Pimp my Build

[NiteFox]

Cookie-cutters never were my thing. Ask anyone who has played alongside my (completely useless) swordsmanship/beast mastery W/R in Guild Wars. I never looked at any builds in deciding my hunter, and simply assigned point on what I thought would be necessary for the near-future. Ideally, I was trying to get a good balance between MM and BM (Though I leaned heavily towards BM until about 35, it was worth it for Intimidation).

Current build - 21-12-0 at 42. About the biggest regrets I have is the points in Improved Mend Pet (Since I never revive in-combat, but it was a better choice for a 10-point investment than either IAotM and IEotB) and possibly Endurance Training.

By a simple process of conversion, coupled with "Ooh, shiny icons" - *Click*, I've kludged together this build. Any thoughts?

Proposed build - 22-11-0 at 42. Focused Fire looks an absolute killer for a 10-point talent, though I may be imagining that Thick Hide has been nerfed (From a flat +30% to a +10% and a +20% "contribution", whatever the hell that means). Intimidation is an absolute must - If I crit my opening Aimed Shot and the following Auto Shot, that's aggro wiped from my pet almost completely. Aimed Shot is another must, since I've gotten used to using it as an opener since acquiring it. Otherwise, 22-11-0 is by no means set in stone. Top of the MM tree is open to change too. I like ICS when it triggers, but full Efficiency or IHM could be better substitutes.

Point is, I'm not really sure where to go from here. There's a lot of talents that seem like utter junk (Animal Handler for one, is a 8% increase in pet tohit worth 27 points?) and there's seemingly nothing in the Survival tree that interests me in the least (Save for maybe Hawk Eye, which used to and still makes more sense to be a MM skill).

Really, it's just a pity I can't get 41-41-0. Couple of nice high-end skills there.

So, any suggestions, fellow lurkers? <strike>Oh, and all hail TinyURL.</strike>

Edit: Thanks, Gnollguy. In rebuilding the whole damn build I also noticed a weird bug with the talent calculator. The 20-13-0 build was actually impossible to achieve, since it involved putting points in Unleashed Fury and Ferocity to get Intimidation, then remove a certain amount of points from UF&F. Weird.

[Kevin]

The links all go to the template not to any builds. Just an FYI.

[vor_lord]

Your current build link works, the other ones are not assigned.

[NiteFox]

Links fixed. Problem correctly identified as the URL not updating automatically when you assign talent points.

Actually, I'm probably silly in believing that they would automatically update. Tsk.

[Kevin]

By a simple process of conversion, coupled with "Ooh, shiny icons" - *Click*, I've kludged together this build. Any thoughts?

Proposed build - 22-11-0 at 42.

OK. A few notes. From doing some tests on the PTR I got these numbers for 'pet scaling'

The pet gets
27.5% of your resists.
22.5% of your ranged AP
45% of your armor

and I can't find my notes for how much of your health, but I think it was around 25%.


So the thick hide talent means the pet gets 55% of your armor value +20% more of it's base armor. I had like 3300 armor and the pet had like 4600 armor before the patch changes. So without talents the pet had like 6100 armor with the changes just from scaling. With the thick hide talent the pet had like 7300 armor (4600 * 1.2) + (3300 * .55) = 7335. So that talent may or may not have been nerfed. If it was still the 30% it would have been (4600 * 1.3) + (3300 * .45) = 7465. At some point (like 3900 armor for that 4600 armor base pet) the new method means the pet has more armor. Lower base armor pets get more benefit from the talent than they did, higher base armor pets get less.

One other thing this pet scaling means is that marks hunters pets get buffed nicely as well, not as buff are beast hunters but they are much more buff than survival hunters. All the builds I tested on the PTR, the marks hunter had by far the highest self buffed attack power, which means that with the pet getting AP from you got a good buff. Trueshot aura served a bit of double duty as well, the pet is affected by it so they get 100 AP that way. The hunter is also affected by it and since the hunters AP went up, the amount of AP the pet gets from the hunter goes up too. So the pet didn't just get 100 AP from it, they got 122.5 AP from TSA. This also mean that since the pet was hitting a lot harder than it had been before it held aggro better.

In fact the full marks build pet, when I had the go for the throat talent, held aggro better than my pet did when I was full beast spec. Well not better but with me having to do less. I could use intimidation or beastial wrath to help make sure the pet held. But I had to do more to make sure the pet kept aggro. With the marks build I didn't. Now some of that with the beast hunter is because the beast hunter was shooting so much faster than my marks build and because the marks build, making things more "sensative" to my damage. I also had improved mark and the beast build didn't so marks pet got 100 more AP on the target with the beast build I didn't have that talent so if I put marks up I increased the gap between the pet even more.

Go for the throat, in my gear (I had like a 28% crit rate and 1300 self buffed AP on the test realm as a marks build) nearly allowed my cat pet to autocast claw, bite, growl, and dash and not really ever be out of focus, almost but not quite. It also insured that the pet always had enough focus to growl after I crit, which is when you really want to make sure the pet can growl. For a solo hunter, this talent is great, it not only helps make sure that the pet holds aggro it can also be a big damage booster for the pet and before you can get L61 so that you can have it and the beast within, it might actually produce more damage, for solo and small group play, than the beast within does, because it can mean that much more pet DPS.


As to animal handler. Again this all depends on how much you have the pet out. Against an even level mob your pet will have a 5% miss rate. That miss rate goes up as the mob level increases above the pet. So 4% chance to hit is a significant damage increase for the pet, it also means the pet has better aggro since it does more damage. That being said you have to compare it to frenzy, which is a big DPS boost and ferocious inspiration which not only increases the pet damage but your damage. It's not a junk talent but it matters for what you are using the pet for. Beastial discipline is also a talent that you may want to look at because 100% faster focus regen is pretty significant. It worked about the same as go for the throat did when I was marks spec'd. Focus chewers like claw could suddenly be auto cast when before it was just a manual cast now and then. But it all depends on how you use the pet.


In the marks tree, aimed shot is just an opener now. Since it resets the shot timer and takes 3.5 seconds to cast instead of 3, it's just an opener you can't weave it into shot cycles anymore. It's still not bad and it adds a good amount of DPS, and with pet scaling the pet can still hold against it even when you send the pet in and start the aimed at the same time. But it's not as good as it was before. Arcane shot has been improved as well. Beast spec vs the blue dragons in the winterspring cave (where I did most of my testing) I was getting 750 arcane shot crits because of the changes to arcane shot. Marks spec I was getting 1K arcane crits. My aimed crits were around 2200 for reference. Multi was still critting around 1300 for marks and 900 for beast.

Also note that scorpid sting no longer lowers str and agi, but it increases the targets miss rate by 5%, I find this more valuable for survivability of the pet.

Scatter shot can help replace intimidation for soloing as well, keep that in mind. If you pull aggro, as long as the pet is on defensive scatter can be used to slow the mobs approach to let the pet get another growl in, or just buy you time to FD. It doesn't work the same but scatter shot can fill some of the role of intimidation did if you decide you want to take the full marks plunge.

The rest of the marks tree is pretty self explanatory.

But really the point I wanted to make is that in the patch a marks pet is now somewhat similar to what a beast masters pet was before the patch because of the pet scaling. They have as much life and armor as the beast pets used to have and they do closer to the same DPS. My marks wolf was doing ~62 DPS to the blue dragons. On live realms when I was beast spec, that same wolf was only doing around 85 DPS (hard to remember since I haven't been beast for awhile on live). It was only doing about 45 DPS on live realms when I was marks and survival spec. I can't find the data for what the beast pet was doing on test but I want to say it was over 100.


I also agree that of the 3 specs I tried on the PTR that survival was by the worst for damage, even trying to work the traps in more. And that is both for just the hunter DPS and for the hunter + pet DPS. The survival pet was the weakest and the survival hunter was the weakest in solo play. However the survival hunter on test was still doing more DPS than any spec I could have been on live could do. So all hunters got buffed it seems but marks and beast got buffed way more. Right now on live in my gear a survival spec does more damage than a marks spec for me, by just a small margin. I know because I've tested and run them both in raids a fair bit. But it's close enough to call it a toss up, and stayed survival simply because it worked better for me in the PvP push I did with the hunter and I didn't figure it was worth the gold to change back when it was basically the same. Both survival and marks were better than beast DPS for group, raid, or solo. But the changes to how agi works for hunters and the changes to gearing for hunters (stripping agi off many pieces and replacing it with AP) meant that survival builds lost more relative to other builds, if you don't change up the gearing since survival builds used to get more from agi.


I know this was long and general but I hope it helps you make some choices.

[NiteFox]

In the marks tree, aimed shot is just an opener now.

Heh, not an issue. I always used it as an opener, and haven't gotten used to weaving it into shot cycles (FYI, my current gun is this 2.50 speed peashooter, lowered with a ammo pouch. With Quick Shots and Rapid Fire, I can squeeze it down to a 1.23 speed, but that's a different story...)

Maybe I'll run my build. I've never paid to scratch my talents, so a full respec is still cheap for me later down the line. Thanks for the advice, it's much appreciated.

[Kevin]

Heh, not an issue. I always used it as an opener, and haven't gotten used to weaving it into shot cycles (FYI, my current gun is this 2.50 speed peashooter, lowered with a ammo pouch. With Quick Shots and Rapid Fire, I can squeeze it down to a 1.23 speed, but that's a different story...)

Maybe I'll run my build. I've never paid to scratch my talents, so a full respec is still cheap for me later down the line. Thanks for the advice, it's much appreciated.

Yeah I didn't see anything that I would call all that bad with your build, but then again things don't have to be optimal for me. They have to fit what I like and want to do. I was raiding as full beast spec and doing as well or better than the full marks and survival hunters in MC, ZG, and AQ20 (the pet could do A LOT in those instance) and still doing lots in 5 mans, including MT while the warrior was an OT DPS because things just worked better that way (yes the pet was the one hold 2 to 3 mobs and the warriors was focusing on one and adding in WW and cleaves for extra damage as needed). I only swapped to full marks because the hunter started to only raid and there were advantages. I then swapped to 21 marks / 30 survival because of PvP pushes and because in MC/BWL gearing Survival is as good as or better damage than Marks, and survival offered more for the 5 and 10 man stuff that I started to do again (helping newer 60's gear, working on some of the dungeon 2 quest line).

But yeah I don't see much need to tweak the build, the question to answer is where you go after L42. And you won't really do too badly even if you just randomly place points in beast and/or marks. :) And as mentioned respecs are pretty cheap still.