I see it a little differently. I think any fight that is roughly a multiple of 3 (+~15 seconds) in length will have this spec will do extremely well. I actually botched my timing on Patchwerk last night because I used Readiness too early assuming the fight was going to last longer than it did (in a 3.5 minute fight I should be able to BW 5 times). One thing that hasn't changed from TBC is that whomever uses the most cooldowns tends to do the most DPS. Readiness + Longevity ensures you'll be using your cooldowns the most. There will be mana issues on longer fights, obviously, but as long as you use Viper during the dry spells between each BW you aren't wasting optimal DPS time.
I also found that on fights such as 4H (and likely Heigan, etc.) Readiness is even more powerful. If I only have 40 seconds of DPS time before I need to move again, I need to do as much DPS as possible in that time. Having 36 seconds of BW over the 40 or so that I am hitting a horseman easily pushes me over other DPS'ers. Considering I can do that to two horsemen, and get a solo BW on at least one other horsemen, how does that not easily dominate?
I dont have a WWS (i KNEW i forgot something). I only have a couple screen shots of recount from fights.
My build was this: 54/12/5 except for the 1st fight i had 2/2 gfft and 0 invig. though neither fight did i run oom or have to pot.
Patchwerk 1: For this fight i DID NOT use serpent sting and had glyph of the viper, steady shot, and beastial wrath. (i believe Rhayne in this fight was 50/21 while on PW2 he was the same spec as me.)
Patchwerk 2: For this fight i DID use serpent sting and had glyph of the HAWK, steady shot, and beastial wrath. (i messed up and didnt "click for next pet" in this screen shot, i used Filter a devilsaur on earlier bosses but for this one i used my cat TheCheat)
I need to remember to combat log next weeks fights. (we might do 10m this week and ill try to log those if im able to go)
Some observations from 2 weeks of naxx 25:
Hunter's are doing some crazy damage early on. we have 3 hunters and would often be top 3. On Sapphrion i was able to do 1.4 million damage while 2nd place did 1 million and that was another hunter.
The scorpid can do some good damage. another hunters scorpid would usually out damage our cat pets. (i could try mine on 10m pw)
When i tested a devilsaur, he was only able to MATCH the damage of a cat. While when i would use my own cat it would do MORE than that same cat. (we do have a feral druid who tanks/dps)
Volley is owning my guns durability and with so much AE in trash.. i had to repair 2x just because of it breaking or almost breaking :|
Call of the wild seems to be STACKING with other Calls of the wild. I've seen the buff 2x AND saw my rap drop as each buff dropped.
Some personal opinions here:
Im not totally sure how good the 51 pt talent is.. part of me says it sucks because all the pets are useless to me but part of me loves the extra points. Im able to get Heart of the phoenix which i was able to use on sartharion, 4h, sapphrion, and kt. It also lets me grab charge and 2 into resists. I dont know if its the talents or not but my pet is able to stay alive in just about every fight that doesnt insta gib him like a void zone. I think im going to try a 50/*/* this week.
Serpent sting uses almost DOUBLE the mana of steady shot.. and on longer fights where i have to switch to AotV, I wonder if im losing damage. cause it sure "felt" like i did.
Originally Posted by noth
Any tips on getting your pet down from the platform,
What i do is dismiss my pet when the 2 guys are around 15%. Make the jump and Call pet while running to thaddius.
I see it a little differently. I think any fight that is roughly a multiple of 3 (+~15 seconds) in length will have this spec will do extremely well. I actually botched my timing on Patchwerk last night because I used Readiness too early assuming the fight was going to last longer than it did (in a 3.5 minute fight I should be able to BW 5 times). One thing that hasn't changed from TBC is that whomever uses the most cooldowns tends to do the most DPS. Readiness + Longevity ensures you'll be using your cooldowns the most. There will be mana issues on longer fights, obviously, but as long as you use Viper during the dry spells between each BW you aren't wasting optimal DPS time.
I also found that on fights such as 4H (and likely Heigan, etc.) Readiness is even more powerful. If I only have 40 seconds of DPS time before I need to move again, I need to do as much DPS as possible in that time. Having 36 seconds of BW over the 40 or so that I am hitting a horseman easily pushes me over other DPS'ers. Considering I can do that to two horsemen, and get a solo BW on at least one other horsemen, how does that not easily dominate?
I was a bit skeptical of the 50/21/0 Readiness build at first because the spreadsheet showed it as lower DPS compared to other builds. Eliirion, you bring up some really good points and the WWS you posted was excellent. Now, I am wondering if it is possible to produce even more DPS from this build by going 1/3 Longevity and 3/3 Cobra Strikes, since it appears that it is still possible to get 5 BW procs in under 5 minutes.
I've been toying with a few builds and already respecced about 10 or so times since hitting 80.
One of the big problems is that BM builds have to be tested in a fully raid buffed environment and at present my fellow raiders wouldn't be best pleased if I pulled out a fine light crossbow for patchwerk. Spreadsheets, while a great resource, often don't quite reflect reality which is a slight on Blizzard's slightly buggy coding rather than the author of the spreadsheets.
WWS does feedback some interesting information though.
Invigoration regenerates a lot of mana hovering between JoW and Replenishment in terms of effectiveness. It has often made the difference between having to viper and staying in dragonhawk, or at the very least reduces my viper time significantly.
People were asking for some data from 25 man so I thought I'd post my WWS. Wow Web Stats
Unfortunately the WWS report is a bit off in some places and doesn't include my pet in some of the fights though he was used for all.
This was a Naxx clear in similar gear to that which I am currently wearing minus 3-4 pieces of gear. Unfortunately there were no other hunters in the raid to compare against.
edit: As a note this is without the steady shot glyph as we are still waiting for someone to discover it on Hyjal.
The ladies like the bestial wrath, they don't appreciate the rapid fire.
So the Beast vs Hawk issue isn't solved yet for which is primary.
However, I think everyone can agree that going into Beast for BW (and what not) is the best thing to do. The pet scaling 50% better for the duration means a great deal to the benefit of Beast, especially since we pop trinkets and Kill Commands.
Also, since Beast appears to be adding too much benefit at this time (what is it 21%?) I have actually plopped down 5g for a Glyph of Aspect of the Beast. Now the big one pops up. Would that possibly be worth killing the Serpent glyph over... If the odd scaling of Beast continues it might just.
I think we may be at a place where there isnt a cookie cutter BM spec in anything like the BC sense. Wheras in the last expansion, the talents almost picked themselves in the end, with a clear set of dps focussed talents all important and all accessible.
But it seems at the moment, there is such a huge range of options - the 51 pt talent, for example, while perhaps not leading to any dps increase at all, in some fights will mean the difference between a pet surviving or not, and clearly that will make a bigger impact to a BM hunters dps than any differing raid build.
The readiness spec clearly gives incredible burst and is very effective in short fights, but not as mana efficient and missing the extra pet talents that can goto surivability.
Personally I love this situation, especially with dual specs coming soon. I think theres potential for several specs, focussing on prolongued mana intensive fights, fights where pets will struggle to survive and short nuking fights. At the moment im liking a more heavily BM focussed build for better mana regen, as Im finding a fair few fights where half the raid is dead (or kicked from server:S) and I need to keep going, possibly without any mana batteries alive in raid, for longer
This is Patchwerk from last night. I was still wearing 5 pieces of Sunwell gear and a mix of heroic epics / Naxx 10 epics during that parse. I am quite sure that it will be the dominant spec going forward.
while that is an extremely good parse given your limited wotlk upgrades, how did you manage to pull off two bloodlusts in a three minute fight?
I was wondering how to use pet abilities, rake and claw, most effectively.
Ideally, the cat should apply rake continuously (its okay to apply it after every cooldown since its close to duration) and claw on every GCD (if energy allows it).
Now, how to achieve this?
If we just enable autocast, Claw works fine but Rake is hardly used (e.g. it was used 30 times during a heroic run).
I tried taking them off autocast and modifying my spam macro to /cast Rake and /cast Claw. I could see rake on the target for like half the time (not sure why, when I looked in pet abilities rake was always on cooldown even if the buff was not on the target, can it possibly miss that much)? Claw on the other hand was not applied that much which worries me. Moreover, this is perhaps a bug, abilities like Kill Command and Cobra Strikes do not affect manually casted pet abilities: I could see the KC/Cobra buff on me with 3 charges but those charges weren't used until the ability expired.
So generally, enabling autocast on Claw does not allow Rake to proc, and disabling the autocast (and casting it manually/through a macro) does not work with KC/Cobra Strikes. I would like to see a solution to this.
It would be very nice if autocast AI was improved to allow DoT abilities to have more priority and proc only when the debuff duration was up.
I was wondering how to use pet abilities, rake and claw, most effectively.
Ideally, the cat should apply rake continuously (its okay to apply it after every cooldown since its close to duration) and claw on every GCD (if energy allows it).
Now, how to achieve this?
If we just enable autocast, Claw works fine but Rake is hardly used (e.g. it was used 30 times during a heroic run).
I tried taking them off autocast and modifying my spam macro to /cast Rake and /cast Claw. I could see rake on the target for like half the time (not sure why, when I looked in pet abilities rake was always on cooldown even if the buff was not on the target, can it possibly miss that much)? Claw on the other hand was not applied that much which worries me. Moreover, this is perhaps a bug, abilities like Kill Command and Cobra Strikes do not affect manually casted pet abilities: I could see the KC/Cobra buff on me with 3 charges but those charges weren't used until the ability expired.
So generally, enabling autocast on Claw does not allow Rake to proc, and disabling the autocast (and casting it manually/through a macro) does not work with KC/Cobra Strikes. I would like to see a solution to this.
It would be very nice if autocast AI was improved to allow DoT abilities to have more priority and proc only when the debuff duration was up.
There are a few points here- first is that if rake was always on cooldown, then it was being used properly, and it would have been used more than 30 times. Next, rake costs 20 focus and claw costs 25, so if both are on auto-cast, rake should go off every time it's off cooldown, and claw should be dumping focus during the cooldown. If your build is starving your pet of focus (not having GftT, for example), then you might see some weird stats at the end of fights.
Edit: I've created a thread to discuss just pets: Pet management
Last edited by Har : 11/27/08 at 12:48 PM.
Reason: adding a new resource
Was it changed with WOTLK in that you should pop your trinkets and damage/ap cool downs before the first poison application? I thought i read that the bonus doesn't last anymore after those cool downs fade?
Edit; Found a couple posts asking my same question. Heres an answer i found and putting it in here to help with anyone else searching.
I did a bit of testing with lvl 70 Scorpid Poison just before shutdown and I just wanted to add, so there's no confusion and because its easy to miss this info, that Scorpid Poison dot damage reflects the CURRENT pet AP at time of tick and not the Attack Power it had at the start of the stack.
Testing was done with myself in AotViper (not attacking) first observing the damage range of a full stack of Scorpid Poison.
I then swapped to AotBeast (still not attacking) and noticed a consistently significant increase in the tick damage over the damage with AotV up.
I searched for a while, and that's the only test I could find. It's a good question, and I'd also like an answer. I found many people explaining that as of 3.0.3 with the slight nerf to the poison damage their scorpids were still out damaging cats and devilsaurs on single target long fights. Unfortunately, none of them clarified whether they were front end loading their AP.
If anyone has any data for us, please post it in the new Pet management thread.
I know there are currently all kinds of BM specs floating around, but has anyone taken a look at the pros/cons of spending points in Focused Aim?
There has been some discussion between me and some of my hunter friends regarding this particular talent, and I'm currently trying to figure out whether it's more beneficial to spend the three talent points to pull myself closer to the hit cap or to spend the points elsewhere. I've been pulling decent DPS for my gear, and I love not having to worry about the hit cap, but I wonder if it would be better to gem for straight up hit and respec for other talents.
This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.
I just thought I'd throw the topic of this particular talent out for discussion. I'm currently putting together a list of things I need to test on Patchwerk/dummies (gear/specs/rotations) so I can hopefully come back here with some numbers for discussion relatively soon.
This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.
Well seeing as how our 10/25 man Tier 7 Loot has not 1 point of hit on it, I'm personally not expecting any on our next tier of gear, I wouldn't be surprised if it did, but I'm betting otherwise. I have been running 53/18/0 for a little while now, and have been getting decent DPS for my gear (2000-2400), but after reading flimflams post I'm trying out his spec, 54/12/5 with 3/3 FA and 1 GftT and 1 in invigoration. I do like the mana regen from invigoration, but I feel like I see alot of bite/monstrous bite crits with no mana return, so once I get a little more hit (or I may drop 1 in imp tracking for 2/2 invigoration) I'll drop down to 2/3 FA and try out 2/2 invig for longer fights.
This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.QUOTE]
Well seeing as how our 10/25 man Tier 7 Loot has not 1 point of hit on it, I'm personally not expecting any on our next tier of gear, I wouldn't be surprised if it did, but I'm betting otherwise.
The chest has 44 hit on it, which is quite a bit. You just have to gem/spec for hit, or find rings/neck/cloaks/weapons with hit, similar to what you had to do if you wanted to be hit capped early in TBC. its the first tier set, its not supposed to be that great, or else there wouldnt be any room for improvement in additional sets.
also, it seems like it is now better to gem for AP once hit capped, rather than agi, even with kings due to the increase in pet dps it generates.
Point for point, hit rating is the most important stat any dps class can have. Take this hypothetical scenario: You hit a boss 100 times at 2000 damage/hit on average across a 100 second span. Therefore you average 2000dps (2000*100/100). Now lets assume you have 1% chance to miss. You hit a boss 99 times at 2000 damage/hit on average across the same 100s span. (2000*99/100) = 1980dps is your new dps for the fight. This is a pretty rough description, but it gets the point across about how important hit rating is. ^^ This is how it was explained to me at least. What I am doing Aelua, is speccing one point into FA, and asking for a draenei in my group.
Right now I am 53/15/3. My question to you here at EJ is how does pet crit scale with our gear? I have 3/3 in cobra strikes right now, but I dont know if the extra pet crit is worth it over other talents like imp tracking and MS.
Before too long I want to try 51/15/7 to get survival instincts for the extra SS crit. I would even go 50/16/7 if I could keep my pet alive most fights without keeping mend pet up the entire time. I took the 51st talent and used the extra 4 points in bloodthirsty, heart of the phoenix, and great resistance. I couldnt believe on KT in naxx the other day, another hunter left his pet in the void zone only to get 1 shot, pop up again, and continue dps again without a sweat!
So my questions are:
How does pet crit scale with gear?
How good is 3/3 CS over 1/3 CS?
Do you think Survival instincts is worth it over Mortal shots?
I will try to get a 25man wws parse of patchwerk this week. Until then, its tough to see what spec is best because It would be hard to get all the buffs/debuffs to raid the target dummy. ^^
The chest has 44 hit on it, which is quite a bit. You just have to gem/spec for hit, or find rings/neck/cloaks/weapons with hit, similar to what you had to do if you wanted to be hit capped early in TBC. its the first tier set, its not supposed to be that great, or else there wouldnt be any room for improvement in additional sets.
also, it seems like it is now better to gem for AP once hit capped, rather than agi, even with kings due to the increase in pet dps it generates.
Wow, I'm shocked I over looked that, sorry for the false post. I was using an older loot list that hadn't been updated yet, won't be using that again. I do still find it odd to have a chunk of hit plopped on the chest and non on the other set pieces, but regardless that does change some things.
Wow, I'm shocked I over looked that, sorry for the false post. I was using an older loot list that hadn't been updated yet, won't be using that again. I do still find it odd to have a chunk of hit plopped on the chest and non on the other set pieces, but regardless that does change some things.
Not to mention the offset items that are purchasable with emblems of valor from 25 mans.
Oh yes, I'm in complete agreement that most of our hit will come from off set items, I just think it will be a little while before well be able to casually reach the hit cap with 0/3 FA and explore other specs that wont require those points. Right now you can reach 296 hit, it just seems you need to sacrifice a chunk of crit to do it.
On a separate is anyone else noticing the DPS spread sheet showing a DPS increase from imp tracking or invigoration over mortal shots?
The wws report that Eliiria posted seems very strange to me. I've easily seen 4.5k dps on patch as 50/21 so far, and I'll hopefully be getting some good reports for you guys next week when naxx resets using a scorpid. But 5.4k dps with 2 lusts, an almost 40% crit rate, and almost 110k volley dmg against mad scientist packs makes me think wws bugged out or is working kinda funky.
So far I've tried both 50/21 and different variations of the 5x/1x/x build and in tests against test dummies I saw a higher dps total for my cat than my devilsaur every time. Once my gear stops upgrading 4+ pieces every reset I'll be able to get some consistent numbers to compare from patch. On beta 50/21 ended up being the spec I saw highest dps with and I don't expect that to change. The amount of extra cooldowns you get with readiness is amazing.
I've also noticed that on fights with a lot of aoe dmg like Heigan and Sapph keeping a cat alive has been much easier than the big fat stupid devilsaur. The box on that thing is so obnoxiously big it can never seem to not get hit by anything within 5 miles of it. Its nice for getting the dmg buff on malygos, which pets thankfully do benefit from, but for alot of things it just seems like more of a hassle than necessary. Hopefully blizz will fix the stupid thing so micro'ing it will be less annoying.
Oh yes, I'm in complete agreement that most of our hit will come from off set items, I just think it will be a little while before well be able to casually reach the hit cap with 0/3 FA and explore other specs that wont require those points. Right now you can reach 296 hit, it just seems you need to sacrifice a chunk of crit to do it.
On a separate is anyone else noticing the DPS spread sheet showing a DPS increase from imp tracking or invigoration over mortal shots?
I'm currently hit capped due to my Draenei racial (which has the same effect as 1/3 FA). It wasn't that hard to do so, but my crit is rather low at only 22%. However, I hope to increase this by replacing a few items and enchanting some gear.
Originally Posted by Aern
I've also noticed that on fights with a lot of aoe dmg like Heigan and Sapph keeping a cat alive has been much easier than the big fat stupid devilsaur. The box on that thing is so obnoxiously big it can never seem to not get hit by anything within 5 miles of it. Its nice for getting the dmg buff on malygos, which pets thankfully do benefit from, but for alot of things it just seems like more of a hassle than necessary. Hopefully blizz will fix the stupid thing so micro'ing it will be less annoying.
I too am getting annoyed by the insanely large hitbox of the Devilsaur. He's quite a nuisance in 5-man heroics, and I can imagine him to be even worse in Naxx and beyond. Blizzard really need to fix the ridiculous hitbox on them, or just nerf the size of the devilsaur. Having a pet that big is simply not needed when raiding.
Point for point, hit rating is the most important stat any dps class can have. Take this hypothetical scenario: You hit a boss 100 times at 2000 damage/hit on average across a 100 second span. Therefore you average 2000dps (2000*100/100). Now lets assume you have 1% chance to miss. You hit a boss 99 times at 2000 damage/hit on average across the same 100s span. (2000*99/100) = 1980dps is your new dps for the fight. This is a pretty rough description, but it gets the point across about how important hit rating is. ^^ This is how it was explained to me at least. What I am doing Aelua, is speccing one point into FA, and asking for a draenei in my group.
(Emphasis mine)
Not entirely true. See Aldriana's post on rough itemization values in the Rogue Simple Question thread for example. Hitting less but harder can be better than hitting more often but with less impact.
Warlocks for example favored hit rating in BC, because their aggro dump was based on a spell that could miss. With the tank threat boost seen in 3.0.2, item values changed from "cap hit, then check the spreadsheet" to "check the spreadsheet".
So the whole "hit rating > all" myth should not be followed blindly.
I am currently using a 54/17 BM specc and I find myself using Viperevery other pull on Heroic/Raid trash and at least once on bosses, usually more than once...
Since I currently have a lot of temporary buff buttons to push ( BW, Rapid Fire, Bloodlust, Gloves with Hyperaccelarator, both trinkets ) it is now a pain to know when best to go Viper (even if not close to OOM).
Any personal solutions you are using? Rapid fire on viper to reduce downtime? Or best to time it along with BW when possible?
On a macro related note, how many clicks/presses would a macrro require in order to change to Viper and back again when casting multi-shot? Spending 300ish mana and receiving 1100 mana back is cool and helpfull.
Thanks all
Last edited by bomzix : 11/28/08 at 6:02 AM.
Reason: Spelling
11/26/08, 3:11 PM
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