[BM] Reforging for spine

[qei]

So I normally go with Crit>mastery>haste which, according to EJ, is optimal for a BM hunter. But I was thinking if mastery>crit>haste would be the optimal reforging priority for spine progress for a BM hunter, since you have Bestial Wrath up for 10 seconds during each Tendon phase and during Bestial Wrath your pet does more damage than yourself, right? Is there any theorycrafting or numbercrunching done around this topic, and if so maybe you could share your information

[kidsafe]

In FemaleDwarf I reduced the length of a fight to .3 minutes, turned off Kill Shot and ran the numbers. In my gear it is a slight DPS loss to reforge out of Crit Rating and into Mastery. In BiS gear it is possibly a slight DPS gain.

To recap, in a 20 second period you are going to get off 1 Serpent Sting, 3 Kill Commands, 13 Arcane Shots and 2 Cobra Shots. If it's the second time around on the same tendon, swap out 1 Cobra and 1 Arcane for 2 Kill Shots.

[eschatological]

Your pet does more damage, but also inherits your crit. Losing crit to up your pet damage is double dipping your losses to buff damage from one source (unless The Beast Within procs your mastery for you too, not too familiar with BM) - not only do you crit less, your pet crits less, even though he's doing more damage per attack.

[timoseewho]

Might be a little offtopic, but are you 100% certain that you want to be BM for this? It happened just this one night for me, but my pet kept dying during the fight, even after reviving it, it just died right away again.

[absolutezeros]

Be sure if you stay BM for this fight that you use Bestial wrath before the pet gets on the tendon, if not you will be out of "LoS" from him untill u make him come back to you so you can cast it. It's quite annoying if for whatever reason you dont push the right button before he gets on the tendon 'cause by the time you relize it and bring him back to use BW tendon time is about half gone or more losing a whole lot of dps... so just be careful with that is all.

[Carlaena]

So I normally go with Crit>mastery>haste which, according to EJ, is optimal for a BM hunter. But I was thinking if mastery>crit>haste would be the optimal reforging priority for spine progress for a BM hunter, since you have Bestial Wrath up for 10 seconds during each Tendon phase and during Bestial Wrath your pet does more damage than yourself, right? Is there any theorycrafting or numbercrunching done around this topic, and if so maybe you could share your information

I wouldn't recommend any changes from your usual setup. I don't even use the VP trinket. Unless you are turning off the 5% nerf?

For an easy kill focus on fast Corruption/Roll transitions and quick Amal burns. You want to have 6 exposes in the minimum possible time, and you will kill it quickly.

[qei]

Might be a little offtopic, but are you 100% certain that you want to be BM for this? It happened just this one night for me, but my pet kept dying during the fight, even after reviving it, it just died right away again.

I haven't experienced the bug you're talking about since the first week of DS

Be sure if you stay BM for this fight that you use Bestial wrath before the pet gets on the tendon, if not you will be out of "LoS" from him untill u make him come back to you so you can cast it. It's quite annoying if for whatever reason you dont push the right button before he gets on the tendon 'cause by the time you relize it and bring him back to use BW tendon time is about half gone or more losing a whole lot of dps... so just be careful with that is all.

Happened to me a few times during progress yesterday, I'm aware of this bug

I wouldn't recommend any changes from your usual setup. I don't even use the VP trinket. Unless you are turning off the 5% nerf?

For an easy kill focus on fast Corruption/Roll transitions and quick Amal burns. You want to have 6 exposes in the minimum possible time, and you will kill it quickly.

Why wouldn't you use the VP trinket?

[Carlaena]

Why wouldn't you use the VP trinket?

Tendons HP was massively nerfed. If your DPS team can kill them without VP Trinkets, then using them is an overall DPS loss, and only serve to make the fight longer and harder.

[eschatological]

It depends on your team. Post nerf, we get the tendon to 30% on the first go around, so we don't need VP trinkets. Carlaena is in a similarly geared/progressed group that downed H-Spine pre-nerf when KS was pretty much mandatory.

If your team only gets the tendon to 45-50% in one go WITH KS, you don't want to lose KS. But Carlaena is right, as the fight progresses and you get mroe gear/get better at tendons, you really want to be pushing the non-tendon phases/dps higher to spend less time in them. Post-nerf the barrier is not tendon DPS but too many bloods late on the third plate.

[AnEvilForce]

Might be a little offtopic, but are you 100% certain that you want to be BM for this? It happened just this one night for me, but my pet kept dying during the fight, even after reviving it, it just died right away again.

1) Try a different pet
2) Ask a GM to check your pet for hidden debuffs. I used to have a crab pet that would take 5000% (no joke) damage from some player and boss abilities (Wound poison and shield of righteousness off the top of my head) untill a GM "dispelled" it.

OT: No, stick with Crit > Mastery, for reasons mentioned above, the overall losses aren't worth it.

[qei]

It depends on your team. Post nerf, we get the tendon to 30% on the first go around, so we don't need VP trinkets. Carlaena is in a similarly geared/progressed group that downed H-Spine pre-nerf when KS was pretty much mandatory.

If your team only gets the tendon to 45-50% in one go WITH KS, you don't want to lose KS. But Carlaena is right, as the fight progresses and you get mroe gear/get better at tendons, you really want to be pushing the non-tendon phases/dps higher to spend less time in them. Post-nerf the barrier is not tendon DPS but too many bloods late on the third plate.

We are getting the tendon down to 20-30% health each plate lift, with half of the group using the VP trinket. But it happens very often that we are waiting for up to 10 seconds for a Grip to happen before we push the Amalgamation down, so I don't see a reason to why we shouldn't use the VP trinkets.

[eschatological]

Are you on the third plate yet? Even if you clear bloods in every transition and soak a good 30 up, on that third plate, by the second lift, you'll have 80 or so up. The thing with the VP trinket is that it's basically an empty slot outside of tendon burn phase, when you pop it and go to work on the tendon. With a VoS (which would be your second trinket normally) you're getting the static agi for both the tendon AND the plate itself, plus the random proc every 10 seconds or so. The non-VP trinket might make it so you can push the amalg after the previous grip, which are on, what, 25 second CDs? That one less grip makes the kill all that much more likely.

[qei]

Are you on the third plate yet? Even if you clear bloods in every transition and soak a good 30 up, on that third plate, by the second lift, you'll have 80 or so up. The thing with the VP trinket is that it's basically an empty slot outside of tendon burn phase, when you pop it and go to work on the tendon. With a VoS (which would be your second trinket normally) you're getting the static agi for both the tendon AND the plate itself, plus the random proc every 10 seconds or so. The non-VP trinket might make it so you can push the amalg after the previous grip, which are on, what, 25 second CDs? That one less grip makes the kill all that much more likely.

Our plan is to take the last plate in one go with Bloodlust and Pots. This is where I believe VP trinkets come in very handy. We have gotten to the last plate couple of times but we got overrun before we managed to get the Amalgamation down (we did get him down a few times but not with everyone alive)

[eschatological]

I don't believe there's been a log in the world yet where they've killed a tendon in one go. Even after the nerfs they have over 11m health - in 20 seconds, that requires 550k DPS raidwide. With 6 DPS (3 heals, one tank who'll be too busy to DPS) that's 91k burst from everyone.

And that's if people get a perfect 20 seconds on the tendon, it might even be 19 seconds, I can't even remember.

[Carlaena]

We are getting the tendon down to 20-30% health each plate lift, with half of the group using the VP trinket. But it happens very often that we are waiting for up to 10 seconds for a Grip to happen before we push the Amalgamation down, so I don't see a reason to why we shouldn't use the VP trinkets.

Our plan is to take the last plate in one go with Bloodlust and Pots. This is where I believe VP trinkets come in very handy. We have gotten to the last plate couple of times but we got overrun before we managed to get the Amalgamation down (we did get him down a few times but not with everyone alive)

All your delaying will become a nightmare later on, exponentially increasing the number of bloods you have at the end.

6 lifts is so easy if you make the transitions fast, so I'm not sure what you are trying to gain by having 5 slow ones (if its possible)

[eschatological]

We got the fifth tendon to 12% last night and that was with a grip going out near the beginning, so I may have to retract my claim. But we have H-Spine on farm at this point. It'd be damn hard right now without stacking classes and perfect timing. But by next nerf, it'll be easy peasy.