If pets were to inherit more stats than they do now, I could see BM being far too good. The scaling from player to pet would have to be extremely small to make it balanced.

Given that pets do satisfying to excessive amounts of DPS already, it's probably fallen into the "no need to worry about this right now" category.

Again, it's a weak stat because of it's abundance on gear. Speaking in terms of MM, if haste was a rare stat, we would likely strive to reach the soft cap. So far haste seems to be very important in order to maintain a proper shot rotation in 3.1.

I like what they are doing with pets in the PTR, so the last thing I want to happen is excessive buffing leading to a huge nerf. The added pet talents seem to be enough to let BM hunters compensate for the normalization of Ferocity damage and then add a little scaling on top of it. I just hope I can stay ahead of my pet on the meter.

What do you mean by per item budget? as in the budget os items and how much each stat has it's own value that adds up to reach the item total budget for the ilevel? Or dps per stat point? (just want to understand it, not being confrontational)

I know what you are saying, I am just wondering, aloud, if at some point the combination of x haste + y ArP is > than other stat combos. I was just surprised to see how, in theory, BM dps seems to benefit greatly from ArP. Haste is the least desirable stat for BM, but it is not as useless as most say, and like most of us, they will take any other stat over haste. On the other hand, it is their natural haste that seems to increase dps thru ArP

I mean that AP doesn't "cost" as much to get from gear. A good example is gems. The same blue quality gem can give you 32AP or 16agi. So while 1 ArP probably provides more DPS than 1 AP, that's not really a fair comparison because you should be comparing 1 ArP to 2 AP.

Actually haste is not important to keep proper rotation since one can never reach perfect 3xSS-1xES rotation due to lag, low frames and being human. Besides that I do not think anyone has got 590 haste which is needed to reach soft haste cap (1.5sec cast time on Steady).
With all your haste you can do is to slightly lower time you need to fire next Exp Shot. You need so much haste to get that minor effect, therefore haste is bad stat for all the specs.

I personally do not think haste will become relatively better stat with ArP changes. Minor effect it has on number of shots one fires will stay the same. It will be better to choose other stats that increase actual dmg done by shots.

Sorry, I don't like what they, meaning Blizzard, are doing on the PTR neither with pets nor with Beast Mastery in general.

To put it simply, none of the core problems with the Beast Mastery tree has been addressed so far. Shark Attack is merely a compensation for reducing the base pet damage of ferocity pets to +5% (down from +10%) plus an extra +1% pet damage, which is basically mockery. As for Wild Hunt, in its present form two ranks in the talent would merely increase a Beast Master pet's Attack Power by about 190 (that is for a Beast Master with about 4,200 Attack Power). It's not like even 400 more Pet Attack Power than what pets get in current Live Raids, may improve BM's Raid Performance substantially, thus Wild Hunt in and of itself is hardly an important improvement.

Some of the core problems with Beast Mastery that still remain unresolved:

1. Less Benefit from Haste: Beast Masters receive less benefit from Haste than both Marksmen and Survivalists.

2. Scaling. Beast Masters get less benefit from gear upgrades than both Marksmen and Survivalists, due to their lack of
scaling talents.

3. Raid Buff Scaling: Again, Beast Masters get less benefit from Raid Buffs than Marksmen and Survivalists do, due to their lack of scaling talents.

4. Lack of on-proc talents that directly benefit the Hunter's DPS instead of the pet's DPS, for example:

(Survival Talents):

Expose Weakness Rank 3: Your ranged criticals have a 100% chance to grant you Expose Weakness. Expose Weakness increases your attack power by 25% of your Agility for 7 sec.

Master Tactician Rank 5: Your successful ranged attacks have a 10% chance to increase your critical strike chance with all attacks by 10% for 8 sec.

A Beast Master's personal DPS would really benefit from something like the above.

5. Lackluster Raid Buff: Ferocious Inspiration is popularly seen as something that a Raid can do without, thus it's not enough of a reason to really justify bringing a Beast Master along in a Raid, as opposed to just bringing 2 or 3 Survivalists.

Frankly, I am not very optimistic that Blizzard will bother looking into these concerns or bother to improve the tree's performance, as Ghostcrawler has stated that "they are happy with BM on the PTR" or something along these lines. I also do not think that Beast Mastery will really be raid-viable come patch 3.1. At most, what will happen is that you will -maybe- sometimes be able to squeeze some passable raid performance out of the tree if you are dedicated enough, but in reality Beast Mastery will still lag substantially behind both Marksmanship and Survival. Survival will continue to be the class' primary Raid tree, with Marksmanship as the alternative riad tree.

Do you really think that the insignificant changes to the Beast Mastery 51 point talent, are really going to make some of the Raiding Hunters (something like 90% of the level 80 Hunter player base are currently Survivalists) respec to Beast Mastery? I think not.

I can agree that Shark Attack is just a compensation for pet normalization, and that in case Wild Hunt gets nerfed to what GC announced it will be lackluster talent.
But I cannot agree with you that BM tree needs "on-proc talents that directly benefit the Hunter's DPS instead of the pet's DPS" due to fact it has 1 already which is Imp Aspect of the Hawk. Another reason is that I personally do not want to see talent trees look alike, meaning having in fact same abilities under different names.
I don't think BM scales badly with raid buffs due to immense scaling pets have. Yes scaling with gear is probably one of the worse among all specs but that is something they try to counter with Wild Hunt talent, which I think would be OK to stay 20/40%.
Tbh I find it odd for a pure dps class to think about buffs it can bring to raid. Almost every buff is now available from at least 2 different classes. It is not that FI is something that raid can do without, but seeing how much Retardins are popular these days it is hard to find a raid without one. Buff will never again be a reason for bringing hunter to raid. Philosophy Blizz adopted, making classes much less unique, is something we need to live with or stop p(l)aying.

Don't get me wrong, I personally find BM to be most interesting tree of all and would like nothing more than to see it being competative, it is just that I feel that you didn't addressed real issues, apart from ferocity nerf and scaling with gear. BM dps largely depends on 2 things, pet and Steady Shot. Since there is little chance new shot will be added and Steady dmg will be buffed, only option for Blizzard is to look into pets. They did it, and we are still waiting to see final result of their work, for now some ppl show BM can do very good on PTR.

The problem as I see it is as follows:

a. pure DPS classes for raids will gravitate towards any spec that has even a tiny, but reliable DPS advantage - a lower DPS spec is only taken if it provides some utility that can't be gotten elsewhere (see: one mage being scorch-bitch while the rest go arcane)

b. blizzard wants to completely do away with unique buffs/debuffs being provided by single classes/specs, so hunter don't provide any unique buffs - the ones we do provide (FI, Replenishment, armor debuffs, 10% ap) are provided much more easily by other classes, since they provide them from their ideal specs/gameplay instead of from secondary specs like we do

c. my own personal opinion is that given a choice of two specs being higher DPS, blizzard prefers the one that's slightly harder to play being the higher potential DPS - in the hunter case that's either SV or MM, since BM is still pretty simplistic to play (I'm sorry if this sounds like a launch into one of the "my spec is harder to play" threads, but I do think BM is currently easier to play and theorycraft than the others - MM is probably shaping up to be the hardest because of all the counterintuitive math being done to work out what order of GCDs makes the best use of cooldowns and procs). But of course, this implies that either MM needs to be higher DPS than SV, or (more likely imo) blizzard didn't anticipate how awkward MM math becomes currently.


If a, b and c are all true, Blizzard can't make BM equal dps (certainly not superior DPS) to MM or SV - they don't want a DPS reason for everyone to play one spec when it's also the simpler spec to play as. Right now the biggest thing holding BM back is its lack of scaling, and this is nothing new - if you're levelling and/or have poor gear, BM is a good spec. If your gear improves, scaling makes other specs better. Point (a) implies that a utility/buff reason to play BM would fit nicely into requiring 1 BM hunter in a lot of raids, however (b) means that we provide no such utility or buff.

The real problem I have with BM is the reliance on the pet to do the majority of the damage. On something like Patchwerk it's completely fine. But on fights like Sarth+3 or even KT where your pet is likely to get insta-gibbed at the drop of a hat you have just become worthless. Losing 20% of my total DPS halfway through a fight is minor compared to losing 50% or more of it. And I am only going to assume (or at least hope) that Ulduar has intense fun fights instead of tank and spanks.