Okay I’ve played around with Beast Mastery a bit in heroics and stuff and I have some tips for it. Note that this is not a comprehensive guide and I haven’t done any rooting around EJ or any real math or anything.

OVERVIEW:

Beast Mastery is now providing a very different playstyle than it has in the past. See, we used to be all about burst. Now, we’re all about ramping up. Your AoE damage is gonna suck now that we’ve lost Volley and MultiShot is expensive, focus-wise. Your DPS is probably gonna suck if your group is full of warlocks doing 10k on bosses (did I mention that I’m back to leveling my warlock? >.>) and thus the bosses die within ten seconds. Where your DPS is going to shine is on longer fights that allow you to use Focus Fire, get some of those tasty Kill Command crit procs (can’t think of the name right now), and take advantage of the new Glyph of Kill Shot which is ridiculous and awesome.

In addition we have a lot of fun procs and a lot of fun buttons to press and while I still dislike the mechanic of Focus (until I get used to it anyway) I’m liking all the new stuff-to-do. I’ve spent some quality time with all three specs and I can honestly say that I find the new Beast Mastery to be the most fun– and I’d like to think that I’m not being biased when I say that, seeing that I really fell in love with Survival a couple months back.

ROTATION:

Basically on a single-boss fight you are spamming Arcane and using Kill Command when it’s up. Use Bestial Wrath when it’s up. View Steady Shot as a “Mini-Viper” of sorts (that made the transition to using Focus easier for me). I.E., when your gas tank is starting to run dry, pop a couple of Steadies to get it back up to speed. Use Focus Fire when you see the icon light up. I had a comment ask if they had to be watching their pet’s Frenzy stacks now– no, you don’t, as far as I’m aware, because Blizzard is nice and made it so you get a big shiny glowy effect on your Focus Fire button when you can use it. (Note: you also get the big shiny glowy effect when your Kill Command “Killing Streak” thing procs.)

Just like I view Steady Shot as a new Mini-Viper, I also view Fervor as a Mini-Readiness of sorts, because it restores Focus to you and gives you a few extra seconds of Fun Stuff To Do. That is, I’ll pop it a few moments into a Boss Fight, as follows:

TYPICAL BEAST MASTER BOSS FIGHT:

The Beast Within ->
Rapid Fire/Any Trinkets ->
Serpent Sting ->
Spam Arcane and use Kill Command when it’s up ->
Once Beast Within fades, pop Fervor… this will give you a little more juice now that you’re not getting the Focus cost reduction from TBW anymore. ->
Right around here Focus Fire is gonna light up, so use that. ->
Go back to Arcane/Kill Command and Steady as necessary. Serpent Sting again if you’ve got a ways to go on the boss. ->
Optional: Check Recount and feel special.

SPEC:
Pretty straightforward; scoop up the talents that give you DPS increases. Really the only choice you’ll be making is Spirit Bond vs. Improved Mend Pet. As usual I’m addicted to the latter but I imagine most people will pick the former, or perhaps put one point in each.

I had five non-Beast Master points left over, which I dumped into Go for the Throat and Efficiency.

GLYPHS:
Right now for Prime Glyphs I’m using Kill Shot, Steady Shot, and Arcane Shot. They’re sexy.

OVERALL SPEC/GLYPH SETUP:
I’m using this. Use at your own risk because I sort of just made it up as I went along.

PETS:
Corehounds are the current New Hotness because they get Bloodlust/Heroism. A lot of pets get a lot of great stuff though, check out this chart for details (I didn’t make it):

…of course, really the chart should have a line that says something to the effect of “Are you Pike -> Yes -> Use Whichever Pet is Prettiest” because you guys have to remember that I’m that person who refused to use a wolf throughout the entire duration of WotLK because I thought dinosaurs were much more awesome, so…

…yeah. *coughs*

THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR:
I’m not sure if it’s bugged or what but Kill Command sure likes to tell me I’m “out of range” and the like when I try to use it. DISREGARD THAT, just wait to use Kill Command until your pet is actually attacking something.

Also my pets seem to be dying a lot.

Dunno, I’ll get back to you on those.

Okay, I think that’s about it. Questions/comments/rants/raves/rambles? Lemme know! *points to commenting link*

So I was browsing MMO-Champion and stumbled upon this blue post:

The only specs we really failed on in LK raiding were Frost mage, Subtlety rogue, BM hunter and Arms warrior.

…and I thought, “BM hunter? Really?”

I mean, I know tons of people see it that way, but I don’t.

Here is a handy list of stuff I raided as a Beast Master hunter:

• Naxx
• Obsidian Sanctum
• Obsidian Sanctum hard modes back when they were still semi-hard
• Eye of Eternity
• Ulduar up through about half of Yogg
• Various Ulduar hard modes (back when they were still hard)
• VoA
• Onyxia
• ToC
• Various ToC hard modes
• ICC, the two times I went in there before I quit raiding

I dunno Blizz, I appreciate the concern, really, but I don’t feel like you failed me. I mean, maybe you did for that dark period between 3.0.8 and when you started giving us consolation buffs (although that didn’t stop me from raiding as Beast Master), but now that we’ve reached the end of WotLK, the spreadsheet has proven that a geared BM hunter does just as much DPS as a geared Survival hunter.  Tons of raiding hunters still play Survival, don’t they? Even though Marks has shown to outstrip it?

See, ultimately what bothered me the most about “spec issues” this entire expansion wasn’t the game mechanics so much as it was a good portion of the playerbase. If you had a problem with raiding BM hunters during the Ulduar era or even during the ToC era, then fine– my guild and I operated differently, but I can see where you were coming from.

But then ICC showed up, BM got more buffs, BM became essentially equal in DPS to SV, and yet blogs/forums were still only posting strats for MM and SV while ignoring BM, and various people in game were still picking on BM while gladly accepting SV raiders.

Yeah. I’m not seeing any logic here. (Please let me know if you see it, so I can correct it and put my foot in my mouth.)

Anyways, enough about that. I don’t raid anymore, and I don’t really seriously play my hunters anymore, so ultimately this doesn’t affect me, other than finally allowing me to get something off of my chest that has been bothering me the last few months. I guess I just wanted to say that I just found it odd that Ghostcrawler lumped BM hunters in with, say, sub rogues and frost mages, who, from what I understand, have it FAR worse off than we do. So yeah, don’t worry about it too much, Blizz. All’s good in hunterland. Go work on our frosty and stealthy friends.

Well, that’s all for now on one of my rare excursions into WoWblog-land recently. I have to admit, blogging here feels kind of odd lately. It truly does feel like what Aspect of the Hare used to be left back in February when I went on hiatus, and I don’t think it’s coming back, even if I do keep blogging here. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I just want to overhaul the blog and shift the focus a bit. I think more story posts are in order. You know, like “Once upon a time, there was this PuG…”

*grin*

I haven’t raided since February. But I’ve done some heroics and testing/spreadsheeting.

Best Pet?: Elitist Jerks says Raptors (yay!) at very high gear levels. Wolves & Devilsaurs are testing out to be slightly higher for me in my ToC duds. By “slightly higher” I mean “about 20 DPS fully raid buffed”, whether or not that’s worth it for you is up to you.

Shot Rotation? Again, going by very high gear levels, Elitist Jerks says you can drop Arcane Shot. Spreadsheet tells me I can’t yet. Praise the light, I hate dropping shots, it makes me bored out of my mind.

Spec? I am still 53/11/7. I tried playing around with dropping Survival Instincts in favor of more points in Mortal Shots but the difference is minuscule (less than 10 DPS, fully raidbuffed). It might be worth a shot if you are better geared, however.

Is BM “viable” yet? Ah yes, that word with the nebulous definitions that people love to toss around. Ultimately this one comes down to you, what you are doing, and what your personal standards/opinions are, but I can tell you two things for sure:

One, Elitist Jerks says that at high gear levels the difference between BM and SV is now very minimal. Both lag noticeably behind MM, however.

Two, if I can pull this off on a single-target boss fight in a heroic as BM in oldschool ToC gear & freaking blue ammo:

…then anyone who makes fun of you for being BM in a heroic is, quite honestly, out of their looney little mind. And yes, you can tell them I said so.

It’s been a few weeks since I seriously sat down and played one of my hunters. But I’ve seen a few Beast Mastery related topics sort of floating around the blogosphere/Twittersphere/MMOChampion-sphere so I figured I’d toss a couple of my thoughts out there.

“Beast Mastery is as competitive as Marksmanship and Survival” … really it depends on what you mean by this, since “competitive” can be used in several different ways. What seems to be at odds here is this idea vs. “A good Beast Master can beat a bad MM/SV, but a good Beast Master cannot beat a good MM/SV.”

In this case, I tend to fall more toward the latter camp, based on both math and experience, but I’m pretty lenient with it.

In fact, I’d probably tend to say “A great Beast Master can beat a bad MM/SV and can also beat a good MM/SV.”

A lot of very good Beast Masters say that they beat MM/SV hunters all the time. I think that this is because most of the MM/SV players you will meet in an average PuG or maybe even some of the ones in their guild are so-so, or maybe good, but not great. But were an equally-skilled and equally-geared BM and MM/SV hunter to meet I’d probably put odds on the MM/SV.

Of course, there are a lot of factors at play here, for example: is the fight pet-friendly? Does the fight involve a lot of running around on the hunter’s part while the pet can just sit there and nom the boss? Or does the fight toss around buffs that benefit the hunter and not the pet? (Twin Valks, I’m lookin’ at you.) All of these things will make a difference. DPS doesn’t exist in a vacuum except maybe on Patchwerk.

Now, a question like “is BM raid viable”, though, depends on your guild and on your personal expectations. For my guild, BM is raid viable. For yours, maybe it’s not. It all depends!

Why hasn’t Blizzard buffed Beast Mastery yet? I see this question a lot. I do have a theory. Over the months there have been a lot of blue posts that seem to insinuate that Beast Mastery is still very popular. Now, I’ve no doubt that this is because a lot of hunters run with one BM build for solo’ing/dailies/playing with exotics/what have you. But Blizzard also seems to have insinuated that Beast Mastery is still a popular raid build, contrary to what many people expect, and that it is only getting more popular as time goes on.

Now combine this with blog comments I’ve seen or even PuGs I’ve encountered in game, where you’ll see four or five hunters at a pop all collectively pining for the days of Beast Mastery, and my own personal theory is that Blizzard is sort of afraid of Beast Mastery’s longstanding popularity. In other words, if they really stick it up there on equal footing with MM/SV, they worry that the pendulum will still swing heavily towards BM, just because it’s that popular.

Now, I don’t have the numbers on this, only Blizzard does. And I don’t know the thoughts of all the millions of hunters that play this game. It’s my theory, though.

Should I use Kill Command and Bestial Wrath at the same time?: I do. It’s one of the big reasons why I’m keeping the Bestial Wrath glyph, even if the Hawk glyph is better.

Should I gem for AP as a Beast Master?: The DPS increase between gemming for AP and gemming for Agi is minimal enough that I gem for Agi, myself. But neither is a bad choice as BM.

Should I use Aspect of the Beast during Bestial Wrath?: I’ve played with this before. The overall consensus from my own testing and from the spreadsheet says that it’s a small DPS increase. Small enough that it won’t kill you if you choose not to do it. But if it’s a relatively easy fight and there’s not much going on and you want more to do… sure, have at it! Just remember to switch back to Hawk when you’re done.

Should I use Multishot in my Beast Mastery rotation?: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

But what about Multishot breaking CC and…: I miss the days of CC as much as the next person but the truth is that in today’s WoW, it’s really not something you have to worry about anymore. I can count the number of times I’ve caused a problem with Multishot on one finger. And that finger goes to those pain-in-the-butt pulls in Ulduar leading up to Iron Council/Kologarn. Something was sheeped and I shot it. After that I simply banned Multishot from my rotation in that hallway, but continued to use it elsewhere.

Just use your common sense (don’t use it if you do see something being CC’d,) and you’ll be fine. ^_^

/ramble-mode off

I was messing around with the spreadsheet the other day and learned something outright depressing.

See, for a long time, the Holy Trinity of Beast Master glyphs has been Glyph of Steady Shot, Glyph of Serpent Sting, and Glyph of Freakin’ 1.17 Second Cooldown Bestial Wrath.

But guys… we now remove our hats and bow our heads…

Because Glyph of the Hawk is apparently a significant DPS increase over Glyph of Bestial Wrath. (By “significant” I mean “close to 100 DPS”, though whether or not that is truly “significant” is up to you.)

*Taps plays somewhere in the distance*

Needless to say I fell into a state of denial and began playing around and swapping out the Serpent Sting and Steady Shot glyphs for the Hawk glyph to see if I could keep my beloved Bestial Wrath glyph, but to no avail. Everything else was a DPS loss. But turning Bestial Wrath into Hawk was a gain. Peh.

Will it effect me? Probably not. Because am I keeping the Bestial Wrath glyph(s, since I have three hunters that use one currently)? Probably yes. Guys. I’m raiding as the spec that does the lowest theoretical DPS of all of them and I’m not even using an optimal pet. When you’re already missing out on a thousand-ish DPS, by choice, 100 DPS doesn’t seem like a huge deal anymore, ya know?

On the other hand I’m gripped with the desire to do as much DPS as possible as a Beast Master, to make up for all the inherent shortcomings, but to be fair if we really need the DPS I’ll just switch to Marksmanship anyway. (Not like I do much more DPS as a Marksman than I do as a Beast Master, but ya know.)

Before my account expired, I did a couple heroics on Tawyn. I have a screenshot of 5.5k DPS in Halls of Lightning as a Beast Master. I’m happy. Whether you are happy is up to you, thus, the decision on whether to reglyph is also up to you! I just wanted to be sure I’m always here bringin’ you the news.

“Whoa whoa whoa, wait, Pike, your account expired? OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!one!”

Yeah, my WoW account expired yesterday and I have not yet resubscribed. There are a couple reasons for this:

a.) both my birthday and Christmas are next week and people have been hinting around that I’ll be getting WoW game time cards as gifts, so I don’t really feel like restarting a credit card subscription cycle if I’m just going to be getting said cards next week anyway, and…

b.) some issues have come up in my personal/family life which have the potential to flip my life upside down, Prince of Bel-Air style, so I sort of don’t want to resubscribe before I know what’s going on with that. (Don’t worry, I’m not dying).

Ironically I have a lot of WoW-related blog post ideas floating around in my head at the moment, and my second account– home to one level 60 resto druid and one level 12 hunter– is still active for another couple of weeks if I need a fix, so! No worries.

I am seriously considering starting a second blog, however, specifically for non-WoW-related stuff, so in case the hiatus turns out longer than planned I will still have somewhere to jabber at. (I know I’ve pimped my Livejournal before in the past but frankly I don’t think LJ works very well as a public blogging medium– it’s more of a social networking thing– so I’d rather just make a subdomain here and start fresh. I’ll letcha know when I’ve got that set up.)

Wow, so, that blog post didn’t stay on topic, now did it…?

I’d hit a point last week where I was feeling pretty doubtful about my own potential as a raider and about the glass ceiling on Beast Mastery. I think it spawned mostly from an Ulduar 10 run with a bunch of people who I didn’t know. See, the first day of that run, there were people there that I knew and liked from earlier raids, but most of them didn’t show up on the second day, and they were replaced by people who were SuperBig raiders who had been doing Hard Modes since forever and who were reminiscing about the good ol’ days of Black Temple and Sunwell. I started to feel extremely self-conscious knowing that I was the Oddball, the Beast Master Hunter who had never done these fights before and kept dying to things that everyone else seemed to be dodging effortlessly. I didn’t feel very good about myself at that point; I was afraid I was nothing but a hindrance to my raid group.

So then yesterday it was guild raid time; I was back on familiar ground and dealing with fight mechanics that I knew (for the most part). We started out in 25man ToC, which was going nicely until Faction Champions decided to glitch out like you would not believe– The Amazing Disappearing, Reappearing Faction Champions, Only On Pay-Per-View!– so because it was unplayable, we headed off to get a head start on tonight’s Ulduar. I was checking Recount after each fight, largely for numbers to report back here regarding things like the Bestial Wrath change.

4999 DPS on Northrend Beasts.
4553 on Jaraxxus (this is a fight I am still shaky on because I haven’t done it very much).
5082 on Ignis.
5297 on XT.

And these are all long, sustained fights– not just a few seconds of burst. I had to dip into Viper at least once on every single one of these. Now I have no idea if this is good or not compared to other hunters, but, I can now safely say that I am certainly NOT being a hindrance to my own raid group by spec’ing Beast Mastery, and that my issues from that last raid were simply my own unfamiliarity with the fights. Class/spec viability does not exist in a vacuum in most cases. So, I felt a lot better about that.

So let’s talk about numbers!

Stuff I’ve observed while “in the field”:

• Wash is still doing a good chunk of my damage. 45%ish or so. The fact that this means he’s doing close to 2500 DPS by himself makes me giddy.
• I actually am starting to really like the reduced time on Bestial Wrath.  The reason is that it can now be safely used in places where I might not have used it before.  Before, it was like “Okay, if I am going to have 18 seconds of uninterrupted DPS time, let’s use it.”  But in fights where, say, there’s a lot of running around going on, or target-switching, or the boss burrows, etc., you may not always have 18 seconds of uninterrupted DPS time.  10 seconds, however, is considerably more feasible.

Stuff I’ve observed by doing “math” and messing around with spreadsheets (note: these calculations were all performed with my own gear/spec.  Your mileage may vary!):

• Wolves have surpassed Devilsaurs in the Beast Mastery DPS department, presumably due to how Beast Mastery DPS has skewed more in favor of the hunter in this latest patch.  The DPS difference is very pronounced in fights where you have less buffs (a la Heroics), and considerably softened in larger fights with more buffs (a la 25mans).  For me specifically, performing several tests, I was actually getting Raptors as being ahead of Devilsaurs as well, but I know not everyone who was retesting my results got that answer.  The Wolves > Devilsaurs thing, however, appears to be legit as far as I know and has been confirmed on the training dummies by the lovely Tchann of Crowd Control.
• For me personally, with my gear, 53/11/7 is still pretty much the best spec.  I know Elitist Jerks has this whole 54/12/5 thing going on, but honestly that was a relatively large decrease for me with no buffs, and only a very slight increase (like, 10 DPS) with all the best buffs.  I also tried a few spec variations that involved putting more points in Mortal Shots, my assumption being that more hunter damage would favor that talent, but again, any DPS increase was incredibly slight and didn’t scale well to heroics and 10mans.
• I then went through and enabled all the best raid buffs and tested pretty much every Ferocity pet I could.  The DPS differences between pets are, in fact, much smaller than I was expecting; the majority of Ferocity pets, when fully raid-buffed and attached to a Beast Mastery hunter, fall somewhere within a spectrum of about 100 DPS.  That may seem like a large number “in theory”, but honestly, if you’re talking about 5400 DPS vs. 5500 DPS, unless you’re in one of The Bestest Most Hardcore Guilds Ever, it’s not a huge deal. It’d be like if you got a 95% on your math test and your friend got a 97%. You’re both still getting an A. It made me happy to see this because I have this tendency to be drawn to the unconventional pets on my hunters; Lunapike is really starting to favor her Wasp, and I have a hard time doing anything with Althalor without his Moth. (Hmm, I appear to have a thing for flying pets as well, it would seem.)

As for Tawyn, well, she’s not going anywhere without Wash. First of all, I have a really hard time getting into wolves as hunter pets. Like… I’ve been trying since before wolves were cool. I’ve been trying since Burning freakin’ Crusade. I’ve lost count of the number of wolves I’ve tamed, tried out, and then released. I dunno, it just feels too much like I’m sending in a cute little puppy to attack, instead of a big ferocious killing machine.

Secondly, I just really like my raptor, and isn’t that one of the reasons to play a hunter– to use a pet you are fond of and attached to and that you adventured with?

My guild really likes Wash. I do too. <3

This amazing picture was made by Van over at Art of the Hunt. It’s one of the best things ever and makes me happy. <3 Speaking of which, if you have ever done a fan-art of one of my characters, send it my way, I’m going to be putting a fan-art section up on the site shortly! (And I may be contacting you for permission to post yours, if you’ve sent me fan-art in the past!) =D

I originally wasn’t going to write this post; I don’t typically do speculations-types of posts and I’ve got another post which I consider much more interesting in the works at the moment. However, this could potentially be Very Big News, and because I seem to be biggest Beast Master Hunter blogger at this point (for better or for worse)– I figured I’d bring this up.

*pulls down screen and turns on overhead projector*

Could someone get the lights…?

Okay.

MMO-Champion says thusly:

* The Beast Within now lasts 10 sec (Down from 18 sec) but now also increases all damage you deal by 10% at all time.
* Bestial Wrath now lasts 10 sec. (Down from 18 sec)

Now, I can envision the reaction some of you may have had there. Lemme sum it up: you read the first seven words of the quote, your heartrate and blood pressure skyrocket, you leap out of your chair and scream something incoherent… and then you read the rest, your heartrate goes down a bit, and you slooooowly sit back down while scratching your head.

If you did that, don’t be ashamed, because I did the exact same thing.

Because of that, I want everyone to take a few deep breaths. Inhale… exhale… inhale… exhale…

Okay.

Now.

Let’s talk a bit.

Right now, in my humble experience, Beast Masters in endgame PvE are particularly good at two things: a.) fights where you’re doing a lot of running around and/or are out of commission and yet your pet can just sit there and om nom to his heart’s content, and b.) burst damage.

As an example for that first thing there, I point you towards something like the final boss in Drak’Theron Keep. Your pet does his normal thing the whole time, while you turn into a skeleton and whack things with your staff. You lose a lot of “hunter DPS” in that fight. Your pet picks up the slack. Another example would be Giant Popup Book Guy, aka Kologarn, in Ulduar. I have noticed in my few jaunts in there that that is a fight where I tend to do very well in comparison to many other classes or hunter specs. I think it’s because while I’m running around like a hamster on caffeine, trying to avoid the eye lasers, my pet is calmly munching on the boss. Once again, your pet “picks up the slack”.

Now, the burstyness. If you’re anything like me you’ve had at least one moment where you– all nice and raidbuffed in your 25man– got a devious little grin on your face, pulled out Recount, and popped EVERYTHING on some random trash mob just for kicks. Bestial Wrath, Call of the Wild, Rapid Fire, trinkets, you name it. During this, you watched Recount very closely and giggled at where you’d peak right after a string of crits. We’re talking in the range of 7000+ DPS, for me anyway… single-target! It’s ungodly. For that blissful fifteen seconds or so, we are extremely hard to catch.

The downside, of course, is that we fall below average inbetween those burst moments.

What the Bestial Wrath change says to me is that Blizzard is trying to iron out the peaks a little and while I have no hard data or testing, my inkling is that it is going to be a slight net gain overall.

At this point, depending on the fight and on buffs and other things like that, my pet’s DPS makes up somewhere around 40% of my total DPS. Sometimes it’s a little less, and sometimes it’s a little more. Let’s take a look at Bestial Wrath, replacing “you” and “your pet” with some percentages (in brackets, so it’s a little easier to follow):

OLD BESTIAL WRATH: Every 1.17 minutes, you increase [60% of your DPS] by 10% and [40% of your DPS] by 50% for 18 seconds. This cannot be used if your pet is dead or unavailable.

NEW BESTIAL WRATH: Every 1.17 minutes, you increase [60% of your DPS] by 10% and [40% of your DPS] by 50% for 10 seconds. In addition, [60% of your DPS] does 10% more damage at all times from now on, even if your pet is dead or unavailable.

…there, see, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? In fact, it kinda sounds like an overall buff, doesn’t it? Maybe not a big buff, but a buff nonetheless. And hopefully it will pave the way for better things in the future.

See, Blizzard is actually taking this in a direction where I have kind of been hoping they would go. I’ve felt recently that pet damage is creeping too far upwards and while I love having a ridiculously scary pet, I also don’t like the fact that I am screwed on pet-unfriendly fights or other weird gimmicky fights where they don’t let you use your pet, or your pet doesn’t get some major buff, or what-have-you. This is ultimately a pet nerf but a hunter buff, and while I’ll certainly miss my favorite 18-second juggernaut, I am glad to see the pendulum swing a little more in the “hunter” direction.

Besideswhich, last I checked, Blizzard is still promising full ArmorPen/Haste/Crit/etc. scaling from master to pet in the near future, and if it does happen soon that’s going to be HUGE.

Keep your chins up, Beast Masters!

…okay, recess! *flips off overhead projector*

–

Closing Note: I had to make a few assumptions here, namely, the assumption that The Beast Within will still boost your damage by 10% during its duration in addition to its overall 10% damage boost. I also didn’t dig into any potential slight DPS loss caused by not having the reduced mana cost on shots for 18 seconds anymore. But hey, this isn’t supposed to be a mathy post anyway…

Also, I acknowledge that I could very well be wrong about all of this. Here, I present to you several grains of salt! *hands out free salt shakers*

Second Closing Note: I suppose in the end what I’m really trying to say here is… I HATE SAUERKRAUT *cough* anyways, what I’m trying to say is that I’m staying optimistic about this. We’re hunters, we’ll survive. To quote one of my favorite books of all time… “All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand Enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.”

“Okay, Dragonbots… roll out.”

Raidbuffed. I basically pulled my character screen up and promptly made a O_O face.

Wash, raidbuffed. 4458 Attack Power.

My jaw. It was on the floor.

This was on trash, so nothing important, but as far as I am aware this is the highest single-target (aka, none o’ that silly Volley spam) DPS I have ever attained. I was very happy to do this well as a Beast Master. ^_^ I giggled like a maniac when I took this screenshot. This also means Wash was doing somewhere in the area of 2500 DPS by himself. You probably won’t want to curse his sudden but inevitable betrayal anytime soon. *sage nod*

Since last week, I have replaced four pieces of gear; since two weeks ago, I have replaced five. They have all been pretty substantial upgrades, and it’s really showing in my DPS. Last week, I was feeling kind of sheepish, putting along somewhere in the middle of Recount– this time, whenever I remembered to check anyway, I was somewhere near the top. I am so glad to be able to contribute to my guild and raid group via Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged PewPew. *nods*

I had a lot of fun today, I didn’t even see many new bosses (well, I saw a few), but I had so much fun! We did some messing around in the new 25man as well. You know, the one with the infamous Two Jormungars. We had some issues that prevented us from nailing Northrend Beasts but we got pretty close a couple times. I was doing about 4500ish DPS all told on those bosses, from what I saw. It is really weird to think that just a few months ago, 3800 was my high score on Patchwerk. But yes, I am glad to report to you all that Beast Mastery seems to be back in business for the most part ^_^

Just for fun, and because I stink at remembering the names of bosses, I present to you:

Pike Names The Ulduar Bosses She Has Seen So Far:
(Can you figure out who is who? =P)

Vehicle Fight
Dragon Thing
Fire Guy
Elmo Bot
Doctor Octopus/Falcon Punch/That Group of Three Annoying Guys
Giant Popup Book Guy
Cat Chick
Hodir (Oh hey, I remembered someone’s name!)
Fight That Involves Running To Walls and Millions of Adds Because It Is Kel’Thuzad Redux In The Mountains

…hmm. That’s all I’ve seen so far. >.> The list shall be expanded at a later date.

WoW is so fun lately, between raidstuff on Tawyn, gearing up Lunapike, and dinking around on my lowbies, I’m having a blast <3

The discerning blog reader who has clicked around on my links and Armory profiles lately may have noticed something interesting; namely, my two level eighty hunters, while both Beast Masters, are currently sporting (slightly) different specs:

Tawyn is using a 53/11/7 build, and Lunapike a 52/12/7. It may look like a difference of one talent point on the surface, but it’s actually three. Let’s dig deeper and take a look.

Tawyn has: 3/3 Cobra Strikes, 1/2 Go for the Throat, and 0/2 Invigoration.

Lunapike has: 2/2 Invigoration, 2/2 Go for the Throat, and 0/3 Cobra Strikes.

First, we’ll take a look at Invigoration vs. Cobra Strikes.

Why the difference?

Short answer: Lunapike just hit 80, while Tawyn has been 80 for a while and has thus amassed a relatively decent set of gear.

Long answer: Cobra Strikes is a solid DPS boost. However, Invigoration should theoretically keep you out of Viper for longer and thus could also be construed as a DPS boost. Which one you want to take is situational.

Lunapike just hit 80, as I mentioned. At the moment she is mostly doing dailies, and five-mans and heroics where Replenishment may or may not happen. She also is still mostly in leveling duds and thus has a very small mana pool.

Tawyn has a larger mana pool and is mostly in raids these days, where there’s often a lot of mana regen being thrown around.

Guess who is going to want Invigoration, and guess who’s going to want Cobra Strikes?

Both are, in my mind, acceptable, though in general, I feel a level 80 hunter is going to eventually migrate from Invigoration to Cobra Strikes. Your mileage may vary, as always, so play around with it… but I sorta think this is a common sense one. /nod

Now, let’s move on to Go for the Throat, that lovely, lovely talent that all hunters everywhere of every spec should have at least one point in, because it’s such a DPS boost.

Lunapike has this talent maxed out. Tawyn only has one point in there… the “other” point is going to max out Cobra Strikes.

Why the difference?

Short answer: Lunapike just hit 80, while Tawyn has been 80 for a while and has thus amassed a relatively decent set of gear. (Why yes, I did just copy paste this from above.)

Long answer: Go for the Throat works off of critical strikes. The more you crit, the more focus you feed to your pet. Let’s compare the critical strike chance of our two examples, unbuffed:

Here’s Tawyn:

And here’s Lunapike:

Big difference in stats, huh? Especially in crit rating! Tawyn crits almost twice as much as Lunapike!

This, my friends, is why Tawyn can get away with only one point in Go for the Throat. Because she crits enough that she only needs one point in there. Actually, even Tawyn is barely squeaking by. The online hunter spreadsheet tells me that unbuffed, I could use another point in GftT, if I had one to spare. Fully raid-buffed, though, I’m good to go, so I feel fine with not having the extra point… it’s hard enough to find places to pull talent points from as it is; there are so many goodies out there for us to nab.

But can you imagine if Lunapike, with her mere 17% crit, only had one point in Go for the Throat? If the online hunter spreadsheet could have a stroke, it would. Of this I have no doubt. All the hunter theorycrafters of yesteryear would collectively roll in their virtual graves. It’d be a disaster, I tell ya!

Conclusion? Well, when it comes to Beast Mastery, there really is no set-in-stone spec. 41/20/0 and its rigidness has been nailed tightly in its coffin for some time now and in its place we have a little bit of flexibility. Having mana issues? Invigoration is the way to go. Not so much? Go for Cobra Strikes and scoop up the extra pet crits. Below about 30%ish crit? Two points in Go for the Throat. Otherwise, you can get away with just one.

But above all, remember to try things out, and see what gets you the best results. Heck, you may have the best results by dropping some of the points in Survival all together and distributing them among the talents we talked about today. Research: it does a hunter good.

And with that… hunterbots, roll out!

So I’ve done a bunch of heroics so far today. One of them was Heroic Violet Hold, which I’ve done a lot and frequently use as a sort of DPS test strip.

Ya know what I was getting when everything (Bestial Wrath, Call of the Wild, etc.) was popped, and with otherwise no outside buffs? 3800 dps. Ya know what I normally get on ten-man Patchwerk when fully raid-buffed? 3800 dps. All and all I was consistently seeing between a 400 and 500 dps increase simply from the buffs to Animal Handler and Wild Hunt. (I don’t think the new Catlike Reflexes will be worth dropping points from other things to put points into… but I’ll probably test it and/or spreadsheet it at some point.)

Eeeeeeee I can’t wait to see what I’d get on ol’ Patchy now O_O

In other news, have you ever seen your pet crit for well over 1000? Multiple times in a row? You’re about to.

It feels so good to be a Beast Master again and not feel like I’m dragging everyone down. No more having to spec Marksman– as much as I did enjoy it, it wasn’t the same– in the name of the raid. We’re Big, We’re Red, We’re Back.

*happy Pike*

Of course, the big question is whether we still lag behind the other two specs in a raid situation. My initial inkling is that we do, however, I don’t think we will as substantially as before. It all remains to be seen, though. I was invited to a guild 25man Ulduar on Friday, but I work that night, so I’ll be unable to go test. All’s well, though, I’m probably way undergeared anyway… best get my feet wet in a ten-man first. *nod*

Preemptive Edit: Because I have a feeling people are going to ask, here’s my spec.