The Enigma Order

Points to notice about pets:

Theredon wrote:

Lamme wrote:

We're talking damage here, Ferocity! Same drill as above, if it's BM, it's Exotic Pets, if Ferocity, than a Core Hound. Why is that you ask? Seriously, it A CORE HOUND, why do you even have to ask?! The talents are supposed to balance survivability and damage - the few points taken away from pure damage abilities seem to be worth it.

If your planning on going with a Core Hound. I'd probably screw Dash, Lick Your Wounds talent and sacrifice a point in Spiked Collar, in order to gain Call of the Wild, which not only boosts yourself, but also your party (melees counted!!!).. Altho the sucky part about Call of the Wild is the 5min CD , but It's reduced with the Longevity talent from the BM tree anyways so, no biggie.

I like your BM-tree in general, but you might reconsider taking Hawk Eye, you can never have enough range .

Fair points I agree.
I guess I took more of a safe approach - sacrificed some dps abilities in favor of survival.
As for Call of the Wind - I'm not too impressed at this point, it lasts short, has a significant (yet reduceable) cooldown and the effect itself could be better. On the other hand, it's something like "use effect" of decent WotlK trinket I'm guessing, and that's not only for yourself.
As for Hawk Eye - our range is being changed alltogether and I got used to its limits.

What I miss the most in my BM raiding build is Cobra Strikes - pure pet damage ability, but so far I didn't manage to find points for it.

Like I said, work in progress and more of a overview of the talents I'm particularly interested in testing.


One thing I really like is how BM and MM specs may be combined by 2 (or more) hunters for greater damage output. Bit like warlocks curses. Funny part is that now it's the MMs who may support BMs rather than what we have now.

In general I like how Blizzard is trying to make stings matter again.

Made some cleaning. Feel free to add/comments.

I've run some test in Shandara's (Cheeky's) spreadsheet. Compared 2 SURV builds - 2/18/51 and 7/13/51. I've run them both in pre- and past-patch spreadsheet mostly in order to see how much of a buff will the numbers show. Results below.

2/18/51
pre-patch: 5383,2
post-patch: 5518,21

net gain: 135,01

7/13/51
pre-patch: 5358,49
post-patch: 5489,24

net gain: 130,75.

Results are pretty much in line with how I understood what Blizzard was saying. It could be interesting to run a similar comparison for BM to assess the nerf, might do it afterwards. I've spoken to a pretty sweet geared EL hunter yesterday in the evening and he claimed his dummy dps as BM felt from 3,5k levels down to 2,5k. Dummy-dps is very innacurate, still that's quite a huge difference.

That said, I believe the spreadsheet should be treated with extreme caution at this point of time. Especially for SURV, there are so many procs, cd's and situational stuff that I wouldn't make any decisions basing on it.

edit: heh, I've tried to run the similar for old/new BM. I tihnk I must have messed something up really badly since it shows a dps increase of ca. 180 dps Don't think I have the patience to look into it.

Posting here instead of updating since the links might be broken:
Lamme's MM raiding build pre 3.1.3

Lamme's SURV raiding build pre 3.1.3]

A handful of doubts I recently have/had:
Unleashed Fury vs Survival Instincts
First of all, in MM build I couldn't make my mind what to take: 2 points in Unleashed Fury (UF) or 2 points in Survival Instincts (SI). Finally it bothered me enough for me to sit down and crunch the numbers. I took a heroic raid as a sample, data from Razorscale to Freya; only looked at boss fights (so trash excluded, boss wipes and kills included). I ended up with the following:
- taking 2 points away from UF would decrease my pet's dps by 220.546
- putting those 2 points in SI would increase combined damage of SS and AS by 210.929.

Take randomness into consideration and that ends up as being about equal. However, I went 1 step further. SI just happens - you do yout stuff and benefit. But only as long as you can stand and shoot. Add movement and it all becomes more complicated. UF is bit more player dependent - you need to keep your pet (i) alive and doing damage (ii) buffed with raid buffs (iii) buffed with pet-food. Granted you meet those 3 conditions, I'm pretty sure UF is better than SI. In pet-unfriendly fights UF is obvious choice (hence bonus points for forseeing what will be better in a given raid; tip - don't invest in UF if going for Mimiron hard mode:).

Improved Aspect of the Hawk (IAotH)
A pain of a talent for anyone trying to calculate stuff. Facts:
- the more talent points you put, the bigger speed increase you get, but not the bigger proc chance,
- glyph of the Hawk is equal to 2 talent points
- auto shots ain't got haste cap
- seady shot is at 1,5 sec haste cap
- haste varried a lot from hunter to hunter
- IAotH ain't got hidden cooldown
- people who know maths way better than me claim there's nothing bad in haste cd's piling up (in theory Rapid Fire during Herosim grants bigger benefit than those 2 used one after another, don't ask me how that's even possible).

This talent is a pain to manage and basically always seam to happen at the wrong times. However, in theory something like "bad timing for haste effect" doesn't exist. I don't understand that. I don't trust that. I chain my effects! . Simple maths say IAotH has very high uptime (that's a good thing). Regardless, SURV build granting highest theoretical dps do not include it.
My very personal conclusion - this effect is random and inconvinient, but the benefit outweights all those disadvantages. That's particulary true seeing as I have laughably low haste (roughly a half of what I saw on you guys recently). In MM build I maxed it since I needed to get higher in BM tree anyway. In SURV tree I put 1 point in it and glyphed for it.

MM glyphs
Again it's a pain. Serpent sting seams to be no.1 as the extra 6 sec damage is recalculated into Chimera Shot, so that's much. Past that it's all very gear dependent. Calculations show Kills Shot, Steady Shot, of the Hawk and Chimera to all be reasonable. Personally I go with Serpent, Chimera and Aimed. This give me a smooth rotation with no delayed shots. That's prior to haste effects though, those put everything up side down. If I was to drop any of them, I supopse it would be Aimed as it's relatively low portion of damage (but than again the glyph is there to make it portion higher, argh!)

SURV glyphs
I roll with Explosive Shot, of the Hawk and Serpent. See below.

Glyphs adjustments
Been toying with the idea og using multiple glyphs during a raid. I'm thinking along the line - eg. Kill Shot shines at the later stage of Ulduar (in particular Mimiron p4, Yogg-Saron above all). But than again it's not so good at Vezax. Since major glyphs are cheap as hell nowadays, I thought I would try to adjust glyphs to each fight some time. Prolly not game breaking, but in light of all the doubts above - might be worth a shot.


That's it for now, not because I run out of discussion points, but need to take of work a bit. Hoping for some feedback.

edit: oh, the builds are "pre 3.1.3" since in that patch Hunter's Mark is getting buffed and it might be very interesting for MM hunter, especially in hunter heavy raids.