Maybe it is because of haste. I have no idea whether Serpent's Swiftness affects Volley, but if it does, then that could explain the difference. With channeled spells, haste just compresses the same damage into a shorter time period, which would allow you to fit more volleys into a given timeframe as BM than Survival.

As you pointed out yourself, this is a gear dependent situation. If you were aggressively gemming hit to make the cap, swapping to AP gems could make a difference, particularly if you didn't have very high crit levels.

Something I noticed as I was playing around with the spreadsheet last night:

For me, 2/2 GFTT makes a *huge* difference over 1/2. Never having played with the spreadsheet before, I just took the CW that once your unbuffed crit is over 25% (which mine is), that you can drop a point in GFTT. But according to the spreadsheet, that's simply not the case, at least for my gear. Granted my gear is nothing special - mostly Naxx gear, with T8 legs - so that may be why. But every time I heard the 25% unbuffed crit comment, there was never really any comment about gear level.

And I don't just mean that it upped my DPS (which it did, significantly). Putting 2/2 GFTT put AP on top as the prime stat that I should gear for. Well sure you say, that makes sense since you're BM - right? But when I dropped down to 1/2 GFTT, the prime stat was...agility.

So not only was 2/2 GFTT a huge DPS boost for one talent point, it also completely changed what stat I would want to gear for. Personally I always assumed any BM spec would go for AP over anything else, but for my gear, 1/2 GFTT means I would want to gear for Agi instead. It takes 2/2 for me to actually want to go for AP.

So there you have it, unless the spreadsheet is screwy. This is why I'd suggest to everyone to not just take the CW floating around on these forums - download the spreadsheet, and try it out for yourself.

Keruen, Agility will give you more crit. I think that's why, for your current gear, the spreadsheet points you to Agility for 1/2 GFTT. You would be increasing your crit, and therefore increasing GFTT focus regen.

Good post Keruen

I am mainly in Naxx10 gear (no blues) and GFTT 2/2 is showing a DPS loss if I try and free up the point from anywhere in my spec (54/11/6 - I took the 2nd point from Survival Instincts and put in to Invigoration as I was having mana issues). In fact if I cheat and give myself an extra point in GFTT without taking it from anywhere at all, then I still only see a 3dps increase.

My stats:

Hit vs. Level 83 100.05%
Crit vs. Level 83 32.51%
Agility 1275
Intellect 667
Attack Power 5669
ArP rating 145
Hit Rating 264
Crit Rating 851

And as for most valuable stat:
Attribute DPS Per Item Budget
Agility + 1 0.933 0.933
AP + 1 0.467 0.934
Int + 1 0.769 0.769
Crit + 1 0.706 0.706

So yes that definitely backs up your comment that you really need to use the spreadsheet rather than just accept what is written. Look how close my AGI/AP comparison is!

On a related note - does anyone regularly get anywhere near their theoretical DPS? Spreadsheet = 4520 for me, realistically I get around 3200 on WWS. Sure I can spike at 4200+ but nothing long term like a whole boss fight.

Forgive me if this is well known, but when switching specs from a BM 20-pet talent point spec to, say, an SV spec, can you resummon the same pet and reallocate the talent points? Or do you absolutely need to have a second pet for the 16-pet talent point spec?

When you swap specs away from a spec with 51 pt Beastmastery, your pet automatically unlearns all of its talents before despawning. As long as it's not an exotic pet, you can resummon it immediately in your new spec and reallocate its (now 16) talent points.

For Razorscale I've been firing arbitrarily, keeping my pet at my side. Mostly, I've been used on spear gun duty.

XT - Exact same. My raid knows as BM I'm better kept single point than AOE, so I'm just a frost trap thrower for scrap bots. But we have like 4 mages per raid so we have AoE to spare.

Ignis - Downed him 3 times now. He's a joke, really. Especially now with the nerf. Your pet wont have any issues.

Assembly of Iron - Commonly known as the Iron Council. We haven't downed them yet, best we've had is two down, with the caster left up and we wipe. Again, no real issues keeping the pet up. You may have to nudge your tank a little to get him further from the Death Runes so your pet isn't clipping it. That was the biggest issue I had, and I use a Devilsaur. I've found that calling and resending gets your pet to adjust his location on the mob, so if you're quick with pet managment, Death Runes won't cause much headache.

All in all I have to say they did a great job on BM in 3.1. They definitely made us competitive again. Went from mid range on the DPS charts to top 5 every time.

Agreeing entirely with this. I can keep up with a vast majority of survival hunters. I believe if you know how to play your spec correctly than you can keep up with any other hunter out there. BM isn't the "worst" spec, its just not preferred by most players because of the constant pet management, but if you get over this barrier then you can keep up SV and Marks hunters.

I absolutely love the fact that I can raid as BM in 3.1, and it breaks up the vast group of hunters that were all SV pre-3.1

We've cleared most of Ulduar 25 and I've had good experience with the instance for pet survivability. Here are my experiences so far for the fights not mentioned already.

Kolagarn: Doesn't seem to have any damage on the pet whatsoever. I don't think my pet ever took a hit from anything. The eye beams may hit it though if someone were to drag it across your pet

Auriaya: The Void Zone seemed to hit him a little bit, but since it's not the instant death Void Zones we're used to, it was almost ignorable. You may have to watch for your pet standing in one though depending on what it's hitting. I don't think the Pounce hits pets either.

Freya: Again, no pet damage as near as I could tell unless my pet was tanking an exploding add for me. Even then they don't hit very hard and a Mend plus occasional heals from AOE was enough to keep him topped off. I don't believe the Seeds in phase 2 hit him either.

Hodir: Again, no real issues. The falling icicles on melee would hit my pet a bit but I'm fairly certain it was reduced by AOE damage reduction. I cast Mend I believe once during the three attempts it took to down Hodir last night but it was a cautionary Mend, not reactionary.

Thorim: While we haven't downed him, this is the only fight where you have to be careful. The melee mobs and large collosi in the tunnel will kill your pet VERY easily from the AOE damage, stun, and DoT effect. If my pet got the DoT, it required Mend and a few Druid HoTs to keep up. I usually didn't send him to melee the small melee mobs, only the colossus, though I had to watch for the Lightning Shield thing to pull my pet out. It's not as bad in the arena, the Challenger's WW doesn't hit the pet very hard, but with the huge amount of adds you'd have to be careful to not let your pet tank something big. The Commoners barely hit for anything but the Evokers might be a different story.

Mimiron: I've only done this on 10 man but this is another fight to pay attention to. The Nova in phase 1 can one-shot your pet and it's rather hard to pull him out of in time if he doesn't have Dash up. He survived the hit a few times but I usually pulled him out of melee after the Plasma Beam just to be safe. Phase 2, 3, and 4 didn't seem to hit the pet for much. The instant-death beam in phase 2 may or may not hit the pet; I never bothered to let him stay in to find out. I did however use him as bait on bomb bots during phase 3 so he did take some AOE damage there.

Vezax: Again, only downed him on 10 man, but this one was easy on my pet. The only damage he took was the occasional bad Crash on melee but it didn't hit very hard at all. The life leech debuff may hit them as well.

Yogg: We haven't downed Yogg on 10 or 25 man yet so I haven't seen the entire fight. Phase 1 posed no issues though. Phase 2 may be a different story with the tentacles and beams.

I'm not a pro or anything, but wouldn't putting 32ap gems in all of your gear, and not going for socket bonuses raise your dps by quite a lot?