POLL: Best Leveling Contest Class

[Kevin]

My first thought, too, but a fast hunter (and a rogue) needs a good weapon, doesn't he?
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That's why the hunter specs beast master. L50 beast master pet can push 70 DPS. The hunter, even with a poorer weapon, will still add more than that, so you can safely grind with autoshoot only if you want at 140+ DPS with quest rewards and crappy stuff you find with no down time and pretty much complete safety along with the ability to do elite quests if the reward is worth it. Other classes can be doing more DPS by then (L32 rogues can push 80-90 sustained DPS without heavy twinking) but they generally come with more downtime too that gets you in the end. And the rogue is helped in the lower levels by the fact that evis is flat damage this does make up some for subpar weapons. Now the rogue that gets lucky and finds a good weapon will do better but if you are limited by respawn rate on killing speed as it is, who cares? :)


As a note, my combined pet and hunter damage, even though I'm a beast master will still often top the damage charts against similar geared players (blues and greens) in instances, even on AoE heavy UBRS runs I can still keep up, if I push it hard and drink during some of the pulls and such. The Marks and survival hunters don't really start to pull away on the damage the hunter himself does until they get the better gearing because the talents are multiplicative and 5% or 100 base DPS isn't quite the gap as 5% of 250 base DPS but the pet stays flat on the damage after the talents are hit. And there are few synergies with higher talents and higher level marks and survival talents that make damage ramp more exponential than multiplicative. The pet ramps up faster in DPS with beast talents vs non beast talents but levels off. The hunter himself ramps more slowly but the ramp gets faster at the end. So generally in lower level given same gearing a beast hunter will out DPS other hunter specs when you factor in the pet. The pet holding better aggro also lets the hunter push himself harder which can help the beast master out too.