BM: Legendary Shoulders are giving me a headache, please help.

[Hiricine]

Dire frenzy definitely gives AoE. It increases atk speed by 42%*3. And that benefits beast cleave. Not sure if it's better or worse than stomps benefit, but to say that it doesn't benefit AoE at all is false.

The benefit from stomp to aoe is massively higher, your post is otherwise very correct though.

[last1214]

The shoulders seem a bit too op in every situation. Kinda hope they get nerfed.

[Deleted]

The shoulders seem a bit too op in every situation. Kinda hope they get nerfed.

Or just make the effect baseline and give shoulders a new effect.

But, yeah, with right itemization (30-35% crit) it seems like you can just go WotC, stomp, Crows, Killer Cobra, One with the pack for literally every type of content.

[Deleted]

As someone with the shoulders and who started on a second hunter I can say I had forgotten how bad it is to play without them. As lucky as I was to get them I don't expect the same luck on the second hunter.

[zaphre]

Or just make the effect baseline and give shoulders a new effect.

But, yeah, with right itemization (30-35% crit) it seems like you can just go WotC, stomp, Crows, Killer Cobra, One with the pack for literally every type of content.

WotC will only scale up in DPS with shoulder + Waist.

For me, using Shoulder + Apex @33% crit, WotC sims 10k less than Dire Stables.

[zaphre]

I think that assumes you never focus cap though which can be unlikely, especially at higher crit % because that means more dire beasts. I believe you only want dire stables when you're going to be multi shotting a lot instead of cobra shot. I think you also take the kill command bleed talent rather than killer cobra in that situation as well.

Aspect of the beast + wotc sims 670k for me

while Dire Stables +:killer cobra sims 700k

you need a lot of focus on the crit build for shoulders mainly because you haver b2b BW nearly on every cicle.

Without belt, WotC is not a viable talent choice, and Aotb will not make it viable in any way, Aotb is just a shitty talent no matter what.

[zaphre]

Those are for pure single target though I assume, right? That's what I'm saying, you want dire frenzy with stomp when you're going to be multi shotting rather than cobra shotting more. If you're cobra shotting less then you also don't get as much out of killer cobra so you take aspect of the beast. It actually got buffed recently because it can crit now.

Either way, they all seem "viable" but only getting to test out one combination a week on farm bosses makes it hard to pin down what's really best on any given fight. I just recently got the boots as well, 3 seconds off kill command every dire beast, and with the shoulders it makes my rotation a lot different trying to maximize the amount of kill commands I get. It seems like dire frenzy makes it the rotation much smoother and allows me to just keep refreshing kill command over and over during bestial wrath with killer cobra and the boots effect which is nice. I probably wouldn't have enough focus without dire frenzy to do that. It's just super fucking annoying on the pull of a fight because I just have so much focus that I'm sitting at focus cap a good amount of the time. The opener is something I'm still working on because it's drastically different once you have the shoulders and boots.

Those results are single target, yes. For Mythic+ i go Dire Stables, Stomp, volley, killer cobra and Blink Strikes

And its ok for you to be confortable with a build or another, but to me is not viable, not when one build sims 100k less DPS than the other, such as AOTB+Dire Frenzy. AOTB is simply not viable for now compared to Killer Cobra, and while Dire Frenzy sims lower than Stomp, it should never be used with Way of the Cobra, and Frenzy needs a lot of micromanagement, making it really easy to screw up, such as losing the 3 stacks buff or over recovering focus.

And from what you said, that you are literally sitting on focus cap a good ammount of time, obviously you are doing something wrong there.

[zaphre]

If you're using dire frenzy then it's single target and you always take killer cobra for single target. I said you only take AotB for when you're going to be using multi shot over cobra shot which means consistent AoE. You could also take stampede but then you lose out on some single target dps.

I said on the pull, with lust up and like 5 procs resetting dire beast CD. Even with weaving in dire beast and kill command the focus regen just has me at focus cap for the first 15 seconds of a fight. It's probably really not an issue though.

Use Aspect of the wild on the opener @50% focus