Valilor at The Master’s Call: Like most people know, the short answer is “It depends on your raid composition” – which is true enough but lets look at it in a little bit more detail.
Before I go on, I just want to point out that his is only going to be from an Marksman and Survival hunter’s perspective, I haven’t done any analysis on the Beast Mastery tree as, quite frankly, I don’t like BM.
Pet Overivew
There are 3 trees of hunter pets; Ferocity, Cunning and Tenacity. Within each tree there are various special abilities, which can provide the raid various buffs, that can help the raid in a multitude of ways as well as increasing the most important of things: your DPS.
Testing Methodology
The outcome I am trying to achieve is to be able to rank the pets in order of DPS, so when you are presented with the situation of multiple buffs missing, you can make an informed pet selection.
As buff stacking can impact the results in different ways (e.g. Bleed Damage & Crit % due to Piercing Shots) I’m going to ignore all stacking and start from a base where there are no buffs present outside of Hunters Mark. I’ll then look at the differences between the family trees and then the abilities, for both MM and SV.
Also bear in mind that these tests (using Female Dwarf) are based on my hunter’s current gear, so you may get some difference if you tested these out. I’m not aiming for 100% accuracy though, just some broad guidance to help with pet selection. … Read Full Article.
I have one nit pick, more a personal choice. As MM, I still prefer a ferocity pet for Call of the Wild.
6% magic damage taken over 5% crit for SV? Huh. I have usually ranked those differently. My thought was this:
Assuming 1% crit = 1% all DPS and 1% magic damage taken = 1% magic DPS, then when magic damage is greater than 83%, Wind Serpent is better, less than 83%, Wolf is better.
So there are a couple points here. As an SV Hunter I would prefer 5% crit over 8% magical dmg increase true enough…but we have a feral Druid in our raid, so he brings KI which means the wolf’s buff is useless.
We have DKs (2) so that means a cat’s Call is useless as is the Ravager’s ability.
My Dragonhawk’s magical dmg buff is really the only thing we tend not to have in the raid as we rarely have a lock, and almost never a rogue.
The second point and more important one is this…The Firebreath buff is 8% increase to all magical damage. Its a guaranteed 8% increase. A 5% increase to your critical strike chance is just that…a CHANCE to crit for 5% of the time.
People confused critical strike chance as a guarantee, it isn’t. You can find you fire a 100 shots and get 50% criticals, then fire another 100 shots and get 10% of them as critical. the 2 samples do not match your tool tip 30% alone, but together they average out. (simple example only of course). Your critical strike chance is actually based on a far larger sample size…more like 10,000 shots from a data sample.
Yes, normally we do see a relatively comparative number to what the tool tip says. So if you have 30% crit, more than likely a single boss pull will see 28 – 32% crit rate…it falls within a margin.
I personally prefer guarantees. But as a Hunter always should do…I go with what the raid needs/lacks.
Devaluing crit because of it’s “chance” nature is not good. Sure, a string of crits is nice, and a dry spell sucks, but I only ever hear Fire Mages complain. Crit is very reliable spread over 5 minutes.
I myself have found the agility and crit buffs covered most of the time. Given that, I usually end up using a wind serpent or ravager, depending on spec.
Crap, the wind serpent buff is 8%, not 6%, so the portion of magic damage dealt should be higher than 62.5% to beat the crit buff as a personal DPS gain. I don’t know why I thought it was 6%.
62.5% seems much more reasonable of a percentage than 83.3%, and the wind serpent buff is likely to be much stronger the higher that percentage gets.
Also, don’t forget how much interactivity these stats have. The strength of SV mastery depends on how much magic damage we deal, and that magic damage can crit. The more often we crit, the stronger the effect mastery has.
a great addon named “raid checklist” helps seeing at a glance what buffs are missing and which of these you can provide. it won’t tell you which one is the best however.. ;)
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/raid_checklist.aspx
Hey,
Well I’m just stating the absolute values really, given the perfect firing conditions, cunning is better than ferocity, although the delta is tiny, less than 100dps out of the 20+ we’re pulling these days so probably not even noticeable.
The cunning pet is coming out slighty ahead because it does more damage itself, so in a real situation it would be swings and roundabouts as to which was really better. Do you or does your pet have more DPS uptime? If it’s the former, a ferocity would be better but considering every single scenario is outside of the scope of my analysis.
The magic damage / crit thing surprised me too for SV but the difference is quite large, so for single target, I’d use this.
In reality, I go MM for simgle target and SV for AoE, so the magic damage rebuff wouldn’t be much use in an AoE environment, so a wolf would be superior (probably still behind the cat though).
My assumptions of 1% crit = 1% DPS, ect. are just that. I have no testing to back them up, though the magic damage assumption is very reasonable, I think.
Choosing pet buffs present very many subtleties that change with the situation and playstyle. Isolating these buffs with a Monkey, Bird and Turtle is very practical, but relying on spreadsheet data, even Female Dwarf, is not good practice.
I’m going to collect some data with a target dummy, starting with SV, and use your framework of relative ranking. I think a few 5 minute tests, using CotW once with each ferocity pet, forcing LnL with frost traps to normalize as much as possible, and removing most other RNG factor like trinkets will show different data. I’d be interested to see anyone else’s test results.