◊ arison

No argument it is convenient, but it won't increase DPS. Proper play on your part (feeding before hand, and not letting it die) makes the actual tangible gain minimal. Seriously, in most fights, if your pet is dying, it's your fault. As for incidental healing, I think you'll find Chain Heal takes care of your pet far more often than mend pet or even bloodthirsty. Not to mention Improved Leader of the Pack.

 

Vilyah

Is rabid still only working if your pet is being attacked? While ok when leveling, this won't do much in raids, and in which case wouldn't putting a point in bloodthirsty or CotW be better?

 

Khassandra

It only autocasts while the pet is being attacked. Putting it in a shot macro works fine.

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

 

Chul

I discussed this a few pages back.

 

KraxisSingular

You do know that it is a lot less effective healing than Bloodthirsty right?
With Frenzy going our pets attackspeed is at around 0.99 (0.825 with WF), add to that specials at least every 1.5 seconds (seeing that odd 1.25 second specials does change it). That means our pet get healed for 5% every 2-3 seconds (on average every 2.6 seconds with WF totem). That's pretty huge, and way more than 4% every 6 seconds (ignoring the time to crit after the CD is up). Not Chain Heal huge, but enough to keep the pet up for most fights. For my pet it is around 150 hps (don't forget Spirit Bond for BM pets). That's close to Mend Pet, but passively and adding happiness.

I would say that relying on Chain Heal alone to help us is not effective. With the current mana issues Resto Shamans have, or at least had, then I think we will see less Chain Heals at 70, remember downranking is dead, so it will be fewer but bigger. That was what kept them going for so long and effectively able to stream those Chains. Now they will likely need to cut back a bit, leading to fewer jumps to our pets, and more risks of it dying. The basic thing is, we can't rely on Chain Heal anymore, not as effectively.

While pets dying is often the result of us not handling them well, it is not that rare they die because they just didn't get enough heals in an intensive situation. And pets die. Sometimes there is just no reasonable explaination for it. RNG, DoTs, bleeds, whatever. They happen. So dying pets are not unusual, Bloodthirsty adds better happiness than glyphed Mend Pet. So it is better on that point. And we don't need to spend mana on it.

Remember Rage? DnD is often just enough to force you to pull the pet back. And at your side it gets no heals besides Mend Pet. Bloodthirsty would enable it to stay in regardless as there is little else to kill it. Similar with Nightbane for instance. As it is we can't expect our pets to stay alive with Mend Pet alone in a Scorched Earth, with Bloodthirsty we can.
It adds more than just 'pfft heals'. In the perfect situation we won't ever need it, and we shouldn't want to need it. But we all live in an imperfect world and we raid in an even more imperfect world. I know from experience that I can't rely on external heals. If you have it so nicely that you can basically knock back with Mend Pet going, then more power to you. But I hope you understand it isn't like that for everyone. If Bloodthirsty means my pet can stay in longer or removes the need to recall it, then it is certainly a DPS increaser.

If it turns out we can just forego Bloodthirsty, then sure. But at this time I don't think so. If our pets don't need that much healing, then dropping one point would be logical (if it dies then 1/2 Bloodthirsty should still be send it back to max fairly quickly).

 

Shandara

There's also Glyph of Mend Pet, although I have not tested it myself.

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

Ristoril

Not 100% sure but the glyph of mend pet only did 20 happiness on the inital application an nothing more. Now my pet could have been close to full happiness when i tried it so it only added 20 happiness and no more. Guess it will be something to check tomorrow if people get inscription up fast and glyphs on the AH for non retarded prices.

 

Esoth

Weighing in on the Bloodthirsty argument, I see it as a DPS talent. Not just for if your pet dies, but, and maybe this is just me being bad and not feeding my pet just before the pull, I have had several times when the pet goes yellow a couple minutes into the fight. On long fights like Illidan or Kael'thas, it never seems to maintain happiness. You're also saving mana and GCDs that you might have to spend on mend pet - not necessarily a factor on random spike damage, but on more predictable damage you can be fairly confident that your pet will have time to heal up before the next bit of damage. As an example, and I know it's not as powerful as T5, but in T5 I used to keep my pet in through Zul'jin's whirlwind because he would heal back to 100% before the next one came. That means I neither have to spend GCD time nor force my pet to stop attacking while the whirlwind happened. It was a significant dps gain.
* less GCD time
* less mana spent, thus less time in Viper
* less chance of happiness fading
* able to keep pet attacking through weak aoe without having to cast mend pet and/or call back.
Unless you have absolutely ideal cases, I can't help but seeing it as a DPS talent.

That said, I think 1/2 Bloodthirsty may be reasonable. In beta I can tame a new pet and have it kill just a couple mobs to get from unhappy to happy - that may be a bit excessive.

 

TrevvyTrev

No, it doesn't add dps, but I suppose my point is that it's one thing to mention that a talent doesn't add dps and another entirely to suggest that it's a "waste of points" because it doesn't add dps. As Kraxxis explained, Bloodthirsty can be the difference between never using Mend Pet in a fight and using it, which actually is a dps increase if you replace those casts with dps actions.

And yeah, while a dead pet is usually my fault (and a dead tank is the healers' fault, and a loose mob is a tank's/cc'ers fault and a financial crisis is Wall Street's fault), the fact remains that all of these things still happen, and buying some insurance in the form of a talent point or two can be worthwhile depending on who you are. Chain heal is great, but sometimes the shaman dies through some unlucky event or maybe they didn't show up that day and we have more paladins or something.

Maybe it all boils down to my being a stickler for language precision. Too often we find ourselves saying things like "x is not viable" or "y is worthless" when we really mean to say things like "x is not optimal" or "y is outperformed by something else.""

 

Esoth

Not sure if anyone has done any testing on volley, but I tried it to try to find out what the AP conversion was (I don't think it has one on live?). I found it to be somewhere around 8.36%. It was also scaling with Ranged Weapon Specialization and Focused Fire - plus it can crit. Not bad - I was doing about 2.8k dps on three test dummies (level 70) in Orgrimmar on my premade... It also has an animation change that makes it look like you are also firing auto shots, but Recount and the combat log only showed volley damage.

 

Airraid

I was under the assumption that you continued to fire auto shot on your primary target whilst you channeled volley. In fact I'm pretty certain of it; I soloed at least a dozen baron runs on the PTR using nothing but a gorilladin with volley spam and I'm sure auto shot was being cast.

 

◊ Lactose

Went on the beta to test.

How I tested/how to reproduce my results:
1. Attack target dummy (Auto Shots only).
2. While Auto Shot is doing its thing, use Volley.
3. Observe damage reports (combat log, recount, combat text above selected target).

Nothing indicated Auto Shot firing during the channeling of Volley.
To make this more apparent, in 2. you could use Volley away from any targets/training dummies, making sure all reported damage is in fact Auto Shot damage.

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

 

Esoth

I just tested again, starting off with auto shot and then making sure volley never dropped (so as to avoid an auto attack in between channeling for testing purposes). I only had the one auto shot I did before starting volley. Again, the animation that looks like auto shot continues, I just wasn't actually auto shooting.

 

KraxisSingular

Damn... But I suppose that was just too good to be true. I can just imagine the Mage/lock tears if we could keep Auto shooting the boss while AoEing around it on the little spawns.
Well, credit where credit is due. Blizzard finally gave us a real AoE ability that is useful. I am going to love it I think. Gonna try the Gorilladin (god I love that term, so fitting) approach with Survival (Explosive-Volley sequence), heck I think I will try each spec to see what strikes my fancy in this regard. Too bad I lack T5S2 for the perfect setup. Them ore you get the more effective you are.

Btw, can Volley proc Thrill of the Hunt? Yeah I know, unlikely, but that would be awesome.

 

Esoth

Specced SV to try out some of the procs. I channeled the full duration several times, facing away from the test dummies to ensure I didn't accidentally trigger an auto shot and skew results. Expose Weakness DID proc from this. Master Tactician, Thrill of the Hunt, and perhaps most importantly Replenishment did NOT proc. I also tried at max range as well as standing right next to the dummies to see if sniper training made any difference - it did not.

I'm not sure how much any of this matters for anything - except for the loss of replenishment on aoe situations. That seems to be the biggest issue in my opinion.

 

Nakari

Well, Hunting Party most certainly shouldn't proc, as it's description clearly state only Steady Shot, Explosive Shot and Arcane Shot criticals proc the Replenishment effect. The wording on TotH also seems to rule out Volley, as it states ".. of any shot when it critically hits." (Volley isn't a shot).
Expose Weakness procs from "ranged criticals", and Master Tactican from "successful ranged attacks", which should theoretically include Volley... if MT does indeed not proc, it might be worthy of a bug report.

 

Esoth

I'll confess to not having read the descriptions that well. Everything you said makes sense. The problem is, the bug report icon disappeared from my UI a couple days ago. How do I report a bug with my UI for reporting bugs? o.o

 

Airraid

It must be bugged at the moment, as it's worked for me previously. In fact a quick scout of the WotLK bug report forums indeed confirms that people have reported the bug of auto shot not working while Volley is being channeled.

There are a few posts out there that confirm that it did work, such as the below from BigRedKitty:

Posted here BigRedKitty Gorillas in the Ramparts and here BigRedKitty: Gorilla - WOW Insider

Purely from a design point of view too, if they never had any intentions of adding auto shot to volley then why would they have changed the animation to incorporate it?

 

Quilde

How are we feeling about marks? if its dps does end up being below BM will it be worth taking for glyphed trueshot aura?

And regarding specs, it seems a little messy and questionable. A few things come to mind:

Is one hunter putting 3 points in Improved Hunters Mark still viable? Its seems possible in a marks build.
Is arcane, aimed or multi going to play and role in our rotations? Or is it just serpent, steady and chimera?
Is piecing shots worth the points or just vital to get lower? Same goes for wild quiver

I'm thinking maybe something along these lines http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunt...10053105010351

Any thoughts?

 

Sebudai

I don't think Improved Hunter's Mark is worth it at level 70 unless you have at least 4 hunters in the raid. I'm currently not planning on using Arcane Shot, Aimed Shot, or Multi-Shot(unless it's hitting 2-3 mobs) in my rotation. Also, according to the spreadsheet, Piercing Shots is an absolutely terrible talent. It's around 5 dps per point. Wild Quiver is pretty average, but not terrible.

I had a post a few pages back that listed the dps value of each talent based on my current gear. Dunno if that's helpful to you.

This is the spec I'm planning on: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

• Intermission

It's been suggested that they took off the Blizzard Feedback UI from the latest beta version as they plan to use that version as the live 3.0 release.

I recommend the Bug Report forum.

 

Cobrakai

would scorpid poison be worth putting in a steady shot macro instead of leaving it on autocast? has someone attempted this with claw on autocast and found the sp uptime to be comparable to turning claw off and autocasting sp?

 

Mikari

I have the feedback UI in my beta version, I'm pretty sure that is why the beta and last PTR versions were slightly different builds 9056 vs 9061.

 

Aern

Actually the most impressive thing about call of the wild is the fact that it stacks with everything right now, even other call of the wilds. We were running 5 bm hunters in a naxx run the other night all of us syncing our first call of the wild to start the fight while using CDs. Some of us were sporting a massive 11k+ rap at the time, its not something thats very practical for raids right now since most guilds won't bring near that many hunters (mine will only bring 2 and might not bring that now that SV is garbage). But its definitely a huge increase and alot of fun.

 

• Intermission

Yeah sorry, I meant his PTR version.