Swapping BM to supply sunder -- when is it worth it?Follow

Never. The DPS you'd lose from going BM far offsets the DPS lost by melee not having sunder up.
You're telling me you don't have a warrior, a rogue, or a druid?

I do have a druid main, but since our guild has a single warrior and I'm the only hunter with a worm (our other 80 hunter has all four spirit beasts taking up slots) I've never noted how much dps I gain from Sunder. I can't provide it on the druid, and Faerie Fire is free and easy, so calculating trade-offs was moot.

Using the calculator for my hunter gave some interesting info.
--SV with a wolf/no FF is ~30 dps more than SV with a firefly, about what I expected. So with tanks being at least two physical guys it's always better to supply faerie fire than go without.
--Worm with BM is about 800 dps less than SV/wolf/no sunder, and adding sunder to my SV/wolf gives ~250 dps. Unfortunately I don't know how that transfers to other classes, but it gives an eyeball of about 3 physical attackers other than me (plus two tanks) before it's worth it. Unless my personal dps is necessary (blood beasts on Saurfang). So sunder is rarely worth it in 10s, often in 25s, right where I expected it to land.
--I need to work on my BM rotation, because while SV was close I've fallen about 3-400 dps short of the spreadsheet in my (limited) BM time.

Edited, Feb 7th 2010 9:41am by selebrin

What is, on average, the difference in DPS between beastmastery and the two others, anyway? Sure, going for the spec with the most DPS seems usually the right thing to do but I've noticed that especially IcC involves a couple of fights where it's actually worth it to go for the spec with the most tools instead. Our ranged leader, a mage, went frost for a couple of Blood Elf Council tries and discovered that sometimes doing a bit less DPS is actually worth it. Then again, he seems to get about ~80% the DPS as frost as he gets as arcane - it would probably not be worth it if the difference was simply huge.

On a sidenote, what use does Beastmastery have nowadays anyway, aside from leveling? Apperantly it's no longer the PvP spec and seeing as it normally isn't raid-viable either it just feels a bit pointless?