has nearly as much AP as I do with TSA, and since some recent upgrades to his gear equal/better hit and crit), and partly because I still like some MM features for the casual PvP I do. Also I never really wanted to be BM with Steelhawk, but I might try with the Gladiator's Xbow. Every time I've tried BM on a ptr, it's been without raid buffs, in my normal gear, and never felt satisfactory.

Howitzer, I'd expect your observation about BM being for low-latency high-FPS players to be true, but having seen fraps of Maelgwn play and noting how incredibly crappy his computer is, I don't think that's necessarily the case.

If you are speccing BM, my recommendations would be to pick up enough AP to be around 1900 RAP, before worrying too much about other stats. And know that every AP consumable you use is extra desirable, since it buffs your pet's DPS as well. Nag people to buff you and your pet, it's worth it.

The only utility downsides I see are:
i. likely no hawk eye, so things can be rough when pulling or finding a spot on gruul
ii. even more dependent on shadow priests, since mana expenditure in full burn is higher, and pet death is a bigger hit to DPS until you res it.

 

alienangel

I probably shouldn't be posting other people's videos, but here's an old video of one of our BM hunters, also on Aran (good fight for pet DPS):

http://video.google.ca/url?docid=520...ioVSSow7lZLSAA

I don't know how useful it is for seeing what he's doing, I spaz out every time I watch it from how abysmal his FPS is. I've been bugging him to make a better one.

 

Madscorl

That's a start I guess, but I want to see some 25 man Raid footage of a BM hunter, I'm not interested in seeing the absolute best pulls of the night for that hunter either(people keep mentioning, "it was a bad night"), more of an average is better I wanna see how he works within the raid. SSC Trash is what I have in mind, even just one pull of trash, there's far more information for me in seeing how he starts and ends the dpsing of each mob than in wws logs, or in swstats meters.

 

Goreshot

Prior to going casual these past two weeks, I was BM for about three weeks (basically when I put up the post with my BM vs. MM damage testing on Dr. Boom, I didn't bother to spec back just to test out BM in actual raids). I easily took either the #1 or #2 spot for Hydross, Magtheridon, and Gruul when I had a Shadow Priest available. This, of course, includes pet damage in the total as well. I didn't stack any "non-mana" gear (i.e. leather); I wore what I have in my Armory for the most part. And yes, I still had to drink mana potions and use mana regen consumables to maintain my mana pool even with a Shadow Priest.

-----

I've done some very preliminary testing on the PTR in Blasted Lands with a 5/20/36 "raiding" build. The change to Kill Command is both a boon and a curse. You can't actually use it whenever you want primarily because you still can't cast it while casting Steady Shot, which means you only have roughly 50% (probably less) of your shot rotation time to actually hit the button. Also, it's not always on cooldown or available to hit during those moments, either. So if you refuse to put it in a macro (like me, because it never works properly and just screws up my timing), what you end up doing is mashing the button pretty much whenever you aren't casting Steady, which is a pretty big chore when you're trying to time your shots within the span of milliseconds. But while I found you really don't use it every 5 seconds, you do end up using it enough that it makes our mana issues even worse than they already are. Even with Mark of Conquest and the ~10% mana return I got from Thrill of the Hunt, I was running out of mana in roughly two minutes flat. I'd really hate to see how bad it is with other specs, where you have absolutely no mana returns from TotH.

 

Breakerone

Well, if you are asking about the pet the answer is easy and more so its easy for everyone, because I dont "handle" the pets dps apart from the grouping.

As I said, I group with a warrior for the battle shout, with a melee shammy for bloodlust and his 10% AP buff, his agi and strength totem, and he also has something to increase nature damage, which I forgot about, but it seems to help my pets LB.
Normally I also have this feral druid in the group for 5% crit and some heals, but for Shade he switched to his warlock, so we had the easy mode with two warlocks on the elementals.

Adding all the multipliers a BM pet has, this sums up to some insane damage for the Pet.
This fight wasnt even 100% representative, because in the last minute Shade repositioned to the wall during a blizzard and my pet died, so there was some major dps lost.

As for the comment on "a bad night", that was only true for some members, not for me.

@Madscorl
Believe me, there is no way to do anything different on SSC trash then on just about any other trash. WWS has this nice feature, where you can pick any participant of any fight, lets say a trash mob and check his death. In his death view you see the last 30 seconds of combat log in that fight, which for trash mostly means its the full fight.
As in here:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...wyta&a=9&dth=7
In that place you get all the infos you need about what each player did.
In the near future the WWS guy will implement a complete combat log for each single player without the actions of other players. That will help a LOT to see exactly what other players are doing. Apart from that I dont think its possible to get anymore infos on any given fight.

For me WWS is the single best invention ever, because it shows every little mistake someone does in a raid. Not only dd's, but also tanks and healers. If hunters tell you they are doing everything they can and still have mediocre dps, you can just check out their logs. Have a look at their weapon speed, calculate how much shots have to be done in what time with that speed and check what they do instead. If people are playing with the blizz interface and miss about a second on each shot you got your 20-30% dps loss right there. And for the first time in 3 years now you can proove it.

 

Goreshot

To clarify, I reached my DPS without ever getting buffs for my pet beyond raid-wide buffs. Since I needed the Shadow Priest, I was almost always put in the healer/caster group instead. I'd imagine that if you tailor-made a group such that the BM hunter got a warrior, a feral druid, an enhancement shaman (dropping GoA, of course), and a shadow priest, you'd see some pretty crazy DPS. Of course, that would never happen.

 

Breakerone

Exactly, you will never get the shadow priest in this group because it makes no sense. He doesnt benefit from anything but my 3% and I would be the only one to benefit from him. So SP's are always in the caster group for better synergies, and thats where I dont want to be, because I cant get all group buffs but only mana and that can be countered with pots.

 

The Iron Colonel

Quick question on mana usage:

Last night I tried out BM for the first time (only Karazhan, so nothing too tricky in terms of pet handling) and I noticed that I was not really using that much mana. For example, whereas before on Prince (w/o a shadowpriest) I was chugging fel mana pots every cooldown, this time I only used 1.

My strategy was essentially to maintain the steady->auto rotation and just manage my cooldowns and haste procs without clipping (so I wasn't using arcane or multishot). I realize this is a low mana consumption rotation, but I'm not really seeing a huge benefit in wedging in a few arcanes for steadies throughout the fight, damage-wise. So my question is: why do I keep reading about BM being hard on mana? Am I doing something different/wrong?

 

Norwest

I disagree on putting a BM hunter in a shadow priest's group. You just don't benefit that much relative to other classes from a shadow priest. BM doesn't have the capability to burn through huge mana for huge damage relative to other classes. If you have a shadow priest, give the slot to a healer and ask them to throw the occasional hot on your pet. Keeping up mend pet constantly is a pretty big drain on your DPS.

I'd much rather be in the melee group, especially with Leader of the Pack. You are going to do much better stacking the raw damage. One of the reasons for this, is that a BM hunter has 2 strong characters that both benefit from group buffs. Rogues get 125AP from TSA, but BMs get 125RAP and 125AP on the pet. It's a very large buff to our group synergy since we essentially get twice the benefit from raid buffs.

On Gear:
I need to double check my math, so this is preliminary. The math leans more towards crit when compared to MM, but that could simply be because MM is very biased towards AP and I'm using numbers from my build with a very bad (15%) crit rate. Still it seems that BM leans towards AP compared to Blizzard's itemization costs. Does anyone have formulae for pet's AP especially how the pet damage modifiers affect it.

What? Really?! But... I... I'm going to take my ball and go home now.

 

Rius

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=eyuf4mecsy3fe&m

Quick Summary:

Ignore the fact that the damage spread between me and the rest of the raid is so vast >.>

Last night's Prince kill, 892 dps over 5 minutes, 41/20/0. I potted up to simulate 2.1 level buffs; had on an elixir of major agility and a mana oil, and a flask of relentless assault to basically simulate the new hunter's mark. Had Leader of the Pack, prot tank Battleshout for my pet, kings/wisdom/might for myself, kings/might for my pet.

It was a pretty easy fight, tank/melee only had to shift once and only about 10 yards, same for the ranged/casters. Of particular interest are the mana returns from my Mark of Conquest, Blessing of Wisdom, and Judgement of Wisdom; if I ever am in a situation where JoWisdom has that much uptime again, I'll swap out of Mark of Conquest. I only Super Mana potted once, and I don't even think I would have needed too. Feels like I was a little lax on using Arcane Shot/Multishot/Scorpid Sting, so I think my dps and mana consumption could both have been higher.


Of course, Prince is a great-case scenario. I never have to move apart from dodging infernals, my pet can't get Enfeebled, and Prince doesn't really have any significant AoE. But this is a good example of how BM spec CAN produce good numbers,