Lerastes

However, how much damage are you saving on the tank compared to how much less he'd take from the boss dying earlier?

3 minute fight with a boss with a 2 second swing timer and 13 million health. 15k damage per swing after block averages and before avoidance.

No avoidance:
1,350,000 damage
90 hits
7500 incoming DPS

With 35% combined dodge and parry:
877,500
58.5 hits
4875 incoming DPS

With 38% combined dodge, parry, and Scorpid Sting:
837,000
55.8 hits
4650 incoming DPS

My DPS as Survival and with the Steady Shot glyph would be 7043. If I drop Serpent Sting from my rotation, it goes down to 6541. If the fight lasts exactly 3 minutes then the raid has 72,222 DPS (13,000,000/180). If my DPS drops by 500, bringing the raid DPS down to 71,722, the fight would last only 1.2 seconds longer (13,000,000/71,722), which isn't even enough for an extra boss swing.

Having a Surv or BM hunter keep Scorpid Sting up may be a good idea then if your tank is taking too much damage or your healers are running out of mana. If you need to squeeze every ounce of DPS out of the raid for a particular fight then you'd want to use Serpent Sting.

Something else to take into account would be that you could then free up two glyph slots. Serpent Sting and Steady Shot would no longer be useful and could be replaced with something else, lowering the DPS gap.

 

Rhy

Tbh I don't really agree with this way of measuring avoidance. It is simply too rng. It is not realistic to average it out like this. The tank can sometimes avoid 5 hits in a row but he can also take 5 hits and be in a real danger of dieing.
Exactly because of that rng factor I don't think it is worth dropping any dps to keep Scorpid up. Chances are that neither the healer nor the tank will notice some significant difference if any.

 

Lerastes

Would you replace all your expensive rare gems with uncommons because the DPS gain according to the spreadsheet is only 50 or so? The entire point of theorycrafting is to average everything out and figure out what's best. Saying it probably won't make a difference could apply to absolutely everything on this forum but that doesn't invalidate the data. You probably wouldn't even notice the DPS loss.

 

alarge

I am dumbfounded by comments like this. By this logic:

* Avoidance is useless since you can't count on it. Stack stamina and armor only! Ignore dodge, miss, and parry!

* Crit% is horrible, since you can't count on it. Stack AP/SP only!

* Get hit and expertise capped! No matter what the tradeoff!

Most end-game tanks would spend a ton of dkp or gold for something which gave them an extra 3% avoidance. I doubt they'd do that if they thought it wasn't significant.

Whether it is worth the dps trade-off is a separate issue, but one that is completely independent of the "rng-ness" of avoidance.

 

Rhy

I think there's a difference between saying "Avoidance is useless since you can't count on it" and saying "3% extra avoidance is useless when you have to sacrifice so much to get it".

However, I still don't think the trade-off is worth it.
If I use your example,if a tank gears up for 3% extra avoidance, he will not necessarily give up something in return. Maybe some stamina or hit/exp, but in any case, they are looking for balance. If the trade-off is too big ( lets just say 100 stamina vs 3% avoidance as an example ), there is a chance that they won't take it. It is not exactly the same in our case, but I hope you get my point.

Don't get me wront, I would always pick raid utility ( AotP on General V. for example ) before my personal dps/needs, but in this case things just don't add up for me.

Anyway, I'm not used to posting that much around here. Apparently it is a badly written post from me, so I'm sorry about that.

 

RobbieW

just a simple question sv>mm oder mm>sv in 10 man with mana support?
(with ulduar 25 gear)

 

alarge

I wasn't taking issue with your determination that the 3% avoidance wasn't worth the trade-off in dps. It was the way you dismissed the analysis that was done regarding what the 3% avoidance is worth ("Tbh, I don't really agree with this way of measuring avoidance. It is simply too rng. It is not realistic to average it out like this.").

There tend to be some standard approaches for how we model abilities that have a % chance to occur. For example, assume you have an ability available once every second that has a 50% chance of doing 100 damage. We'd rate that as a 50 dps ability. This is true whether it is 50% chance of 100 damage every second or 50% chance of 1000 damage every 10 seconds or 5% chance of 1000 damage every second or 10% chance of 5000 damage every 10 seconds. For a reason I cannot fathom, some people will refuse to give full value to such an ability just because it has a random component.

 

the_fox

Simple question: What's the fasted way to lvl your pet?

Been planning to switch to a turtle for some solo work (been using a worm till now), but I'll have to lvl it from 75 to 80. When I raid, I use a wolf, I got him from 75-79 by just grinding, but it was really boring. After raiding a couple of weeks with it, it still was at lvl79. Raiding isn'r verry good for leveling a pet, but simple grinding is soooo boring.
Anyone else got any ideas?

 

Rhy

Leveling pet in a raid isn't viable because the exp a mob will give you is shared between everyone in the raid. At least that was the case before, unless something changed. What I can suggest you do is grind heroics. With a decent group its fast, you get badges ( that you can either use or sell in the form of orbs/gems ) and you can also get your hands on some items/shards.

 

• VRoscioli

My understanding is that as of the Burning Crusade, no xp at all is awarded in raids. Heroics are the fastest way, in my experience. (Not to mention the badge/gear/rep benefits stated above)

 

Lythic

What makes AP better for BM hunters than agility, and agility better for MM/SV hunters than AP?

I know that straight AP is better, but can't really figure out why.

 

Iru

Because of the impact pet damage has on total damage as a BM hunter. As the item bonus structure has 2AP=1Agi, straight AP gems & enchants give more total AP than the Agi->AP conversion, which leads to more pet AP, which leads to more pet damage.

For SV & MM hunters, the pet is already a much smaller component of total damage, both trees have talents that provide a multiplicative benefit to Agi but not AP, and the additional crit Agi also provides is more valuable (crit does not transfer to pets).

 

theane

While I agree with Iru it has to do with the transfer of AP from the hunter to the PET for BM,especially with Wild Hunt. I was under the impression that the fundamental reason related more to Crit than anything else. Simply put MM and SV talents supported higher DPS only once crit reached a certain level. Piercing shots, expose weakness, thrill of the hunt, and others simply made DPS scale better when crit was added.

Additionally at a certain point the raid buffs (especially Blessing of Kings) have stacking agility adding more to the DPS bottom line than simply stacking AP as it scales better. All of this would be on top of the benefits that Agility (higher armour, dodge) had in the first place.

 

Jimke

I hope this is a simple question, but is there a general rule about how long you should wait to cast a shot that is higher in priority rather than casting a lower priority shot?

I tried the search function and looked through the spreadsheet but only found mention of this type of situation regarding how long to wait for Chimera.

 

Iru

There have been posts describing the math involved. See here for an example.

As a general rule of thumb if your higher priority shot will be available in < 1 sec, delay for it. Otherwise, don't.

 

Myuria

I apologize if this has been asked before, but I have read up to page 15 and could not find an answer, so it got a bit tiresome. What is the best pet to use for leveling prior to getting a gorilla? I am still at a level where I am not able to get a gorilla.

 

Rezdan

All Tenacity pets now have access to Thunderstomp, the pet spell that made gorillas the top levelling pet. Of the Tenacity pets currently available, though, I would personally suggest a Crocolisk for Bad Attitude in addition to Thunderstomp for AOE tanking. Bears with their low cooldown frontal Swipe are also decent.

 

Celfydd

Is Swipe still only frontal? The druid bearform Swipe was changed to affect enemies behind as well, and the tooltips for the pet abilities are the same.

 

elandriel

It seems that the pet swipe ability is still frontal only. More info on the matter here: Wow - Suggestion Forums

"If you tell a tiger who's never seen a mouse before that it's very scary, then the tiger may not be able to sleep because of fear."

 

netbeast

checked the pet management forums, and wasn't able to find a good solution for my problem:

Is there a way of designing an one-click macro with which i can call my pet and disable all of its autocast abilities?

I think that this solution is a little bit lame:

since it means, i need to mark all trash targets, which costs a lot of overall dps. And i cannot disable my pet's autocast growl, if it even has no frame around it in the spell book, it still growls.

Second question:
is there a macro with which i can cast all of the pet's special abilities + kill command + trinkets? (furious howl, rabid, etc)

I have found this macro, but still, it seems to me, it does not work as i would like to:
Maybe not that simple questions, but i am checking wowwiki and EJ forums for days and i am not able to manage my pet the way i would like to.

 

Iroared

1. It would probably work, if you're concerned about hunter's mark being applied to trash you can always make another macro. I have /petautocastoff's macro'ed with my steady shot key.

2. What do you mean by "it doesn't work as i would like to"?
As long as there are no abilities that are on GCD it should work.
One thing you might change is macro'ing kill command to some other shot since it has a (significantly) shorter cooldown than other abilities.

 

• Praxx

Are you looking for something along these lines?

Not sure why you would want to disable all the other auto cast abilities Like Bite and Rabid.

 

Iroared

You might want to enable them, because I noticed that sometimes claw/bite gets randomly disabled which can lead to quite a bit of DPS lost if you don't notice it in time (and its hard to notice unless you actively watch your pet energy bar).

 

Iru

That's a known bug with a known work-around. Keep the talents you want to stay permanently-on on the pet bar and they will maintain their settings. It's the ones not on the pet bar that get reset occasionally.

 

Kharthus

But unfortunately the bug causes some skills to turn on and other to turn off. I'm constantly checking my pet skill list to make sure they're all setup correctly.