If i were to look purely on DPS output, then all pets deal the same damage, no matter if they are spirit beasts or not. The only thing that matter is the utility the pets bring:
Spirit Beasts bring Spirit Shock (removes magic and enrage effect) and Spirit Mend (a personal heal) and they are a Tenacity Pet, meaning they also bring 2 more defensive skills.
Ferocity Pet gives you 10% leach and a 6 min cooldown ability called Primal Rage (bloodlust abilty).
They way i see it, Spirit Beasts is more of a defensive pet rather then aggressive pet and that makes me use a Ferocity pet for better DPS output, even if it is on a 6 min CD.
It depends on what you want from your pet in that situation.
The reason people say spirit beast is precisly because you get defensive cooldown and the heal (was very op at the start of the expansion) and they have the dispel.
Ferocity pets does have the bloodlust (remember it is a 10min cooldown as you get a debuff) Leech is nice but it is not ticking damage that will kill you as the hunter it is burst damage that is why the heal from spirit mend is quite good. And there are pets in ferocity that does have the magic and enrage remover.
When they made the classifications Ferocity Tenacity and Cunning it went like this Ferocity was the dps pets Tenacity was the tank pets and cunning was the utility pets. However now they do the same damage and it only matter what you want from the pet, if you want BL a ferocity pet is going to be better then a tenacity pet.
Oh and i should mention Leech works differently on the pets so Ferocity is very good for soloing things as you will need to use less if any mend pets.
From purely a DPS perspective, a few fights have pet movement in which case a cunning pet is a slight DPS increase from ever so slightly less downtime.
Imagine two bosses and and adds and your main target is the boss but youāre going to nuke an add with another 1-2 people sending your pet to that target a cross a room for 5seconds to run back for another 5 seconds is a net dps loss than staying on one target (the boss)
Ofcourse there are momentscwhen macros are handy but Not attack target macros except on an opener. Manually controlling your pet is a dps increase.
Try it out youāll be surprised this comes from method, limit and pieces who all have extreamly good hunters in the rosters not some idea I made up
Pet macro is supposed to cause more bites etc which means more dmg.
Pet running between targets is obviously a dps loss but if the fight requires it you donāt really have a choiceā¦ You cannot ānukeā adds without pet, not as BM anyway.
This is a VERY niche situation in which the vast majority of cases will not matter for 99% of the population. There is not a single fight this tier (Or this expansion from memory) where this has been a DPS loss. If something has to die at ranged, then you WANT to send your pet on it because itās clearly important, otherwise if itās not important enough you donāt switch at all obviously.
For a casual player, the DPS lost from having a pet lag behind and not switch targets quickly will far outweight the DPS loss from a hypothetical scenario in which an add across the room lasts 5 seconds.
On this case you are wrong Jerby if you lose 5-10 seconds often on a boss fight having it macroed is not worth it.
The REASOn why you want to macro it has to do with that pets are bugged and overcap focus if you do not macro it this makes them use there pet attack ability more often.
The pet dps loss for having it not macroed is what is very tiny amount of damage.
Ctrl+1 is the default command to send your pet to attack.
A boss fight in this expansion on mythic where macroing it was a dps loss is Orgozoa in The Eternal Palace.
For a casual player it does not matter if you have it macroed or not.
There is not a single fight this entire tier (or this expansion) where there has been a target that 1. You have to switch to and 2. Thatās not important enough that you donāt pet switch.
Either you have to kill the target and you pet switch, or it doesnāt matter much and you donāt switch.
Iām not advocating for the use of always macring your pets because clearly for absolute optimal play you manually move. But to suggest this to an average player is just silly. The DPS loss from this hypothetical scenario is almost nothing compared to the loss from your pet lagging behind and not instantly switching for beast cleave and the like.
No? If you hard switched to adds on Orgozoa mythic you were hard trolling your group.
Frenzy AND Kill command charges your pet at the target anyway, so in what situation would you want to DPS a target, without your pet, without using frenzy and kill command? Itās pretty much never.
You did not hard switch you had the pet in the right position to cleave on the adds with beast cleave while you and the pet focused boss.
You can claim it is trolling but those adds had to die and with so many hunters we had to deal damage to them.
And if you use the command called Move To and you have it at the right spot you can use all those abilities freely and still cleave adds if the tank placed mobs at the right place.
Here you are just plain and simply wrong about what you are saying.
And yet you advocate using macros something that the average player do not do much off at all.
The dps loss from not macroing and just having your pet on Assist is not a big deal what so ever.
Remember Beast cleave has a range component to it (from memory 10yard aoe around pet) your kill command has an inbuilt 50yard charge your Frenzy has a charge (from memory 30yard)
I see the problem here you use this very specific situation as basis i am using the general situation of pet movement and pet changing targets.
If you lose 5-10 seconds of your pet running around not doing damage example of a situation where the pet can run and the thing dies right when pet get there is orb on Raden. (at least in heroic) and then the pet needs to run all the way back to boss that is a massive dps loss of course if you know the people will kill it and you are not a team player you can stay boss but as we all know when enough people do not do mechanics wipes happen.
Maybe you are completely misunderstanding what iām saying. Iām saying that vast majority of players should macro /petattack into their abilities (Alongside claw/smack/bite). Just because you do this, does not mean you cannot manually move your pet. Whether you have attack macroed into abilities or not made ZERO difference on orgozoa, because in both instances you either tanked adds in range of pets, or moved pets to the correct back-leg. Neither of these cause any problems with /petattack like I said.
Iām not wrong, you are just talking about something entirely different. A new/average player should absolutely macro /petattack into abilities, particularly multi shot so the pet instances moves to an AoE pack if you multi shot it.
In AoE situations it absolutely can be. If you want to max damage you want your pet to be in position ready to AoE the absolute moment you want to cleave.
There is no difference here? The āoptimalā play for this is to switch to raden orbs when they are in range of pet charge, and therefore you have zero downtime.
If you want to instantly hit the orb using āmove toā before they spawn then great. But thatās just moving the DPS loss/downtime from during the orb spawn to just before the orb spawns.
No new/average player is ever going to use manual move pet correctly. Macroing /petattack will be absolutely fine in 99.99999% of situations.
Itās more from the lag of the pet switching. And yeah sure it wonāt be a huge gain, but there is basically no reason not to just put /petattack on your abilities, hardly complicated. But either way itās almost negligible so bit of a pointless convo.
