Nope, I'm using 7/57/7 also, and stacking agility. Here's my hunter armory and I use this spec for my pet.

I think your Wolf is definitely focus starved. I am a strong believer in 2/2 Gftt despite the much marketed 1/2. In ulduar you need to stop rotation and move in many fights for a big number of reasons which leaves a wolf definitely focus starved in many cases. Check your WWS logs to see if the Wolf uses "bite" every CD or not to find out

I use 2/2 GftT too, I think with all the movement in Ulduar, the "ranged" (Auto/Steady) are limited so they'll get less focus. Downing Auriaya is as far as my guild has got in Ulduar so far and a lot of fights up to this point don't have many stand & shoot options for me. Kologarn is probably the most stand & fire boss and the fight lasted 4 mins, which is 160 GCDs (4*60/1.5). of which my pet did 113 bites, so he isn't missing a lot of focus...

Ok, well your gear is about 2 tiers higher than mine (I'm mostly Naxx25, you're Ulduar 25) so I can understand more pet DPS but double seems quite high? What was your DPS and your pets DPS on Kologarn? My pet was 549 and overall we were 4396. Actually, considering you have lots of 25 man gear, I presume you do 25 man raids (I do 10 man) so that might explain the difference (gear + raid buffs + skill too perhaps?)

My WWS: Wow Web Stats

(yes, I generally get owned by our lock).

For Kologarn I did 5448 with my pet doing 712. I haven't run any 10mans lately so don't have any logs to show. Here's our 25 run though. Wow Web Stats

Cool, thanks for the WWS Parse.

I notice you don't use Volley at all here? I like to use volley when an arm shatters to get in some cheeky AoE DPS...is this not a good idea? I also don't use Aimed shot and go for multi shot as you can hit both arms and the boss = more DPS than Aimed, might be worth considering (at a loss of Piercing shot though).

With my extra use of Volley, that will generate less focus for my pet and also less wild quiver (yours procced 5 times, mine 0). Your raid lasted 3 mins 51 = 153 GCDs and your pet used 103 bites with only 1 point in GftT. I have 2/2 GftT and my pets bite was used 70% of the time while yours was 67% - even though I didn't use as many normal "ranged" attacks. Not a big difference though, I wonder if another point in GftT for you would be more beneficial than Imp SS, which only procced twice for you there?

I thought Ensidia suppose to have top notch people, Tuskar's Vitalilty in order to give room for errors? All the stuff in Ulduar can be avoided easily with normal run speed.

The adds are usually taken care of quickly so there's no need for me to volley.

I've thought about adding a second point in GFTT. The spreadsheet doesn't show any DPS increase with two, but I may just add the second point and see how things go.

The not using multi shot part is just a flaw of my own with getting in a rut of always using aimed on bosses.

Movement speed is the most OP "stat" in the game and it makes perfect sense to enchant for it as a DPS increase. A point of contention would be that in BC all of our DPS required us to be still (if you were BM) while this is not completely the case anymore. Probably worth doing the math but there's no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

Looking over my WWS last night, silencing shot averaged 60 dps per fight, which is pretty awesome for a single talent point. It's also nice to have when you want to unmacro it and have an extra interrupt, like on stormcaller after the interrupt, or vezax as a last ditch fail safe. I also find it useful on yog for making the guardian pull to sara go smoother.

I also agree with tuskar's vitality. Ulduar has alot of movement fights and alot of things you have to react to quickly, the sooner you get out of the way the sooner you can get back to dps. I personally have nitro rockets attached to my pve boots and they're a life safer.

And aimed>arcane provided you have enough armor pen to make it exceed arcane's damage. I sit at 22% normally, which isn't enough, but if my mjolnir runestone procs my armor pen shoots up to 60%+ and aimed deals about a thousand dmg more then arcane.

Does anybody use two pve specs? Im currently 11/53/7 and im thinking of going back to 7/57/7 just to try and determine what pushes out more actual dps. Any thoughts?

It's not as easy as saying MM > SV, which spec has the highest DPS will depend on gear and how well you play it. A lot of people are switching to MM because they "heard it's the highest DPS now" - this is only the case you you start to get BiS Ulduar gear so for 99% of people SV will still be top. Maybe in 3.2 MM might start to get a little further ahead but until then I wouldn't say it's significantly better.

Check the spreadsheet and also test it out. If you can't get it to better your SV DPS, stay SV!

I've actually been finding Nitro Boosts (Nitro Boosts - Spell - World of Warcraft) to be amazing. I don't think I'd want to enchant one of the passive runspeed enchants, but the on-demand boost from the nitros means I can do things like running to a rune all the way across the IC room at the cost of 1 auto + 1 steady, and escape all the clouds in P1 Yogg, get to a distant Shadow Crash that no one else is using on General, pick up a storm power from someone across the room on Hodir, etc. The speed boost is so high that you really can cover the length of most boss rooms during its 2s duration. And the crit rating on it is better than icewalker if you don't need the hit.

Now, it's not good enough to make you take Engineering instead of one of the better professions, but if you're staying an engineer for whatever reasons, it's quite a good enchant (as are the pyro rockets to gloves).

As you already have, I am also a big fan of 2/2 GttT in Ulduar because of all the movement cutting down on the focus generation of the pet from GftT.

The 1K needs to be taken in perspective. First, it depends on your gear, since your pet's stats and DPS potential are derived from your stats. Second, the spreadsheet number is assuming an ideal standstill fight where you pet is attacking constantly, you are keeping it focus available, and proc abilities that modify its DPS by procing regularly.

The spreadsheet tells me that in the ideal case for my gear and 25-man raid buffs that my pet should be doing about 1088 DPS with 3.1.3. My guild raids on Fri/Sat so, I do not have any 3.1.3 WWS yet. However, using my last pre-3.1.3 WWS, I see the following:

For the whole night on bosses, I did 4400 DPS, with my pet accounting for 12% of my DPS, so only 530 DPS. Now the thing to realize is that all the boss fights are not ideal fights. For instance, during Razorscale my pet has a lot of down time running around and usually dies at some point, which costs its DPS.

However, if I look at an example of a near ideal fight, such as Ignis, I do 6600 DPS, with my pet accounting for 15% of that for about 990 DPS, which is pretty close to the 1088 ideal.

Other have already stated the reasoning, but here is some evidence from my last WWS. Against all bosses, including ones where I did Volley, it averaged 1560 damage per shot and it accounted for 1.2% of my DPS (about 52 DPS), which is awesome for 1 talent point spent. On the more ideal case like Ignis with no AoE so that its frequency is greater, it accounted for just over 1% of my DPS at 69 DPS.

All the damaging shots are instant except steady shot, which means you can move and shoot at the same time. Increase in movement speed will allow you to get from point A to B faster and may be get off another steady shot 0.5ms faster. I really don't see how it's better than Icewalker for someone who needs hit or 16 agi for those who are hit capped.

It depends on the distance involved IMO (speaking of the Nitro Boosts, not tuskar's, which I agree are too small a boost for hunters to bother with) - if the distance is such that you'd take more than just a steadyshot or two to cover, then without nitro boosts you quite possibly wouldn't bother covering it (I certainly wouldn't run across the assembly of iron room to reach a rune at normal run speed, because there's a chance it's actually out of range of my target, and a chance a rune of death could spawn and screw me out of it). But the on-use for the boosts is so large a speed increase that pretty much everything other than the length of General's room is coverable in 2 seconds or less, so it's the difference between being in a rune of power/shadow crash for 20s and not, not just the difference between 0.5 extra steadyshots and not.

Moving an extended distance also means either no autoshots (and wildquivers, and benefit from haste effects) for the duration, or slower and more attention demanding movement as you pause to get autos off while moving, and it definitely means risking loss of Sniper Training.

I personally use two specs, one MM that assumes I've got a raid with enough mana replenishment to push the numbers to the max (no Efficiency or mana-conserving talents), and a survival build designed to assist my guild when we need the mana regen or I find myself mana starved for other reasons. You just have to remember which spec to use for what fights.

It also means less auto shots (and thus less wild quiver procs) which are something of a big deal for MM. Everything alienangel mentioned as an advantage of nitro boots is simply a matter of movement speed being a factor. More extreme in that case, but it's essentially showing that it is a factor in DPS. The degree to which it is a factor is probably worth looking into but as far as I know, no one has modeled it yet, meaning the most you are going to hear on either side of the argument is opinion and anecdotal evidence.

It's not. People are just getting bored so they are trying to make a case for MM being better. It may begin to scale better with the next content, but for now survival is still better.

As far as I have been able to read from the spreadsheet survival is best up until a certain point. It depends on your gear. Once you get close to BiS ulduar gear, MM takes over as the higher dps spec.

On this note, I'd think it would be fairly simple to make a mod that tracks how much time you spend moving per fight. Ideally this would just be one of the quantities recount tracks per encounter for everyone in the raid. Not the first time I wished for recount's reports to be modular and customizable (actually, maybe they are, I can't say I've ever actually checked).

Other minor points in favour of moving quickly: running around makes our already lacklustre 4pc set bonus even worse, and of course reduces pet-focus due to lack of Gftt procs.

As for anecdotal evidence, I'm far from ulduar BiS, but the spreadsheet already shows me at higher DPS as MM than survival, while still wearing gear I collected and gemmed for *SV*. Given the last couple nights of raiding this does seem to be true.

I am talking about Tuskar's since that's what the ensidia guide said. If a rune power spawned at the other half of the room, you can reach there relatively fast even without nitro boost, you just need to jump and disengage. All I am trying to say is Tuskar's isn't better than Icewalker/16 agi.

EDIT: hell, you can even run and let auto shot go off, then keep running if you are really good.

@alienangel, correct me if I am wrong, you gem the same way you do for SV when you are MM, still agi.

This very well may be, but only if you don't run out of mana. However if you do, one must also consider how expensive this shot is from mana consumption perspective. I'm not saying speccing Silencing Shot is bad, but one can not evaluate its value based on the shot's DPS contribution only. It's potentially possible that running out of mana earlier due to higher mana consumption resulted in overall DPS decrease.