Note: I wrote this yesterday, then wasn’t entirely happy about it so I saved it in drafts and went to bed. Now it seems to be jumping around the blogosphere without me, which makes me late to the bandwagon simply because I waited a few hours x_x, so I did some quick editing, and here ya go:

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Anyone who has been lurking around the blogosphere lately has likely seen a “Healing Questionnaire” floating around. This was eventually turned into a Tanking Questionnaire. However, I didn’t see hair nor hide of a DPS version. Never fear, Google to the rescue! A DPS version appears to have been spawned over at a DPS Death Knight blog, Death Goddess.

So, because I felt awkward posting my healing responses here (I should really get over that one o’ these days) and because Pike has no tank, and because the NaNoWriMo site is down which means the word count updatey-thingy (my biggest writing motivator) is down… here ya go!

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary DPS?

Tawyn, dual-spec’d PvE Raid Beast Mastery / PvE Raid Marksmanship Hunter would be my main, although she’s certainly not my only level 80 hunter!

What is your primary DPSing environment? (i.e. raids, PvP, 5 mans)

At the moment I am in raids the most, both 10 and 25man though probably skewing more towards 25man. I do at least one 25man a week (ToC), and occasionally Ulduar or Ony and a coupla 10mans as well.

What is your favorite DPS spell/ability for your class and why?

Feign Death doesn’t count, does it? >_> Umm, hmm. Bestial Wrath is always fun. I really like Silencing Shot when I’m spec’d Marksmanship. Nommy silence.

What DPS spell do you use least for your class and why?

Tranq Shot but you use it a surprising amount of times in ToC. Let’s see. Jaraxxus? Check. Faction Champions? Check. Anub’arak? Check. Now that I think about it, though, I’m not sure if that counts as a “DPS ability”. Hmm. This is a tougher survey to fill out for DPS than it was for heals! D= Does Rapid Fire count? Only cause of the long cooldown.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your DPS class and why?

Well solo’ing and questing and the like is obviously pretty easy but in a PvE raid-ish situation, I’d say the very fact that we are ranged but not magic-based is a strength. On my (very rare) ventures into the Moonkin Suit, I’m always surprised by these weird boss mechanics where you’ll be silenced or locked out of a class of spell. I remember mentioning to my boyfriend the warlock how irritating I thought this all was, and he was like “SEE?? FINALLY YOU UNDERSTAND!” So getting to bypass all of that is nice.

As a Beast Master in particular, I like the fact that I can be doing a ridiculous amount of DPS but I rarely have aggro problems because my aggro is split– about half of it is my pet’s threat, and half of it is “mine”. Having to Feign Death is delightfully rare as a Beast Master, so you pretty much never have to stop DPS!

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your DPS class and why?

The fact that we become screwed at melee range. This can be avoided in most PvE situations, but it sucks in PvP when you’re up against someone who knows what they’re doing. Fortunately I avoid most PvP beyond level 60 or so.

I also think that Blizzard did a somewhat haphazard job of incorporating pets into things. Those fights where you get a gigantic buff? Your pet probably doesn’t. Although this is annoying in raids or instances, the most glaringly painful example of this, to me, actually isn’t in a raid or instance, but in Battle for the Undercity. Guess who gets a giant, massive-stamina-and-constantly-getting-health-restored buff? You. Guess who doesn’t? Your pet. Guess who can’t survive more than two seconds in the AoE heavy Battle for the Undercity? Yeah. That entire quest, instead of being amazing and awe-inspiring, was nothing but me Volley spamming and not having my beloved pet beside me, and being frustrated overall. It was much better when I did it later as a Moonkin.

I also wish there was a way for you to “give” a zonewide buff to your pet instead of you. If I’m out grinding or questing, the last thing I want is some super massive damage buff on me making me pull aggro from my pet. Put it on my pet instead of me, please. Pleeeeeeeeeease.

Similarly, all those quests where you get to pick a reward item of either “gain back health on physical attack!” or “gain back mana on spellcast!” … can there be one for “gain back mana on physical attack”? Please? /puppy dog eyes

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best DPS assignment for you?

Single target, stand-still, pet-friendly, pewpewfest. Patchwerk, in other words. (I’m sure most DPS would say that…)

For Beast Master in particular, we excel at fights where there is a lot of loss of character control or where you’re running around a lot, and your pet doesn’t have to. That’s 45% of your DPS right there merrily DPSing away while you run around like a freak.

What DPS class do you enjoy DPSing with most and why?

There are multiple ways to interpret this question, I’m going to interpret the “with” as “alongside”. In which case, probably something like a feral druid for Leader of the Pack or a bunch of paladins for the buffs.

Or clothies, cause they won’t roll on my stuff. I’M GREEDY OKAY. >_>

What DPS class do you enjoy DPSing with least and why?

Other hunters, which makes me feel kinda horrible, but… I get crazily, madly competitive around other hunters and I just end up constantly checking my position on Recount as compared to theirs. I’d much rather be in a group of all other classes where there is no real comparison between my DPS and theirs, because I know nothing about their classes. Then I’ll usually just forget about Recount entirely and focus on having fun and doing my job.

Really, I love people who play hunters, I just… have a hard time playing with them. =(

In the end though, I’m not hugely picky about who I group with =P

What is your worst habit as a DPS?

Now that I’ve started playing my druid a lot I find myself inadvertently watching healthbars. =X

I also do this thing where I get trigger-happy and overwrite my Serpent Sting before I need to. Gotta work on that.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while DPSing?

BUFF. MY. PET.

Can I make it blinky and in a scrolling marquee? Cause I totally will. Just watch me. Juuuuust watch me.

(In all fairness, I get super irritated when I’m on my druid and hunters don’t rez their pet in a timely fashion. By which I mean, buffs are going out and the hunter knows his pet is dead cause it’s laying in the middle of the floor, and isn’t doing anything about it. In that case, you’ve missed out, bucko. Huh… I’m turning into one o’ them fabled Snarky Healers, aren’t I?)

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other DPS?

The Beast Mastery spec lags behind the others but not nearly as much in practice as I think people tend to assume it does. Both of the facts in said sentence (that it does lag, and that people overestimate the lag), irritate me to some degree.

As for hunters as a whole, I dunno, all the Recount screenshots I’ve seen of superendgame guilds show hunters as really lagging behind, but that must just be a superendgame thing because hunters destroy the meters in my guild. Like, you’ll have that one crazygood mage, that one crazygood rogue, and that one crazygood feral druid, but everyone else toppin’ the meters? Hunters, hunters, and more hunters. So, I dunno.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a DPS?

Recount is the obvious one though I have a love/hate relationship with it. Hunters are just so dependent on buffs, group makeup, fight mechanics, and everything else that it’s silly to use Recount as a be-all and end-all for it. One day I’ll have 6k DPS on a fight and then the next day I’ll struggle to hit 4.5k on the same thing.

Honestly I think it’s mostly an “impression” thing. If I’m getting invites to the Hard Mode Stuff, which I know the raid leaders are selective about in terms of invites, then I know I’m doing good. [Ed. note: apparently I got an invite to a Hard Mode Thing via Twitter in the middle of writing this, so my point is proven! Huzzah!]

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?

That hunter is about /send pet and /afk auto shot. See, I have a theory about where this misconception came from. A hunter’s “special attack” doesn’t really look like anything. Okay, so the arrow or bullet might be a little shinier. That’s it. Melee classes spin around and do fancy footwork, casters make all sorts of different things come out of their hands, but hunters are all the same. Pew. Pew. Pew. It literally doesn’t look like you’re doing anything but Auto Shot, and that wiggles into other peoples’ subconscious.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new DPSers of your class to learn?

Pet management and keeping an eye on your pet. For me, it’s so ingrained from playing so many hunters, that a.) Wash is often the last pet standing in a tricky fight, b.) I spaz out when my treants die when I’m playing a moonkin, and c.) I’ve been known to instinctively pound my Mend Pet keybind when I see the main tank low on damage. All of the above are Trufax.

Beyond that, I think that there are little nuances that people don’t expect to have to look into that make a large difference in hunter gameplay– glyph choices, intuitive cooldown uses, etc.

What DPS class do you feel you understand least?

Pretty much anything that isn’t a hunter, although I have a rudimentary understanding of boomkin (seeing as it’s my druid’s “solo’ing spec”) and to a lesser extent warlock, since my boyfriend played one for so long. Lemme put it this way: I could probably play a boomkin for something and not entirely fail, and I’d probably fail slightly more as a warlock but still have a decent idea of what I’m doing. Everything else, I’d be completely and utterly lost.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in DPS?

Omen though I don’t need it very often these days; threat is pretty much a non-issue for Beast Mastery and when I’m Marksman a Feign or two will fix it right up. Scrolling Combat Text and Scrolling Combat Text Damage to see procs and see a sort of visual representation of what I hit for and how often I crit. OmniCC for cooldowns. Quartz for the cast bars and the DoT/HoT timers, though honestly I find that one to be waaaaaaaay more handy for my druid than for my hunter. (Cast bars for the moonkin, and HoT timers for the tree.)

[Your class's preferred basic stat] over other stats or balanced stat allocation, and why?

Depends on whether or not you’re hit-capped. =P

Beyond that, this one really seems to go into an area of being a moot point once you enter endgame stuff. Install RatingBuster (which is much better than the Blizz default stat thingy.) Compare your gear. ???? Profit! If you’re really hardcore you can even use a spreadsheet or something.

Well, that’s the end of the survey. I tag any of you fine DPS folks who want to fill it out! =D

NANO SITE IS UP *poof*

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

“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.

Caster? What’s a caster?

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

An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that Marksmanship has given be a definite DPS boost in heroics but not so much in raids. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it’s all the buffs my pet gets. Or maybe I still just stink at anything that isn’t BM. =P

Either way, I definitely tied my current Beast Master DPS high score in OS25 yesterday. 4900 again, on that one drake that makes everyone’s numbers go crazy.

My Sarth+1 Drake numbers were well below most of the other hunters’ despite the fact that I was the only one with my pet still alive at the end of it all (all the other hunter pets died very early on in the fight. It’s my BM instincts, I guess?) Although I think a lot of that can be attributed to how the other hunters spent the bulk of their time Volleying adds, the simple truth of the matter remains that I have fallen rather viciously behind in terms of gear and I keep winding up in PuG raids with Ulduar-geared hunters who are going EoV-farming to sell the bracers or whatever. This can make it difficult to use other hunters as a yardstick so I have to use myself as a benchmark, and it’s not always easy to remember how I’ve performed in the past. But it was 3600 or so on Sarth as MM which is pretty similar to what I get as BM. (Sarth isn’t exactly a good benchmark fight because of all the stuff you’re doing, but hey.)

I’m still trying to get into Naxx to go play with Patchwerk. I tried to get into a Naxx PuG that was going on yesterday morning but they wanted a shadow priest. So I went and did a bunch of heroics which is when I realized that my heroics results as Marksmanship were quite better than they were as both BM and SV. Verrrrry interesting /strokes chin

Also found out that the second I spec’d MM, suddenly every other hunter I heroics’d with was also MM. It kept making me sad that my Trueshot Aura was going to waste because there were two of us with it. I miss Ferocious Inspiration…

Well, I did it. Got into Naxxramas as Survival. Unfortunately it was a 10man and not a 25man, and furthermore… the raid was kind of a giant failure. Yay PuGs, right?

It had one thing going for it though. The raid decided to do Patchwerk first. So that’s what I did. (And all I did in Naxx, actually.)

I felt really in the zone. I had super rhythmic music playing in the background, I was firing my shots in the correct order, my latency was low, my FPS was high, I was watching Quartz like a hawk and hitting my buttons and hotkeys the split second I was able to. Perezvon was Furious Howl’ing up a storm and I felt like I had finally nailed Survival and that there was absolutely no way in heck I wouldn’t beat my previous 10man Patchwerk high score.

So when it was all said and done and all the dust settled down I whipped out Recount…

I was a thousand DPS higher than second place.*

…I was 400 DPS lower than what I usually do as BM. (3333 as SV compared to 3700ish on most of my BM attempts. My personal high score on 10man Patchwerk is 3980, as Beast Master.)

/tilts head to one side and scratches scalp

And so I leave it at that. See, I am going to be working evenings the rest of the weekend so my chances of getting into another raid before I continue with the project and move on to Marksmanship are slim.

The verdict? Well, to be honest with you guys I am convinced I was using the right glyphs, spec, and rotation. And that screenshot I posted in my last post was a bad example; normally my pet is only doing about 15% of my damage, he was doing an unusually high amount in that last screenshot due to the mechanics of the fight, but I know I was pulling my weight this time.

So why did I not see this big DPS increase? Why did I wind up failing the Patchwerk test?

My guess is that it’s a gear issue. The vast majority of my gems are +hit gems, and I couldn’t exactly afford to lose those so I couldn’t re-gem to Agi. On top of that, I am puttering around in a mixture of Heroics blues, Naxx10 stuff, and a couple of Naxx25 and badge lewts. My guess is that at a lower gear level (like mine), BM simply scales… better.

And honestly I can’t help but think the fact that the Beast Mastery playstyle feels like it’s simply a natural extension of myself helps too… =P

Survival was an interesting experience, to say the least. I have gone from absolutely and utterly disliking the playstyle at the beginning of the week, to a sort of jovial handshakey acquaintanceship. I can appreciate the complexities of the shot rotation (even if staring at Quartz and my action bars made me feel horrifically claustrophobic) and the big Explosive Shot crits were pretty fun to watch– when I could see them out of the corner of my eye while staring at the action bars, anyway.

…but it wasn’t quite “home”. I have heard it said that playing a hunter spec is just pressing buttons in a different order… we will have to agree to disagree on that one. *nods*

–

* The second-place contestant was a very good Death Knight friend of mine who is normally neck-and-neck with me in the DPS department. He later expressed his befuddlement to me at how very poor his DPS was that round, and I’m starting to wonder if the group makeup was just horrible somehow and if that had something to do with my own performance. Guess I’ll never know, though. Not having a stable raid group sort of made it rather difficult to do a decent analysis of specs, really.

So that’s basically about, oh, 50-100 DPS more than I do as BM on 10man Patchwerk. I probably should’ve just snapshotted the Current Fight (I think it was on Overall) but hey, it was a nice number. And much more than I’ve normally been doing as Survival so far this week. (Even if the whole Twilight Torment thing from my pet kinda skewed the numbers. I had decent numbers on the other fights too, so it’s justified. /cough)

Mostly I’m surprised because I don’t feel like I changed my playstyle at all. I did wind up sucking it up and installing Quartz this morning, but I don’t think it had much of an effect, since overall my latency is pretty low and my FPS is pretty high. Very helpful for my moonkin, though. >.> 1900 DPS at level 75? Yes please. Aaaanyways, perhaps I just got the right mix of buffs, finally.

I feel like I am finally starting to get into the Survival groove. Maybe. At least, this was the first time I saw a bunch of mobs and thought “Oh! I should use Frost Trap for Lock and Load!” only to find out it was on cooldown because of Black Arrow. I’ll uh… remember next time. >.>

…Frost Trap is the one, right? <.<

I had a comment in my last post asking what the current “on paper” best Beast Master raiding spec is.

Now as a forewarning, I do not have access to all these pretty spreadsheets everyone else uses. I’m on Linux, so no Excel for me. And the Open Office versions lack a lot of functionality. =P

That said, I have been lurking the Beast Master threads on Elitist Jerks, and the one spec that keeps coming up is 53/11/7 or some very similar variant (such as swapping out Improved Mend Pet for Spirit Bond– no real difference on your DPS).

I was extremely wary about this at first. Give up 5/5 Mortal Shots and a point in Go for the Throat? I mean, I’d swapped out Improved Arcane Shot for Improved Tracking a while back, having been sold on it based on my own testing, but was Survival Instincts really that worth it? The Mortal Shots change was the one that scared me the most, although eventually I managed to talk myself into it with the logic that my pet was 50% of my damage (which Mortal Shots doesn’t effect) and my Auto Shot is 50% of my personal damage (which Mortal Shots doesn’t effect) and my crit hovers around 30% so that’s 70% of special shots that Mortal Shots doesn’t effect… and etc. So, while I resisted for a while, I recently made the plunge.

My ten-man Naxx a few days back with my new spec went very well, and then yesterday I got into a 25man OS.

4922 DPS on one of the drakes. Using Wash the raptor, and 53/11/7.

For you guys that are in diehard raiding guilds and are in 25man gear, that’s probably not a big deal. For Pike who still considers 10man Naxx to be challenging and fun and is toting around a couple blues, it’s a big deal.

The other two hunters had 4800 and 4300 respectively; they were both Survival and outgeared me. To be fair, the 4800 guy was usually a smidge ahead of me on all the other fights. But no, this fight was mine, all mine, and it was glorious.

More importantly I was sold on the spec. Survival Instincts? Makes me crit more, and when I crit more, Cobra Strikes procs more, and when Cobra Strikes procs more, Wash’s Savage Rend crits more and his damage is increased by 10%. That thing was critting left and right and it was awesome. Not only that, but I was keeping a careful eye on Wash’s focus, and I never saw him focus starved. Not once. 1/2 Go for the Throat + Bestial Discipline for great justice!

My recommendation: give 53/11/7 a whirl and see what you think! Afterall, it’s only as good as it works for you. Though I think you will have a good experience with it.

Now some of you are no doubt scratching your heads and wondering why the heck I am trying to maximize BM DPS when SV is still all the rage despite the fact that the difference is much smaller now (and may become even smaller if the 3.1.2 Lock and Load change is a nerf and not a wording fix.) If you are wondering that, you will probably have to continue wondering it and just smile and nod, because my head is kind of an odd creature when it comes to this and chances are if you don’t really understand it now, nothing I can say would change that! Suffice to say that I’m the girl who very happily raided Karazhan for eight months back in BC and is very merrily raiding Naxx now, with little to no motivation to raid anything harder, who would rather have minipets over gear and would rather see her screen filled up with an amalgamation of both hunter and pet crits than be the top of the DPS every time… who still likes to see herself performing well in Recount.

That, my friends, is just how I roll.

I have really been trying to get in a lot of “DPS testing” so I can get a feel for how Beast Mastery is doing these days. The training dummies and I have become good friends, and I’ve even sometimes just sic’d Wash on the training dummies and sat there for minutes at a time watching him go (this is actually what inspired me to take a point out of Improved Mend Pet and stick it in Frenzy, pushing me back up to 4/5. It just wasn’t proc’ing enough to satisfy me as 3/5. Granted, that doesn’t take raid buffs and Cobra Strikes and the like into account, but it was bothering me.)

PuG’d a 10man VoA; the other hunter was a Marksman hunter who seemed to know what he was doing, and had a wolf (the hot new pet in town!) I am pleased to report that we were one-two on the meters, neck-and-neck, both of us doing somewhere in the ballpark of 3800 DPS on the new boss. On the trash pulls Wash and I were consistently well over 4000. In mostly Naxx10/heroics/rep gear. This rather satisfied my own curiosity regarding the viability of 3.1 Beast Master in your average raid situation.

Then something interesting happened. I was invited to a late night Naxx10 which I chose to attend (yes I know, this was my “break week”… yeeeah). There was another hunter there who was better geared than I and clearly knew what he was doing, and ya know what?

He was spec’d 53/11/7.

That’s right. I was in raid with another Beast Master. An Elitist Jerks approved spec, too, and one that I’d tried before but didn’t really like.

I might have to try it again, however, since he and his wolf roflstomped me on the meters… okay, mostly only on Loatheb. Oh my goodness did he roflstomp me on Loatheb. I blame his 3/3 Cobra Strikes when he had the spore buff, while I’m currently sitting at 1/3. We were pretty close on the other bosses though, and I was ahead a time or two. We didn’t hit Patchwerk, unfortunately (too many people decided to mysteriously disconnect about halfway through the raid)… I would have been curious to see those numbers.

Oh, another interesting thing about that hunter, he didn’t use Multishot. At all. Whereas I weave it into my rotation whenever it’s up. It might be a mana conservation thing because I’ve always had good luck with using Multishot, and I like using it because it gives us more to do. Still, I may have to look into that.

It’s still “Wash and me” by the way, although I’ve tamed a wolf to try it out, but since the wolf lacks a focus dump move I wonder if the new Furious Howl would be worth it for us Beast Masters. Reports in the aforementioned Elitist Jerks thread (which is a very good thread by the way) are putting wolves second to Devilsaurs, with raptors in third. So, we’ll have to see. I still maintain that you should strike a balance between finding a pet that is good to use in your situation, and finding a pet that you like and are attached to. In my humble opinion, that is just a part of reaching the Grand Pinnacle of Hunteriness.

Okay! I apologize for potentially boring my lovely non-raiding readers with babbles about numbers. However, there is a lot of curiosity for this type of thing right now if my site’s Google hits are to be believed, so I figured I’d share my musings with the hungry masses. You will be redirected shortly to typical Pike stories and guides. For now, for lack of anything else to say, have a picture I made for my guild a year or so back:

If you guess what it is without looking at the alt text, you get a cookie =P

(Thank you, Historic Tale Construction Kit!)

I would like to present to you some DPS breakdowns that I took a screenshot of after a recent… memorable Heroic UK PuG (if enough people are interested, I’ll post the story about it. Hint: I think I’ll call it “The Fable of the Egotistical Death Knight.”)

Here’s the whole damage report… yes, after the entire run, which means rotations and the like aren’t gonna be super perfect:

And now a breakdown of my shots. I would like to point out that this was a largely Multishot-free run due to lack of Replenishment and some other factors:

“Why are you showing us this, Pike?”

Couple of reasons.

First Reason: Look how much damage your pet is doing. I have consistently found that ever since 3.0.9, my pet will come close to 50% but not quite surpass it. Still, that’s a lot.

Now, this is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, keep him alive (dur) and secondly, if you have to, kindly (kindly!) remind your resident paladins to give him Might* if they forget. That alone is a huge DPS boost. You shouldn’t have to worry about most other buffs unless said buffers are passing out the K-Mart versions. That includes if your pet died and you had to rez him. In my experience, 95% of people will fail to re-buff your pet after said pet rez (or will do their groupwide buff before you’ve rez’d your pet). I always hate having to point it out to people because it makes me feel like a whiner of some sort, but really, it’s that important to your DPS and thus to the group, so don’t be afraid to ask for those buffs for your pet. While we are on the subject, I always go out of my way to thank people who specifically remember to buff my pet after a rez. ’cause said people are rare. (If you are a buffing class and fall under said rare category, you have my undying affection and love as of… now.)

And yes, I also find it amusing that my pet and I have a different “most attacked” target. =P

Second Reason: Arcane Shot. I fired 186 Steadies and 113 Arcanes throughout the course of the instance, and despite that fairly sizable discrepancy in the number of shots and the fact that I’m using the glyphed Steady (10% more damage), Arcane Shot still was really closing the gap there. What this means is that it’s very important to fire off your Arcane Shot when it’s up; it’s an instant cast and you can use it while moving so it’s basically free damage. In fact, really the only shot that I think should have priority over it is Kill Shot.

Why do I keep pounding this into everyone’s heads, you’re probably wondering by now. Well, it’s because I’ve been running into a few BM hunters in instances who are still doing nothing but Steady. And they could be doing a lot better!

Third Reason: Mostly I just wanted to show what a good shot breakdown will probably look like for you as a Current-gen Beast Master. Gone are the days of having one shot doing as much (or more) damage as Auto Shot. Your Auto Shot is going to be sitting pretty at about 40%ish of your hunter-half’s total damage, because you have other shots to play with now that will be comprising the rest of that damage. And personally, I really, really like this change.

In closing: I am not a theorycrafter, and this is not a theorycrafting blog. I don’t know if I’ve said that before or not, but it bears saying again if I have. Sometimes I get comments or e-mails asking for more in-depth math and here’s the thing: I’m down with some math every now and again but I usually don’t dig into it. Most of my playstyle comes from observation, field testing, and common sense. My “numbers” posts are not meant to blow the Elitist Jerks folks out of the water, rather, they are here to spark inspiration in your head and possibly give you some new ideas to play around with or new things to think about. As always, feel free to take my post and add numbers to it on your own and do your own testing. I would be very flattered if you did that, in fact. But above all, remember that hunters are for fun! ^_^

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* I’m pretty okay with Kings too if the warriors really want it, since your pet gets whatever the warriors get. Hey, it’s better than nothin’!

And yeah, I was edged out by an elemental shaman.  But seeing as he was in almost all epics, and I’m in mostly blues and a Shade of Aran cloak, I’m not too upset about my performance. =P

Oh and lemme post the first pull, ’cause it makes me giggle:

Now, the point of this post is not to claim astronomical DPS like the screenshots I’ve seen of epic’d out min/maxers doing 6000+ on Patchwerk. I’ve never gotten near that, and I don’t think I ever will. So, I can’t vouch for DPS changes in the Elitist Jerks croud, who are probably going to be more affected by scaling. But, I’d like to think I can vouch for the I-PuG-Raids-When-My-Schedule-Allows Crowd, and I don’t think we have anything to worry about, at least not for the time being. More testing may need to be done, true, but I feel pretty reassured for now.

Beast Mastery is not dead, my friends. Carry on!