(Also First-time poster) A discrepancy of 5 dps is most likely due to a variance in procs from one test to another. While you can statistically presume that Quick Shots, DST, SSO neck, etc. will proc X number of times in Y minutes, that is ultimately a percentage and not a promise. The same thing applies to crits or even the damage an individual shot does. If, on the other hand, you were to see a discrepancy of 100 or more DPS, then you would really have some questions to ask.

Will different ranks stack? Say one person does 1/3 next does 2/3 and the ret pally arua is a straight 3%?

If you are always going to have a ret pally it may be viable to drop FI completely and put points elsewhere. I know there are not huge DPS gains at FI or lower that we don't already take, but improved survivability is good too.

Going to try stacking different ranks tonight (I am sure it wont work, but its worth a shot)

Well, it appears the mana situation is a bit more complicated now. People are moaning about JoW, and WF totem gone and a slightly nerfed total from Viper. Invigoration might actually be a good idea suddenly. And if that is a good idea, then Ferocious Inspiration is too. Just too bad it provides nothing outside ret-less situations. Suddenly Invigoration is a 5 point talent. Pretty costly I would say.

In a 50/21/0 build, you have basically 4 points to distribute between Invigoration, Longevity, and Cobra Strikes, because Kindred Spirits is far superior to either Longevity or Cobra Strikes for DPS, and you can get both 2/2 Invigoration and 5/5 Kindred Spirits. Whether Invigoration is better for DPS than either Longevity or Cobra Strikes depends on how mana-starved you are, but generally speaking if you have to AotV during a fight, Invigoration is more DPS.

3/3 Cobra Strikes offers roughly a 2% (Hunter+Pet) DPS boost when using a Scorpid or a Cat. Longevity is a harder talent to model because its effectiveness fluctuates wildly with the exact length of the fight. Generally speaking, for a 50/21/0 build with a Scorpid, 3/3 Longevity gives you just above a 2% DPS boost on sustained fights (when you figure in the 10% fewer Claw attacks on the Scorpid with 3/3 Longevity in 3.03).

However, dropping to 2/3 Longevity will lose you most of that DPS boost. This is because 3/3 Longevity gives you an extra BW at the 3 min mark, whereas 2/3 Longevity will delay your Rapid Fire and Readiness for 30 sec in order to squeeze in that extra BW, which turns out to be a wash with just popping RF then Readiness right at the 3 min mark (which you can do with 0/3 Longevity).

2/2 Invigoration 2/3 Cobra Strikes, 1/2 Invigoration 3/3 Cobra Strikes, 1/2 Invigoration 3/3 Longevity, 1/3 Cobra Strikes 3/3 Longevity are all options. Cobra Strikes increases your mana regen with Invigoration, but Longevity offers more utility outside of pure DPS. Both talents offer roughly the same raw DPS at 3/3. Which offers the best overall DPS depends on how mana-starved you are in a given situation.

With 2/2 Animal Handler, the average MB damage bonus over time is roughly 8.352% with 0/3 Longevity, which only goes up to roughly 8.537% with 3/3 Longevity. For pets with non-DoT specials, Cobra Strikes generally offers superior DPS to Longevity.

Luckily if you're gonna be picking up a devilsaur you'll probably have quite a few extra points to play around with in the BM tree. If you're not going for readiness sinking a whole bunch of extra points into MM will probably end up being less dps then filling out invigoration longevity and cobra strikes. Imp tracking and maybe even survival instincts might be another alternative to sinking points into marks if you're 51 in bm, but from my testing on beta I didn't really see a significant dps increase, although most tests were pretty bland and unsophisticated.

I'd really like to figure out why scorpid poison is doing so much damage and if that will be carrying over into raiding at 80. Some people have floated around the idea that scorpid poison is somehow using the level 80 formula to calculate its damage but I've seen no actual evidence to prove that theory. If it does infact carry over to 80, I really don't see it being realistic to use any other pet, the dps is only going to increase with drastically higher AP for both hunters and their pets. I personally like having scorpid poison be huge amazing dps, but if blizz keeps seeing nothing but scorps in raids, they're sure to nerf it (who wants to fix something when they can just slam it with a nerf anyway?). So figuring out whats going on might be a good idea so we can prepare for a potential nerf instead of just having it dropped on us outta the blue in a hotfix.

Unfortunately I still don't have excel so I can't test this stuff, so I'm really only providing info based on my experiences from beta so alot of this is also just speculation. I guess this is my shameless begging again for a OO version of the new spreadsheet, I really am getting the shakes not being able to play around with the numbers.

I was just sitting in shatt experimenting with aspects when I discovered aspect of the beast is currently bugged in 3.0.3. Without any aspects on, I have 836 AP on my pet. When I turn on Aspect of the Beast, the expected amount would be 836 * 1.1 = 919.6, but the actual amount of AP my pet has with beast on is 1012.

After looking around at buffs, it appears to be double stacking the buff as the buff is on the hunter as well as the pet, allowing it to double dip for the AP. 110% * 110% = 121%. 121% * 836 = 1011.56. It matches up.

With this bug, could it mean that aspect of the beast is a raid viable aspect to use? 21% pet AP seems to me like it could be a lot after raid buffs.

Aspect of the Beast only affects the hunter's melee attack power though. Pets get their AP from the hunter's ranged attack power according to the in-game tooltip.

Using some numbers according to the WotLK spreadsheet(version 76g), I began to work out some numbers of how much beast would change my DPS.

No aspect: 3186.57
Hawk: 3342.45
Difference: 155.88

So in order for Aspect of the Beast to surpass Hawk, I would need to gain 155.88 DPS from using beast. What I did to get the damage here is I took the AP bonus, and multiplied it by 121%, then took all the other calculations exactly the same. The initial numbers come from not having any aspects on and calculating the damage with an additional 21% pet AP.

Damage gained per pet white hit: 759.51 - 644.85 = 114.66
Damage gained per claw: 711.56 - 588.08 = 123.48
Damage gained per initial rake: 987.31 - 828.41 = 158.9
Damage gained per rake tick: 627.04 - 525.07 = 101.97

Assuming a rake every 10 seconds and 7 claws inbetween, total damage gained from specials in 10 seconds is 7(123.48) + 158.9 + 3(101.97) = 1329.17, or 132.917 DPS.

With white hits, my pet has an average attack speed of .80 according to the spreadsheet. 10/.8 = 12.5 attacks every 10 seconds. 12.5(114.66) = 1433.25 damage gained over 10 seconds, for a total of 143.325 DPS.

143.425 + 132.917 = 276.242. So I would gain 276.242 DPS from using Aspect of the Beast over no aspect at all. I would gain 155.88 DPS from using hawk over no aspect according to the spreadsheet again. 276.242 - 155.88 = 120.362 DPS gained from using Aspect of the Beast instead of Aspect of the Hawk.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be a nice gain in DPS.

A gap that big would be easy to see on test dummies. I would suggest some testing.

someone still use the scorpid or everybody switch to the cat ?

on dummies 70, 5 stacks poison tick for ~490 to 505 dmg (depend if FI is up or not)

i'm 50/11 spec with 7/8 T6.

Test results on a level 70 target dummy. I took off all my proc items so the only procs I had were IAotH, cobra strikes, FI, and frenzy. I DPSed until OOM each time, which was about 65 seconds for each run. Format is (Total DPS / Pet DPS)

Stats without an aspect on: 749-910 damage range, 1.96 speed weapon(53 haste), 2323 RAP, 140 hit, 113(15.26%) ArP rating, 32.40% crit, using badge bow and blackflight arrows. Hunter spec used.
Pet stats: Cat, 815 AP, pet spec

With Hawk on:
Test 1: 1416.1 / 479.2
Test 2: 1401.9 / 476.2
Test 3: 1334.5 / 448.2
Test 4: 1410.6 / 457.1
Test 5: 1497.1 / 494.9
Avg: 1412.0 / 471.1

With Beast on:
Test 1: 1457.3 / 522.4
Test 2: 1202.9 / 417.3
Test 3: 1355.6 / 501.2
Test 4: 1309.2 / 497.9
Test 5: 1482.3 / 550.2
Avg: 1361.3 / 497.8

1412.0 - 1361.3 = 50.7 more DPS from using hawk in these tests.

My theory as to why I got much better results on paper is because these tests were only self buffed. 201 constant AP and quick shots would do more for DPS than 21% more pet AP(171 pet AP in the gear I did the tests in). With more pet AP, Aspect of the Beast will continue to scale while Hawk will remain to be a constant AP bonus. Another thing to note is that I did not use Kill Command or TBW which would also favor the Aspect of the Beast setup.

Also ran some testing on level 70 target dummies to see whether Hawk or Beast comes out on top in dps. Each test included one viper session (from ~1% mana to ~100% mana) and also two TBW. I didn't record data more than looking at the numbers in recount after each session, and from this I couldn't determine a definitve outcome.

Needless to say, the test results came out very close (all in the range 1650-1700 total dps). My conclusion of this is that it needs more testing, but Beast might actually come out on top of Hawk due to the better scaling our pets get in raid, especially counting Windfury.

Hmm, the AotBeast vs. AotHawk piece always seems to re-surface every couple weeks. There has been theorycrafting on this topic a month or so ago that basically showed the breaking point for when AotB could effectively over take AotH as a true DPS gain. I believe results are situational (as most DPS theories tend to be) because we are looking at results assuming a straight tank-n-spank, i.e. Brut, Gorefiend, Patchwerk, etc... Player contribution is something to also consider.

I am stuck at work, but using the spreadsheet to play around with in the meantime is pretty fair depiction of DPS results. I set up the spreadsheet to reflect my current armory gear config (use armory for stats) and a Cat. I used the default level 70 raid buff scenario and a shot rotation that only used (1) BTW (2) Rapid Fire and (3) Steady Shot ... in that order of priority to be used every time they are available. The results show for me a 36 DPS decrease switching from Hawk to Beast.

Some things maybe to consider is how the pet scales from buffs and AP contributions from us. One thing I did last week was completely switch out every 10 crit gem I had for Wicked Pyerstones, which bumped my RAP from around 2620 to 2700 (80 AP boost) and I dropped from 36% crit to 34.5% crit. My thinking initially was that I would be transferring additional AP to my pet without losing a significant amount of crit (since crit doesn't transfer to my pet). The results from last night's SWP clear was good compared to what I saw in my previous SWP clears (3.0.2), plus having 10 expertise for my pet. The AP increase for myself and pet scale far better than crit with raid buffs too.

Maybe try plugging in different gem options into the spreadsheet to see what results you get. Gems are easy for us to control vs. loot drops (especially with only 1 week left to raid).

Forgive the Reaganomics, but crit does indirectly transfer to pets presuming you're rocking at least 1/3 Cobra Strikes. The thing that makes this tricky to model is that it's only special attacks. Otherwise we could just say multiply the hunter's crit chance by 0.6 and then that number by 2 to find out the rate of transfer. However, even assuming zero focus starvation, each pet is going to have a different ratio of specials:autos. For example, CS would cause a Devilsaur's MB to crit, while it would do nothing to a Sporebat's Spore Cloud. Thus the Sporebat would only see a crit gain to its focus dump.

My question would be, do we have any ballpark figures on the 3 "main" DPS pets (scatpids and devilsaurs) auto:special ratios? Say that a cat's dps is 55% special, 45% auto. Could we say:

Hunter's Crit x 0.6 x 2 x 0.55

...to get a number on "pet crit scaling" from the hunter? Or am I oversimplifying it?

I just reactivated my account and wow i'm so lost. It's like i've never played hunter before. So, the only shot rotation that BM's use these days is steady shot spam? Doesn't sound so exciting. Do yall manually weave in any other shots? Serpent sting, maybe? If anyone could help me out that would be great. It's like playing a whole new game now.

If you have Glyph of Steady Shot, then weave in Serpent Sting.
Otherwise, yes, it's just Steady Shot spamming for our "shot rotation".

What seems to 'complicate' matters for BM hunters is less on our shot rotation, and more on min-maxing our pets' special rotations.

Honestly, I think you are putting way too much thought into this. Cobra Strikes is a talent option that gives our pets the ability to crit 100% of the time for the 2 special attacks, and this is completely controlled by our crit chance to even proc it. Yes, I see your point in saying this does basically provide a heightened crit rate for our pets specials. Cobra Strikes is still an optional talent choice, where AP is a guaranteed stat transferred to our pet. AP scales with raid buffs (pets double dip here) where crit is a static % relatively unaffected by any direct raid buff.

Granted Cobra Strikes is quickly becoming a staple in the BM raiding build (TBD) and does have some influence on your pets ability to crit. So, with that being said, it re-enforces the gem choice of AP over crit (without gimping our own crit%). Cobra Strikes is affected by our ability to crit consistently thus giving our pet guaranteed crits, so added AP transferred from us is a bonus to those guaranteed crits.

The difference in the rate of special attacks for each pet is basically irrelevant when CS grants 100% chance to crit with the next 2 specials.

Last night in SWP I was noticing that my Quartz auto shot timer at times appeared to be getting "pushed back". I have no idea what may cause that, but it also appeared to me that my autos weren't going off at the frequency they should have been at times. This leads me to wonder if there have been any changes that could be interfering with my macros. I tried using a few macros and unchecking/checking the autoshot/auto attack option, but I wasn't able to resolve the problem.

Has anyone else experienced problems similar to this? Also, what macro is working the best right now, and should the autoshot/auto attack box under interface options be checked or unchecked?

Had the same problem a week ago, only solution for me was just get rid of the macro's and spam steady manual.
Only have TBW and stuff macroed now. I have autoshoot enabled and stop on switching target also.

First run with this yesterday went pretty well. I raid with a scorpid, I hardly did see any lower dps on the scorpid after
the nerf so quite happy with that. I just let autocast do it's job on the scorpid. Just hope they won't hit them again with
a nerfbat.

Wow Web Stats

Was my first full SW since patch, think it went pretty well, though DPS could be improved on some cases.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Hunter "BUG" x2 since 3.03

Then why don't they make it an optional 1 point talent lower in the tree? While giving us a better/useful 51pt talent!

I am wondering about Steady shot speed.

If my steady shot is under 1.5(using quartz to see the speed) I am assuming that it is actually shooting at 1.5 secs. Am I right on that? So haste is just not good me at all if my steady shots are already there?

So currently I should be using my
Shiv of Exhaustion + Dagger of Bad Mojo OVER Shivering Felspine
and Berserker's Call over DST?

Which leads me to wonder about the DPS spreadsheet, I mean haste really only affects auto shot dmg, which is what 50% of our dps roughly not counting the pet(so roughly ~35% overall). But the spreadsheet seems to value haste pretty highly.

I haven't noticed if it actually uses both charges, but it certain crits in all targets involved. And Thunderstomp also appears to be the only special where using Kill Command is of marked value. 60% + crit + BW = big numbers. Heck KC alone produces quite respectable numbers in combination with Thunderstomp (should we agree on calling it TS?).

flimflam... Well that has sort of been the argument a lot of Hunters have been putting out for a good while now. Blizzard is convinced that we will eventually see the light that is 4 extra TP for our pets. I respectfully disagree with them, we will not see that light as it isn't as bright as other options are.

The really meh about it, is that if mana becomes a premium comodity (don't know how the changes are affecting us yet), then we could be forced into speccing Invigoration and Cobra Strikes, but with the BW glyph leaving out Longevity would be foolish... So we end up with not having 21 points to spare for Readiness without sacrificing a lot of stuff. So we end up with this. But then some have argued that our pets can certainly use the 4 points well, and the Devilsaur could potentially be the best pet... So moving a point from Imp Tracking to BM would be the result.
Now why is that strange? Well BM the talent is being equated to a talent point from a fiver in the first tier and only just beats it. It is being picked because you have a sort of left over point. Impressive talent to end the tree.

You are always firing your Steady Shot at whatever speed your haste rating allows you to, even if it's below 1.5s. The key point is that you can't fire the next Steady Shot until after 1.5s. Thus, your Steady Shot DPS doesn't increase with more haste past a 1.5s SS.

However, your Auto-shot keeps firing faster and faster, so more haste still helps that shot.