Cranch

Not mocking, just pointing out that EJ hunter theorycrafters represent only a small portion of the hunter population. I like my albino Devilsaur (a lucky spawn!), I'm just unlikely to ever bring it out of my stables...

 

Khassandra

I have the albino devilsaur, as well as the white corehound, white silithid and a rhino. Mock away, because I adore my rhino and silithid. I'm quite upset that they nerfed the size of the corehounds to half what they were. If they are going to start taking away the coolness factor of the exotics, the 51 point talent definitely won't be worth it.

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"I've always wondered what it'd be like to have a prehensile penis, but you don't see me shitting up this thread with my idea." - Kaubel

 

Steelfleece

Well, in my opinion, they really should move the extra pet talent points to somewhere else in the tree (to me, Animal Handler seems rather weak for its place in the tree now, given that Focused Aim as Tier 1 MM will give both the pet AND you hit%, so I say drop the hit% from Animal Handler and put the extra pet skill points there, 2/4) and improve the secondary effect of the BM talent rather than actually changing exotic pets in any way.

I dunno, just throwing out that if the 51-point BM talent gave the pet an extra X% of RAP as AP (10-15%?), an extra X% of our Stamina (15-20%?) and an extra X% (20-30%?) of our Armor it'd certainly look more attractive.

As is, it was said that the original power of the BM 51-pointer was to be in the 4 pet skill points, and I'm not thinking that's really the case at the moment (even for Tenacity or Cunning pets, when compared to what Explosive and Chimera Shot bring to their trees). An alternate solution might be to stick some talents in the pet talent trees that improve scaling. I'd definitely like a way to improve pet scaling, at any rate, to make sure that pets don't fall too far behind once we start upgrading gear.

 

Catalept

TBH, at the rate things are shaping up "Exotic Pet Taming" should just be a Major Glyph (and exotic pet abilities tuned accordingly), and the 51-point BM talent completely revamped. I'm not sure that yet another scaling talent is a good idea... perhaps giving the pet unlimited focus for a few seconds when Arcane Shot crits, or something along those lines.

 

Steelfleece

As you reach higher levels of crit, Go for the Throat should enough focus. I think a more straight-forward solution to define that a 51-point BM pet (Exotic or not) is better than any other is in order.

 

dssurge

So, I'm in a search for the absolute optimal DPS rotation and talent selection for a Marks build, so I'm just going to make a quick post and see what bounces back.

This post is based around this spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Glyphs: TSA, Steady Shot and Aimed Shot

The general idea behind this spec is to use Aimed shot in a PvE-centric rotation, partially using Imp. SS and taking advantage of the added damage bonus on Marked for Death which should produce more damage than a 5x Steady -> Chim rotation. The rotation I came up with was very simply: Chim -> Steady -> Aimed -> 3x Steady, all with Serpent up obviously. Sub-20% priority goes to Kill Shot over Aimed.

The 2 parts of this that I'm trying to optimize are:
- Aimed Shot's location in the rotation. I put it after a single Steady on the off-chance Imp. SS would proc, but this makes me wonder if it's worth using the Imp. SS proc on the Aimed shot or to save it for Chim would be more beneficial. This will require live testing. Probability formulas, which don't get along well with RNG, would suggest that 3 steadies would have ~37% chance of proccing Imp. Steady whereas 4x Steady would be around 60%. Completely hypothetical, and almost impossible to prove or test reliably.
- If Aimed shot is indeed a more viable option in this rotation than say, Arcane shot, which is also dealing more damage than Steady Shot, also has a mana reduction glyph, and takes advantage of Natural Instincts and raid spell damage debuffs. Obviously the Spec would change to accommodate Imp. Arcane over Piercing Shots.

So, I have a few factors to account for, and as far as my limited testing has gone I find it very hard and impractical to test this in a non-raid scenario. The Hunter spreadsheet is also not advanced enough yet to use the suggested rotation nor pop cooldowns at appropriate intervals, etc. Mana consumption is also not effectively factored into DPS totals.

Now for some quick napkin math, the idea behind which is to optimize talent allocation in order to pick between Arcane and Aimed. In order for Aimed Shot to scale at the rate of Arcane Shot's damage (asuming 3.0 speed weapon) requires the target to have 30% damage reduction, and I can't really tell if itemization will allow for this. Another inherent flaw with the target dummies vs. real raid data. The damage provided to Arcane Shot from Curse of Elements should be partially offset by the 10% additional crit damage from Marked for Death on Aimed shot, again relevant to Crit rate.

I'm going to be leveling my Hunter up on Beta this week (assuming I can even transfer it, queues full) to hopefully get some more accurate testing done, but it feels somewhat futile with the Hunter class in the state of flux it has been for the last few months of fundamental class changes.

 

• Nisu

dssurge: there's just one problem with your idea. Aimed Shot scales terribly. If I did my math right, Aimed Shot does less damage that Steady Shot at ~780 AP, and only gets weaker past that. It also costs nearly double what Steady Shot does before being glyphed. It does benefit from Marked for Death and Improved Steady Shot, but it can't proc Improved Steady Shot, and from running some DPS tests I found that I could fire enough Chimera Shots to account for most of my Improved Steady Shot procs, making it a waste to use the buff on the much softer-hitting Aimed. Hasted, Steady and Aimed are both GCD-limited, so there's no advantage to Aimed Shot unless you're moving, in which case Arcane Shot is a cheaper, lower-cooldown ability that costs less mana, ignores armor, benefits from CoE, and can be further improved through talents. Finally, Glyphing for Aimed Shot prevents you from being able to Glyph for AotViper, which is a much more powerful Glyph.

As a disclaimer, I didn't do any rigorous math for this, so I could be off, but some quick napkin math basically says that at its current state, Aimed is dead as a PvE ability except as a last resort GCD burn if you're moving and your other instants are on cooldown.

 

Mikari

Are people planning on picking up focused aim as BM? I can't really see where I can spare the points.

 

Gorah

Seeing how good pets are with their double dipping, I've been pondering something along those lines: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

It's a MM/BM build, I haven't been playing with spreadsheets yet, but it's not completly impossible that putting some talents into pet dps won't be quite beneficial, seeing how they scale with all the buffs. I'm going to check it once I will get out from work, but I was curious if anyone has tried this kind of the build in beta already.

 

Enova

I'd go something along the lines of 55/16/0 or 49/22/0

 

TrevvyTrev

Going back to pets not autocasting Rabid for a moment, while it's very possible (perhaps even likely) that it's a bug, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is a (short-term?) hack to deal with some pet AI issues. Pets used to autocast Rabid without being attacked -- in fact, several people posted that cats would always break their own prowl by autocasting Rabid. It could very well be that they tried to "fix" this by changing it so that pets wouldn't cast Rabid until attacked, which would of course solve the prowl-breaking problem. In leveling/aoe situations you wouldn't notice a difference, and they might have just overlooked those times when the pet is doing damage and not getting attacked (or decided that it was worth manually casting in those situations).

Now I know this isn't the most elegant solution by any means, but there could have been some technical issues with the alternatives or just plain old miscommunication. This theory also explains why Maeven [sp?] seemed to indicate that the behavior was on purpose instead of "that's odd, I'll look into it" or something similar.

 

Midnight

I´m using almost the same spec on beta - most notable diffrence being that instead of Ferocuty I put 4 points into Improved Tracking which, according to the spreadsheet, should give you slightly better returns (assuming the target is trackable).

Concerning pet autocasting - I put Rabid into my steady shot macro and call of the wild into my trinket/rapid fire etc macro which works pretty fine for me.
The biggest issue I have with autocast right now is actually pet specials turning autocast on on their own if I don´t have them on my petbar. This became apparent when I put prowl off the petbar (with autocast turned off) and at some point my cat just started to prowl again for no obvious reason. Needless to say autocast was turned on again. Ironically this forces me to put every special I don´t want to use on my pet bar while leaving those I do want to use (and that don´t fit at the ba any more) in my spellbook hoping autocast works and doesn´t turn off the same way others turn on.
To be honest, the whole restriction to 4 pet specials on the pet bar seems like a relic of WoW 1.0 to me anyway.

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Gurth

I was considering going for a MM spec with lnl. The free arcane shots seems a nice addition considering serpent sting should be up on boss full time and will allow to grab improved tracking, hawk eye and survival instinct aswell. Improved arcane shot + survival instinct should help scale as good as steady shot so when lnl proc you use gcd for it instead of steady saving mana.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=00000000000000000000000000531003201000300000000000000000530513123201005310522 0351]

The 2 points in wild quiver are spare points. I'm still not sure where to spend those to have the best out of the spec, but i'm not a big fan of efficiency these days, looks like you will need to go in viper aspect a lot anyway, might as well get the most in the time you are out of it.

 

Kaejin

I'm not sure that leaving out GftT or Kindred Spirits is ever a good idea. An extra 20% damage for pets speaks for itself, and as for GftT, I don't think there's been a time yet in beta where any pet I've used hasn't been near-instantly consuming all of the focus it has. I know hit% is a powerful stat, but does 3% make up for the DPS of either of those talents?

I was having this problem with cower when I first started playing on my friend's beta account. I was pulling aggro from my pet with the first few shots and could not figure out why my pet was so bad at holding aggro. I realized that every time I had to resummon him, all of the abilities in his spellbook would go back to having autocast turned on unless they were on the bar.

I was pretty excited to figure out how to fix my pet's aggro problems at first. Then I finally started to fight some mobs and manage to pull aggro within a few seconds with cower off anyway.

 

Shandara

I was testing Rabid a bit more on the Beta and I was worrying that I never seemed to reach a 5-stack at all. Also, the increases were very slow, despite my pet always having enough focus for Claw spam.

So I tried a little experiment. First I turned of all pet abilities and just let him melee. Sure enough with Rabid activated the pet'd usually reach 3-4 stacks before it falling off. With parries/dodges and such that's not unusual.

Then I positioned my pet next to the dummy and manually spammed Claw while it was on passive and told to stay. This will not initiate the pet's normal melee attacks.

Now the curious thing. Try as I might I could not get Rabid to proc a stack with spamming Claw at all. I must've tried for 20 mins to get it to proc, but to no avail. On the other hand, triggering Rake manually (I was using a cat) did make the pet autoattack. So I was unable to test whether Rake does in fact proc Rabid.

Can anyone try it and confirm?

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

Khassandra

This has been driving me nuts with my rhino's stampede, too. Its not on my petbar and I turn it off in the spellbook, but it seems every time he is summoned or resurrected, its back on again. I love it for soloing but I normally play with an enhancement shaman who then has to go chasing after the mob once the rhino sends it flying. I didn't think of putting it on the petbar and turning it off. Thanks, I'll try that. Man, the workarounds we always have to figure out!

http://fdwde.wordpress.com/

"I've always wondered what it'd be like to have a prehensile penis, but you don't see me shitting up this thread with my idea." - Kaubel

 

Ketari

I ended up at ~900AP, but basically I agree. This also applies to multi-shot on single targets, of course.

 

• Nisu

For those of you having autocast issues, it's possible to macro autocast toggling, so something like

/petautocastoff Cower
/petautocaston Growl
/petattack

(this was my leveling pet attack macro when Cower wouldn't stay off) can be adapted to make sure autocast is in the correct state.

 

◊ Lactose

Steady Shot and Aimed Shot both have a 20% RAP component, an AmmoDPS component and a static bonus damage component.
Aimed Shot does not scale any worse than Steady Shot (excluding specific boosts to either skill, e.g. 4 piece T6, glyphs, etc.). Aimed Shot actually scales slightly better with crit than Steady Shot does, due to the static bonus being higher on Aimed Shot.

The same is true for Multi-Shot.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

Ketari

I'm not seeing a static 20% AP boost in my testing. Aimed and Multi are scaling, but with less than 20%.

I'd note that my results from mobs is inconsistant from the ones with the training dummies - I'm refering to my results on mobs here. The training dummy results are currently showing NO scaling.

Even if you're right, Lactose, the terrible damage per mana dooms it for pve.

 

Kinv

Is Wild quiver really that bad for DPS that everyone is skipping it?

 

Cranch

I didn't in my 1/53/7 MM build for lvl 70. I'd wait until we see what patch 3.0.2 really is before worrying too much.

 

sjogren

I did some napkin math with the following assumptions:
* autoshot is 30% of my dps
* mob armor is 25% reduction
With those assumptions, Wild Quiver ends up being a 2% damage increase (0.10 * 0.50 * 30 / 0.75) for three points. Far from the 1-2% per point their "budget" is, but I've found that's the case with most hunter talents. (Probably because we have so goddamn MANY damage-increasing talents and few utility talents...)

 

Donitsu

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunt...10000000000000

I'd say that's a solid spec considering what we're looking at. I didn't feel like throwing the extra point in beast mastery, so i threw it in invigoration.

 

mako

Is there any particular reason you chose to give up 20% pet damage as well as only put 3/5 in frenzy in order to get an extra TBW every 3 minutes?

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