Best hunter pets

[Swiftsage-pyrewood-village]

I know the bird i killed it the first i saw (south darkshore near the semi hidden path to bfd) it then realised my mistake.

It does have pink bits though, was some time ago.

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

Yes, but each pet by itself isn’t that much of a difference. My tallstrider will do 74.3dps or something in your example.
Only the wolf will probably do significant more if you’re in a melee group because it increases dps all around.

Ah my bad, misunderstood you.
A wolf isn’t gonna make a huge difference compared to other pets. Furious howl gives 22.1 dps in longer fights (buffing 5 targets including itself), and a cat will do like 14 dps with its claw plus 10% more autoattack damage, in the end it’s pretty much even.

[Anonymouse-chamber-of-aspects]

Furious howl gives 22.1 dps in longer fights (buffing 5 targets including itself), and a cat will do like 14 dps with its claw plus 10% more autoattack damage, in the end it’s pretty much even.

It’s almost the double but it’s even ? Yeah…

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

It’s almost the double but it’s even ? Yeah…

Missed that part?

plus 10% more autoattack damage

[Anonymouse-chamber-of-aspects]

It’s almost the double but it’s even ? Yeah…

Missed that part?

plus 10% more autoattack damage

Well, 10% of 14 is 1.4… so the pet is doing 15.4 dps ?

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

Well, 10% of 14 is 1.4… so the pet is doing 15.4 dps ?

Jesus mate… read that again. 14 is the dps of claw alone. There’s also the autoattack damage which in case of a cat is 10% higher than that of a wolf.

[Bones-hydraxian-waterlords]

Let’s just say that in the end you do 340 dps with the perfect pet instead of 330dps. I personally think it’s neglectible and I’d prefer aesthetics in this case.

[Anonymouse-chamber-of-aspects]

Well, 10% of 14 is 1.4… so the pet is doing 15.4 dps ?

Jesus mate… read that again. 14 is the dps of claw alone. There’s also the autoattack damage which in case of a cat is 10% higher than that of a wolf.

It wasn’t very clear in your post sorry.

Furious howl gives 22.1 dps in longer fights (buffing 5 targets including itself)

This doesn’t take the damage bonus of all recipients into account.

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

It wasn’t very clear in your post sorry.

Well, I’m sorry about that then.

This doesn’t take the damage bonus of all recipients into account.

There’s no damage bonus to take into account though, furious howl just adds a flat damage bonus that doesn’t scale with anything, so a crit would recieve the same bonus as a regular hit.

[Greybushy-bloodfang]

So going by a standard of 100 dps (because why make it complicated) being 1.0 pet autoattack dmg:
-A wolf will do 100 + bite + 22.1 in longer fights if it buffs 5 people
-A cat will do 110 + 14 from claw

So am I missing something, or is bite just terrible dps?

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

So am I missing something, or is bite just terrible dps?

A wolf will get focus-starved from furious howl alone, you can’t add any bite damage on top of that.

[Retherz-mograine]

And a cat can do like 1.5 claws per Bite

[Mílkme-zandalar-tribe]

What is the best pet

[Anonymouse-chamber-of-aspects]

Furious Howl 4 gives a 45 to 57 damage bonus every 10s.
That’s on average 51 damage every 10s, which is 5.1dps per recipient.
For 5 recipients, that’s a 25.5 dps bonus.
That is on top of the damage of the wolf.

And the cat won’t use claw on CD forever, it will be focus starved, so claw will do way less damage than that.

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

Furious Howl 4 gives a 45 to 57 damage bonus every 10s.
That’s on average 51 damage every 10s, which is 5.1dps per recipient.
For 5 recipients, that’s a 25.5 dps bonus.
That is on top of the damage of the wolf.

And the cat won’t use claw on CD forever, it will be focus starved, so claw will do way less damage than that.

That’s not how I calculated the pet skills’ dps.
Here’s my little sheet: https://i.imgur.com/rD9yGHK.png
So what I did was I calculated each ability’s damage/focus and then multiplied it by 5.2 which is pets focus regeneration rate per second.
So the dps shown in this table is how much dps it’d do if you could dump all the focus into this ability.
Furious howl ends up with 22.1 instead of 25.5 because of the focus starvation which comes quite quickly. I realize it’s still not the most accurate assessment, but its better than other ways I think.
So if you use bite as a wolf you’ll get starved even faster and lose dps on any fight longer than like 20 seconds or something.
Bite has a better dmg/focus than claw, but obviously it can’t use up all the focus, so it has to be combined with claw if you even decide to use it.
In my table claw has 10.6 dps, but it doesn’t take critical hits into consideration, so I just took the number from my latest raid which was 14.4.

So in the end, lets take a real example.
My cat did: 67.3 autoattack dps on bosses (I don’t have the best pet management skills I’ll admit) and 14.4 damage from Claw, with the total of 81.7.
Lets imagine I had a wolf instead, it’d do 67.3/1.1 = 61.2 autoattack dps + estimated 22.1 raid dps from furious howl, with the total of 83.3.
The difference really doesn’t seem significant to me, but to your point a wolf could be adding raid dps while staying away instead of dying like my cat did in quite a few cases, so that’s something to consider.
But then again, with a better pet management (not losing the Ony buff at Geddon etc) a cat could still be able to catch up maybe.

[Greybushy-bloodfang]

But you’re assuming focus starvation on Bite and ignoring it on Claw.

At a regen rate of 5 focus per second, it’ll take 5 seconds for Claw to be ready once the initial 4 have been used. That gives Claw an effective CD of 5 secs in a long fight.
With a 10 sec CD on both Bite and Furious Howl, the initial attack will leave your pet with 5 focus, and regen up to 55 focus when the CD’s are up, which allows for a second Bite and 20 focus left, which means 8 more seconds until you have enough Focus for the second FH. So Bite + FH will leave your pet alternating between the two, but with Bite alone pet won’t drop below 65 Focus.

So that’s Claw doing 35-49 dmg every 5 secs (or about 8.4 dps) base
And Bite doing 81-99 dmg every 10 secs (or about 9 dps) base
Bite + FH… I cba to work out.

With a BM/MM specc, Claw will probably come out on top due to crits, but (without bothering to do the math) Bite would seem better for MM/SV speccs, though the difference seems marginal.

Now work out Lightning Breath and LB + Bite!

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

But you’re assuming focus starvation on Bite and ignoring it on Claw.

Nope, I’m taking starvation into account on all skills. Without starvation Claw would do 51 damage every gcd which is 34 dps.
And Claw’s dps of 14.4 is just straight from my raid log, so it’s a real number.

With a 10 sec CD on both Bite and Furious Howl, the initial attack will leave your pet with 5 focus, and regen up to 55 focus when the CD’s are up, which allows for a second Bite and 20 focus left, which means 8 more seconds until you have enough Focus for the second FH. So Bite + FH will leave your pet alternating between the two, but with Bite alone pet won’t drop below 65 Focus.

With Bite and Howl both active a pet would get to 5 focus in two globals, therefore neither of those abilities will be cast on cd anymore because of starvation, so they’ll both do less dps.
Even if you use Howl alone, you’ll starve eventually. However, seems like I overestimated how soon it happens, I just did a test and it takes 60 seconds of using Howl on cd before you can’t cast it on time anymore. So if we know it does 25.5 dps without starvation and 22.1 when starved, its fair to say that the actual dps would be somewhere inbetween.

Figuring out exactly how much dps a Wolf would do with both Bite and Howl activated seems too difficult for me right now.
First of all, you’d want to stop using bite once you’re starved, because Howl has a better dps/focus ratio. Which means you only use Bite once at the beginning of the fight and then you just use Howl. So I would say, approximately, Bite+Howl dps equals 22.1 plus the damage of the initial bite divided by however long the fight takes.

One more thing to consider is that the Howl dps doesn’t scale with anything, while autoattack damage scales with buffs.

Lightning Breath would be great once ZG comes out, but its hard to measure since it can be used at 20y range, so it’ll make a better use of pet’s focus than melee abilities, and you can also just use it from a distance when your pet is low on hp.

[Greybushy-bloodfang]

Nope, I’m taking starvation into account on all skills. Without starvation Claw would do 51 damage every gcd which is 34 dps.
And Claw’s dps of 14.4 is just straight from my raid log, so it’s a real number.

Derp! I was looking at Claw rank 7.
At rank 8, it would be about 10.2 base dps after the initial 4, and crit (especially if you have 5/5 Ferocity) should boost that a bit, so 14.4 seems about right.
Unless Cat’s +10% dmg applies to Claw and Bite too, which I honestly don’t know.

With Bite and Howl both active a pet would get to 5 focus in two globals, therefore neither of those abilities will be cast on cd anymore because of starvation, so they’ll both do less dps.

But you’ll also regen 50 focus (assuming 5 per sec) by the time the first of them is off CD, so after you get the second Bite (at around the 12 second mark), you’ll regen enough for a FH before Bite is off CD, and at that point they’ll be on different timers and you’ll start doing a rotation of 2 Bites then 1 FH.

So a roughly 1min fight (ignoring travel time to target and Focus regen during GCD, and rounding out decimals) would be something like:
0s: FH (40 Focus left)
2s: Bite (5 Focus left)
2s-12s: 50 Focus regen
12s: Bite (20 Focus left)
12s-20s: 40 Focus regen
20s: FH (0 Focus)
20s-27s: 35 Focus regen
27s: Bite (0 Focus)
27s-37s: 50 Focus regen
37s: Bite (15 Focus left)
37s-46s: 45 Focus regen
46s: FH (0 Focus)
46s-53s: 35 Focus regen
53s: Bite (0 Focus)
53s-63s: 50 Focus regen
63s: Bite (15 Focus left)

And the rotation will just continue steady on from there.
So (unless I’m forgetting something) that’s about 3 FH and 6 Bites every minute.
Using your numbers:
FH: 255dmg x 3 = 765 / 60s = 12.7dps
Bite: 90dmg x 6 = 540 / 60s = 9 dps
So about 22dps for FH+Bite (pretty much your guesstimate for just using Bite once!)

Feel free to check and correct those numbers, because I tend to overlook and forget things when it comes to math, especially when I’ve been up for a while.

Btw, are you assuming a Wolf for Bite? Because if Cat’s extra dmg bonus applies to abilities and not just autoattacks, Bite still seems better for a MM/SV specc

[Oakenlix-golemagg]

So (unless I’m forgetting something) that’s about 3 FH and 6 Bites every minute.

A bit less, because you don’t get the free 100 focus every minute like at the start of the fight.
But yeah, your estimation seems correct in general, but if the fight takes 1 minute you shouldn’t be using Bite at all. You could do 6 Howls in that time instead = 25.5 dps, after that the starvation kicks in and it gets to 22.1 dps.

Btw, are you assuming a Wolf for Bite? Because if Cat’s extra dmg bonus applies to abilities and not just autoattacks, Bite still seems better for a MM/SV specc

I’m not counting any dmg modifiers in that table, but yeah, they should affect Claw’s and Bite’s damage, that’s why ideally you’d want your cat to have both, but I just cba spending learning points on it, I’d rather get more fire resistance or something.

[Bloodcall-shazzrah]

For pve cat is the best dps by far. Wolf terrible despite what most people believe.

For pvp there are more options. Broken tooth/zg bats are good with 1 sec attack speed vs casters. Total annoyance.

Boar is a fair option for melles trying to close range but otherwise nothing special.

Wind serpents can be good for some cases in pvp due to their ranged attack. For example vs a mage your pet will be in nova slow most of the time and the mage trying to get close to you. In that case the serpent will at least do SOME dmg.