One of the rare pet nuts with a blog (refuses to have a pet which wasn't elite to start out), talks about using NPCScan to find mobs. Rare Finder NPCScan Addon | Find Gondria | HuntsmansLodge.com | A World of Warcraft Hunter Site


I don't use it myself, but it seems he has little enough problems with it once he makes it work off NPCID.

He actually mentions the problems associated with NPCScan and rare spawns at the bottom. Though you can manually add them to the tracked list of IDs, you have to delete your creaturechace.wdb every single time you come into half a zone's distance of a hunter with the pet you are searching. If your server is anything like mine, you better avoid Dalaran, as NPCScan's alaram will go off about 5 minutes later (requiring you to delete the creature chache again).

Just read the blue poast about making all stats stack for pets.

Does this mean gemming for AP will be obsolete? Agi might be better now right? Thoughts?

Here is the relevant post by Ghostcrawler. While he says that the pet will inherit 100% of some stats - like +hit - I sincerely doubt that the pet will inherit 100% of the +crit of the owners gear. That would make BM pets totally overpowered.

Agreed, but if the pet is getting haste, armor pen, crit, and other stats inherited even at a small percentage, this could change how we gear.

If haste translates better, maybe BM hunters can actually use all that haste gear in Ulduar.

Because the pets auto attack speed is already so quick i doubt haste would have that much benefit.
Regemming Agi may be something that pulls ahead, and i also imagine ArP will gain a lot more benefit.
It will be interesting to see though if the scaling changes bring BM up to Survival/Marks DPS

they've finaly understood that if you rely on your pet for almost 50% of your damage, it has to scale with your gear as you get upgrades, or else those upgrades will only benefit you by ~50%. Ofc there will still be a "best" to aim for but then you will get an about an equal upgrade as mm or surv would have.

gj blizz!

Im still wondering if BM might be equally as viable as survival or marksman. If it does, then blizz would finally make me very happy about hunters. Do you think Int would also be a stat that is inherited by the pet. If so, then spirit beasts might actually be one of the top 2 or 3 raid dps pets since they will benefit the most from the inherited stats.

Don't spirit beasts still use focus?

Yes, they still use focus.

I know they use focus. I actually meant that int would help spirit beasts unlike other pets because their spirit strike scales with int instead of atk power.

Where exactly did you get the facts to support this? I haven't seen anywhere that spirit beasts "benefit the most".

This log is from our last Deconstructor fight: Wow Web Stats. I simply pulled all the information between the lines SPELL_AURA_APPLIED "Exposed Heart" and SPELL_AURA_REMOVED "Exposed Heart".

I was able to put out just under 10.5k dps and I was one of the people handling adds for about the last 10 seconds of the debuff. If I were able to focus on the heart the whole time I would expect to see around 11.5k dps.

So here's an interesting occurrence. I'm not a hunter myself but I was helping a friend switch from SV to BM. On dummies and on the bosses of H Azjol-Nerub he did 3.7k ish. Later that night we walk into 25 ulduar and suddenly his dps drops to barely over 2k. We were on general and I realize that's not the most consistent of boss fights but never once this raid did he go over 2.5k including trash. I don't get it, he says he'd soing everything right. Anyone have any possible explanations?

EDIT: Here's his armory
The World of Warcraft Armory

We switch all his Agi gems to hit gems to compensate for the loss of two points in focused aim.

Hi Guys,

First time poster...long time reader.

I'm curious...i see the spreadsheet has been updated for the changes to Hunter's Mark. Im trying to determine if 2/3 Imp hunters mark over 2/5 Mortal shots would be a more viable choice now that it has been buffed. I curently run a variation of 53/11/7...with 1 pt out of survival instincts and into invigoration because often times the mana regen in our raids is light. The DPS per point seems to be in favor of hunters mark now, AND we also raid with 2 other hunters that would benefit from this (not sure how to accomodate this in the spreadsheet). I'm even considering droping glyph of the hawk for HM glyph and putting my mark at 700 AP...200 more AP for myself and 2 other hunters.

This all sounds good...but is based on serious napkin math and I was hoping I could get some more informed feedback.

Thanks

Since there's no 3.2 BM thread yet: MMOchamp have their patch notes up. Patch 3.2 PTR Patch Notes, Battlegrounds Q&A

Big changes to BM are the following:
"All pets now receive 40% of their master's resilience and 100% of their master's spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums."

In other words, Animal Handler is dead as a raiding talent since the 10 expertise it gives is now pretty much worthless. That gives 2 points floating to be reassigned one of which has to be below Bestial Wrath to allow tree progression one of which could also be assigned to Catlike Reflexes.

"Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds."
I think one point from AH to here would be worthwhile, but I can not see anything else I'd like to skimp on at this level in the BM tree. What do people think?

Why would you want to move points out of Animal Handler when that would mean we'd have to gear even more for expertise?

Because of:

The expertise you get from Animal Handler would be excess that isn't needed. Why put points in a talent that buffs your pets expertise when its already expertise capped?

Hm, I'm not entirely confident in their wording. It sounds like if you're hit capped then your pet is both hit and expertise capped. It's a bit vague though, I'm not sure I trust it yet.

From the 3 classes that use pets ( hunters, locks, DKs ) only DKs benefit from expertise or have any on their gear. So I believe its safe to assume that 8% hit will bring our pets to the exp and hit caps. The wording is pretty straight forward as well.

Anything less than three points in Catlike Reflexes doesn't seem to be helpful. Currently many BM hunters coordinate Kill Command with BW for maximum effect. Taking 10 seconds off means you either never sync them up your you wait 21 seconds instead of 11 seconds every BW cycle. Maxing CR, however, makes it possible to use KC with every BW while also having it available again 30 seconds into your BW cooldown.

Investing in CR is more tricky overall. You have to pull points out of other dps talents in the other trees to get it, particularly if you've invested 5+ points into SV. These will at least partially offset the CR gains. Even in the build you posted, you can't max Cobra Strikes and CR, which means the missing point there will also offset the gains, and that's before you even consider missing out on Improved Tracking.

If you take a 5 second attack speed and give it 10% haste the result is the same as a 2.5 second attack that does half the damage with 10% haste both will do the same amount of damage in a 4.5 second time frame. Saying "well they already have enough" usually isn't a good justification.

Catlike reflexes is only a dps increase with 3 points since that gives you enough time to get 2 kill commands between each bestial wrath, though you will have to delay your bestial wrath by a little. All and all it is an incredibly poor change that makes no sense at all.

Also an aside I recently learned that ghouls scale with haste. Isn't that crazy that death knights have better scaling pets than us?(especially with glyph of the ghoul)