AOE Farming

[Pandragon]

Which spec is best for AOE Farming? MM or Surv?

[Garam]

Survival.

[Deleted]

well SV may do more damage, but with RK and bombardment you will have way better focus management as MM.

[Vurrin]

Honestly it likely depends how tough the mobs are. If you can just MD-Multishot spam unto your pet marks prolly wins. If you're going to need to mix it up with actual kiting Survival will win easily with stronger/wider/rooting traps and Serpent Spread doing excellent damage while kiting.

[seymourclearly]

well SV may do more damage, but with RK and bombardment you will have way better focus management as MM.

This isn't quite right. Rapid Killing by itself is barely going to help your AE grinding. You need to take Rapid Recuperation for it to be of any use. The problem is, because Rapid Killing is based on getting experience/honor from a kill, it won't help you grind lower down at all.

Let's take an example and say someone is grinding Netherwing rep. They're going into the mine and killing a lot of mobs at once. Rapid Killing, and thus the focus restoration part of Rapid Recuperation, aren't going to do anything at all. Then there's the added problem with auto shots killing a mob before a Steady Shot goes off (I've been trying this), which leads to further focus starvation.

It doesn't feel smooth at all and it's another reason why I don't like Steady Shot being tied to our focus regeneration. I had to basically tab around after Multi-Shot (being as nameplates are currently not functioning correctly) to try and find a mob with reasonable amount of HP to cast Steady Shot at, else a mob would die and I'd starve myself even further. Fox doesn't help in this situation either, meaning in a sense, it's encouraging you to tank a few mobs in order to gain focus from the melee hits.

Rapid Killing and Rapid Recuperation need looking at.

[Zeryx]

I go BM and pick up a worm pet. All you do is misdirect him and send him into a group of mobs. You spam multi-shot and have him burrow underground and deal even more AoE damage. Don't forget your explosive trap and mend pet. Works perfect for me every time.

[Pandragon]

I'm trying to do some AOE Northrend farming, but my pet keeps dying on me against 78-80 groups. My current Tank pet is a turtle. Would a worm work better going underground?

[seymourclearly]

Are you manually using Shell Shield and Cower, or do you have them on autocast? If you have them on autocast, a lot of the time the turtle used to stack them together (pre-patch, not checked 4.0.1) and it wasn't so good. Rotating both CDs makes a huge difference. That's effectively what made soloing Netherspite in Karazhan so much easier for me.

[Rasengu]

Survival no doubt about it

[Deepfriedegg]

Survival no doubt about it

Think about MM with high mastery. I have 22 mastery which translates into 40% chance to proc Wild quiver.
Wild quiver can proc of EACH shot that is fired during multishot.

I was leveling my new pets by AoEing packs of 6-8(?) converted heroes in Icecrown (I had Rapid Killing 1/2, Bombardment 2/2 and Posthaste 2/2). I noticed two things: 1) Wild Quiver (MM mastery) was the most damaging ability and 2)my weapon suffers serious durability issues when Multishot + WQ

[Arcsecant]

Think about MM with high mastery. I have 22 mastery which translates into 40% chance to proc Wild quiver.
Wild quiver can proc of EACH shot that is fired during multishot.

I was leveling my new pets by AoEing packs of 6-8(?) converted heroes in Icecrown (I had Rapid Killing 1/2, Bombardment 2/2 and Posthaste 2/2). I noticed two things: 1) Wild Quiver (MM mastery) was the most damaging ability and 2)my weapon suffers serious durability issues when Multishot + WQ

I'm sure with a decent mastery rating MM will come out on top. On giant trash pulls before marrowgar my wild quiver proc accounted for more damage done than multishot. Since multishot is physical damage it won't benefit from survivals mastery although the mini serpent sting application will.

Also I'm finding that the bombardment buff is disappearing before I can steady shot to nearly full focus again. What I find is working better is trap launcher explosive trap macro then dump focus with multishot spam then steady shot twice and dump focus with multishot spam again. That way multishot will always cost 20 focus instead of 40.

[ASO]

I go BM and pick up a worm pet. All you do is misdirect him and send him into a group of mobs. You spam multi-shot and have him burrow underground and deal even more AoE damage. Don't forget your explosive trap and mend pet. Works perfect for me every time.

The worm actually does a surprising amount of AOE. I was against him because the tooltip says its ~800 "over 8 seconds", which with its AP scaling was coming out to about 400 a second, but it turns out that's 800 PER second, scaling with AP, so my worm's AOE is hitting for more than my MS.

Note though that it's on a 30 second cooldown.

[Pandragon]

I go BM and pick up a worm pet. All you do is misdirect him and send him into a group of mobs. You spam multi-shot and have him burrow underground and deal even more AoE damage. Don't forget your explosive trap and mend pet. Works perfect for me every time.

OMG TYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTY. the worm is awesome as hell. i couldnt do a single trash pack with the turtle, with my worm i have done over 20 so far.

[Deepfriedegg]

The worm actually does a surprising amount of AOE. I was against him because the tooltip says its ~800 "over 8 seconds", which with its AP scaling was coming out to about 400 a second, but it turns out that's 800 PER second, scaling with AP, so my worm's AOE is hitting for more than my MS.

Note though that it's on a 30 second cooldown.

Good to know. Although the looooong cooldown makes up for that high damage.... Another drawback is that worm is stil exotic pet. Have you tried Chimaera´s AoE (damage done + size of affected area)? There doesnt seem to be any cooldown listed on their AoE ability (Froststorm breath), only focus cost.

[S7orm]

The worm actually does a surprising amount of AOE. I was against him because the tooltip says its ~800 "over 8 seconds", which with its AP scaling was coming out to about 400 a second, but it turns out that's 800 PER second, scaling with AP, so my worm's AOE is hitting for more than my MS.

Note though that it's on a 30 second cooldown.

my worm is more likely 1000-1200 per second :P

surprisely chimaera AoE sucks instead (a bit more damage but every 1.5-2 seconds instead 1), they hidden nerfed it during beta (where my level 77 chimaera was doing over 20k hits per target during BW in a run in CoT:S)

[Pandragon]

Good to know. Although the looooong cooldown makes up for that high damage.... Another drawback is that worm is stil exotic pet. Have you tried Chimaera´s AoE (damage done + size of affected area)? There doesnt seem to be any cooldown listed on their AoE ability (Froststorm breath), only focus cost.

The cd doesnt even matter. His AOE + MS kills groups of 80s before i his quake is even done.