Level 80 builds.Follow

I'd have to disagree with your marks builds, though I could easily be proven wrong. I just can't see LnL being worth, essentially, 11 points.

These are what I would do.
With Barrage

Without Barrage

Both are actually 7/56/7+1 builds.

Your hybrid build is actually very close to what I'm playing currently (obviously +10 talents). Gives big numbers. ^^


Edit: This is what I'm running with right now I believe.

Edited, Oct 21st 2008 1:41pm by Ieatrocks

Because Thick Hide is useless for raiding since if anything hits your pet directly he's dead anyway. Imp. Revive is just the best option in case you ***** up and let your pet die to aoe damage or (s)he eats an accidental cleave on the way to the boss or whatever.

It's just filler points, but it's the best option.

Well, if you are using a ferocity pet in Raids with Heart of the Phoenix, those '***** ups' are dealt with automatically, so if they are just 'fill points' then IMO, I'd go with the Thick Hide. It might keep your pet from dying to that heafty physical attack and give you/your healers the chance to fix the issue before the pet dies. If you are going with a multitude of pets, the Improved Revive makes more sense to me.

Having said that, armor is worthless against magic attacks (spells) so I guess being 'fill points' it doesn't matter one way or the other. Whatever blows your skirt...

You really want two points in invigoration.
it's not just the exotic pets though, there are other talents you're passing up.

I see BM specs going two ways. One is 55/16/0 and the other is the 50/21/0

The comparison is really between longevity and readiness. The point about desyncing TBW and trinkets is valid, however longevity also decreases pet CD's for all abilities, which could end up being significant and readiness would desync them anyway. At this point you get the 51 pt talent just because the points are quite handy for pet survivability and there really isn't anything better. You also get 1 extra point in cobra strikes, which is nice, and makes invigoration better. Honestly I really really hope that this is very very close in terms of DPS. I'd love to have the option to go either way.

Of course this ignores efficiency. But by all reports it's not needed.

Edited, Oct 21st 2008 11:37pm by Xsarus

I'll definitely go for a 50/21/0.

BW + Logevity + Readyness....

Time (s)	Ability 
0	    BW 
18	    BW Ends 
18	    Readyness 
19	    BW 
37	    BW Ends 
103	    BW 
121	    BW Ends 
198	    Readyness 
199	    BW 
283	    BW Ends 

In the first five minutes you get over a minute of BW.
Basically you're getting Big Red Kitty 25% of the time.

Edit: formatting

Edited, Oct 22nd 2008 6:02am by Kelnoen

Actually I don't see cobra strikes as this bad. It is not a great talent, but spending points on it is not a total waste after all.
Lets take another approach to see why.
The normal crit rate of a BM pet is:
5% standard crit rate
+10% from BM talents
+ 9% from pet talents
+ x% from raid buffs and mob debuffs
So we are looking at a crit rate of 24% + pet buffs and mob debuffs. Lets assume a raid buffed pet currently gets to 30-35% crit rate (leader of the pack, mob debuffs plus stat buffs).

Since the crit rate of your pet is not bound to the hunter's gear and cobra strikes only procs from special attacks (which are bound to the GCD), the pet should be able to eat up the charges before it procs again.

But how much damage does cobra strikes give us?
I'll try to answer with data from a BT run we did yesterday.
Over all boss fights (I ignore trash fights as those mobs never are fully debuffed and vary in their level) my pet had a crite rate of 35% with normal attacks.
However special attacks (claw and rake) had a crit rate of 50% and 49%.
Here is the WWS from yesterday so that you can see the numbers I use as a reference: BT clear

Since only cobra strikes increases the critical strike chance of my pet specials I can safely assume that cobra strikes (which I have specced 2/3) increased my pets crit rate on special attacks from ~35% to ~50%.
By looking at the avg damage values of those abilities a critical claw hit gives an extra 349damage and a critical rake hit gives an extra 423damage.
Lets calculate the overall damage gain:
claw: 595 hits (of which 300 where crits). With a 35% crit rate my pet would have crit 595*0.35 = 208 times with claw. So cobra strikes gave my pet 92 critical strikes with claw which gave my pet 92 * 349 = 32k damage.
rake: 100 hits (of which 49 where crits). With a 35% crit rate 35 my pet would have crit 35 times with rake. Thus cobra strikes gave my pet 14 critical strikes with rake or 14 * 423 = 5.9k damage.

So in total cobra strikes gave my pet 38k extra damage over all boss fights. My pet did ~1m damage against those bosses, thus cobra strikes is about 4% of my pet's dps.
Me and my pet did about 3m damage in total, thus cobra strikes was responsible for a about 1.3% of my total dps.

So as a answer to how good cobra strikes is, I can say that cobra strikes seems to yield ~0.65% damage per talent point.
If a talent gives you more in terms of total dps, it is better than cobra strikes, if it yields less, it is worse than cobra strikes :)

Anyone seeing flaws in my assumptions and calculations?

Ok I get to sound like a newb doof. But what Talent calculator are you all using? Because the one on the main wow site only allows me to do builds up till 70.

Ahhh thanks very much.

Yes, although more pet crits = more chances for proccing frenzy (which should make 3/5 points in frenzy a viable option).



I don't think that the pet would not be able to eat up the charges a lot of the time. Every pet has a focus dump currently.
Every 1.5 seconds the pet will do a special attack. Thus the two charges will be eat up really fast (in 3 seconds tops).
Cobra strikes only has a 20, 40 or 60% chance to proc an a crit of a special shot. A hunter can not do more than one special shot every 1.5 seconds.
Even if two special shots crit in a row, both shots would have to proc cobra strikes for a charge to be wasted. All in all that is rather unlikely to happen very often. So yes, the first point might yield a bit more dps than the second or third talent point but the difference should not be very noticable.

I was thinking about this as MM...

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=ctbMzLZ0eAbMAz0xoxbAox

any thoughts?

I'm definatly going with a BM: 50/21/0 only thing I'd do different then yours is put the 3 points from improved stings into efficacy. I've actaully noticed and just me personally I get more DPS by not wasting a global cool down and 10% mana off a steady shot will let you keep aspect of the hawk on longer, before switching to viper for those longer encounters. I dunno just an idea will see how everything plays out very soon. Hope we stay on top of the DMG meters!

Edited, Nov 13th 2008 9:17pm by fhfire

Just have a question on the OP. Can that be used to level from 70-80 on the BM build. OR should I go with 51 in bm so I can add the 4 extra points to my pet then respec to it at 80? Got 2 points at level 72 and don't know were to add them >< lol messing around on the wowhead and came up with this for pveing to 80: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=ctbMztgRmuzeRu0eVbom

Just looking to get to 80. Then I'll take a raiding build since well..I'll be raiding. :D

for the 50/21 PvE build, why don't you take focused aim instead of improved stings. Is it just because there is so much hit gear that you can't help but become hit capped? I was hoping to need less hit and be able to focus on more crit/agi/ap.

I'm only 72 and haven't even browsed the 80 gear yet.