9, 8, 7, 9, 8, 7, 9…
That’s the countdown our Ferocious Inspiration buff is doing lately. Since every time our pet crits, FI resets to 9 seconds, the near constant refresh means our pet is critting a heck of a lot. Which is good!
But we have another pet-talent, Frenzy, that also procs from pet-crits. It’s a less obvious buff, graphics-wise, because it is a pet-only buff. We can see FI on our own buff-bar easily, but we’d have to search our tiny pet-buff-bar to track Frenzy. But if we delve into the WoWWebStats reports, we can track how frequently our pet crits, and how many times FI and Frenzy proc as a result.
We’ve been running with 4/5 in Frenzy for many moons, because with the rate our pet crits, Frenzy procing from four out of every five pet-crits has kept Frenzy up almost continuously. But with our pet critting even more frequently than before, we’ve been wondering if we can try going 3/5 in Frenzy.
But what do we do with that extra point? It’s not like we can plunk it hither and yon, wherever we feel like it. There are only so many talents that are accessible at the point in the BM talent tree. Here they are:
We could take a point in Catlike Reflexes, perhaps. It’s not a great raiding talent, so probably not.
Spirit Bond? Maybe, extra heals is never a bad thing.
Another point in Improved Mend Pet is never a bad idea.
Pathfinding would be different, since when we fly places we can’t use a speed-boost trinket anymore. And the extra boost to Aspect of the Pack would make the timed event in Culling of Stratholm a tiny bit easier.
Improved Revive Pet seems moot now that we have Heart of the Phoenix.
Endurance Training doesn’t seem to be a better choice than the others, and we’d be “wasting” a high-level point on a low-level talent.
Or we can just stick with 4/5 in Frenzy and not worry about it.
/ponder
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hmmm, spirit bond isnt bad. its always good to make it a little easier on your healers right after you take damage. 5% extra healing shouldnt be overlooked.
also, improved revive pet still isnt bad because if your pet died twice within 10 minutes in nax (it shouldnt, but this is theoretical), you would have to spend alot of mana/time brining it back … and it would need to heal up more before heading back in.
maybe you can do some testing, keep your spec exactly the same. and just test out on a dummy with 4/5 and 3/5 frenzy on to see if the drop of dps is noticeable enough to justify keeping it.
I would be curious to see some numbers for 3/5 Frenzy vs. 4/5 Frenzy particularly after the impending pet-nerf. It may be research-time!
/science-mode
I have been running with 3/5 in frenzy for some time and dumped my point in Spirit Bond to make it 2/2 again. I haven’t done any in-depth research about it, but it seems to be up about 95% of the time as far as i could see on my pets buff bar.
Probably just me – I have respecced 12 times or so since the last patch – but whenever I go completely without Revive Pet, I miss it.
For whatever reason, in a fairly brief trial, Heart of the Phoenix did not process at all for me. /puzzled
That said, there are no bad choices in the group you mentioned.
My impression is that all the cookie cutters are on sabbatical nowadays.
A lot of people have thought of the 3 points in frenzy, including me.
It SEEMS like a good idea, but the RNG hates me.
Nonetheless, with cobra strikes maxed out, 3/5 Frenzy would make sense.
Where to put the one point leftover?
Improved mend pet IMO. For two reasons:
1. I hate unfinished talents. Just aesthetic.
2. Less mana spent on mend pet in a fight, and a better chance for it to proc.
your best bet is spirit bond. every heroic has at least one boss fight where the whole party takes some sort of damage. so do the raids. one of the brk mantras is to help our healer, right? well, nothing better than making their heals more potent on you AND your pet…
I’m with Doom – I’ve got a point in Spirit Bond (though no points in Frenzy) and it really makes a big difference in healing received. When we first started raiding, I had two points in it to help the healers out as we learned to deal with raid damage in Naxx.
Consider Sapphiron and his unrelenting raid damage. Extra healing to two raid members? (Yes, our healers heal my pet, /love KI healers.) That’s huge!
Should read “though four point in Frenzy.”
Sure would be nice if the edit option worked…
Now I want to see your DPS and Frenzy uptime % with 3/5 and 4/5 on dummy.
You are best hunter-blogger I know..
I’ve been wondering about 3/5 Frenzy myself; when I first started levelling I kept 3/5 Frenzy for awhile to see how it’d go; it was *almost*, but not quite, 100% uptime. However, I was pretty undergeared (and still am!), and I’d be interested to see how it would go now, with slightly better gearing.
As for the spare point… I like Spirit Bond and also Mend Pet. Very useful for soloing stuff and getting stacking debuffs off in fights.
to Phyllixia
Gear does almost 0 to frenzy, because fromdata of Wowwiki.com, we can see that base pet crit% is 5 and the rest is only talents. Nice. We have 1 more talent point to spend.. Its almost We got 81lvl Hunter- DPS is like for 81 too
Too bad I can’t put it in The Beast Within and still keep my Trueshot aura too. I put mine in as a single point to mend pet, to get rid of those pesky long-term debuffs.
Come to think of it, you don’t really see those annoyingly long curse’s or diseases that last like 10 minutes every time they are applied like you did in old world 5-mans.
If by “For whatever reason, in a fairly brief trial, Heart of the Phoenix did not process at all for me. /puzzled” you mean cast automatically when your pet dies, it isn’t auto cast. I prefer it that way; a ten minute cooldown needs to be saved for when I need it. If Gojira goes down at the last few seconds of a fight where I can kite and melee to finish something off, I don’t want to waste it for when I have to fight the big elite a few minutes later….
I think spirit bond is the only place to put that point. The extra heal buff for you and your pet is great, particularly when your guild healers love you and toss HoTs on the pet. The heal tick is also nice, and may have kept me alive once or twice in Naxx. Couple of times, I was sure I was dead, looked up at my bar expecting teh DoT tick to kill me and saw a tick from spirit bond that seemed to keep me above zero, then a big heal land to save my ass. That tick has certainly kept my pet up as I pull him out of an AoE near the boss.
…there’s always points in foccussed aim ;3
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