We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Priests
“Dear BRK, I’ve been raiding Kara, Gruul and Magtheridon for a couple months now, and been seeing in person the difference between a marksman hunter and a beastmaster hunter in a raid setting, aside from just the damage meter readouts.
“I’ve been discussing with a hunter who’s considering making the switch from Marksman to Beastmaster and I came up with a good reason: my buff is better than his buff. However I don’t have the theorycraft knowledge to confirm that, but I figure Trueshot Aura’s 125 AP is the same in Kara or in Black Temple, but Ferocious Inspiration’s 3% damage gets better as the raid’s DPS gets better. Could you enlighten me? Tribadala”
Imagine, if you will, a Marksman Hunter with Trueshot Aura in a party with four rogues. The aura will be used and appreciated.
Imagine a Marksman Hunter with Trueshot Aura in a party with four resto druids. The aura will be wasted.
Imagine a Beastmaster Hunter with Ferocious Inspiration in a party with four rogues. The buff will be used and appreciated.
Imagine a Beastmaster Hunter with Ferocious Inspiration in a party with four resto druids. The buff will be wasted.
Your first role as a Marksman hunter is to remind your raid leader that Marksman hunters need to be with melee-DPS classes. Your first role as a Beastmaster hunter is to remind your raid leader that Beastmaster hunters can be with melee, ranged or caster-DPS classes.
There is no point in determining a Better Buff if that buff is not going to used properly. Only once this is accomplished can we consider Which Is Better.
So.
The rogue in your Magtheridon party does 10 DPS, (yes, 10, just work with us.) You give him Ferocious Inspiration and his DPS increases to 10.3 DPS. Wow. Replace FI with Trueshot Aura and his DPS increases to 20.
Another rogue in your Magtheridon party does 380 DPS. Now you give him Ferocious Inspiration and his DPS increases to 391. Replace FI with Trueshot Aura and his DPS increases to 383.
Now we just made up these numbers to show a point, that the problem with Trueshot Aura is that it doesn’t scale while Ferocious Inspiration does. It is a mathematical fact that Ferocious Inspiration will provide larger returns as the power of the individual being buffed increases. The point at which FI overpowers TSA is dependent upon each individual, though. One cannot say, “At an Attack Power of X Ferocious Inspiration is better,” because total-damage is not solely-dependent upon attack power.
Also, the difference between the potential damage increase cannot be directly calculated as FI is proc-based while TSA is always on. Your pet must crit in order for FI to be activated and that is a random variable in our calculations. If it procs on the first hit your additional FI-based damage will be larger than if your pet doesn’t crit for ten seconds. It would be a very mushy calculation if one wished to accurately estimate the differences.
Let’s go back to party-make-up. Just how many melee-classes does one generally cram into a single party when raiding? How many rogues and arms warriors and duel-wielding shaman and feral druids get included in the party with the Marksman hunter? Does one usually find a boomkin or mage in your party, soaking up a TSA and doing nothing with it? We’re going to guess the answer is Frequently.
In your Beastmaster hunter’s party, we can take that boomkin and mage and elemental shaman and warlock and shadow priest along with those melee-classes and crank all their DPS by 3%. For party/raid-functionality, a BM hunter’s potential is much easier to maximize simply because of the mechanics of Ferocious Inspiration. And, of course, Ferocious Inspiration stacks.
Aetherial Circle started a new Karazhan run last night without a priest. Three hunters provided the crowd control for Moroes, if you can believe it. Two Beastmaster hunters and a Marksman trapped those Moroes adds like the pros we are and Moroes was one-shot without a single Shackle. There was pet off-tanking, stacked Ferocious Inspiration, some Scattershotting, TSA, BigRedKitty, a BigRedOwl and massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS. Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, and Romeo and Juliet downed without a single Shackle.
/swagger
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10 Responses to “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Priests”
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Skeletal Ushers without a shackle? Color me impressed, BRK.
-Dave
Was the priest too bus answering fanmail?….
We do not have a priest in our Kara group so we took Moroes with 1 hunter (me), 2 pallys, 1 shaman, 1 mage, 2 rogues, and 3 warriors (1 fury). It took us a few tries but it boiled down to killing adds as fast as possible and me keeping one on ice. Like they say there are lots of ways to skin a cat.
It was a cruel surprise to find that the Ushers couldn’t be trapped. We managed but man they hit hard. We’ll give it a shot tonight and still don’t have a priest but did add another hunter
This priesty is locked to the first Kara group.
Kitty has yet to send me moar fanmail XD
~Cay
Cool, thanks BRK, I’ll let the other hunter know your thoughts.
Once again the world is ignorant towards the SURVIVAL-hunters.
Following your arguments, the SV-hunter may be put into any group in the raid and will provide all physical DD regardless of the group with a buff (essentially a debuff on his target, the mighty Expose Weakness).
All he has to do is crit, and this is as granted as the pet providing FI will crit.
And last but not least, the buff will scale with the equipment of the hunter himself.
One thing I have yet to find out: Does EW stack? Probably not…
Is there a chance of more than 1 SV in a raid of 25 anyway? Probably not…
Cheers, Xi
Your example of comparing MM and BM party buffs is fine… And Magtheridon is possibly the most pet friendly 25-man encounter I’ve yet seen so it’s a great example for BM.
Your overall point is right, the math is wrong. There will be a point where FI is better than TSA for physical damage dealers (hunters, rogues, fury warriors… Enh Sham and Ret Pallys are sorta in between). I know we haven’t reached that point yet with our rogues.
The simple fact is: +3% damage is +3% damage. Simple and great and easy to calculate and simply NOT up all the time (unfortunately) for all 25-man boss encounters (but up most of the time). TSA is. And, like you said, you made up the numbers. The dps bonus from TSA depends on spec and abilities etc… But from what I’ve calculated over the last few weeks of farming Grull, Mag, and VR (where I’ve convinced people to swap groups around), TSA has been better for the rogues than FI.
This is not what I expected, and most of these guys are still only in T4 with Kara/Arena/Heroic weapons. I’m sure once your rogues are in T6 with T5 and T6 weapons, that +3% damage will start to mean way more.
Our raid leaders have been playing around with groups alot lately and we often have our Surv, MM, and BM hunter all get in the same group with a feral druid (we beg to at least keep the feral druid, and he’s more than happy to be there). Not really a bad setup.
Here’s a question for you BRK: Would you rather have +125 AP for both you and your pet, or +3% damage?
Lets do some quick math: +125 AP is approx 125/14 = 9 dps increase.
Pet: 9 * 1.25 (well fed) * 1.2 (UF) * 1.2 (SS) = 16.07
So if your pet’s normal dps is greater than 535.7, FI is better.
You: Auto Shot: 9 * 1.02 (FF) * 1.2 (SS) = 10.93 (white damage of 364.3 for FI to be better)
Your steady shots will get 125 * .2 = 25 damage increased… and then e’d get into shot rotations but for you, it’s one steady per auto, so +25 damage every 1.96 sec = 12.75 (is your steady shot dps better than 425? probably not)
Anyway, you get the idea. TSA is probably better for you as a BM hunter. When you actually start taking into acount abilities and haste and offhand+mainhand… TSA is a beast of a buff… For Kara, TK and SSC. FI is still more versatile as it helps casters. But no BM hunters wants to be in the caster group.
TSA really needs to scale. MM hunters need some love for PvE, but when played right, they can keep up with BM hunters through TK and SSC in both personal dps and value to raid. Past that… it’s hard to see MM being able to keep up with the massive scaling of SS and FI.
“But no BM hunters wants to be in the caster group.”
No BM hunter wants to sit in a group of a Shadow Priest and casters? One of our caster group consists of a Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman, 2x Mages and our BM hunter. Any BM hunter that doesn’t want in on that is messed up in the head. You have mana flowing out of your ears as well as AoE healing on you and your pet. Their single solitary job is to keep FI up. 3% increased damage to 4 of our top DPS’rs is INSANE. 3% increased damage to our shadow priest = 3% more mana returned to mages and 3% more AoE healing to all members. You see the pattern here? The BM hunter in this group is always on the top of every fight along with the Shadow Priest and 1 of the Mages. His only job is to keep FI up. Spec’d properly there’s no reason he can’t. Your job isn’t to provide big numbers, it’s to provide crits and steady DMG. He does all 3 like a good BM hunter should. And let me note, this is in Kara, Gruul, SSC and The Eye.
It’s all a matter of working with what you have. We’ve done Moroes and subsequently Kara with zero CC outside the warlocks enslaving and banishing and Paladin fear (our healers had CC duty, lol).
Other nights we’ve done Oz with only a single hunter fear to control Roar and only 2 tanks.
Coordination and teamwork as well as a solid plan will get you to your goal. As long as everyone knows their class and abilities it’s not usually important what those abilities are.
It’s very much possible to run Kara without priest (or even warrior tanks).
My guild had a kara run without any priests and warrior tank (for Group 4 – the weekender group and all our priests and warrors were locked with the first 3 groups). We had 2 pally tank, 1 healadin, 2 resto druid, 2 mage, 1 hunter, 1 warlock, and 1 rogue. We 1 shot every boss till nightbane. We did wipe once at the start because the pally was felling too OP and pull too many trash… just joking (we wiped cause one of the new guys was feared into another group of trash and people was still unprepared). For Moroes, we only trap 1 add, 1 tank took moroes, the other took 2 adds and the last one was kite by the mages. Just burn them down fast and everything goes down fast. This shows skill is more important the raid make-up.