Tier 0.5

[Kevin]

We pull her about to the cart, sounds like you pulled her further.  Must have been the Hunter DPS :P

T0.5 are not extraordinary until considering the 6/8 set bonus.  Most sets have a pretty significant DPS booster on the 6/8 bonus that makes it worthwhile to use 6/8 T0.5 and 2/8 random other pieces.  For the sets I've looked at extensively (warrior DPS set and warlock) there are no better blues for the optimum 6/8 config and it takes multiple pieces of (attainable) purple gear replacing T0.5 stuff before you get overall improvement.  But, of course, it takes the whole 8 pieces before you can get the optimum 6/8.
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Right I think (I have not looked really closely) if I could use the gloves, chest, legs, bracers, hat, and belt with the gear I have now it would be better, but that would require the entire upgrade chain and 4 of the pieces woud then be purples. The bracers compared to my curent gear and the boots would individual piece downgrades, only better because of the set bonus. I'm currently using the gloves, bracers and belt. Bracers only because they have an enchant and the others I got don't and I don't have any GEE's sitting around to get it enchanted.

Heck I acutally took off two pieces of beastmaster today after getting the new boots I had enchanted. That lost me the 4 piece bonuse (which is the 6 piece bonus for the upgrade) of 40 AP. But the net result was only -22 AP, -157 HP, +1.17% crit and +15 mana. Since I had upgraded my boots and right now I'm using 1050 RAP with Aspect of the Hawk up as my baseline to work my health and mana around when looking at balancing the gear and my health was still over 3400 unbuffed I think I've upped my damage. That was what really got me thinking that the other upgrades might not be worth the time. When a couple of the pieces are stat downgrades over what I have (bracers and boots for example) the initial thought was that the gold outlay for some of the stuff I might have to purchase start to make me wonder.

I admit as a hunter it's hard to judge the value of the 2% crit on the pet, 3% more damage for the pet, 10% armor for the pet and 3% more damage for the pet that I would get. These stats in some fights are completely wasted though as the pet just won't be able to even add a little damage. I know all of those would help me solo grind the elite dragons better and the times when I have to use my pet to MT an instance (much rarer these days) it will help too. And while I can control my pet well enough to make it actually be helpful in the ZG and AQ raids without taking mana from the healers, which can be witnessed by me+pet leading the last 3 Keepers raids in total damage done over AoE mages, and the marks hunters + pet who have better gear than I do as well. Pet damage is a fixed quantity since with the expection of those 4 beast master pieces it doesn't scale with gear. The hunters damage does scale with gear more and since my damage is greater than the pets right now it helps more to up my damage even more, in most case. This is why you see very very few beastmaster raid hunters. Last ZG run me+pet was 210 DPS. I was 145 of that, pet was 65. I've already got the gloves that give the 2% more crit, so I can get it 3% more damage so I could kick the pet up to 67 DPS or so with that. I guess the 10% more armor (500-700 more raid buffed) amd the 3% life (100-150) might allow me to keep the pet in combat a few seconds longer so that the damage would go up a little bit more. But really my pet is less and less useful the bigger the instance gets. In ZG I tank the spider spawns on Mar'li. I cna keep a raptor or bat from damaging an AoE mage, I can keep a zerker from moving around after the knockback (since the wrathed pet won't move and if I leave growl on will usually be 2nd or 3rd on the aggro list) and I can add a little bit of DPS on the focus fire targets and on some of the bosses (including Mandokir even with his whirlwinds). I know in MC the pets will be even less useful for even damage additions. So the stats on the beastmaster set that buff the pet become wasted stats in the later stages of the game even for a hunter who uses his pet a lot.