Uhm, I didn’t know which of the post to leave a note in – So this one it is!

Thanks a bunch for them all (the guide posts) .
I just hit 80 last night on my hunter. I left him in Outlands when WOTLK hit, since I felt BM had been gimped too much.

But now the hunter and his cat is back with a vengeance … except I realized that I had no clue about anything anymore, besides that my gorilla and the leveling spec I build around keeping him alive, was most likely not such a good choice to venture into a heroic with.

But already this morning I am now up to date on spec, pet spec, glyphs and rotation.

So thank you very much for helping suck less

Argh why do we only get three majors? There’s a few I want and it’s hard to single them out.

For BM, I’m not sure how to theorycraft the Viper advantage, but Serpent Sing is easy:

We’ll assume a 5 min boss fight (’cause trash doesn’t matter – it dies anyway):

Normally SS lasts 15 sec; to keep it up we have to apply it 20 times over the course of the fight. If we extend the duration by 6 sec (since we know that’s coming we’ll use that), then we have to apply it only 15 times over the course of the fight.

That means we gain 5 global cooldowns. We get to spend those hitting Steady Shot rather than Serpent Sting. If we say that Steady Shot averages 1k damage per shot, then we are gaining 16.6 dps. If we say our Steady Shot averages 1.5k damage per shot, then we are gaining 25dps.

Of course this is DARYL best case scenario on timing, your actual dps returns will be 10-20% lower. And it’s assuming that it’s to your benefit to apply serpent sting (no one else is – and your glyph actually applies off another persons serpent sting — and if it does it’s not a bug that will be fixed).

Regarding the choices for the third Major Glyph:

Rapid Fire – using Glyphs of Steady Shot, Bestial Wrath, and Rapid Fire, and a mix of Naxx-25 and blue quest/heroic gear, I’m able to sustain 4200 DPS on a benchmark fight like Patchwerk-25. In other fights where there’s brief periods of buffed DPS output (such as Malygos when you stack sparks for 50% damage boost per spark) I love the ability to burst some damage by triggering BW, RF and trinkets to take advantage of the temporary buff. Sure, people say that haste is not really useful for Beast Masters, but in practice, I’ve been loving this glyph.

Viper – I find that I dip into Viper very rarely in 25 person WotLK raids so far (having cleared all 25-person content with this weekend’s Malygos kill). When we first entered Naxx, I was a Glyph of the Viper kind of guy, however I don’t use it anymore. I do take big advantage of the “passive” regen part of Viper by ensuring I flip on Viper during every spare moment of a boss fight (as boss switches between phases, a few seconds of DPS pause during aggro wipes, or when the raid leader calls for a DPS halt to wait for a special boss ability, etc).

Serpent Sting – I also had this glyph in place when we began 25′s in WotLK. I was liking the extra 3 seconds of not having to waste a GCD or just mentally remember to reapply the sting, but the benefit ended up not being enough. If it gets changed to 6 seconds, that really is pretty nice, so I will reconsider, but not sure I’ll change.

Even when farming.

Kongsecrate hates me, I think.