Thrill of the Hunt Beast Mastery rotation (2 replies to this topic)

Hello, A few weeks ago i read the hunter tutorial and how it claims we should be using Dire beast talent. I changed from thrill to it and gave it a shot. A few things i noticed right off...It's not as fun for me and its extra work having to manually manage energy with the talent every 30 seconds. I'm sure there's plenty of people that do this successfully, but i found it just wasn't for me. My DPS went down, frustration went up, and fun went down. So i decided to go back to thrill spec and try to learn it well. What i came up with increased my DPS by about 20% over what i was doing before.

A priority system based on energy management. Situations change so the system is a bit complicated. once i figured it out, it took me about 2 to 3 days to get proficient at it and now it feels natural for me.

The key to it all is getting as many free shots possible by using abilities to try to proc free arcane shots, and limiting use of Cobra shot to when it's not optimal to do something else.

The priority is from top to bottom of this list:

• Kill Command during Beastial Wrath (get 2 in for each BW)
  
• Kill Shot (2 shots)
  
• Proc'd Arcane shots (3 shots)
  
• Kill command not during beastial wrath
  
• Serpent Sting stays up all the time with cobra shots. Reapply if it falls off.
  
• Glaive Toss
  
• Non-proc'd Arcane shot > 40~50 focus during Beastial Wrath
  
• Non-proc'd Arcane shot > 70 focus
  
• Cobra Shot (never more than twice in a row, unless prepping to do Beastial Wrath by getting to about 100~110 focus, which happens but rarely if I had a bad string of no procs of arcane shot)
  
• Non-proc'd Arcane shot < 40 focus (one shot when low on focus to maybe get a proc then go back to 1 or 2 Cobra shots. Don't use this option if Kill command or Glaive toss are just about off cool down. It's better to do nothing for the 1 second.

Beastial Wrath and Glaive Toss are purposely lower priority than proc'd arcane shots because they are used to try to proc free arcane shots. Using abilities that spend focus when you have proc'd arcane shots is a DPS loss except KC during BW.

I also like to use A Murder of Crows right after the first Kill Command during Beastial Wrath so that it costs 30 focus, instead of 60. So: BW -> KC -> Crows -> Others as above -> KC before BW ends.

Use Rapid Fire when not in Beastial Wrath. I sometimes use it right after BW and sometimes in preparation for BW for fast cobra shots to get my energy up.

Use Stampede on Cool down. How is stampede affected by Heroism/Lust, Crit rating, haste rating, mastery rating, or Rapid fire if at all?

Your thoughts? (please don't post how i shouldn't use this talent. Not interested in trolls.)

Justus, on 13 January 2013 - 11:22 AM, said:

Thank you for your post.

What you wrote, in terms of how to make use of the procs from Thrill of the Hunt looks to be accurate. I agree with almost everything you said, in fact

Regarding Stampede, the pets don't seem to benefit from Bestial Wrath, but they do benefit from things that improve your haste, such as Rapid Fire and Heroism/Bloodlust, meaning that they regenerate their focus faster and get to use their abilities more. They also benefit from your innate stats.

However, I do have to object to one thing, and this does not make me a troll. In your opening paragraphs, you give the indication that by using Thrill of the Hunt properly, you can do more DPS than by using Dire Beast, and you use anecdotal evidence to support this.  I feel I need to correct you here and say that, according to simulation tools, Dire Beast is currently a 7K DPS increase over Thrill of the Hunt, if both are used correctly/to their maximum capacity. This is based on simulations with 10,000 iterations, a much higher number of attempts than you or I could ever reproduce in game. These simulations also take into account raid buffs and debuffs, things which we cannot accurately reproduce on training dummies, try as we may.

So, while Thrill of the Hunt is good, and it should be used as you describe, I cannot agree with the statement that it is better than Dire Beast. This doesn't mean you should use Dire Beast, though, and I thank you again for your contribution.

As BM hunter great part of your DPS came from your pet, delaying bestial wrath and Kill command will likely lower your dps. On fight with lots of movement my pet have done over 50% of my total damage since the pet can always be on the boss (i.e. Spirit kings).

I'm sure you're way more confortable using thrill of the hunt on your rotation because you got used to it, but probably if you get timed your rotation with dire beast it won't be that hard to do