First of all, I only got to experience a few months in vanilla “back in the day”, and to put it mildly I wasn’t very good at the game at that time. But over the years, I’ve advanced further and further in the raiding scene, eventually fighting for world top 10 kills on retail so I learned how to do my own research and trying to min/max my character.
So there are a couple of things that I’ve heard from either fellow guild mates, or read online that I wanted to look into myself.
“Tier 1 is better than Tier 2 for hunters, as long as there is an 8/8 Tier 2 hunter in the raid”
Tier1:
- 189 agility
- 4% crit
- 3% hit
- 15% multi-shot and volley damage
Tier2:
- 208 agility
- 5% crit
- 2% hit
- 20% increase to aspect of the hawk (24 more ranged attack power)
- Chance to expose weakness, increasing ranged attack power by 450 against that target
The most common argument people use in favour of Tier 1 is the 15% increase to multi-shot damage. But when looking at logs from my raids, multi-shot does on average about 82 DPS. Add 15% to that and you get 94 DPS, which seems about right when looking at the logs I have when raiding now with 8/8 Tier 1. That’s a 13 thirteen DPS increase, which is not a lot at all, certainly not enough compared to the 19 extra agility, 1% extra crit, 24 more ranged attack power as well as more uptime on Expose Weakness, because it gets pushed off by other debuffs. Just to make sure, I tried to run this in a simulator as well, and tier 2 comes ahead at 747 DPS vs 716 DPS for tier 1 with an 8/8 tier 2 hunter in the raid, even if it’s 0.4% chance off the hit cap (hit cap being 8.6%). How about tranq shot you ask? Either just equip a piece of +hit gear on that specific boss that requires tranq shot, or simply have a backup hunter ready to tranq in case it misses. Note that the chance of tranq shot missing with 8% hit is 0.4%, or 1 in 250.
“Wolf increases the raid DPS more than a cat, due to furious howl”
This one is a little more complicated, but I will try to break it down.
Furious Howl: Party members within 15 yards receive an extra 45 to 57 damage to their next Physical attack. 10 second cooldown.
On average, that is 51 extra damage to their next attack. Since it is within 15 yards, the hunter will not benefit from this, so I will consider that 5 party members will get buffed by it (because the pet is also a party member). 51 damage * 5 party members = 255 damage. Let’s assume that the warriors and rogues in the group have 35% crit chance which equals 344 damage. Divide by 10 seconds to get dps (because it’s on a 10 second cooldown) and it will yield 34.4 dps. I think this is also quite generous because it won’t get automatically cast every 10 seconds on the point, and 35% crit seems a bit much.
Now, looking at the top logs I wrote down around 20 different cat and wolf pet DPS and got an average of 105 DPS for cats and 66 for wolves. So, that means in this situation a cat does 39 DPS more than a wolf, which is more than the 34.4 raid-wise DPS increase the wolf optimally brings with Furious Howl. Keep in mind a wolf only has Bite for focus dump while cats can use claw which is much better, as well as keeping all melees in the group buffed every time is not very realistic.
Sorry for the long post, but I find this pretty interesting and would love to hear feedback or any arguments as to why you think I’m wrong.
TL;DR:
- 8/8 Tier 2 is better than Tier 1 because of better stats and more uptime on Expose Weakness. 15% increase to multi-shot only amounts to approximately 13 DPS
- A cat does more damage alone than the wolf brings to the raid with Furious Howl
. Pets stand to the side of bosses and enemies in general (thats why pets often die to breath and cleave attacks), usually far away from melee camp. I used a wolf for the first 2 or 3 MC ids and it rarely buffed any of the 4 melees in my group. I even made jokes like “Put a mark on my pet so melees can stay near”
Also the uptime on expose weakness is only decent when you have several hunters with full tier 2 set i assume. As the proc chance is something like 1.5 % percent or so.