Hagen

I don't play BM at the moment, but I prefer Boar's Speed over the alternatives, because the speed increases the time your pet can do damage (faster at the mob), it helps it avoid damage (faster out of AoE), in contrast to charge it's always active and doesn't annoy your tanks by stunning a mob.

 

TrevvyTrev

The pet build we're talking about includes Dash. The question thus isn't about the benefit of a speed boost, but which speed boost (Charge or Boar's Speed) has less overlap with Dash. BM pets typically have enough focus to Dash out of AoE if really needed, and BM pets have a passive 10% speed boost already from Kindred Spirits. Charge is even faster to the mob than Boar's Speed is, and it doesn't annoy tanks because it doesn't stun. It roots for one second, and just about every raid mob is immune to it. If Charge is on CD, Dash is almost always up because there is only a small window between the duration and the CD when you're BM specced. So I gave charge the (slight) edge by virtue of the AP boost and the fact that it serves a different purpose than Dash does, so it's less redundant.

 

Lupius

My biggest question in regards to the change in expertise is, with 3/3 Focused Aim, does your pet get max expertise if you have 5% hit from gear? I hope Blizzard didn't neglect this in their equations.

And exactly how much is max expertise? Is it maxed for attacking from in front or behind?

 

Namarus

Charge doesn't stun.

 

TrevvyTrev

My testing on the PTR against the training dummies suggests that it is maxxed for attacking from behind (i.e., dodge) but not from the front (i.e., parry). When my pet was out of position, it got parried a few times, but it didn't get dodged at all once it successfully maneuvered behind the target.

 

• Tsook

Which means that the expertise on Animal Handler can be considered a pet tanking boost, just as the dodge on Cobra Reflexes is, since that's the only time that parries are relevant for pets. So, not a raid dps talent any more, but has its place just as CR does (mostly soloing old content).

 

arlen

It immobilizes them for 1 sec though, Charge - Spell - World of Warcraft

 

TrevvyTrev

It almost never works on raid mobs. I only say "almost" because I can't say for sure that it won't ever work, but I have never seen it work myself. This thread is "raiding as beast mastery" and the context is that using charge will annoy tanks during raids because of positioning. That is not a valid concern, because during any raid encounter where the tank actually cares about positioning, using charge won't have any effect on that.

 

Hagen

Though the point was made quite clear in TrevvyTrevs post from a few days ago (You're right, Charge seems to be the better choice.), I had tank complain a while back about warlock's Felguard's which stunned some mobs he was trying to taunt and pull together (I think it was at Razorscale) and I worried that Charge might have the same annoying effect.

 

Lupius

As a follow up to the discussion on page 1, wouldn't it be a good choice to include /cast Aspect of the Beast into the Bestial Wrath macro and manually switching back to Hawk when it's over?

 

TrevvyTrev

The hunter spreadsheet can give an exact answer for a particular spec and gear level, because it has an option to switch to AotB during Wrath on the "Settings" tab, but the general answer is no. Short answers why:

1. Hunter damage is boosted during TBW also, so the effects of 390 AP (modified by 10% damage) are lost. BM hunters still do more damage with shots than they do with the pet, unless something is way off about their rotation or uptime.

2. The melee AP bonus to the pet is offset in part by the lost AP from scaling. Using ~24% AP scaling to the pet (assuming Wild Hunt, that number is from memory so it may be slightly off), simply not using Dragonhawk is roughly a 94 AP loss. This means your pet's first 940 AP doesn't really count -- it takes 940 AP for the extra 10% bonus from AotB to equal the amount lost from losing Dragonhawk. It's only AP above that which makes a difference, and even that is at 10%.

 

Kadaq

I put a point into my pets charge instead of 2/2 into bloodthirsty and just leave it at 1/2 b/c of alot of the new fights their is target changing, knockbacks and i never have a problem with my pet dying.

 

zeroKFE

Well, there's the answer to the question of what would become of the former expertise bonus.

Also, there's a pretty good answer to the question of how they intend to address BM's lagging DPS. Odd, though; I could swear GC had said that they wanted to find ways to buff the hunter rather than the pet. I'll take what I can get, I guess.

Edit:

At this point, I'm looking at one of the following three specs come 3.2:

55/11/5

53/11/7

53/13/5

I guess some people prefer a build with Invigoration, but what I'm most interested in testing is the relative values of the extra Kill Command now offered by Catlike Reflexes, the bonus crit damage from Mortal Shots, and the extra crit chance from Survival Instincts.

 

S7orm

55/16/0 should work well too

it depends from how good catlike reflex is...

 

Neruse

CLR is about 10 dps per point. Very weak buff.

With the recent buff to Wild Hunt to 15/30% combined with the other changes, I think BM would be somewhat competitive. Only problem is that BM dps will again fall off as better gear becomes available.

 

Criven

My gut feeling is to move the 3.1 mend pet/spirit bond floater to CLR instead and call that a day for the BM tree. It's a DPS boost, but unlikely to be big enough to warrant losing 2 points from better talents in the other two trees to cap it out.

I reckon We're going to see 53/12/0 as the core of the spec with the last 7 floating points reliant on the spreadsheet results (probably standard 7 points in survival for IT and SI given what we've seen on the Colosseum boss types so far):

 

zeroKFE

I'm not sure those particular floater points can migrate that far down the tree, but my testing is showing results along the same lines of your general premise -- the extra Kill Command is probably not worth as much as more points in mortal shots or points in Survival Instincts. Unless they play with the numbers a bit more, I'm thinking CLR will remain most useful for PvP or soloing/off-tanking.

 

Criven

Well, there are usually two points between Spirit bond and Mend Pet. One is necessary to reach frenzy, the second one is not but until now there's been nowhere better to put it (essentially, it could go in MP, SB or Frenzy 4 for insurance).

We still need a point in Mend Pet or Spirit bond to get to frenzy in the first place but the second point only becomes necessary 6 tiers down the talents - where CLR sits.

 

zeroKFE

Ah, fair enough. I thought you meant move both points down.

Still, anything less than a full 3/3 in CLR will cause a disruption in pairing Kill Command with Bestial Wrath, and three points are hard to find at that point in the tree.

 

Criven

That's a worthwhile point - we're not going to get 3/3 points into it at that position in the tree. Setting that aside for a minute, I'm not sure the fallout from CLR depaired KC is as bad as people seem to think.

BW glyphed and talented has a 70 second cooldown and an 18 second duration rather than just a 70 second cooldown. In other words, if you're hitting it as often as you can, it should be up for 18 seconds, then down for 52.

KC has a 60 second one when untalented. KC gives a bonus to the first 3 special attacks made by the pet (of various degrees). So 3 GCD or 4.5 seconds duration (in reality, it's less time than this because the third GCD doesn't need to end before BW - to make it easy, call it 4 seconds).

So we want the 4 second KC to occur within the 18 seconds that BW is up rather than the 52 seconds it's down whenever possible.

Lets assume we hold off on KC if the cooldown will not sync up with BW again for a long time.

So, from working through this in excel:
CLR 3 doubles the number of KC during a fight when paired (1 on every BW, 1 off).
CLR 2 gives 3 for every 2 you would use. (1 on BW, 1 off BW, 1 during BW, hold this one to resync with BW)
CLR 1 begins to skip some BWs by necessity. (1 on BW, 2 unpaired by CD, 1 during BW, hold to resync)

So basically, whether CLR 1 is worthwhile comes down to whether 2 non BW KC's are worth more than 1 BW KC DPS wise, by how much and whether the extra complexity in knowing when to hold your KC cooldown is worth that to you.

 

zeroKFE

You make an excellent point, and it's definitely worth further investigation.

To paraphrase your post, getting 1/3 in the talent essentially causes you to go from a place where for every cycle of three BWs, you have three paired KCs, to a place where you have two paired and two unpaired KCs. So is one paired KC worth more DPS than two unpaired ones? If so, then we might as well keep using that floater point in Spirit Bond or Improved Mend Pet. If not, well, we just got a little bit of free DPS out of a point that used to have marginal utility for raiding.

So there is that question. Then there is also the question of if we've already put one point there to get the most of our 53 in the BM tree, is it worth putting one more in and going with a 54/11/6 or a 54/12/5 to get the extra KC between every other BW at the cost of a point in one of two talents that are guaranteed, no maintenance needed DPS boosts.

Anyway, I'm fairly certain that as currently implemented the spreadsheet doesn't model Kill Command usage in a way that can answer these questions, so a bit more good old fashion testing may be in order here.

 

KraxisSingular

Even for BM KC is a pretty weak DPS ability. Going to use it assymetrically like that might not be worth it in the vast majority of cases due to lost attention elsewhere, and/or the messup factor.
Theoretical DPS is not always attainable, and sometimes trying to get it might lead to lost DPS. This seems to be one of those cases.

Overall rather surprised they have decided to try out buffing our pets. With these buffs we are basically back to square one concerning the 3.0.8 changes, minus the Steady nerf of course. Which is rather odd, since the net result is a weakeneing of the Hunter but not the pet (for the same gear of course).

I do disagree that this will bring BM back up there. It still suffers more on more fights that has nothing to do with the DPS capacity. Beyond that I doubt the capacity will get buffed all that much by this. Survival looks to gain a fair bit from the Wild Hunt change as well (having the largest AP pool). 10% AP is pretty nifty for the pet, no doubt, but the difference is too great for that. Even with the removal of dodges.

I don't think they are finished based on the changes so far. The Hunter is bound to get something too.

[EDIT] Regarding the boost of DPS so far the spreadsheet seems to agree. My gear with Shandra's BM spec (which appears to be pretty good) saw a total gain of 80-100 DPS. A boost for sure, but hardly one that is worth declaring BM alive again for. Still behind by a magnitude of 800 DPS.

 

Iru

While I agree that buff gimmicks not applying to pets means a lot of fights put BM at a disadvantage, your argument that the spreadsheet undervalues BW because hunters only use it when standing still is erroneous. It is not possible to move less than not moving at all which is exactly the situation the spreadsheet models, a stand still tank-n-spank fight, e.g. Patchwerk.

 

D3thray

Then maybe I should have said it inflates SV and MM moreso than BM because most fights aren't patchwerk. The point remains.

 

KraxisSingular

Hardly.

MM/Surv has the advantage of being mobile with their shots. BM has the advantage of being more mobile in regards to the pet. The BM pet is about as good as the instants of the other specs. BM has instants too of course.
But like BM wouldn't use BW while running, similarly Surv and MM wouldn't use Rapid Fire (and CotW of course). Now BM has the advantage that BW is more pet centered (so it doesn't lose as much power if you are forced to move in it's duration) and the cooldown is a lot shorter, so potentially it can be used in more 'pauses'. However BW has more than 25% uptime optimally, meaning it's usage is considerably more vital. Any lost second on it is more damaging.

And we shouldn't forget fights like Mimiron or heck even Yogg where our pets are either at our sides for a good time or attacks a much less vital target (if any is within reach at all).

The benefits of BM are also the detriments.