Let Me Rephrase That…

On the whole my blog entries are for everyone. Generic, normal(ish), you get the idea. Today will be different I’m afraid. I apologise to those of you who won’t have the foggiest notion as to what I’m writing about but this is aimed at a very specific group of people, namely those of you who play and raid as Beast Mastery Hunters on World of Warcraft.

We all got hit with the nerf bat, boo hoo etc, let’s not dwell on it. If, like me, you enjoy playing the game and aren’t all about the top spot on the DPS charts then chances are you’ve stuck with Beast Mastery. I take this assumption because in my opinion Beast Mastery is the most fun spec for Hunters (although, I’m sure Nassira will tell me differently…back me up here BRK!). So you’ve stuck to your guns (or bows) and kept Bestial Wrath etc, good for you! But in doing so you’re struggling on the DPS side of things. If you’re not then great, you probably don’t need to read on

I’ve been kicked into writing this post by the amount of hunters I’ve seen with 2 or 3 points in Focused Aim…

“Fantastic! An extra 3% hit? Oh I’m having that!”

Hold onto your horses a second there, beaver! I was also a Focused Aim chap, I found myself missing on bosses and as we know, you could have all the attack power in the world but if you miss it’s useless. With this in mind, Focused Aim is brilliant. Or so I thought…

So, class of BM’09, what is our most precious thing in the whole of WoW?

No, not cake. Well, yes but no, not in this instance. Our pet! That’s what’s most precious to us.

With Focused Aim we could afford to drop our hit rating right down and rely on the extra 3% to boost us back up so we don’t miss. There I was, testing out some new gear on the target dummies and wasn’t missing at all. It was bliss.

Then the voice of realisation hit me when I reviewed Recount.

*SLAP*

“Ouch! What the hell?”

“Hi ‘geebs, um, just thought I’d point something out to you.”

“Okay, but could you not have whispered me or something, what’s with the hit?”

“You mean you already know?”

“Know what?”

“About the hit.”

“You just hit me, of course I know about the hit.”

“No, I mean your hit rating. Focused Aim doesn’t affect your pet’s hit rating.”

“So my precious Enigma doesn’t get that yummy 3%?”

“Absolutely diddly-squat.”

“But…”

“Nope.”

“So, that’s not helping at all, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Ah. Well, thank you. But next time bring me cake.”

That was a lengthy way of telling you, but it’s 3:43am and it seemed like a good idea. Focused Aim only stops you from missing, not your pet. Your pet is still running off the percentage your base hit rating gives. So if you have a base hit of say 6.70%, WoW rounds down, giving your pet 6% hit. Not ideal. And WoW always rounds down. It doesn’t matter if you have 7.99% hit, your pet will get 7% of that.

What we actually want to be seeing is an unbuffed hit rating of 263 and the following in your Marksman tree…

Do what you like with the three points you save, I decided to place mine in Rapid Killing and something else, I’ve forgotten now. You can find my talent build here.

263 hit rating will ensure your pet won’t miss. It will still have attacks parried and blocked, that’s the opponent doing the work. Technically you’ve still hit the target but it has done something to stop your attack doing damage. We can only avoid this with Expertise. Expertise is no good for us though as it’s a melee thing and that’s just not our bag, baby! Great for pets, useless for us. Just remember to put two points into Animal Handler and you’ll give your pet a little bit of help.

I went a bit hit-happy after this. I replaced most of my +32 Attack Power gems with +16 Attack Power +8 Hit Rating ones and did some other gear tweaks. In total I lost a fair chunk of Attack Power but my Hit Rating finished up at 274 (8.36%) giving my pet 8% hit. So whilst my Attack Power dropped, I’m actually doing more DPS because my precious little Enigma is now hitting more often. A lot more often.

We had a good chance to test out our theory in Naxxramas that evening. It was certainly a good test, with us one-shotting Kel’Thuzad on 10-man (our first kill) and both BM hunters easily cracking 3,000DPS over the whole fight. This was a figure we had only dreamed of hitting previously. A video of our kill can be seen below, there’s a teeny bit of colourful language so beware. Oh and I tabbed to check the health of the adds at 40% and didn’t realise my pet also swapped targets as he shouldn’t have done!

digg this?