A couple of nights ago, I dragged my undergeared Dwarven butt through a  number of instances, Heroic and otherwise, specced out as BM, and while I can’t claim to have output to rival our first-tier raiders, my output was consistent enough to warrant a comment from the GM. A month ago, I was struggling to maintain 2K dps. This weekend, 3K was consistent and I peaked at 4K at one point.

So what’s the deal? What am I doing differently?

In essence, I’m playing this true to what I love.  Rather than struggle with SV, I’ve fallen back into the warm and familiar embrace of Beast Mastery, and as a result, I’m getting numbers that are at least satisfactory enough for me to be happy.

Now, I will say up front that I have conducted objective tests on this, and SV is still a higher damage bringer than BM, but the margin is slim. I could widen that margin quite a bit by regemming and so forth, as right now I am emphasizing RAP, as is right for a BM hunter. Survival depends more on Agility to give its numbers a boost.  So let’s get that out of the way right now: I am not claiming that BM is better than SV.  I’m saying it is better for me.

This is where that “being true to yourself” part comes in.

I started out as an MM hunter, and Fai for a while was SV (pre WotLK).   But when BM became a viable build in BC, and I gave it a try, I knew I had something special. I’m comfortable here. I know the nuances, the tricks, how to move around and keep it delivering, how to get more from my pet than just have it chewing on the boss’ ass, and so forth. It all just clicks in a way that neither of the other specs did.

SV and MM may give higher numbers, but only if played right. I can technically play both “right”, but it’s always been a struggle to stay in the groove with those two builds. They feel haphazard, strung together out of odd parts that don’t quite fit together well, but at a distance give the illusion of being integral.

The other thing that I think affects this is my playstyle. I can be a little more mobile as BM, it seems, without losing as much output as I would with MM or SV¹. The rotations are longer and more involved, for example. After each move, there’s always a brief period where you have to evaluate whether your stings need refreshed, and so on. There’s more of that going on with SV and MM than there is with BM.

Yes, I am saying that BM’s rotation is simpler. Only an idiot would say otherwise. But that does bring some advantages with it other than appealing to the Alfred E. Neuman crowd, as someone has hinted without coming right out and saying it.  Simplicity has its benefits, and I don’t care if someone feels the need to look down on me for liking it. Complexity isn’t better unless it brings solid benefits. I think the benefits are somewhat less than are hinted at, though the numbers won’t back me up on it.

A long time ago I mentioned our MM part-time raider’s propensity for pulling aggro at the drop of a hat, his ineffective trapping technique, and so forth. Well, this isn’t BC anymore, and trapping is something that’s fallen by the wayside, but the kernal of the statement remains true; a good BM hunter brings more to the table than just damage. Damage without pulling aggro, for example. The ability to peel the beast off the boss and onto something chewing the healer’s face, without stopping DPS. The ability to break things up a little with one or two well-placed traps².

So, the bottom line for this long and windy spiel is that sometimes, you gotta say screw the stats, I’m going with what fits me best. For, while there may be a 20% gap between SV and BM damage statistically, that will never be the case, once again, for me.

I think that’s true of many people for many specs. Maybe you’ve always fancied Affliction as the most fun spec for your warlock.  Maybe you prefer Frost for the mage, and always have.   If the gap isn’t that huge, and your raid isn’t marginal, what’s the harm?  So it takes just a little longer to down the boss … but the boss, it is downed.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The consequences of this choice are immediately obvious to me. I had a blast, a really good time bounding around with the stompasaurus, following my heart.  No, not so much as to want to change my mind on raiding – that’s gone too sour for me – but if I were called, at least I’d be more enthusiastic ³.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Trinkets!  One thing I am sorely lacking is trinkets!  I am toting a blue and a green around, and I haven’t replaced them in forever because there are no trinkets out there with RAP.  I was very excited when I saw that Scattered Shots was covering this topic, but then I was sad when I saw the conclusion that there just wasn’t anything up there with RAP. But at least now I know that I should give up on that and find some suitable compromise.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Last night, I obtained my first real holiday achievement; Call me Elder Grimm if you must, for that title is mine. I was hoping to complete the Love is in the Air achivement, as well, but I encountered a problem with the rocket achievement that required me to retry it four times before I got it. That was sixty tokens out the window, which set me back on the other components.  Well, maybe next year.

1. I know, that makes absolutely no sense at all considering that the three big guns for SV are insta-shots [↩]
2. Did you know that if you MD on the tank, and then put an explosive trap at his feet, that the trap damage all MDs to him? True story! [↩]
3. Yeah, there’s some behind the scenes politics I’m not talking about here. It just is, and that’s that, and blogging it just isn’t appropriate. [↩]

Thought the first:

I am Beeesmastar! I don’t mind being dependent on my pet!

“We don’t want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet.“

You guys (Blizz) spent the better part of all of BC convincing us that that was, indeed, the intent, design, and raison d’etre of the entire Beastmaster spec! Now is hardly the time to say that you didn’t really mean it.  Fer Mog’s sake, ya gave us Exotic pets on top of everything else!  This screams out dependent on the pet, don’t you think?

Yes! Yes, I do want to be dependent on my pet, a thousand and one times yes.  It’s what sets us apart from MM and SV¹.  I think I’m safe speaking for the Demon warlocks that they, too, are just dandy with the idea of coupling their DPS to the demon².

Listen, I want to improve my DPS contribution as much as the next huntard. But I don’t want to do it if that means being the same thing as MM or SV with just a different shot rotation. That’s boring.

BM I am, and BM I be, and I don’t care if I don’t see the inside of another raid dungeon because of it.  BM is the heart and soul of the class. It deserves to be treated at least equally with the others, and on its terms, not theirs³.

Thing the Second:

Patch 3.3.3:

• I dunno, sounds almost like I could toss AuctionLite completely.
• Regarding hunter changes: not much to say, but they didn’t have much to say, either.
• I wonder if the multilevel instance map thing will work for old instances. Five gold says it won’t.
• I have nothing to say about the BG changes, though I suspect the hardcore PvPers do.

1. Aside from the disparity in the contribution to any raid we may wish to attend [↩]
2. Heck, the whole talent tree was shaken up drastically in 3.0 for that very reason – e.g. the oddity of a DEMON warlock sacrificing his or her demon to get moar DPS. Remember that? Wasn’t that odd? Didn’t it make sense to couple the Demonology warlock’s abilities more tightly to the idea of having a pet that was alive? [↩]
3. Come to think of it, why is SV more or less a clone of MM with a different rotation? I tried SV prior to 3.0 and it was a blast, but with a very distinct and fun playstyle. It’s my alternate spec, now, and I have to say that I’m not impressed with the play-style, numbers be damned. [↩]

Frostheim’s article notwithstanding, I’ve gone back to BM for heroics and the like since, despite his opinions and samplings, my purely empirical tests show that, with the gear I have, BM gives me moar Dee Pee Ess. Oh, I’m sure that he’s right in the long run, but re-gemming and re-enchanting on faith is an expensive proposition. All that RAP replaced with AGI is pretty much what it comes down to.

Geared as I am, however (including – dear me! – one green trinket!) I’m hitting close to 3K nowadays. I am as surprised as most at that turn of events, it wasn’t that long ago that 2K was hard to sustain.

Laser Kitty still isn’t cutting it for the big numbers, though. I am sad at this.

On a related front, I am going to rename my stompasaurus from “Reaganomics” to “RawrRawrRawr”, I swear. Everyone that gets it, has gotten it, and the ones that don’t, aren’t going to.

Flora can keep her evil jello mold. I found something a lot nicer laying around old Strat.

Slowly, the truth rears its ugly head.

I’m a mount whore.

Grimm noticed this first, but it’s hit me, too.  The Apothecary bosses are just horrible on pets. Grimm at least has a HoT heal for his (that also cleanses). Phil the Phelguard doesn’t have a chance. I was able to recover slightly by bringing out Iggy the Imp and, as long as he followed me, keep him alive.

What this fight does is highlight what someone else was saying elsewhere; Blizz is making it hard on our pets, and for those of us for which pets are significant (hello, BM Hunters and Demon Warlocks!), this causes a major drop in our usefulness to the team.

So much for “Avoidance is the answer”.

Moving on.

I’d like to introduce you to Squicky, isn’t he the cutest lil thing? His hobbies include eating rats, moles, mice, small cats, and beagles when he’s really hungry (and really big).  I like hanging out in the tram station with him just to watch him chase the rats.

Stompy!

Yeah, man?

Our DPS is lower than usual – like, a lot!

Why is that, boss?

I don’t know! Yesterday we were doing 2200+, now we’re doing 1700. And I changed nothing!

Well why don’t you look at the logs?

I was afraid you’d say that.

OK, let’s see here … :: shuffle shuffle shuffle ::

Uh … Stompy?

Yeah, man.

You saw that other hunter in the group?

Yeah, man. Survival spec, Naxx epics. He pwnzored you.

Yeah, yeah. But did you see his pet?

Yeah, man. Wolf. The latest and greatest, the new hawtness, the sizzle fo shizzle.

Did you notice …  his DPS?

No … lemme look.

… wow.

Yeah. A Survival Hunter’s non-exotic pet out-dps’d you.  Any idea why?

I … oh, look.

You have “Bite” turned off, boss man.

What?! I didn’t turn it off!

You KNOW that this keeps happening. Why don’t you check first when you go into an instance?

Well, I was kind of hoping for a little help from my big galoot of a partner, if not at least from some engineer in Anaheim.

You work with engineers. What are the odds?

/facepalm

Oy. You’re right.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Seriously? Blizz? Fix this!

I was a bit surprised to the the senior staff log in tonight considering that raiding has been suspended for the week. I was quickly asked to come to the daily (HoS); I was quite happy to. Grimmy needs a new hat.  So off we went.

I found that the goal was also to get a couple of achievements; we failed at the final one because we failed to understand the difference between the two kinds of slimes.  But I got a few.

After that it was decided to storm Gundrak and go for more achievements.  Unfortunately, we were only able to get the one.

Finally, we went for CoS. We planned a timed run, but the tank had never run it before and started the Malgannis fight instead.  I franticaly changed out to the bear which got rofloneshotted.

Once everyone died, we still had time; however, our druid died on the wipe and didn’t take the rez in time to get credit for the kill or a chance to roll on the drake. She was quite cross, and actually left the group in a snit once we downed Mal. Him and Jas should get together and drink. A lot.

I didn’t get the drake, but I got credit of a sort.

I wasn’t aware of it but I had been stacking up Timear quests all along, and this put me over the top.

Overall, my DPS was around 2250. Not bad for an undergeared BM huntard.

While Jas was hogging the spotlight in Ulduar this week, I was continuing on in Naxx, with a desire to complete it.

Coming out of Military wing, we had Four Horsemen left and I was looking at relatively pleasing numbers with the Stompasaurus. I had some time to prepare, so I took advantage of it.

First up, the laser kitty was leveled to 80, and the peasants rejoiced. Once I had that, it was time to do some numbers, so off I went to Darnasus (because I needed a trainer close by) to do some comparisons. I was troubled to find that the laser kitty lagged behind by around 100 dps. No matter what I tried, it simply wasn’t going to exceed a Stompasaurus properly talented. Incidentally, I found a talent build that added 200 dps to the lizard’s contribution, so it wasn’t a wash.

Thus armed, I returned.

Our first attempt was a wipe when the shammi in the back corner kind of freaked out and died. This was his first time on 4H and he probably panicked. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell people that all they need to do is keep aggro and live, they freak until they experience one good run.

Tenatively, I volunteered to pull out the Bear and take one corner. After all, I had seen the fight through Jas’ eyes, and I know more on the theory of how it could go. Besides, if a tree druid can do it, so can I!

I’m happy to say that it worked like a charm. I just kept autofire on and kept heals on Bumbles, and it just ticked like clockwork.  BM, foshizzle! RAWR.

Construct went smooth as glass, leaving us with Sapphir -

What?

You want Jas to come in to heal Sapph and KT?

Nooooooooo!

/sulk

/sigh

I’ll be over there trying out the ales.

Onoz teh dramaz

So, remember when I said to enjoy the good times when you have them? The underlying sentiment is that they are all too fleeting.

You know where this is going: I was proven right.

The very next night, one of our long-standing founding members and officers – who has been a constant pain in the codpiece – decided to erupt in /g chat with a pile of obscenities and swearing about how bad pugging on our server was, and our server in generally just sucked. A guildy – OK, it was Mrs. Grimm – snapped back, “well, roll on another server, then.”  He immediately /ragequit.

/sigh

I’m done with him. I’m so done with him that I’m considering leaving the guild and starting my own to house all those that want to have nothing to do with him. That might effectively end OCV, because at this point I don’t know if even the GM would stay behind.

For now I’ll consider my options and mull it over some more. I have to decide why I would even bother starting a guild if this game has gotten to the point where I’m willing to go that far. I mean, maybe it’s time to wrap it up, or at least take another break for a few months. Maybe all I need to do is put him on ignore and be done with him.

In more pleasant news

Much to my surprise, raid night at Naxx proceeded as planned. Even more to my surprise, I was invited. I had Jasra parked there since the priest that we had planned on healing in her place was not on (we found out later: wife aggro).

I was unhappy that I was not able to bring out SDI for the proceeds, but as he’s currently only 78, there would be level aggro all over the place.  So out came Reaganomics, the stompasaurus of economic dooom!

I had a bad moment after the Anub fight. I looked at the damage meter and commented that my DPS was sucking big-time at only 1200. The GM disagreed … then I realized I wasn’t merging pet numbers in, as I had been wanting to see how SDI’s broke out from mine earlier.  Once I merged the numbers, I was much happier with my performance.

I came in 3rd in a relatively weak DPS pack. Our top-flight mage and hunter (SV) were leading with around 3500 and 3000 apiece, then me at 2500, then various melee dps starting around 1900. Our tank¹ actually outdid most of the melee DPS, as far as that goes.

Which makes it more astounding how well we ran that raid. We had a couple of wipes, no doubt attributable to some relatively newb blood (including me!), but overall we ran through the place and got 2 1/2 wings done, one of which was Construct, so no ezmode for us.  We got plague wing and Four Horsemen, then we go after KT.

I got two pieces, a neck piece from Anub and a helm from Thadd, which is – by the way – the first helm I’ve had that I wasn’t ashamed to show in a long time. It’s a right proper helm for a Dwarf.

Or the Goddamn Batman.

1. ”All hail K! All hail K!“” [↩]

Location: 67, 77.

Time: 10:38 Server, probably spawned at 10:30

I had parked outside of Nexus because one of the DPS in the group inside was having connection problems. While Jas went off and ground SoH, I waited around in case I was needed. As soon as possible, I was back in the air headed for Zim’Torga. The time: 10:27. I thought I might be able to make it if I hearthed to Dal first.

Arrival at Zim’Torga was 10:33. Chances were slim, but the only guarantee is that if you don’t look, you don’t find it. I’m talking to my sweetie at the time, when all of a sudden words of less than one syllable came out of my mouth. There he was!

/land

/abandon pet¹

/drop freezing trap and stand on it

/tame

Several shakey seconds later, my sweety is cheering in my ear and I’m estatic

Mister SDI is only level 77 now, so I have to level him before I can take him somewhere serious. I’m looking forward to seeing how we do together.

/collapse in heap

As Rosa has pointed out, this has been a great week to be Grimmtooth. Got my green drake, got my laser kitteh, helped recruit a cracking good tank into the guild, might get to RAID again … I’ll take it. Enjoy the good times, laddies and lassies, for you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Here’s to good times.

1. A gorilla named der trihs – figure it out! [↩]

Ugh. One thing us hunter types like is hours and hours of paperwork.

Psyche.

OK, you got me. We pretty much would prefer raiding with the Onyxia Wipe Guy to paperwork. But it’s a necessary evil. There are tons of sites and tools out there that will cater to you and make helpful suggestions on gearing options so that you can plan your gear needs out. Wouldn’t you hate to miss out on a run to Heroic VH in which an actual upgrade dropped? I know I would. Well, by knowing what you need and where it comes from, you can make ready to jump on that open DPS slot before some Boomkin gets it instead.

And yet, it’s not that easy. Sites like Gear Wishlist provide you with raw information, somewhat filtered, but it’s useless without the proper context.

As an example, as a BM Hunter your primary characteristic will be Hit.  Right until you hit the Hit Cap, which is around 263. After that? RAP, Crit, and Haste. And gems? How do they play? I always give an arbitrary +30 RAP for every red, and +10 for every yellow. Blues I kinda don’t know what to do with them.

But you probably see the point here. RAWR or whatever can only address (comfortably) one particular aspect of your character, if there are more than one to consider. Since I’m well beyond hit cap, I don’t really care about +hit unless it drops me below again.  Yet most of the tools out there won’t assume you’re hit capped.

And so, I grind. Grinding of a different type.  Pop an item off the list, compare – by hand – with what I’m wearing. Score it. Move on to the next.

Now, this is paying off well, but it is tedious. And since I prefer to be in-game for this (using Rating Buster to help me zero in on preferred attributes), that means I spend a lot of time just sitting around.

So I’ve taken to camping out. Just me, my mount, and – somewhere – Gondria.  I can sit there hovering over a spawn point, mess with my numbers, and every half hour, fly the route.¹ Then it’s back to hovering.

I’ve chosen the spawn point southeast of Zim’Torga to be the ideal spot to hover. If I get called to action for a run, it’s a quick flight to safety and then either mount up or change out toons. It works out nicely since that spot is the one most likely to get ganked due to its proximity to a quest hub and three different quest areas. The others are more secluded and thus have a greater chance of survival until I get there.

It’s a zen way to kill an hour or two.

My main concern is this: it disrupts the daily routine for the clan if I use the whole session for this, but the more time spent in a contiguous block the better my chances.  On the one hand, I really need to gear up in all respects, including the raiding pet. On the other hand, I do have allotted time slots in which to do this.

In the end, I think I’ll be partially pulling rank, and partially guilting the others into letting me have the time. After all, I’ve been graciously giving my time to the team when my turn pops up, for the past few weeks.

Guilt: it’s what’s for supper.

Oh, and the choice of Gondria? Sure, Skoll is the Sleek New Hawtness, but I really like the looks of Gondria over all of them. It’s that simple.

1. My research indicates that Gondria spawns at the top and bottom of the hour, if he spawns. Know differently? Drop a comment and call me a newb! [↩]

Flora can bite me.

This past week we ventured into VoA for a little bit of fun, and Jas was asked to sit it out for another healer to get his gear on, so I gave it a go. We figured that the worse thing that happens is that I swap out for Flora or Shadow-Jas, right?

What happened though is that I and my stompasaurus came in 3rd on the meters.

I was actually quite surprised. I guess the little upgrades here and there do add up.

This weekend I sat out while Jas went into EoE with the guild. The did well for the very first time, though they didn’t bring down Maly. Phase 3 was achieved but they were getting there with 2 minutes or less each time. Have to get better at placing the sparks.

But that’s not what this is about.

As is usual for us, our new MT, a new recruit to the guild, got nicely geared up, then departed for a “raiding guild”. He left alts behind, including one to whom Slithmere had just given two stacks of gold ore to level his mining.  Number of gold bars returned: zero.¹

In times past we would have been highly annoyed. Now we just roll our eyes and assign his alts to “pond scum” level and move on. Maybe we’ll have a working tank for Tuesday, or maybe we’ll take a week off from raiding and see who else bails out of impatience.

I’ve said before that we’re not one of those guilds that eschews raiding, but we also don’t push it. We like to be able to raid on a weekly schedule, but if someone is sick or out of town for a week or two, we just lay back and chill out. Some people don’t get the ‘casual’ part of our guild charter. I guess they think that we mean that we wear blue jeans while we raid, instead of dockers.

It’s a shame; he was a good tank, and I was on the verge or recommending his promotion. I was concerned he’d do this, and that held me back, and I was fortunate to see how he behaved in an actual progression setting.  The short answer: if we don’t get it in one session, he leaves. Noted. He might have also had some issues with our usual collection of screwballs, but that never really came up.

Our guild bank funds were flat empty with all the toons repairing using guild funds².  I’ve been running the troops on a savings plan with the intention of buying the guild a 5th tab in the guild bank, but after seeing that I decided to replenish the progression repair funds instead. Between Flora, Illume, and myself we were able to pop 3000 gold into the fund. We’ve still got 1000 apiece over 10 toons, so this is not a big sacrifice. Feels good to contribute, too.

1. ETA: He returned the ore. I withdraw my trash-talking in that regard. [↩]
2. Including a certain warrior, I’m sure. [↩]

Ever since 3.0 came out, I’ve suffered from a common malady that other hunters have as well: our typical “pull shot” macro quit working. Specifically, you got put into auto-attack, and your pet went flying into combat.  This spelled bad news as you could break your own trap.

This solution does not FIX it, but it works around it.

To use it, you have to hit the same key *twice* when pulling. That’s all there is to it.

/s *** Pulling %t ***
/petfollow
/cast distracting shot
/stopattack

And here it is annotated.

/s *** Pulling %t ***       # Advertises what you are pulling.
                            # Optional, but useful.

/petfollow                  # Make your pet follow you.
                            # This is important on the second
                            # keypress but has no ill effect on
                            # the first

/cast distracting shot      # The meat of the shot. Gets the
                            # attention of the mob.

/stopattack                 # This will be ignored the first
                            # time through but will stop
                            # autoattack on the 2nd keypress

Hope this proves helpful to someone!

It’s been a quiet week here at Casa de Grimmtooth. People getting settled in, setting up a new rotation that gets Fai some time to get her trades up, and so on.

On Wednesday Grimm entered the Heroic ToC (to his surprise as well) and with a few minor glitches got through OK. No major drops – in fact, a lot of leather, some cloth, and one belt that was mostly an upgrade for him. But no BRK-1000 or Marrowstrike.

Yesterday, our GM’s little sister – a Dwarven Priest – got invited to run it in regular mode, and they did so for five straight. The goodies flowed like water.  I didn’t see all of them but I can bet that she’s getting closer to being able to hold her own as a healer … which means that Grimm or Flora might be called out of the minors sooner than they thought.

To have choices is a good thing. To possibly give Grimm a chance to flex his trigger finger some more is, as well. He’s great about this, he really is, but it seems to be unfitting to have our patriarch not completely decked out in finery. Well, as he’s pointed out, the day of the BM hunter are past, and that’s what he is, and that’s that. “And”, he chuckled once, “I’m not givin’ up BM until I have me a spirit beastie!”  So there you have it.

Oh, and this: Chef’s Hat. I didn’t get it for the cooking speed buff. I got it for those boss screenies, to go with our MT’s sombrero.  I am done with cooking dailies for a while, until I need more spices.

First of all, a quick /salute to Hydra at Almost Evil, who has been and will continue to be (fortunately) one of my personal a-listers in the blogosphere. Creator of the EVIL CHECK(tm), she’s a joy to read.  Happy second anniversary, Hydra!

On other fronts, there was a recent Hunter Q&A¹ posted at Blizzard’s website that is an interesting read. I have thoughts. I am no BRK, and will never make such claims. These are my private views and nobody else’s. You have to remember that I’m still pure BM despite empirical evidence that Survival is the Sleek New Hawtness. Unsolicited these opinions are, and likely unwanted.

They are also inevitable.

• Ammunition – The idea of removing ammo as a consumable was a good idea. We are already there with throwing weapons. They certainly have a map showing one model to follow. But they failed to follow through due to fears of blowing up the database (talk about touchy-feely development),  so what we got was all bonuses removed from quivers and ammo pouches, and x1000 stacks of ammo. It would be nice to get that bonus back, to be honest, as I don’t see where it went. But I doubt we’re going to see anything further on this because of the database fears. I also predict that there will be no changes on warlock bags for the same reasons. Though they might surprise me. The hunter changes require movement of data structures. Changes to warlocks might cause it to just ignore a certain structure. But I have strong doubts in that direction. I also suspect that means that X3 is closer than anyone imagines – otherwise they’d not want to wait another 12-18 months to solve this little issue.
• Auto-shoot while running – I can’t believe they actually talked about this, it’s just silly. There are very few things that anyone can do while running, and none automatic that I am aware of. Moving stops auto attacks of all kinds. That’s a core mechanic. There are exceptions but they are just that. Move on.
• Mana vs something else – GC pretty much punted and said this would be a blizzcon topic, which immediately implies that something else actually is being contemplated. TL;DR: I agree. More below.
• Stings == Curses – I would buy that for a dollar. My greatest fear is that there will be more of a one to one mapping between the two as we go forward – “Bring the player, not the class”² which makes the game less attractive overall³.
• “Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree.” – Duh. Hello, “Beast mastery“? That’s what we do. Make it so our DPS doesn’t suffer when our pet dies, and it’s what, again? That’s a huge chunk of what this spec’s about. There are two ways to help here: (1) Hunters keep the pet alive, and (2) raid healers heal raid pets. #2 is my favored because it acknowledges what a BM hunter brings to the raid, such as buffs and so forth. Damage is damage, people.
• Regarding GC’s response to that question: “Getting the pet out of trouble” isn’t going t resolve anything. Whether the pet is running back to me, or dead, it still isn’t doing any damage. The only net difference is my DPS loss when I am rezzing my pet if it dies. Really, if buffing Arcane Shot⁴ deep in the tree is the only answer, then carry on.
• Pet Survivability – to the point of the above two, pet survivability does not resolve the actual current issue, which is that BM hunters are the DPS Tail-end Charlies of the hunter world these days. Survivability only addresses the status quo, and the status is not “quo”, as it were.
• Pet Action Bars – More? Groovy!
• Number of Pet Slots – I am content with five + one slots, and GC claims that this is a good number that forces a choice. Allow me to be pessimistic. If the crybabies are loud enough (and when are they not?), we will see that expanded.

More on Mana

The Mana topic is an interesting one. I personally don’t feel that it is at all an appropriate resource for Hunters, so I am completely behind changing all that. It would be such a fundamental change that it would have to be an Expansion that brought it.

If not Mana, then what? Energy? Rage? Something else?

I personally lean towards Energy, the same as Rogues use. Hunters do physical damage rather than magical, which is why I find Mana ill-advised for us. However, for me it is more a matter of aesthetics than anything else theory-craftish. There is no compelling reason to shift from mana to anything else. Mana is a deeper pool that recharges more slowly. Energy, a shallow pool that refills quickly. Depending on how you tweak abilities, the two come out pretty much on an even footing. It’s just a matter of scale. So, in this regard, it’s really immaterial except in one respect.

Down time. When playing a rogue, you see quickly that other than for bandaging and buff food, you have no real down time. You’re back to 100% pretty much by the  time you’re done looting. Mana based classes occasionally have to stop and drink. This to me does not fit the Hunter lifestyle.

Consistency. Pets use an energy-ish resource system. In fact, I imagine it was a big fat headache to bolt the pet system to a mana-using class. Hunters using energy, however, would allow for more direct linkage between the two resource systems.

Bonus – Why stop at resource type? Rogues also have “combo points”. Want to make the class more interesting? Maybe you can make combo-linked skills and talents. Maybe that’s the answer to the BM issue.

Finally; there are a lot of people that look at Hunters as if they’re more or less heavy-armored Rogues with combat pets. Some, like Gweryc, take it to the extreme and make it work. There are very good reasons behind the natural assumptions some people make, as well as the very real results that some post⁵. And yet, few people would make the argument that Hunters are more like Shaman with guns and pets, much less tougher versions of Warlocks.  What I’m saying is that the similarities between Hunters and non-mana classes are greater than those between Hunters and other mana classes.

A mana-using class that does primarily physical damage is a very, very odd thing.

Not that that has ever been a detriment to us.

1. Which really isn’t as … spontaneous … as one might suppose from the title. [↩]
2. To which I reply: nuts. [↩]
3. Though it will help on keymapping between me and Flora. [↩]
4. Of course, if they drop Mana as our “resource” then Arcane Shot makes little sense since it is no longer rooted on a mana-based class. Arcane, Mana, dig? [↩]
5. Of course, Gweryc also makes a good argument for Hunter / Warrior mechanics crossover. [↩]

Patch 3.1! Many amazing things were done, and some of them affect us Hunters. One of these many things is the ability to summon a pet from the stables from any location.

There is only one problem with that.

There are now 110 very unhappy NPCs just standing around doing nothing.  They have no purpose, unless I happen to be near one AND I’m still in cooldown AND I need to swap out pets.  But otherwise, they’re just standing around.

Sighing.

Except for Azzleby, who is a bit more … aggressive.

Still, all that sighing makes me want to … I don’t know … hug them or something.

Can we find something for these poor wretches to do, please? Anyone?