BM vs MM in raidsFollow

I believe that this has to do with the current maximum dps build being the 41/20 BM/MM build. With Serpent's Swiftness and pets gaining avoidance (and therefore being easier to keep alive), BM/MM will generally out-dps a deep MM build. Several other threads on this board have previously shown the math for this. Hope this answers your question.

From what I have seen in my raids (playing as my shadow priest, not my hunter) the BM build always comes out on top if the hunter is skilled enough to know when to pull their pet out for a few seconds for a heal. We have all three builds of hunters in our raids. BM hunters come out on top for personal dps, followed by MM and then SV. However, I think BM and SV bring more to the raid dps overall with Ferocious Inspiration and Expose Weakness. True-shot aura just doesn't cut it anymore since it doesn't scale. All three builds of hunters can keep their pets up the entire fight even when it's not melee friendly these days thanks to Mend Pet now being a HoT and the addition of the Avoidance skill you can train. BM just has the advantage right now due to serpent's swiftness. If itemization for SV hunters was better, I'm sure they would be right up there as well.

I've never been a big fan of MM, if you couldn't tell :) It gets the job done in raids, and a lot of people like to have scatter shot and silencing shot for pvp.

Wha? I'm 41/20 BM, and never pull my pet out on Curator or Gruul for that matter. Never. With Avoidance, I find that I forget to pull him out on Prince sometimes, and he does well. Now, I prefer to be safe and back him out on Prince, but he always does a ton of DPS anyway and never dies on any of the 3 mobs you mentioned.

Now, Void Reaver is a different story. That fight does, in fact, suck for pets, but I use mine anyway...go go imp. revive...

From my experience, the 2 BM hunters (me and one other very experienced guy) always outdamage the sole MM hunter...but we love her anyway, cause we are addicted to TSA~

In a fight where Pets can't be used, and none of those you mentioned qualify as such, the BM Hunter will still be out damaging the MM Hunter. MM hits harder, BM hits faster. Just as Cobra reflexes makes the Pet hit faster but for less damage and still provides a net higher damage output, the BM Hunter will do more damage over time than the MM Hunter.

Pets hard to keep alive? Both incorrect and irrelevant. If the BM Hunter can't keep his Pet alive, the MM Hunter will have lost his own Pet long before. BM Hunter Pets have access to higher Armor, Stamina, and more efficient healing plus debuff removal. MM Hunter Pets do not.

And while the MM Hunter is supplying his group with TSA for a tiny DPS increase to only the physical DPS classes, the BM Hunter is supplying his own group with FI for a 3% increase to all damage no matter the source.

I'm not sure 2 days can really qualify as having "tried BM". If you'd have given it two weeks, I might consider that you'd given BM a fair shot. But if I recall correctly you grew frustrated before you ever learned to adapt to your new Talents and re-specced right back to MM where you were comfortable.

I'm not 'dissing' MM Hunters, just replying to the OP as to why he's found that BM Hunters are selected first, and trying to dispel the myths spread by DalaranCaine.

In my own Guild we've got several MM Hunters, and all of them are skilled players and good contributors to the raids they attend. There is nothing intrinsically 'wrong' with being a MM Hunter. But unlike the days before BC, MM is no longer the Talent spec which allows a Hunter to maximize their DPS.

GOD this disscussion is getting old.

In my opinion its all about the player. Some are better for bm some are better for sv and some are better for mm.

I play a 42/19 marksman/survival hunter. I do my job and i do it well. do i top the damage charts for the instance? NOPE

what i do well is this : I am able to cc about 3 things at once for a short period of time. Im able to keep 2 mobs cc'd for quite some time. and i can keep 1 mob cc'd literally forever.

Not only that but although im not the most damaging class in an instance. I am the most burst damage. and i also never pull threat unless i want too. and probably the most important. i have seen marksman hunters CONSISTANTLY take less healing in raids. and that is huge. the tanks should be the only ones getting and needing heals.



The thing is. Im sure there are bm hunters and sv hunters out there who could school me. and also other marksman..

i play the build that i think is best for me. I have played them all. and mm/sv is my playstyle.

I would just plain suck as a bm or full sv


... so once again.... IT ALL COMES DOWN TO PERSONAL PREFERENCE!!!!

stop bringing it up and get the hell out there and try them out for yourself.

ah thanks for answering my questions. it really helped a lot.

and Caldone the Shady, we are not dissin MMs. and i think ur out dpsing ur fellow BM guildy because u out gear or out skill him/her; i'm sure if u spec BM and try it with no rejudgments and actually work hard, u will find that ur dmg out put is higher than be4

While player skill has a lot to do with player effectiveness under any Talent spec, to make an apples to apples comparison of which Talent spec offers the opportunity to do the best DPS you have to ignore player skill as a variable. Any two players of any equivalent hypothetical skill level should be able to do X, Y, and Z DPS if specced BM, MM, and SV respectively. And right now the highest of X, Y, or Z just happens to be X.
No amount of obfuscating the facts by dragging in player skill or "personal preference" (as if that made any sense at all. As a BM your preference was to suck?) changes the apples to apples game mechanics comparison.

Wow, this is a new spin entirely. Could you please take a stab at explaining how a MM Hunter, who does not have the Talents Endurance Training or Survivalist and thus has a lower Health total than any given BM or SV Hunter, and who also stands at range just like a BM or SV Hunter, will need less healing?
Again, in any even comparison all Hunters will require the same amount of healing. If there is a slight bias at all it is against the MM Hunter who has less easy access to Health boosting Talents.



Edited, Aug 27th 2007 12:24:51am by Kompera

155/14 = 11.07
Your figures are assuming that the group contains 2 Hunters, one MM and 1 BM. Or maybe you're assuming two groups, one with a BM Hunter and one with a MM Hunter. These are not a typical raid group compositions.

FI gives a 3% damage buff to everyone in the group, and every form of damage not just physical. Your Fire Mage? +3% to all his spells. Your Warlock? +3% to all her spells. Let's assume that the Warlock does a mere 600 DPS. 3% of that is 18 DPS, better than the 12 you are claiming for TSA (TSA gives more than 12 DPS in any event, the 11.07 DPS from AP/14 is white damage only). And this is for but a single DPS caster in the group, and doesn't include the Hunter providing the buff, or the Pet. Do you now see how FI is better?

How many Hunters are typically grouped together in your raids?
If there are 2 Hunters in any given Kara raid I'd put the MM Hunter with the tanks and rogues, and the BM Hunter with the DPS casters and Shadow Priest.

In this case, which is not at all an unreasonable group composition, FI will provide a much greater boost to raid DPS than TSA.

And as you advance a 3% boost scales with you. You Mage gets new gear and is pushing another 100 DPS? Add 3%. If your Rogue gears up and gains 100 DPS, TSA is still just 155 AP.

Edit: Meh, mikeyvach beat me to it. That'll teach me to open 7 tabs and get to each in turn. :)

Edited, Aug 27th 2007 12:32:53am by Kompera

EW>TSA, with a decent amount of agility for raiding (650-700 unbuffed) and the fact that agility scales better with buffs reaching 800+ agility raidbuffed isnt hard.
800 agility = 200ap for the whole raid.
already 45 more then TSA and for more people.
and 800 agi = 20% crit, add in the +8% crit from talents and extra things from buffs and gear and you'll easely hit 30+% crit

hell with a feral druid, getting 40% crit is very possible.


@slammer, what your saying is pure f*cking *********
How much damage a hunter takes is affected by 2 things.
1: skills
2: wether he/she has survival instincts (2/4% less damage)

and nr 1 counts for 99% of it.

I am a full BM Hunter, and will always be, just because it's my playstyle and because that's what i've played with from 10-66, so i'm good at it.

My response is to the pet healing, whereas, I do see the validity in a priest healing the pet, I do not agree with it taking valuable heals from the tank or other more valuable characters in the party. A BM Hunter should be paying better attention to his pets health and be using Mend Pet almost constantly in those bad fights where its needed and also recognize that as a BM Hunter, you should have Imp. Revive Pet, and simply let your pet die rather than ask the priest to heal it in situations where the heals would be better off going elsewhere because we can rez our pets in the middle of a fight and get right back into it. yes it sucks and lowers our pets damage because it's happiness drops and then we have to feed it, blah blah blah, but a dead and/or unhappy pet is better than a dead pissed off party.

And regardless of which build tops the damage meters, none of that matters if you can't play your build right in the first place, and you have to be in a party or raid situation to make the best of the meters anyway and if you suck or don't measure up to the other Hunters in your guild you're not going to the instance, so again the build which tops the meter doesn't matter, player skill and player reliability outweigh the ability to top the damage meters.

I just LOVE this discussion because nobody seems to want to address the real issues...

It is possible for an MM hunter to out DPS a BM hunter.
It is possible for a BM hunter to out DPS an MM hunter.

There is only ONE statistically significant way to answer this question and by the time ANYONE will have accomplished it, Blizzard will have changed things and the arguement will be irrelevant.

The reasons for all this are:

1. Because THE PLAYER brings the MAJORITY of skill to do the dps.
2. Damage is RANDOM across a given spectrum. You can only average the damage in THEORYCRAFT. Actual combat is different. Specs only adjust the spectrum.
3. Character Skills and Talents are important, but they are a minority indicator of difference. Even macro use, button placement, keystroke mapping and timing are more important than even the most refined 'build'. A few points misplaced here or there will make very little difference as long as the major dps talents are in place. The character must be tailored to the players skill for optimum combat ability. There is no build to rule them all.

So, how do you actually figure out which is better:

Pick 2 players. One MM Master, one BM master. To verify their Godhood in the role they need to be put against each other.

They both dual 100 times as MM. They both dual 100 times as BM. So long as those are within about 10% +/- of 50%, it's good as long as the 'master' in the spec is the leading winner. Then they both dual as BM Master in BM vs. MM Master in MM. At about +/- 5%, they are roughly equal players.

Then you run the same instance 100 times, pick one that favors neither spec. Assign a priest to each hunter and a God at tanking to hold the aggro. This will keep both hunters in pure dps mode and it will also work on the pet side with the pet limitations. The hunters MUST keep the priests alive, their assigned one and the other one, just as they should in a normal instance. This also will test CC ability.

See who tops the damage meter and by how much each time. Query the tank each to see which hunter they'd rather have backing them up. Query the priests to see how much healing they had to do and could they keep up with the hunter and pet. There is more to being a good hunter than dps and it's valid to check the pdq's as well as the xyz's....

This is about the CLOSEST you'll get to a fair comparison and it will be a pain in the tush to do.

So, all you hunter spec warriors out there, swallow your egos and LET IT GO! There is just not enough of a difference to worry about and if there was, Blizzard wouldn't be doing its job in balancing!

They can do Theorycraft as well as anyone here and they have access to the actual formulas with all the variables. I wouldn't doubt it if they didn't have calculators that had all this built into it and work it out on them before even implementing a change for playtesting. I know I would...

Focus on YOUR skills, not your characters spec and all the associated garbage. Tailor the character to YOU and be happy with it. YOU are the source of dps, the character is only a tool/toon. Sheesh... @_@

*sigh* Some people seem to be incapable of getting the point.

Of course a skilled player of any spec, can beat an unskilled player of any spec. But who cares? The skilled player sure doesn't care. The skilled player just might want to test themselves against another skilled player, however. This is why I've stressed in my posts above that skill must be removed from the consideration of the mechanics of how the different Talent specs work. If you blithely assume that you're a more skilled player then your opponent, then it just doesn't matter what spec you chose or how you spend your Talents.

Thus the exploration into which Talent builds can provide the highest DPS output when standing next to your peers attacking the same Boss. The fact of this exploration does not make the players doing this exploration evil, poor group mates, or any other thing. If they use their knowledge for evil, that's another story entirely. There is a fairly decent amount of the player base who enjoy understanding the game mechanics and how they balance against each other. How they really work within the framework of the game. In my eyes this exploration offers the opportunity to be better group mates, since a player who more deeply understands their class and the game is naturally better able to respond to game challenges in a group setting.

Thank you, sloshot. This is the funniest thing I've read on these boards in a great while.

That is a fine and highly idealistic position to take. It's also hopelessly out of touch with reality.

The reality of the matter is that Blizzard has a small number of developers and playtesters and a finite amount of time to do testing before releasing any given patch or change into the game. And then the player base of 8.5 million gets to do their own 'playtesting'. Do you see the practical difference here? Even if Blizzard were to be able to afford to pay 1000 engineers/designers/playtesters and devote 1000 hours to testing each patch or new release, they would still fail to put out a perfectly balanced and error-free game. And their staffing levels and available time falls far below those hypothetical numbers.

The Blizzard employees simply don't stand a chance in hell of catching every possible exploit and unforseen combination of abilities, or even of balancing class abilities. They simply can not compete with the variations of situations to which the player base will subject the game to, nor the hours of play time which the player base will use to explore variations of game play.

This is not Blizzards fault, it's simply the practical situation which exists for any company with a large customer base which uses their product in 'live' situations in ways in which the company can not hope to compete through any reasonable amount of testing.

Edited, Aug 28th 2007 9:35am by Kompera