Mine were with a cat and 2/3 longevity. I'm 100% sure a scorp would have brought the dps up another 50-100dps easily.

Surv rotation was ES, steady x3

BM rotation was steady spam. With steady matching GCD I couldn't really see using anything else. Serpent sting does about 1400~ dmg and uses a GCD. On average a steady will do a LOT more dmg and use less mana. I really can only see serpent as viable for MM right now.

Ex

You must not spec Rapid Recuperation. It's extremely hard to drop below 90% mana while grinding mobs with it. It's making me consider leveling as MM.

I know this was briefly mentioned before, but I really need to say how great Gorillas are (as BM and MM/SV). In addition to being able to rally up 40 or more mobs on the southern BT entrance place and holding aggro on all (and almost killing them all solo), its great in heroics.

Me and a few mates went around doing all the heroics for the achievement, and my gorillas Thunderstomp was doing 50-60% of its damage. We basically pulled 1-2 packs at a time and AoEed them all down. Volley counted for around 40% of my damage for the night.

The downside however, is how often you need to Revive the thing when he pulls aggro on multiple mobs. Its normally fine, but when our paladin switched from Prot to Holy and our warrior began tanking, it got a bit worse. A Thunderstomp is around 2.5k threat non crit, without Bestial Wrath and Kill Command. With cooldowns, it can crit up to around 3k, which leads to very roughly 4-5(?)k threat.

In the end, the paladin just made my pet his Beacon of Light, and he shared tanking with the warrior during Bestial Wrath periods, lucky crits, etc.

Also for the record, add me on the list of people loving our new AoE abilities. By the end of the 15 or so heroics, I had almost doubled the mage's damage, who was second. We were all in Sunwell level gear, aside from the healer. Fun times!

Yeah, Serpent Sting won't be that awesome until you get the steady shot glyph, it will be worth it for everyone then.

On another note, I was planning to try out MM with a scorpid, just to see what it can do.
I was looking at a spec mainly and Im guessing its everything that gives dps and 7 points in BM for imp aoth and FF.
Regarding the scorpid, does Cobra Strikes affect the damage from scorpid poison?

Spec ideas and stuff would be welcome, I have read the entire thread but in the current phase the game is in info from even 3 days ago can be considered really old.

I'm pretty sure Cobra strikes is for auto's only. Not to sure how it would speed up a DoT.

I may have to give rapid recoup a try as doing dailies went from easy mode to a chore :-)

I'd suggest going 7 points in SV instead, just because you have your steady shot speed with quiver and windfury alone, making iaoth kinda lackluster.

*finishes catching up on 18 pages of posts*

Going back a few days; we had the problem with pets not attacking on brut too. What the other hunter and myself did was just put our pet on stay right next to the tank before the fight started, and no problem. If you forget (Our tank got pulvarized into a fine mist on one pull... in the laughter and taunting after, I forgot to take care of my pet), Eyes of the Beast the pet in. It only takes a sec. Or, just don't care about your pet DPS that fight.

I am curious about what folks are thinking about the Armor Pen talent. 6% armor pen stacked with what you have on gear, plus sunders and what-not... seems like it could be pretty useful? I'm not at home right now and admit to being lazy, but if I remember right they changed Armor Pen to all be percentage based, which means that this stat could become a kind of no brainer? No more "Hhmm. That boss in a clothie, Armor Pen is going to be way more beneficial on him than on this other guy." kind of thinking. Its just a flat 10% reduction in their armor for everyone.

Lately i'm having troubles getting pet to stop attacking target. It just wont stop, whether i press atack-recall macro, or switch him to defensive and back to passive. Anyone have similar problems?

I believe your gear / talent ArP % calculations get added after all the debuffs, meaning that if sunder armor / faerie fire w/e remove ~2k(do not know the real numbers) initial armor, your % only applies to the 5k left over which does nerf the stat

Do you have any macros, or otherwise force your pet abilities like claw? because even after recalling the pet and then forcing it to claw might order it to keep attacking.

Hm, alright. That makes sense I suppose.

Doing a little math just on the talent. PLEASE feel free to correct me. I'm still new at this "theorycrafting" thing. This isn't quite as disciplined and clean as other people. But, hey.. at least you can see my logic and point out where I'm wrong?

Assuming a boss with 7700 armor, and that Sunder Armor stacked to 5 still reduces the armor by 2600.

With my gear, I have 74 Armor Pen Rating. I'm in 4/8 T6 (pre-SWP Tier gear), badge ring and another ring with 18 armor pen.

According to info on WoWWiki.. 7.4 rating = 1% armor ignored. So I would have 10% armor ignored in my gear.

With Talent (16% armor ignored):
7700-2600 = 5100 * .84 = 4284 armor

Without Talent (10% armor ignored):
7700-2600 = 5100 * .1 = 4590 armor

Now... for working out the the DPS increase:

Mitigation of a boss at 73: (Armor / (Armor + 11960)) x 100

With Talent:
(4284 / (4284 + 11960)) x 100 = 26.37% mitigation.

Without Talent:
(4590 / (4590 + 11960)) x 100 = 27.73% mitigation.

DPS increase = ((With Talent damage Taken / Without talent taken) -1) * 100

So that works out to a 1.88% increase in damage for 3 talent points in my gear.

Cleaning this up, I think that the following formulas would work to figure this stuff out faster, assuming you have the maximum armor reduction debuff on the boss during your raid.

.... Right? Feel free to poke, prod and clean up.

And this is why I post and ask for prodding. Will change the calcs in my post to reflect this. Thanks!

There aren't really any mana problems as MM (or as anything else) currently, unless you're trying to squeeze in aimed/multi or volleys (the volleys are necessary on aoe fights, but single target steady does more damage than aimed/multi for just about everyone in 4pcT6 and no barrage).

Wow Web Stats

14.8k mana regenned just from JoW over a 3 minute brutallus, as MM. Compared to 15k over a 5.5minute fight from JoW a few weeks ago as BM - Wow Web Stats (edit: what that amounted to was, as BM I had to mana pot once and use a blessed weapon coating, and as MM I didn't pot and didn't use any mana oil/coating, but still finished with plenty of extra mana).

As fights get longer again (everything is trivially short right now), or if JoW gets nerfed mana will be a problem again, but raid buffed Viper still regens a ton of mana).

Does anyone believe aspect twisting will become something useful in the future?

Possibly Hawk on steady releases to Viper/Beast on autos.

I didn't see an answer to this in the previous Scorpid pet poison discussion, does the spell dmg component of the pet spell get affected by raid spell dmg buffs?

I believe that JoW is still bugged and doesn't have its 4 second internal cooldown, which is why you are seeing such a huge mana gain back from it. Unless I am mistaken and it was hotfixed, but from what I read, the case is it is still bugged.

Since you have that talent you are also likely to have Chimera and Imp Stings. Well, that just lowered the usefulness of that DPS increase by a considerable amount (Chimera and sting amount to what? 30% total?). Also the pet isn't affected, and while MM pets aren't BM powerful, they are not to be scoffed at as there are talents that do empower it in MM and the BM talents most MMs take.
So the actual power is decidedly low for three points.

GC about AotV:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - AOTV: not enough regeneration [9095]

Don't know how it is in PvE now, lets hope it's not too huge of a dps reduction, and if it is that it will be corrected if it pushes us under other classes.

Well GC's post once again displays that blizzard actually does have some grasp of the concepts that affect hunter dps. I am however worried about the last part of the second sentence there, it seems like blizzard might be thinking about nerfing hunter dps. Personally I've fealt that the numbers hunters were putting up at 80 was kinda out of control, 2k dps above the 2nd place dpser is pretty crazy, but I also feel like as gear levels get higher, other classes catch up to us faster which worries me for t8 and t9 instances. I guess its only worrisome speculation right now but I don't entirely like what I've seen from blue posts about or dps numbers, and with how easy the t7 content is, we'll be in t8 stuff before too long.

Anyway doom and gloom off, I'm wondering about the point allocation discussion for Cobra Strikes and Longevity with a scorpid and how it affects GftT point allocation. I think most of us have come to the conclusion that scorpids really are putting up the highest numbers for bm hunters right now, but it seems like we still haven't agreed on whats the best spec for that pet. Some people are saying 3/3 Long 1/3 CS, some are saying 1/3 Long 3/3 CS, and that doesn't even take into account 1/2 GftT or 2/2. I personally have seen the best numbers on test dummies with 2/2 gftt and 1/3 long and 3/3 CS but I haven't had a chance to test it with raid buffs and that makes a huge difference. I was also thinking that 3/3 long and 2/2 GftT might sort of off set each other considering that the only time I've seen problems keeping stacks up is when I go for a long string of no crits. So maybe going 1/2 gftt, 3/3 long, and 2/3 CS with 4/5 kindred might be an option. Basically I'm asking someone who has had the chance to play around with the spread sheet to see what type of numbers we can get at top SW gear with these different specs. If I had the ability to run the spread sheet I would, but not having excel really makes me want to kill a kitten (shameless begging for a OO version of the WotLK spreadsheet!). Sorry for the wall of text, let me know if anyone has some numbers out there.

I find it odd that when this viper change was first discussed GC on many occasion assured us that it was going to remain in parity with the regen the active viper gave us, in fact he said numerous times that they liked the way that viper worked for us in PvE currently and that the changes to it were to make it better for PvP also and not to nerf its effectiveness. Then outcomes the change that keeps us in viper 40% longer and the first response we get is that its being designed (nerfed) around the fact that they want to lower our dps?

Nice switch up there. A 100% about face. Went from "We are going to make it equal to the active version" to "We are going to downgrade it so you do less dps". Its a shame the thread went completely off topic after that, I really wanted to see if he could give some reasoning as to why the change to viper went from "Parity to its current form" to "A tool to lower hunter PvE dps". The change wasnt even supposed to be PvE focused at all, the entire purpose of them touching it was supposed to be for improving PvP. On top of that, running the numbers, the increased time we will need to be in viper is so substantial that this change is still going to do little to nothing for hunters mana problems in area, simply because the passive percentage is just far to small and the active portion is much weaker now as well.

It seems that the list of nerfs that were a BM hunter's bread and butter: (Steady Shot, Kill Command) along with the general messing with Aspect of the Viper has put us in a precarious position.

As for Aspect of the Viper, I've found that it's current functionality is improved for one thing only: Grinding and leveling. Pick a target, let your pet do the work and fire away till you get all your mana back -- seems I get my mana back faster with the new Aspect of the Viper than the old. In raids, PVP, and instances, you would want to avoid it at all costs unless you are completely out of mana. If your gear and raid composition is not mana-regen heavy and you have to regularly rely on Viper to restore your mana, then the drop in DPS is considerable.

The trouble with nerfing Hunters is simple. Other classes do many things. We kill stuff. Even an SV Hunter cannot keep up with most other classes in Crowd Control and given the choice between and SV hunter and another utility DPSer ... I'm not convinced that the SV Hunter is very high on people's priority list at this point. Take that in tandem with BM getting a bunch of DPS nerfs and Marksmen not exactly getting enough to put them up above the Warlock, Mage, Rogue, etc ... It is quite concerning that raid groups may soon overwhelmingly view the Hunter as a "slot filler" and lowest priority to pick up. Even the rogue can scout ahead and open locked chests for a raid. Hunter just kills stuff. Especially Marksmen and Beast Mastery. If the Hunter cannot snag top DPS honors consistently (or at least always be very close to the top), then we're about to get a lot less popular overall.

I'm trying to sort whether it is worthwhile to pick up Aimed Shot (as it is now an instant cast and still has very impressive damage). If so, working it into a shot rotation could be tricky. If your mana regen allows it, would it be advisable to work out a Steady Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot rotation? Serpent Sting still looks like a waste of mana and debuff slot to me. Do we keep Kill Command in the rotation or do we pair it with Beastial Wrath? Do we add Rabid and/or Wolverine Bite into a rotation macro? By the way, has anyone had any luck coming up with a working macro that works with the changes?

2 points of Go for the Throat and Rapid Killing are no-brainers. I'm continuing to notice that my pet is doing a lot more of my damage. Keeping up my pet's focus is more important than ever. The increased frequency of Rapid Fire is just as obvious as it has always been. Haven't completely sorted where to put points in the top of the BM tree -- except that 51 point builds pretty much suck no matter what. (Hope to see that change.)

Actually 1/2 in go for the Throat is more than enough when fully raid buffed. I have around 42% buffed, and pet's focus dump is only 25 focus (getting lowered to 20 in 3.0.3) so we will have waay more focus on our pet than it knows what to do with. BUT, for lvling 2/2 would be good cos t5/t6 geared hunters won't be replacing their gear any time soon in Lich King so their crit will go down each lvl.