I was messing around with the spreadsheet the other day and learned something outright depressing.
See, for a long time, the Holy Trinity of Beast Master glyphs has been Glyph of Steady Shot, Glyph of Serpent Sting, and Glyph of Freakin’ 1.17 Second Cooldown Bestial Wrath.
But guys… we now remove our hats and bow our heads…
Because Glyph of the Hawk is apparently a significant DPS increase over Glyph of Bestial Wrath. (By “significant” I mean “close to 100 DPS”, though whether or not that is truly “significant” is up to you.)
*Taps plays somewhere in the distance*
Needless to say I fell into a state of denial and began playing around and swapping out the Serpent Sting and Steady Shot glyphs for the Hawk glyph to see if I could keep my beloved Bestial Wrath glyph, but to no avail. Everything else was a DPS loss. But turning Bestial Wrath into Hawk was a gain. Peh.
Will it effect me? Probably not. Because am I keeping the Bestial Wrath glyph(s, since I have three hunters that use one currently)? Probably yes. Guys. I’m raiding as the spec that does the lowest theoretical DPS of all of them and I’m not even using an optimal pet. When you’re already missing out on a thousand-ish DPS, by choice, 100 DPS doesn’t seem like a huge deal anymore, ya know?
On the other hand I’m gripped with the desire to do as much DPS as possible as a Beast Master, to make up for all the inherent shortcomings, but to be fair if we really need the DPS I’ll just switch to Marksmanship anyway. (Not like I do much more DPS as a Marksman than I do as a Beast Master, but ya know.)
Before my account expired, I did a couple heroics on Tawyn. I have a screenshot of 5.5k DPS in Halls of Lightning as a Beast Master. I’m happy. Whether you are happy is up to you, thus, the decision on whether to reglyph is also up to you! I just wanted to be sure I’m always here bringin’ you the news.
“Whoa whoa whoa, wait, Pike, your account expired? OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!one!”
Yeah, my WoW account expired yesterday and I have not yet resubscribed. There are a couple reasons for this:
a.) both my birthday and Christmas are next week and people have been hinting around that I’ll be getting WoW game time cards as gifts, so I don’t really feel like restarting a credit card subscription cycle if I’m just going to be getting said cards next week anyway, and…
b.) some issues have come up in my personal/family life which have the potential to flip my life upside down, Prince of Bel-Air style, so I sort of don’t want to resubscribe before I know what’s going on with that. (Don’t worry, I’m not dying).
Ironically I have a lot of WoW-related blog post ideas floating around in my head at the moment, and my second account– home to one level 60 resto druid and one level 12 hunter– is still active for another couple of weeks if I need a fix, so! No worries.
I am seriously considering starting a second blog, however, specifically for non-WoW-related stuff, so in case the hiatus turns out longer than planned I will still have somewhere to jabber at. (I know I’ve pimped my Livejournal before in the past but frankly I don’t think LJ works very well as a public blogging medium– it’s more of a social networking thing– so I’d rather just make a subdomain here and start fresh. I’ll letcha know when I’ve got that set up.)
Wow, so, that blog post didn’t stay on topic, now did it…?
Oh No. It seems like we may be losing another classy WoW blogger *sad face*
@ Bigguss – Fortunately, I certainly don’t plan on quitting WoW or blogging anytime soon…! =P
…bah.
I wonder when that happened. Was it a recent Hawk Glyph change, or has it just always been that way?
Interesting. Regarding GotH increasing DPS compared to GoBW, just off the top of my head, that sounds like it might be a result of reaching a certain % of Armor Penetration, which doesn’t scale down to your pet like some other stats, and autoshot being one of the places it’s most noticeable.
Also, best wishes for all things in your personal life. 🙂
@ Tchann – I am not sure, though I sort of suspect it happened with that one Bestial Wrath change a couple patches back that nearly cut its uptime in half.
@ Eidtalheg – Possible! I’m not sure. Autoshot has always been a big chunk of a BM hunter’s damage, thanks to Serpent’s Swiftness.
And thanks ^_^
The turnover point where bestial wrath is less than glyph of the hawk might be based on your gear- the bigger the slice of DPS done by your hunter, the more hawk will do. Gear like weapons are especially important, as only the AP they give you passes to the pet, but none of the crit or raw weapon DPS.
Hmm.. we may share a birthday (Dec 22).
I will likely let my account lapse until Cataclysm is released. My schedule does not allow me to raid on a regular basis and frankly, the novelty of running random heroics for emblems with players who already kill bosses in less than 30 seconds already got old.
One feature I wanted to see included in the LFG tool was to allow players to select the maximum number of players in a party. I ran a few pre-BC and BC dungeons with full groups and frankly, they were way too easy and not fun at all.
And before I forget, I would more than likely read you non-WoW blog if you chose to start one!
@ Hugmenot – Squee! It appears that we are Birthday Buddies.
And to be honest with you, my favorite part of the new LFG is running it on lowbies!
Could it be from the new pet talent? A static 3% damage increase from your pets critting (at least its static for me) would give Hawk an edge, I think.
Maybe?
Heya Pike!
I’m not going to mourn yet..yet. :P. As others pointed out it just seems that your personal contribution eclipsed your pet’s. It would be interesting to see when that happened.
Now this hiatus thing. Let’s call it a vacation. Yeah, that’s it a vacation. 😛
I’m raiding as the spec that does the lowest theoretical DPS of all of them and I’m not even using an optimal pet. When you’re already missing out on a thousand-ish DPS, by choice, 100 DPS doesn’t seem like a huge deal anymore, ya know?
On the other hand I’m gripped with the desire to do as much DPS as possible as a Beast Master, to make up for all the inherent shortcomings, but to be fair if we really need the DPS I’ll just switch to Marksmanship anyway. (Not like I do much more DPS as a Marksman than I do as a Beast Master, but ya know.)
lol
so you lose 1k dps by being bm, but you dont do that much more dps as the other spec? so are you saying 1k is exaggeration or is 1k just not that much?
@ Hesperus – I’m saying I suck at Marksmanship, and if I was actually good at it then I’d be doing considerably more DPS. =P
Thanks for the info scoop! I’ll have to test run the changes on the spreadsheet and see what happens!
And I hope the “issues” work themselves out in a positive way!
PS. Happy early birthday and Merry Early Christmas!
Thanks for giving us all a holiday scare.
Hope things work out well on the home front =)
I hope that the maybe-family-crisis works out and everyone is ok in the end. Good luck with that, Pike!
Props to you for playing what you like and to you-know-where with the min-maxers. I like all the specs, and while I do my Instancing with a Marks spec, I love using Beast Mastery for my soloing.
I can’t deny the fun in going and soloing some of the BC Heroics. 😉
And I’m glad that you won’t be going anywhere, Pike; especially now that I’m brave enough to start leaving comments!
Honestly, the ‘theoretical’ increase here would not be worth it for me in real fights, I don’t think: The biggest thing that I get out of BM is “Burst”: having BW down to 1.17 minutes means it’s up for pretty much every mistress of pain, new wave of adds, etc. Losing the glyph would mean that I couldn’t use the damage when I needed it, and the raid would suffer as a whole, I think. Combine that with the benefit of an extra trinket-like effect, and you’d be giving up a fair amount for a relatively minor DPS increase.
(For the record, on my character, it’s only a 33DPS increase to grab hawk over Bestial Wrath; I’m in mostly 232/245s except for my trinkets. Switching to a Mjolnir Runestone for my trinket doesn’t catch me up to your difference either, but the buff is slightly larger; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the ArP comment above is explaining some of it. Feel free to compare to Tetron on US-Malygos (with Canus as a pet), if anyone cares.)
With the duration nerf + static 10% buff on Bestial Wrath and the new tier of hunter gear having ArP galore, I can see how the BM hunter’s dps has shifted from the beast to his own auto shot.
Still I’d recommend using Kill Shot in place of the Serpent Sting glyph. The only time where these numbers even matter is in a 25 man raid (The mana issue with BM makes it hopeless in 10s unless you somehow have 3 paladins in the raid). In this case, you should have another hunter to be your serpent sting bitch!
The Steady Shot glyph works on anyone’s sting, remember?
Nnnnnooooooo. I refuse to give up my glyph. I’m gonna be BM forever.
Beastial Wrath!! NOOOOOOOO!!!
Is it not bad enough that we BMs do a lot less damage than the other hunter specs? Do we now have to find out that our signature move really isn’t powerful anymore??
When testing glyphs out on my spreadsheet, I found that my DPS change when getting rid of glyph of bestial wrath was only about 40 DPS, but I think that would turn out not to be true in-game. Why? Well, you do have to remember that the spreadsheet doesn’t wait for Bestial Wrath to come out of cooldown before is uses Kill Command (BMs should always have these two macro’d to eachother). This does provide a DPS boost, and glyphing so that the two cooldowns are quite close to eachother may actually be better choice than the Serpant/Steady/Hawk combo.
Hmm… Well, I’m off to the dummies to go test this out, I’ll tell you what I find 🙂
I’m having trouble wrapping my head around that one, that Glyph of the Hawk is a DPS increase over Bestial Wrath, especially for an already Hastey (via talents) spec.
So, in trying to wrap my noggin around this, I recalled reading in a few places that The Spreadsheet tends to over-value Haste, and that may be why you are seeing those results.
Otherwise, I cannot see why that Glyph would rate higher than a shorter CD on your biggest hitting spec advantage. The Spreadsheet (Holy though it may be) is only one data point and should not be considered as the be all and and all.
No worries about the randomness of your blog entry, makes me feel better about my blog entries, and it has to make Brigwyn feel better about the many squirrels he chases every week.
As for your Price of Belair life changing event, even if you don’t die we hope that you make it through it in one piece. You’re not going on a mission soon or anything? I mean that would be okay of course if you wanted to do that and we’d sit here waiting patiently for you for 1 1/2 years (for your blog to return of course). Ha! Here I am speculating about your life. I’ll stop ;). Just don’t leave the WoW world permanently. We’d miss you.
@Pike I agree, about the LFG thing for lowbies! My hunter (which you are not allowed to tell other people in the guild about) is having a great time actually being able to run instances at her level.
Speaking of hunter, I have decided that explosive trap + disengage is an awesome combination at this level.
And you’re not allowed to leave WoW. You’re going to be with us when we take Arthas on, whether you like it or not.
I wish “the spreadsheet” worked for characters below level 80 🙁
As for your life, just live it, OK? Ain’t none of our business anyways…
I’m guessing the change happened when they changed Bestial Wrath from 18 seconds to 10 seconds, and that no one had really checked/noticed since then, as most serious raiding hunters that would keep up with that sort of thing aren’t playing BM right now.
um don´t know if someone mentioned it already
but serpent sting and steady shot glyph are worse than the beastial wrath glyph
you should use kill shot glyph as the #1 for all speccs, and as an bm beastial wrath + hawk glyph
@ Seryth – I shouldn’t, according to the spreadsheet! =O I’m sure it is different for different people, though, depending on things like gear *nods*
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