Raiding as Beast Mastery in 3.1 - Page 17

IceyDevil · 10/14/09, 5:11 AM

As per culling the herd;
Keep in mind that this a baseline talent replacing avoidance, therein SV and MM hunters will also have it. They will probably be able to keep near 100% uptime, so this change doesn't close the gap any. In fact, since they do more damage to begin with, this change only widens the gap between SV/MM and BM.

I may do some tests tomorrow on a training dummy to see how high my bat can hit WB unbuffed, and add in some AP variables to see how it scales. I'll report back if I can figure anything out.

zakaria · 10/14/09, 7:03 AM

Originally Posted by IceyDevil

As per culling the herd;
Keep in mind that this a baseline talent replacing avoidance, therein SV and MM hunters will also have it. They will probably be able to keep near 100% uptime, so this change doesn't close the gap any. In fact, since they do more damage to begin with, this change only widens the gap between SV/MM and BM.

I may do some tests tomorrow on a training dummy to see how high my bat can hit WB unbuffed, and add in some AP variables to see how it scales. I'll report back if I can figure anything out.

Pets with MM or SV specs can't keep up culling of herd 100% simply becasue these specs lack of critical chance boosters unlike BM, in shandra spreadsheet my wolf fully buffed has 21.42% crit chance againts bosses which is pretty low. on the other hand BM has 4 talents in BM specs and 1 in pet specs orbiting around this new ability (ferocity,frenzy,cobra strike, invigoration and spider's bite) which all of them can keep up mostly your pet on very high crit chance, haste buffed, mana regen for you and 2% dmg modifier to all pet/hunter attacks. This is cleary saying It's BM buff.

ArmeisV · 10/14/09, 7:56 AM

From MMO - Champion

Pet
•Culling the Herd - When your pet's Claw, Bite, or Smack ability deals a critical strike, you and your pet deal 1/2% increased damage for 10 sec.

Culling the Herd lowered to two ranks? Three was too powerful?

Sellath · 10/14/09, 8:57 AM

Originally Posted by ArmeisV

From MMO - Champion

Pet
•Culling the Herd - When your pet's Claw, Bite, or Smack ability deals a critical strike, you and your pet deal 1/2% increased damage for 10 sec.

Culling the Herd lowered to two ranks? Three was too powerful?

It's still 3 points for my wolf of the pre-made. I guess it was just a typo. Before it said (PH) on the tooltip.
I went and did some testing on the PTR and checked if it got implemented, but it didn't procc for me and my wolf after quite a few crits of Bite.
Never saw a buff nor a change in the damage (char info).

KraxisSingular · 10/14/09, 9:44 AM

Originally Posted by zakaria

Pets with MM or SV specs can't keep up culling of herd 100% simply becasue these specs lack of critical chance boosters unlike BM, in shandra spreadsheet my wolf fully buffed has 21.42% crit chance againts bosses which is pretty low. on the other hand BM has 4 talents in BM specs and 1 in pet specs orbiting around this new ability (ferocity,frenzy,cobra strike, invigoration and spider's bite) which all of them can keep up mostly your pet on very high crit chance, haste buffed, mana regen for you and 2% dmg modifier to all pet/hunter attacks. This is cleary saying It's BM buff.

The difference between BM and the other spec's pet special crits isn't that great. They have the same frequency in just attacks, and the other specs also have Spider's Bite. So it is only Ferocity and Cobra Strikes that mark BM out in favour of this. Yes it will mean more uptime, but the question is how much more. In 10 seconds a pet can strike with around 8 specials. That should be enough for the buff staying up at very high percentages for around 21% crit. Anecdotal experiences tell me that my pet crits with specials plenty in that time.

IceyDevil · 10/15/09, 6:00 AM

Originally Posted by zakaria

Pets with MM or SV specs can't keep up culling of herd 100% simply becasue these specs lack of critical chance boosters unlike BM, in shandra spreadsheet my wolf fully buffed has 21.42% crit chance againts bosses which is pretty low. on the other hand BM has 4 talents in BM specs and 1 in pet specs orbiting around this new ability (ferocity,frenzy,cobra strike, invigoration and spider's bite) which all of them can keep up mostly your pet on very high crit chance, haste buffed, mana regen for you and 2% dmg modifier to all pet/hunter attacks. This is cleary saying It's BM buff.

Assuming your pet isn't focus staved, because MM and SV both crit insane amounts (really, all 3 specs do), it'll use its focus dump every 1.5 seconds for six attacks in nine seconds. One of those six will crit as long as your pet crit is greater than 16.6>, which you say yours is. 100% uptime, given distributed RNG.

Hagen · 10/15/09, 6:12 AM

Pet GCD is 1.25s.

IceyDevil · 10/16/09, 7:37 AM

As promised;

Wolverine Bite Trial I;

Base pet AP: 2070
Sample Size: 100

Wolverine Bite (min/average/max damage);
Hit 671/672/672
Crit 1343/1343/1343

Wolverine Bite Trial II;

Base pet AP: 2179
Sample Size: 100

Wolverine Bite (min/average/max damage);
Hit 680/681/681
Crit 1361/1361/1362

Damage modifiers;
Spiked collar - 9%
Culling the Herd - 3% (confirmed?)
Unleashed Fury - 15%
Ferocious Inspiration - 3%
Kindred Spirits - 20%
Total damage coefficient: 1.59580578

Actual damage of Wolverine Bite (I/II Trial);
Hit 421,1039/426.7437
Crit 841.5811/852.8607

Change in pet AP; Change in Wolverine Bite damage before damage modification (hit/crit);
I-II 109 5.6389/11.2796

Change in damage/Change in attack power = .051733 damage/one attack power

Alternatively, observe that 421 damage is a mere 16 damage above the base damage of Wolverine Bite (405).
16.1039/2070= 0.0077797
This leads me to a basic formula of:
WB = d(5x + .0077797y)
Where "d" is your damage modifier, "x" is your pet level, "y" is your pet's attack power

While I'm sure it's not this simple, this formula holds true in predicting the damage output of wolverine bite in all of my trials of varying pet attack power. I did a third trial to test it, although this post is getting lengthy enough without my providing the data that this formula would give you.

Using this formula, and the damage modification of the best raid buffs (another 4% physical damage, 25% less boss armor (about 7% more damage for the pet, I believe)), I estimate it taking 201294 pet attack power (about 915000 hunter attack power) to see your pet hitting 3500 average wolverine bites. This is non-crits, of course, and without using bestial wrath at all.

To summarize, from my testing I believe attack power has a very small bearing on wolverine bite damage. I seriously doubt that, without severe changes to pet stat inheritance, the way wolverine bite damage is calculated, or some other miracle, we will see wolverine bite doing nearly the damage it needs to to make cunning pets a replacement for ferocity pets. Wolverine Bite should currently only be worth about 200 DPS maximum over not having it, and the deficit that my spreadsheet calculates between cunning and ferocity is near 500.

If any of my numbers are wrong I'll be happy to recalculate, but I doubt they would make enough of a difference anyway. I'm giving cunning pets a thumbs down, still. Attack power simply doesn't change the damage nearly enough to make a difference to get a 405 base damage to ~2500 hits. If 110 pet attack power (almost 300 hunter attack power) can only raise the damage of WB by 5, the scaling just isn't there.

These trials were conducted on the grand master training dummy, with nothing but the hunter auto attacking to help the pet's focus regeneration. No procs from any source were had except ferocious inspiration, which kept a 100% uptime.

@Hagen,
That only further proves my point, no?

Qaenyin · 10/16/09, 9:25 AM

Ah, that's saddening then. That'd make Wolverine Bite scale worse than any other pet attack in the game if I'm not mistaken(your data suggests roughly 5% pet attack power scaling, all other pet physical specials scale at about 7%.

Oh well, was worth a shot.

Edit:Although in retrospect it was previously mentioned someone had seen 4k WB crits in naxx, so I'm truly confused as to how that would be remotely possible with these numbers.

Maybe they nerfed the coefficient in 3.3 to compensate for the increased availability.

• Tsook · 10/16/09, 1:19 PM

Originally Posted by Qaenyin

Although in retrospect it was previously mentioned someone had seen 4k WB crits in naxx, so I'm truly confused as to how that would be remotely possible with these numbers.

Maybe they nerfed the coefficient in 3.3 to compensate for the increased availability.

I don't remember investigating the context. So that may well have been on a boss or mob that took extra damage in a certain phase, with both bestial wrath and kill command up, or something. I was surprised, too, when I saw it. Seems like that's not going to be reproducible, in general.

Lupius · 10/16/09, 2:50 PM

@IceyDevil

I highly doubt that any Blizzard code monkey would have the humour and the luxury to come up with an arbitrary yet insignificant AP modifier like 0.0077797. My hunch is that there is no AP modifier at all.

One flaw in your test parameters is the inclusion of the 3% from Ferocious Inspiration, for which you cannot guarantee equal uptime across trials. I recommend grouping with a ret pally while you do the tests so you don't have to waste gold to respec and stuff.

edit: just remembered WB triggered by pet crit, so scratch what I said.

edit2:

WB = d(5x + .0077797y)

This formula does not validate your trial II results. You might want more data points to see what's really going on here.

IceyDevil · 10/16/09, 3:36 PM

Originally Posted by Qaenyin

Ah, that's saddening then. That'd make Wolverine Bite scale worse than any other pet attack in the game if I'm not mistaken(your data suggests roughly 5% pet attack power scaling, all other pet physical specials scale at 7%).

That having been said, one thing I have to point out is that you said WB's base damage is 5n, n being your pet's level, yet in your calculation you cited the base damage as 405. If the base damage after attack power you mentioned was 400 rather than 405 as you stated, that'd be a difference of 21 damage, not 16, increasing the coefficient by slightly over 1/3(presumably this would bring it up to 7%, matching all other pet physical attacks, which would make far more sense).

Also, my previous statement of 3500 average WB needed to match a ferocity pet was over the duration of a fight, and including criticals. For example, if WB crit 50% of the time at a 200% multiplier, it would need to deal 2625 non-crit after BW, or about 2300 before BW.

You stated a damage coefficient from talents/buffs of 1.59580578, which would bring this down to about 1500 damage base+attack power. 400 damage base, so 1100 damage from attack power.

About 16k attack power. Definitely not happening.

Oh well, was worth a shot.

Edit:Although in retrospect it was previously mentioned someone had seen 4k WB crits in naxx, so I'm truly confused as to how that would be remotely possible with these numbers.

Maybe they nerfed the coefficient in 3.3 to compensate for the increased availability.

The damage on the tooltip says 405, so I use 405 as my base damage. I believe the damage for WB is 5 + pet level*5, so it would be 5 at level zero, 10 at level 1, 405 at level 80. I understood that my calculations did not include critical hits or bestial wrath/attack power procs/etc, my point was merely to show that the scaling of attack power with this ability was so minute that it would take exorbitant amounts of attack power to make wolverine bite a serious ability, levels of attack power that are unreachable (and may very well scale better with ferocity pets anyway). It is possible the coefficient calculations are wrong, this was all done after 40 hours of not sleeping.

How do you calculate 16k AP for 1100 damage from AP? My logic says if 110 AP increased wolverine bite damage by 5, it would take 24200 pet AP to reach the required damage level. Keeping in mind that the required hunter attack power is more than double this, at least we agree that it is not happening.

@Lupius
I agree with you, the formula is likely much more complex than my linear model, and probably has more than one attack power variable. They have random numbers tossed in for diminishing return calculations, armor penetration, armor damage reduction, and none of these make sense, nor can anyone have figured them out without Blizzard assistance. My aim wasn't to re-create the AP scale model, merely to attempt to represent it with an imaginary line that I could extrapolate to the attack power levels required for WB to make up a 500 DPS deficit. While my estimation maybe off by tens or hundreds of thousands of attack power, it doesn't change the fact that when I added over 300 attack power to my hunter, my pet gained 5 damage, making 1500 too large a number to reach.

Ferocious inspiration was only added into the calculations because it WAS always up during my trials, and I had to take the damage bonus out of my data to find the raw damage of wolverine bite. I was only using the spec I already had up, and taking the damage modifiers back out of it.

The formula makes for 400 base damage on wolverine bite, it should be 405. My mistake in typing it in, it should be more like d(5+5x+.0077797y). I can't attempt to recreate my data since I believe my findings are clear enough. If anyone takes nothing else out of my experiment, simply note that the addition of 109 pet attack power raised the wolverine bite damage by barely more than 5, and then because of poor hunter>pet attack power inheritance, it would take obscene amounts of hunter attack power to get wolverine bite to acceptable damage levels. I would like to be the first to point out that my math skills are comical, but I don't believe they are too horribly off. Finding the exact coefficient or formula seems irrelevant at this point.

Of note, remember that this is all also assuming that wolverine bite is used on cooldown. Doing the trials I noticed it rarely was, partially because of GCD overlap (7 seconds doesn't quite fit with the pet GCD), partly because my pet couldn't crit enough to always be able to use it. Perhaps the crit part will be taken care of by raid buffs, but the GCD part won't be. This only requires wolverine bite to do even more damage, an even more unobtainable number.

Edit2:
Also, there is definitely attack power scaling. My pet always hit for the exact same amount of damage (except for small changes in what appears to be rounding calculations), and this amount changed when nothing but my pet's attack power changed. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I have to add that this scaling is extremely small.

Edit4:
Didnt' see tsook's post, removed edits 1/3 because they pretty much said what he said.

Qaenyin · 10/16/09, 9:22 PM

Yeah error in my math, sorry, I'll just remove that. Anyways suffice it to say WB's dps contribution is more or less insignificant. Which is really a shame.

Lupius · 10/21/09, 2:00 PM

Originally Posted by IceyDevil

Alternatively, observe that 421 damage is a mere 16 damage above the base damage of Wolverine Bite (405).
16.1039/2070= 0.0077797

I think I found the problem here. The base damage 405 is the theoretical damage before the target's armor mitigation, but the recorded damage 421 is calculated after the target's armor mitigation.

IceyDevil · 10/22/09, 1:14 AM

Originally Posted by Lupius

I think I found the problem here. The base damage 405 is the theoretical damage before the target's armor mitigation, but the recorded damage 421 is calculated after the target's armor mitigation.

Attack power definitely changed the damage of wolverine bite, regardless of any other possible reason for the damage difference. It's also certain that the change was insignificant.

diadren · 10/26/09, 11:49 AM

Our retadin has recently picked up a near terminal case of the lazy, and forgets to show up most of the time. I got stuck providing the FI buff for those nights.

Since I'm already taking a hit to personal deeps for the raids bennie, another question crossed my mind. I'm quite ignorant of the exact #'s involved as far as how much dps a warrior loses by throwing up sunders, but I know that when they whine like 12 year girls when they are forced to sunder. Not even going to touch on the chances of our rogues throwing expose up instead...

So my question is thus - have any guilds looked at using a worm for the armor debuff instead of using sunders? I'm concerned with the inevitable loss due to pet insta-gibs and the loss of flexibility on my end. I can spreadsheet my personal dps loss, my question relates mainly to how well this will work in a raiding sense.

alienangel · 10/26/09, 12:50 PM

There was a thread I *think* on the rogue sections of the forums a few months back (early Ulduar I think) trying to math out the DPS hit from sundering vs. exposing, you should be able to dig it out with some searching. IIRC they concluded expose was better than sunder for a lot of fights.

Speaking for my alt warrior's experience, sundering isn't that bad if you have more than 1 warrior in the raid - the biggest DPS loss is from getting the initial 5 stack up, which 2 or more warriors cooperating helps with greatly - after that it's one GCD every ~20s or so, which is easy as fury, harder as arms. On fights with target switching or time off target though, keeping sunder up is a huge PITA as a DPS warrior.

KraxisSingular · 10/26/09, 10:35 PM

Expose is vastly better on targets or fights where the DPS-time is relatively low. So if you have to switch very often and/or a sunder stack would fall off get those Rogues to work. If they complain, tell them that they have so many times complained they bring nothing to a raid (which most rogues have done or still do), and now that they do they don't want to do it. Got my roguebuddy to do it.

Anyway, I really doubt that a Worm is worth it, the loss as mentioned to a Fury is fairly small, but a Tenacity pet is a huge loss for a BM.

Nachti · 11/02/09, 10:13 AM

My guild is starting to try Yogg+0, and I'd like to know if it's worthwhile to spec BM for that fight (being one of the guys who taunts the Marked Guardians) and if yes, which pet and skill build would be the best for that fight. Last thing I read is that a wolf is the best pet for a BM too, but as I won't be DPSing all the time, would a devilsaur maybe be a better choice?

Namarus · 11/02/09, 2:02 PM

I was thinking of leveling up a new pet for my BM off spec, and a thought hit me. Do heirloom pieces increase the rate at which pets gain experience?

Never mind, after testing with heirloom chest, and shoulders, there was no difference in experience gained by the pet.

IceyDevil · 11/03/09, 5:32 PM

Originally Posted by Nachti

My guild is starting to try Yogg+0, and I'd like to know if it's worthwhile to spec BM for that fight (being one of the guys who taunts the Marked Guardians) and if yes, which pet and skill build would be the best for that fight. Last thing I read is that a wolf is the best pet for a BM too, but as I won't be DPSing all the time, would a devilsaur maybe be a better choice?

Can you send me a link to wherever you saw that the wolf was the best BM pet now? I'd really like to see the data, as I can't believe the several hundred DPS that monstrous bite gives your pet can beat 320 AP with partial up time.

Anyway, if you're on the outside BM is a solid choice for yogg +anything I think. Taunting guardians will kill your hunter DPS regardless of spec, but at least your pet can do 2-3k DPS to yogg himself while you do your job. If you're part of the portal team for some reason, however, pets still can't attack the brain and you'll be gimping your brain damage. I would imagine devilsaur to be the weapon of choice for yogg, due to its highest personal DPS, if you do decide to roll BM for this fight.

Namarus · 11/04/09, 4:40 PM

Originally Posted by Nachti

My guild is starting to try Yogg+0, and I'd like to know if it's worthwhile to spec BM for that fight (being one of the guys who taunts the Marked Guardians) and if yes, which pet and skill build would be the best for that fight. Last thing I read is that a wolf is the best pet for a BM too, but as I won't be DPSing all the time, would a devilsaur maybe be a better choice?

For my guild's yogg 0 I used a Cunning pet. Solely because of the feeding frenzy talent.

Nachti · 11/04/09, 8:05 PM

I can't give you a link, and it's entirely possible that I don't recall it correctly. Thanks for your replies anyway. By the way, any tip on an addon for quickly selecting marked targets? We have an addon that sets raid icons on the marked guardians, but I have no idea how to select them very quickly other than clicking and hoping I target them on the first few clicks.

Storytime · 11/04/09, 11:05 PM

Try MagicTargets-

Rhy · 11/05/09, 3:36 AM

The thing that I used when we did Yogg+0 is Aloft. I just read someone using it and gave it a go. I absolutely hate it and it is annoying to set up (at least for me) but it did the job. What it does is basically allowing you to increase the size of the marks on the nameplates which makes targeting a lot easier.

Oh and about BM, it is totally worth going for it. And if you have 4/5 T9 available it will be even better than it used to be. I used a devilsaur with the spec listen in the Best Possible DPS thread. My pet even got the killing blow on Yogg