◊ Tobin

I've found that the combination of 1/2 Spirit Bond and 2/2 Blood of the Rhino keeps my pet alive more often than not just from incidental heals. As for debuff removal, I yell at the right people and they actually cleanse/decurse/dispel from time to time. All in all, it's tough to kill a pet with that much of a healing bonus *and* nearly 24K hp fully buffed with random raid damage.

What I really miss from the ferocity trees is Bloodthirsty...while not eminently useful for the heal component, having your pet at max happiness 24/7 just from DPSing was a nifty bonus.

 

Schniepel

Yes I agree, while slightly increasing the pets life via endurance training doesn't do much for its survivability, the traits of a tenacity pet do make a significant difference. Even, or especially, if you are solo healing it.

 

Mattaos

Just to inject my take on the Endurance Training vs. Imp Revive piece and to seemingly re-enforce comments that have already been made on this topic. Even a full 5/5 Endurance Training is a minor buff to pet survivability in a raid environment. Typically, Fort, MotW and Kings (even an occasional Commanding Shout) is plenty for bumping a pet HP to a doable level during a boss fight. In fact, I have seen my pets HP spike higher than mine being in melee range of a warrior's shout. The single most threatening aspect of any boss encounter is the "insta-gib" or the slow death due to AoE/DoTs and from experience when an issue like this happens to a group the healers will always look to heal players before pets. This leaves several fights where you can almost bank on your pet dying at least once to any number of random things. Imp Revive provides a speedy recovery to not lose such a major portion of our DPS. Ferocity pets have Bloodthirsty to gain happiness back after a rez, but every hunter should have the Glyph of Mend Pet. Keep mind, the time it takes to Revive a pet untalented vs. the rapid rez with 2/2 Imp Revive is night and day (plus the added HP for the pet upon rezing).

Imp Revive has more of a place as a DPS boosting ability than Endurance Training. Also, Spirit Bond has more overall benefit for pet survivability than Imp Mend. Raidwide totems help with poison cleansing and Mass Dispel for curses, not to mention the 10% buff both the player and pet gets from heals keeping a pets healed up and taking stress off the healers.

 

Greenpiggy

To jump back to the topic of Aspect of the Beast vs Dragonhawk while under the effects of BW i did the following:

1. Changed the uptime of BW in Shandara's Spreadsheet to be 100% for both the hunter and pet.
2. Using my ideal T7 loot list, I compared the dps with no aspect, with beast and with hawk.

Results:
None: 7106.74
Beast: 7416.24
Hawk: 7455.37

So on that evidence, Hawk > Beast even while under BW(and yes I did have all the raidbuffs and petbuffs included)

 

Cobrakai

Im browsing the log files of 5k hunter fights and comparing them to mine and can't seem to find glaring differences between what I'm doing and what said hunters are doing, even though my dps isn't anywhere close to 5k at the moment. Here is a parse from last night:

Wow Web Stats

This fight was done with me as 50/12 with BW/Steady/Hawk glyphs (my armory shows me in my new gear which I just recently acquired, but I did the fight in question with T6 belt/bracers/boots/chest). What I really dont understand is, how my dps dropped from the previous weeks http://wowwebstats.com/6nc5quxdruibc?s=232990-274695 which I did as the same spec and Serpent/Steady/Hawk glyphs. Can anyone see something that may indicate the problem? Serpent is up almost all the time, I time cooldowns to coincide with each other, and spam nothing but steady shot.

 

Osse

Your pet missed something big like BoM. It had higher crit rate this week and it still did almost 300 less dps.

 

Mattaos

Also, look to see what the total duration was for the kills by the 5k hunter parses. I have looked at one earlier that was a 3m 30s something kill. Packing all those CDs and raid buffs in that shorter period will produce big numbers. Osse, brings up a good point too.

EDIT: Here is the link to that parse. It was a 3m 13s kill. That is blazing fast. Also, compare gear, spec and stats. This hunter has about 600 more AP, which is going to produce higher results, plus they used a Scorpid. I believe it has been stated that currently Scorpid Poison is enhanced by AP and not spell power. What pet are you using?

 

Cobrakai

I was using a cat for the benefit of the raid (CotW). A missing buff might have done it - I was wondering what resulted in the about 300 dps drop that my cat suffered. You bring up a good point with the timing of the fights. Hopefully this next weeks coming fight will prove yesterday's an aberration.

 

mako

Cobrakai, on your more recent attempt, it doesn't look like you had heart of the crusader or master poisoner for the 3% raid crit. There were also 7 "lost" serpent sting ticks on the lower dps parse; are you recasting serpent sting before the previous one gets it's last tick in?

Also, as far as being below 5000 dps, does your raid have a minor armor debuff? I didn't see any faerie fire, CoR or sting debuffs on either parse.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Pokkai

My pet did 2050 dps on 10 man patchwerk, your pet only did 1800 dps on 25 man petchwerk. It must not be getting the right buffs or something. Mine only had battle shout, rampage, UR, sunder+faerie fire and totems.

 

Cobrakai

I'll have to check on whether people just didn't cast those debuffs/buffs, but as to serpent sting, i did lose some ticks due to the inability to refresh a sting if the previous sting occurred during some sort of damage buff (whether it was a trinket proc or ring proc or whatever). I kept receiving a message that said "a more powerful spell is already active." this would result in a lost tick here and there.

 

Zwaineroth

Just to summarize an earlier discussion for my own benefit:

Osse determined that 3/3 Longevity and the BW glyph, on a 4min fight, wouldn't produce an extra BW. The consensus was thus that, for 50/21, the spec should be 1/3 Longevity, 3/3 Cobra Strikes, and using the BW glyph.

For Scorpids, however, Tobin pointed out that Scorpid Poison can't crit, so the extra Cobra Strikes procs are wasted when used on poison applications. Thus, we're back to 3/3 Longevity, 1/3 Cobra Strikes when using a Scorpid.

Finally, Osse pointed out that the AotH glyph is a 60ish DPS increase, and so, where we have 3/3 Longevity, we can safely glyph out of the BW glyph.

Short form:

Using a Cat: Spec 50/21, 1/3 Longevity, 3/3 Cobra Strikes, use BW glyph.
Using a Scorpid: Spec 50/21, 3/3 Longevity, 1/3 Cobra Strikes, use AotH glyph.

Seeing how Scorpids are putting out 300-500 more DPS than Cats in stationary fights, it looks like the latter is optimal.

If everyone agrees, this should be reflected in the first post.

 

UnLeashed

I think he was referring to you refreshing the current sting on the target too soon, therefore, the current sting would not have been able to completely "tick out" and thus you would be gimping yourself by using more mana and wasting GCD's over the course of the entire fight. When you should be refreshing the current sting just as the last sting reaches its duration.

 

Zwaineroth

Does anyone have any suggestions on timers or mods to use to keep track of glyphed Serpent uptime? I've been relying on Pitbull's debuff filters but they also show the Serpent of our Marks Hunter and I'd like to have something in bar form that is easier to see.

 

mako

I use ClassTimer personally, but just about any "dot timer" should work.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Ulfang

This question just occured to me, Do timers currently reflect a glyphed serpent sting? If the timers are still only reflecting a "normal" sting time then it would be possible to clip a tick.

 

Crowbite

No. Both should use 3/3 longevity with the AotH glyph because Call of the Wild is affected by longevity as well.

 

Apathy

Your pet had horn of winter on the Monday WWS, it did not on the Wednesday. Wednesday, you had 5BW, 3Rapid fire, Monday you had 4BW and 4 Rapid fire, Monday was the longer fight time. Miss a BW? Plus what others have said.
Wednesday parse seems a bit weird with 285 FI procs, Monday having 24.

 

Neruse

Parses wherein a rogue is providing Master Poisoner are going to be funky, as that talent currently provides 15% crit per stack of deadly poison.

 

Kkyle

I can't speak for all mods, but I use quartz to monitor serpent sting up time and it does start the counter at 18 seconds when I have glyph of the Serpent Sting.

 

Osse

Scorpids don't have call of the wild sadly.

I've been running Naxx with 1/3 longevity and 3/3 cobra strikes with scorpid and I very, very rarely waste the charges with ~35% crit.

I should also get a rather interesting WWS parse from 10 man Naxx later today.

 

◊ Tobin

EDIT: double post.

 

◊ Tobin

One thing that lowered my DPS in previous weeks was how I applied Serpent Sting. I egregiously thought putting up Serpent Sting would be more important than letting a cast of Steady Shot go off. In short, do not use a stopcasting macro for Serpent Sting...do not side step...do not interrupt your last Steady. Another thing that could drop your DPS is if your pet wanders into the green ooze and gets its stats reduced.

While fight duration does play into things, my guild's Patchwerk kill last night was only 19s longer than his. I received 3 loot upgrades yesterday, so my armory stats do not reflect what I had on during the kill. I had 3455 AP and 28.01% crit before the raid last night I think. I do use a scorpid however...

This assumes the other two glyphs are Serpent Sting and Steady Shot? I think someone mentioned earlier that Glyph of Serpent Sting and Glyph of Bestial Wrath are a push in DPS, so I currently use the combination BW/Steady/AotH. I favor BW because I can just macro it together with Kill Command every 70s.

 

flimflam

I've noticed this to. I seem to be the only Hunter in my guild that uses Serpent Sting (probably due to the others not having the glyph yet) and sometimes my Steady Shot damage is lower. Then on the next fight or another fight i won't use Serpent Sting and my damage will rise. It feels as if im wasting a GCD on Serpent Sting.

 

Echion

In regards to using AotB and AotD durring BW, which one would yield more damage?

I have read through the thread(s) and found some posts saying AotB is better and there was just one stating that AotD was about 50dps more.

Mainly, is there a big difference when a scorpid is being used?