They Re-added Aspect of the Beast in the latest Build. Can anyone think of a reason to use it? As it stands, it will add (10%) melee AP to the pet and the hunter. I think I'd practically prefer any other aspect.

Is there something here that I'm not seeing, or could this ability use an overhaul?

I will use it, but mostly for the same reasons that I'm using it on live - to stay untrackable in BG's when necessary. I find it useful often in BG's when I attack nodes etc, although it is hard to say how much difference it actually makes. I'm glad it did not disappear entirely, but the AP bonus does not really do anything.

As for using the AP bonus, with the aspects still triggering GCD there's no way I'll use it for my personal melee - only thing I can think of it is for pet tanking. Now I'm not familiar with how the pet's ap scales with our ranged ap, but it would be interesting to see if the melee ap bonus the pet gains from AotBeast is more than the ap it gets from us increasing our ranged ap with AotHawk.

Aspect of the Beast was never removed from beta. That was a data mining mistake by mmo-champion and the like.

I happen to think that if they are going to put a melee AP bonus on one of our aspects, why not Monkey, our melee aspect? What does being untrackable have to do with having increased melee attack power?

If aspects were off the GCD I can see maybe macroing this to raptor strike or whatever, but as it stands it won't be pulled out of my spellbook.

With our pets scaling so amazing and doing more DPS than the Hunter, Aspect of the Beast could very well be useful. 10% AP is nothing to scoff at for our pet. We would lose the ranged AP and iAotH procs though. Someone in beta should do some tests and see if AotB is worth using.

At my gear level (Hyjal/T5/SSO badges), AotB just *barely* increases the pet's attack power, but it does increase it. As we get better gear and Hawk becomes a smaller percentage of our total RAP, then we can expect AotB to make a larger impact on the pet's AP. Ironically, it seems to make the most difference when the pet and hunter are raid buffed, which is of course the least likely time anyone is going to switch to it.

Where does your pet do more dps than yourself? With BM I have around 950dps on a 70 dummy and my pet hast ~250.

There were reports of a pet doing roughly 55% of total damage at Patchwerk earlier in this thread.

If the RAP --> Pet AP conversion isn't changed, and is still 22%:
Aspect of the Hawk, at max, gives 300 RAP - 390 with Aspect Mastery.
This converts to 66 pet AP - 85.8 with Aspect Mastery.

Seeing as e.g. Greater Blessing of Might - Spell - World of Warcraft gives 550 AP, it shouldn't be too hard getting Aspect of the Beast to grant more pet AP than Aspect of the Hawk does. Do to the massive pet scalings for Beast Mastery, I could see pets gaining quite a lot from this aspect. The problem would be losing 300 RAP, as well as the Quick Shots proc. Most likely it won't be worth it, but it's an interesting train of thought. Exact comparisons would need some decent estimates for Hunter/Pet (raid buffed) stats.

It's almost strange that Aspect of the Beast is not affected by Aspect Mastery, in some way.

I am in no way a strong theroycrafter or excel in complex math equations, but I have been playing with some generalized numbers trying to determine a guideline for a shot rotation for the current BM spec involving more than Steady Shot spams. With GC stating that in the next build we will see Aimed Shot not reset Autos anymore, could it be possible to work Aimed Shot into a rotation effectively without jacking up DPS due to poor DPM. Below is a very quick attempt at some napkin math that maybe someone could expand on...

Ex: L.80 BM Hunter w/ 10,000 mana (5406 base mana)
No passive haste w/ 3.0 speed weapon (2.17 Autos)

12 sec. rotation cycle

5-6x Auto Shot @ 0% mana cost
6x Steady Shot @ 5% of base mana per shot = 1620 mana
1x Arcane Shot @ 7% of base mana per shot = 380 mana
1x Aimed Shot @ 8% of base mana per shot = 432 mana

Approx. 2432 mana spent per cycle over 12 sec.
5 possible rotations per 60 sec. = approx. 12160 mana spent
(Assuming replenishment accounts for the extra 2160 mana)

60 sec. straight DPS period before “OOM”

30x Steady Shots
28x Auto Shots
10x Arcane Shots
6x Aimed Shots

At this point my maths skills force me to actually use my brain to calculate the amount of DPS in 60 sec. period assuming 5 rotations of the above reflected 12 sec. shot cycle. Can anyone continue to elaborate on this or even correct the above assumptions if it looks to be off (which I assume it is slightly)...

What is the average AP/Crit for level 80 BM hunter in say Naxx 25?

EDIT: Fixed a few spelling/grammar errors

I just wanted clarification on Improved steady shot, if the 2nd part of the tooltip, which reduces the mana cost of aimed, arcane, and chimera shot by 20%. Is this affect based on an improved steady shot proc, or do you get the mana reduction all the time and an improved damage on a proc? I haven't seen mention of this in the couple threads I browsed.

I believe Aspect Mastery does not include AotB, because it was previously removed and thus eliminating any reason to buff it. Wouldn't the hunter himself be gimping himself quite a bit by not staying Hawk, since Aspect Mastery does provide a nice boost AP and assuming their is a TSA available the hunter would lose even more AP. How much would AotB boost the pet overall DPS approximately and would it be enough to offset the lose in hunter DPS?

Aspect of the Beast scales (has a 'plus percent').
Aspect of the Hawk does not scale (has a 'fixed amount').

Math will tell us that at some point, a scaling ability will eclipse a non-scaling ability. Our job is then to figure out where that breaking point is.

Now, assuming (for simplicity) that pet damage is exactly 50% of DPS, and 1 AP for a hunter boosts the hunter DPS by 1, and 1 AP for the pet boosts the pet DPS by 1. Thus, 1 AP for a hunter boosts total DPS by 1.22 and 1 AP for the pet boosts total DPS by 1.

As Lactose showed, AotH adds total 475.8 AP with Imp Aspects.

So, that means using AotB is best when:
X + (.22 * X) * 1.10 > 475.8 + X + .22 * X
Where X is the Hunter's AP. That gives me a value of 21,483.

Big Caveats
This doesn't include the DPS has proc from IAotH. - This would raise the break-even point.
This doesn't include direct buffs to the pet's AP (BoM, TSA). - This would lower the break-even point.
This doesn't include any natural AP a pet has. - This would lower the break-even point.
I'm assuming a straight 1 AP = 1 DPS. - Depending on actual values is where this could raise or lower the break-even point.

If I can get clarification on any of the Caveats, then I can modify the formula rather easily.

As someone previously mentioned, Beast was never actually removed from the beta/PTR - it just dropped off of Wowhead or whatever due to a data mining issue.

Can't say that seems like a very long time to me

The pet scales drastically better with ap than we do atm, due to the number of % modifiers being applied to them.

IIRC, the mana reduction only applies after the ISS proc. So say for Chimera with it's 10 second cd, you'll see increased damage and lower mana cost for every other Chimera.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't want anyone speccing Survival at this point.

I laughed.

Anyways, the perfect Aspect Mastery bonus for AotB would be pet specials hit 2-3 nearby secondary targets in addition to the first. I mean, if pets are supposed to be semi-viable tanks then that's the one thing that's still missing.

Also someone was commenting on how Efficiency was mandatory for marks builds: You would really have to have something against Arcane Shot for that to be true. Assuming that early SV manages to get salvaged, LnL seems designed explicitly for MM to dabble in to in favor of Aspect Mastery.

They should have AotB dismiss the pet and add it's base HP, AC and *melee* AP as a buff to the hunter. Now THAT would be a good beastie aspect. It's not unprecidented, locks are getting demon form, and droods get a similar buff from going bear form...

I think that was referring to one of my posts. The way I see it, MM has the biggest mana issues and the only ways to lessen the hurt are through Improved Steady, Rapid Recuperation, and Efficency. If you dropped Efficiency, your time till OOM goes down by 10%. Meaning more time in Viper, meaning less damage overall. I think that's especially true considering the damage talents in deep MM you'd have to forgo to pick up Lock n' Load along with all the utility/filler talents you'd have to pick up as well.

Wouldn't it make more sense to at least put 7 into BM to pick up Focused Fire and dump more points into MM?

Anyhow, all of this is going under the assumption that 51 points just isn't enough to get all relevant talents in MM. That leaves very little wiggle room to go very far into BM or SV.

GC answers some questions:

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> @ Devs Q&A - Shoo away the QQers



... but it looks like nothing was really answered. The GCD answer seems dumbed down, like we were expecting some kind of .1 GCD or something. The dodge answer seems really... dodgy, because rogues are able to enjoy very high dodge rates with their agility.

Agreed. Taking GC at her word, the logic here is:

1. Agi grants dodge
2. Hunters value agi more than (most) other classes
3. Hunter gear has a great deal of agi
4. Therefore, hunters should have an extremely low base dodge

By anything remotely resembling parity, rogues should have the same penalty. Although, really, I don't think that's what's going on here. I think the design model, probably lingering from way back into vanilla, holds that hunters should be badly (read: fatally) penalized for being in melee. The onus is then on the hunter to keep out of melee. The problem, of course, is that while that model worked then, it fails now. There are simply too many closers, and too few answers, and responses like GC's pet-rezzing reply make me concerned that they don't see that (being able to start a pet rez before the pet dies wouldn't make us spend enough time "gimped"? yikes!).