[BEAST MASTERY]Legion Alpha Discussion

[Deleted]

But question was: Is chimaera a dps preference or a playstyle preference. And although it is the former in some cases, it's the latter for most people.

I think chimaera should be slightly better than stomp but to get punish when u dont use it lets say in next 5s, something like this. After 5+ seconds to be a dps loss. Actually i think almost all passive abilities that dont affect ur rotation should be slightly lower dps than act/pass abilities that change it.

[kaid]

So, without chimera shot you spend 2:30 minutes doing nothing in a 7:30 minutes combat?

Looks fun...

I was playing my BM hunter this weekend in LFR and soloing old raids. I did not notice anywheres near that kind of downtime. There are some times where if I get a bit to frisky cobra shotting I have to wait a second or two for the resources to kill command but nothing to crazy. It is a pretty simple spec to play but it does not seem to be bad and my damage seems in a good place and pet survivability seems to be back up to where it should be. In beta my pet felt kinda squishy but it may just be the scaling mobs hit harder.

Between beast cleave/multishot/barrage and stomp my aoe damage felt pretty darn good and even under geared I was doing good on the DPS meters.

Still a bit torn on how if I want stomp or chimera shot but both seem pretty valid options. If you go stomp I do recommend in the first tier to take the talent that gives you more resources per dire beast summon as that does seem to even out the gaps the graph is showing pretty significantly.

[jon234]

Is there a pathing issue at the moment with pets for BM everytime on a lot of fights I cast kill command with my hunter it says my pet is out of range when its not delaying a lot of stuff I do. I have noticed this quite a bit.

[Thursley]

I was playing my BM hunter this weekend in LFR and soloing old raids. I did not notice anywheres near that kind of downtime. There are some times where if I get a bit to frisky cobra shotting I have to wait a second or two for the resources to kill command but nothing to crazy. It is a pretty simple spec to play but it does not seem to be bad and my damage seems in a good place and pet survivability seems to be back up to where it should be. In beta my pet felt kinda squishy but it may just be the scaling mobs hit harder.

Between beast cleave/multishot/barrage and stomp my aoe damage felt pretty darn good and even under geared I was doing good on the DPS meters.

Still a bit torn on how if I want stomp or chimera shot but both seem pretty valid options. If you go stomp I do recommend in the first tier to take the talent that gives you more resources per dire beast summon as that does seem to even out the gaps the graph is showing pretty significantly.

You're talking about one person's anecdotal evidence taken from one weekend's worth of LFR and soloing old raids, presumably with end-of-expansion gear, or something approaching it. They're talking about data drawn from thousands of simulations of 7+ minute fights with early-expansion gear. Without seeing the simulation parameters and all that I won't go so far as to say the pie chart is 100% accurate, but regardless of their chart your claim of "not noticing anywhere near that kind of downtime" is completely unhelpful.

Don't let that stop you from the playing the spec/talents that you enjoy of course. It's just not fair to make those statements as if they were facts when facing actual data on the opposite side.

[Rehija]

I did not notice anywheres near that kind of downtime

Neither do i on the Beta Realms. After a view Minutes of adjustment BM felt absolutely natural aslong as i dont spamed my buttpns and played a little bit more relaxed. When you get haste up into the 20ish percents it starts to get a lot more fast paced and even with a premade lvl 110 toon an the crappy starter gear i noticed that i fell in to a certain rhythm wich let me press my buttons without "feeling" a real downtime.

I dont claim that my feeling trumps "thousands of simulations of 7+ minute fights with early-expansion gear", but my gut tells me that a customized, slower paced playstyle will bring more in the end than an apm oriented one.

[sayne9]

You're talking about one person's anecdotal evidence taken from one weekend's worth of LFR and soloing old raids, presumably with end-of-expansion gear, or something approaching it. They're talking about data drawn from thousands of simulations of 7+ minute fights with early-expansion gear. Without seeing the simulation parameters and all that I won't go so far as to say the pie chart is 100% accurate, but regardless of their chart your claim of "not noticing anywhere near that kind of downtime" is completely unhelpful.

Don't let that stop you from the playing the spec/talents that you enjoy of course. It's just not fair to make those statements as if they were facts when facing actual data on the opposite side.

That was also without chim shot. Possibly without dire stable as he didn't say. That is ~22 focus per 8 or so seconds even with crappy gear. That makes a huge difference.

I'm only in 680 gear since I just came back to the game. Doing timewalking, mythic dungeons, and some lfr I'm not seeing anywhere near that kind of downtime either. Chim is frequently hitting two targets which makes a big difference as well.

[Deleted]

Always the same discussion with 1s GCD instant cast specs and downtime.


If a spec has 0.1s GCD and casts one spell per second, they have 90% downtime. That doesn't mean the spec is slow. I found beast mastery very comfortable to play, especially with Chimaera Shot.

[Deleted]

Always the same discussion with 1s GCD instant cast specs and downtime.


If a spec has 0.1s GCD and casts one spell per second, they have 90% downtime. That doesn't mean the spec is slow. I found beast mastery very comfortable to play, especially with Chimaera Shot.

Not sure how to read that first line. But base gcd for all 3 specs are 1.5s

[Deleted]

I really like Beast mastery atm, but has anyone noticed that Bestial Wrath's CD only goes down by 15 seconds instead of 30 secs as it says on the tooltip when you use Dire Beast?

[Kaeth]

I really like Beast mastery atm, but has anyone noticed that Bestial Wrath's CD only goes down by 15 seconds instead of 30 secs as it says on the tooltip when you use Dire Beast?

The 15-second reduction is correct and intended. The tooltip never got updated from when the effect was nerfed during beta. Hoping they fix it soon for the sake of my OCD.

[kaid]

That was also without chim shot. Possibly without dire stable as he didn't say. That is ~22 focus per 8 or so seconds even with crappy gear. That makes a huge difference.

I'm only in 680 gear since I just came back to the game. Doing timewalking, mythic dungeons, and some lfr I'm not seeing anywhere near that kind of downtime either. Chim is frequently hitting two targets which makes a big difference as well.

I would guess for those sims to make any sense he likely was not using dire either. I played arms when WOD came out it had gaps almost exactly as bad as the dead times those are showing and it was god awful and it stopped me from playing arms for the expansion. I am pretty sure it would be pretty noticeable in game play if the dead time was as bad as listed. I can however seeing it being about that bad if people specifically chose not to grab dire stables or chim shot. I think at least with the current level of gearing most people will start the expansion with you probably are going to want dire stables or chimera shot bare minimum. And if downtime bugs you grab both between having an extra button on a short CD to hit the extra income from dire stables should mean almost never a time where you can't hit cobra/mult or kill command as appropriate.

[Nythiz]

Neither do i on the Beta Realms. After a view Minutes of adjustment BM felt absolutely natural aslong as i dont spamed my buttpns and played a little bit more relaxed.

That's exactly what downtime is though.

It's not too bad, since it's often spaced out between abilities, so it's not like you're afking for 10 seconds straight.
But that 1-2 seconds you wait each time before you have the focus to KC or Cobra IS downtime.

I can live with downtime, but currently it's A LOT. And it's not just the downtime.
If the downtime was there in combination with having to make some sort of rotational decision later on it would be fine. If there still was some sort of proc, some kind of cooldown that requires some sort of timing it would all have been fine and dandy, but there isn't.
AoE with BM feels better than single target, and not because the focus costs differ. But purely because trying to maximize beastcleave uptime in combination with the rest at least gives you SOMETHING to pay attention too. Single target everything is just hit when the button glows; even BW which previously required some timing and Focus Fire uptime, is now generally just hit on cooldown because it resets so fast.

And there is little showing on the horizon that this is going to improve. Our artifact brings a single on use skill with a 1 minute cooldown, and it's not all THAT interesting either.

My major gripe with the prepatch currently though, besides the rotation (it's something that's IMO flawed, but something I could get used to) is how much we are nerfed in the "solo'-category.
It's REALLY hard now to AoE grind, solo multiple elites, do old content, or what ever without your pet dying.
And I don't mind it too much if I need to whip out a tank pet (hell, I applaud that as tenacity pets were long presumed dead), but even that seems to help little.

On top of the pet nerfs there is the quality of life nerfs, that came with the removal of some skills and glyphs. Such as Glyph of Misdirect and Distracting Shot.
Not sure why it all had to go. They all had a solid uses and are removed for little reason. They should have baked glyph of MD into the default misdirect, it was by no means extremely OP.

[Rehija]

I consider a "downtime" something were i have to wait 2 to 3 seconds or more before i can press my next button, not the 1,5 ( one gcd ) at max wich i noticed occured sometime. On Beta i played something like a 2 second button press rhythm and with that i almost never had said windows were i could not press anything that deals damage.

Sidenote; with 20% Haste the cooldown of dire beast sinks to 10 seconds.

Honestly, i like the new playstyle but i miss my traps ...

[Firebyrd]

I notice most of the people saying "it's fine" aren't on the beta. You can't go by what you're seeing on live. The live experience isn't playing like it does on the beta because of the gear difference. Yes, dude with 680 gear, your gear is bad by end of the expansion standards. Your gear is amazing compared to the 588 ilevel I had upon hitting level 100, though (I had to continue questing and holding onto random greens I couldn't use just to bump my ilevel high enough to queue for heroics despite having smashed silver PG because lol, silver PG). At the start of Legion, things will feel differently. It might not feel awful for long. The premade pvp gear has a ridiculously low ilevel and amount of haste and Keyimin reassured me on the official forums that he easily ended up with both a higher ilevel and higher haste, but it's not going to feel like it does in live. Also keep in mind that a lot of us currently have the class trinket, and with the further prune, The Beast Within is gone. The effects from it have been baked into Bestial Wrath directly, which means the class trinket is affecting us for ridiculous amounts of time, not just our pets. That means with Killer Cobra, we have a lot longer time when we can be resetting KC and filling up GCDs (and our higher haste + Chimaera + Dire Stables allows the focus to use most of them, at least at my 724 ilevel). I only even found BM to be playable on a premade on the beta once Dire Stable got adjusted. Before that, even Dire Stable + Chimaera wasn't filling enough GCDs.

Even with ridiculous gear plus things like the class trinket affecting things, I'm still not happy with how this is playing. It's bearable now, but it's still not fun. It feels like I'm pushing a bunch of buttons with no meaning and almost no synergy. Instead of actively maintaining my focus and having to play well all the time, the only time it feels like it's even possible for me to screw up is if BW and DB come off cd at about the same time and I can use DB before and waste the cd reduction on BW. It just feels like there's no complexity to it (though we have another BM hunter with a slightly higher ilevel than me that I'm consistently outperforming, so maybe there is more complexity than it feels like or that I'm acknowledging. But it sure feels like I could smash my face on the keyboard randomly and do just as well).

[Zeth Hawkins]

Honestly, i like the new playstyle but i miss my traps ...

I miss traps, spirit bond, camo, infinite MD, spirit bond, cheetah, deterrence, spirit bond, and responsive pets.

But oddly, I'm having a pretty enjoyable time.

[Deleted]

I notice most of the people saying "it's fine" aren't on the beta. You can't go by what you're seeing on live. The live experience isn't playing like it does on the beta because of the gear difference. Yes, dude with 680 gear, your gear is bad by end of the expansion standards. Your gear is amazing compared to the 588 ilevel I had upon hitting level 100, though (I had to continue questing and holding onto random greens I couldn't use just to bump my ilevel high enough to queue for heroics despite having smashed silver PG because lol, silver PG). At the start of Legion, things will feel differently. It might not feel awful for long. The premade pvp gear has a ridiculously low ilevel and amount of haste and Keyimin reassured me on the official forums that he easily ended up with both a higher ilevel and higher haste, but it's not going to feel like it does in live. Also keep in mind that a lot of us currently have the class trinket, and with the further prune, The Beast Within is gone. The effects from it have been baked into Bestial Wrath directly, which means the class trinket is affecting us for ridiculous amounts of time, not just our pets. That means with Killer Cobra, we have a lot longer time when we can be resetting KC and filling up GCDs (and our higher haste + Chimaera + Dire Stables allows the focus to use most of them, at least at my 724 ilevel). I only even found BM to be playable on a premade on the beta once Dire Stable got adjusted. Before that, even Dire Stable + Chimaera wasn't filling enough GCDs.

Even with ridiculous gear plus things like the class trinket affecting things, I'm still not happy with how this is playing. It's bearable now, but it's still not fun. It feels like I'm pushing a bunch of buttons with no meaning and almost no synergy. Instead of actively maintaining my focus and having to play well all the time, the only time it feels like it's even possible for me to screw up is if BW and DB come off cd at about the same time and I can use DB before and waste the cd reduction on BW. It just feels like there's no complexity to it (though we have another BM hunter with a slightly higher ilevel than me that I'm consistently outperforming, so maybe there is more complexity than it feels like or that I'm acknowledging. But it sure feels like I could smash my face on the keyboard randomly and do just as well).

Im on beta. I think BM is very fun to play, easy but fun. Especially in mythic dungeons.

[Deleted]

I know I'm getting lynched for this but for me this is just fine. When aiming for high-APM and thought involving play I play survival in mythic+ atm. When I don't really feel like raiding or playing at all, and just have to be there because I'm needed, I play BM and can watch a movie while still doing enough.

I feel like betraying my own values writing that but Legion just made me stop caring all too much.

[Sencha]

You guys have fun hitting 3 buttons on CD and another one when you're about to reach max focus? Not sure we have the same definition of "fun".

[keygy]

You guys have fun hitting 3 buttons on CD and another one when you're about to reach max focus? Not sure we have the same definition of "fun".

Yeah because the BM rotation before the pre-patch you needed to hit 8 buttons, the cobra shot and arcane spam has be very fun.

[Dch48]

I really disagree. Yes BM did lose a few things but, I find it more complicated and more fun now than ever. I'm also finding it to be pretty strong. My iLvl is only 690 and the Hunter has 4pc LFR gear but I tried out LFR and was in the top 8 for damage on every boss. I went to the target dummy in my Garrison and tested BM against MM. I did 20% more damage as BM and that's with Chimaera Shot, Stampede, and Murder of Crows talented. MM had Barrage, L&L, and Lone Wolf. I have always played with a shot macro that included Kill Command, Arcane, and Cobra Shot. Now, because the spec has become much more dependent on cooldowns. I can only macro Kill Command and Chimaera Shot together and have Cobra on a separate key. For me, BM is more involved now than ever. MM seems simpler.

BM is far from boring. I notice very little downtime and I pretty much spam Cobra in between Kill Commands and Chimaera Shots. I really don't even watch the focus bar. I also do not have Dire Stable because I think you miss too much fun without it. My Haste is also only about 10% with Mastery in the 60's. All of my gems and enchants are still Mastery. I also use Murder of Crows and Stampede. They are both very strong.

To me, fun is doing respectable damage, without having to push too many buttons or manage too many cooldowns. Now, I have slightly fewer buttons, (but not really with Aspect of the Wild added in) and a lot more cooldowns that change constantly. Like I said, I find it a lot more involved than it has ever been.