Tag Archives: dps

specs

Fiftythree-Eleven-Seven

41 Comments

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.

respec, specs

More 3.1 Beast Mastery Dee Pee Ess Musings

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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:

Medieval Curator

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

(Thank you, Historic Tale Construction Kit!)

screenshots, shot rotation, Uncategorized

Arcane Shot (And Pets) Never Faileth

10 Comments

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:

shotbreakdown2

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:

shotbreakdown1

“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! ^_^

—

* 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’!

screenshots

Nerf me harder, Blizz. I dare ya.

24 Comments

arch25dps_postnerf

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:

firstpull

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!

screenshots, shot rotation, specs, Uncategorized

Can I Has DPS?

21 Comments

Okay, now that I have talked about my “emotional” investment into Beast Mastery in my last post, let us talk about another awesome component of the spec: Dee Pee Ess. Most people know that the Holy Church of Fortyone Twenty was the way to Hunter DPS Heaven in Burning Crusade; but by the looks of things the Reformation is happening in Wrath of the Lich King and we will see a lot more specs running around in raids. This strikes me as a Very Good Thing because I don’t like to see people spec something that they do not like. That was sort of one of the points I was trying to make (and I think I didn’t do a very good job at it, so sorry <3 ) in my last post. I want people to spec the way they enjoy the most. But I know there are at least a few of you crazy nutcases out there who love BM for its playstyle, like I do, who are maybe curious about new shot rotations in the like. Never fear, Pike is here!

Tawyn has spent probably close to a hundred gold on respecs since the patch hit; she started with a very deep BM build and slowly has been drifting to a lighter one, moving to 51/10/0 and now sitting at 48/13/0. The reason for the talent shakeup was threefold: firstly, I wanted to pick up Animal Handler now that it’s going to be useful again in the next patch (I am so down for extra pet expertise). Secondly, Deep BM at 70 was feeling very… top-heavy, for lack of a better term. Too much in BM, too fast. And Invigoration and Cobra Strikes are both kinda “iffy” to me right now in terms of the proc rate and “worth it” value– which saddens me, cause I love their synthesis concept, but sometimes the truth hurts. Thirdly, I have come to the conclusion that Go for the Throat is a Super Vital Talent™ and it is worth it to sacrifice the Exotic Pet and four extra pet talent points to pick it up. You can always go back and pick up the Exotic Pet talent later on once you get closer to 80.

Lunapike is still 46/15/0, which is very similar, but a little different. Points in Focused Aim, for example, because she is not hit-capped, and she is testing Invigoration at the moment whereas Tawyn is testing Cobra Strikes, so those talents are switched.

ANYWAYS, I was getting really curious about the performance of these specs so I downloaded Recount, spent approximately four seconds deciding that I liked it better than SW Stats, and headed off to visit our friends the Training Dummies.

With some 1900 AP and 25.29% crit and unbuffed (Except for stuff like Aspect of the Hawk/Ferocious Inspiration), and having popped all her cooldowns and trinkets over the duration of the test, which lasted until I was out of mana, Tawyn hit about 1180 DPS at her peak and consistently maintained 1050+ DPS using Steady Shot and keeping Serpent Sting refreshed (because Serpent Sting is supposed to be viable now =P). Not too shabby. I’m satisfied. I’d like to make a comparison to pre-patch DPS but I honestly never paid attention to anything beyond where I sat on the chart (does that make me a good or bad hunter?)

This is not an entirely 100% accurate breakdown because I took this screenshot after a Viper cycle to replenish my mana. Still, it can give you a general idea of what the DPS will look like after one full round of DPS and the full round of Viper, and it also gives you an idea of what Locke is doing in terms of damage. And looking back, I’m thinking I was a little slow on the uptake with Serpent Sting once or twice. Derp.

My testing was not finished though, oh no!

Now Lunapike is obviously at a disadvantage here and I wasn’t out to make a real comparison exactly for this reason. She only has roughly 1450 AP (with Aspect of the Hawk) and 22.35% crit. However, I mostly wanted to see the wasp stats, and also see if Invigoration was going to be making a big difference. The verdict? …it procs often enough, but… I dunno, it lets me do what, get maybe three more Steadys in before I switch to Viper? Dunno if it’s worth it for the two points or not. More testing will have to be done.

This screenshot was actually taken right before switching to Aspect of the Viper so I wound up with 884 DPS as an unbuffed hunter in semi-enchanted blues. Again, I am satisfied. Now, let’s discuss the pets; Serenity the wasp and Locke the Kitty are almost identical in terms of the stat breakdown (Roughly 60% regular melee, 30% focus dump, and 10% DoT/special ability.) The big difference I see is that Serenity brings a big whoppin’ armor debuff with him whereas Locke doesn’t. I think that this is gonna be one of the things that makes a difference when it comes to which pets you will see more often in raids. And of course, things will get all the more interesting when we throw Exotic Pets into the picture, with their intended upcoming buff and their extra talent points.

And the moral of the story is: Beast Masters, Steady Shot and Serpent Sting is looking like your rotation for the time being, unless I totally botched up somewhere (in which case, please tell me ^_^). Although I would still call Serpent Sting situational; depending on if Scorpid Sting might be preferred or if there might be emergency trapping in the forseeable future.

The second moral of the story is… next time, remind me to do my testing on Beta where respecs only cost 1 copper. Cause next up I think I wanna do the Go for the Throat vs. Exotic Pet/extra points Showdown. But I’m not willing to throw more gold into it. I’m just a poor Pike from a poor family.