Cunning VS Ferocity

[Dvorjak]

Frostheim made a post on Warcraft Hunters Union regarding cunning vs ferocity pet dps in a raid. He says that http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53205 from a Cunning pet is providing more dps than Call of the Wild at lvl 85. What are your thoughts on this?

[3clipse]

Spider's Bite?

Both families have Spider's Bite.

Did you mean to link Roar of Recovery?

If so, I can't see how 30 focus (i.e. 1 Arcane Shot) is better than 10% AP for 20 seconds.

Are there any parses/recount logs/theorycraft to back it up?

[harky]

Don't believe everything you read on Warcraft Hunters Union. It's usually a decent read, but they rarely have their information 100% right. In any case it isn't about Spider's Bite. I'm not sure where the OP came up with that. It's about Wolverine Bite + Owl's Focus + Wild Hunt. The less crit you have the better a Cunning pet will do in relation to a Ferocity pet. Owl's Focus gives you free Claw/Bite/Etc, while Wild Hunt gives you double damage when above 50% focus. Every time Owl's Focus procs you'll get an extra double damage special from your pet. Then every 10 seconds you get another free special. There was a while in 4.0.1 where this happened as well, but Wolverine Bite was nerfed and our crit rates were too high for it to matter much. The issue isn't that. That's pet DPS vs pet DPS. Call of the Wild makes it a non-issue.

[3clipse]

Oh, that makes sense.

Hmm.

It's competing with Rabid as well. I don't really know how to theorycraft this one, we'll have to wait til 85 to see this one.

[Skybluesky]

If so, I can't see how 30 focus (i.e. 1 Arcane Shot) is better than 10% AP for 20 seconds.

Are there any parses/recount logs/theorycraft to back it up?

I checked the WHU entry mentioned above -- there are no numbers used to validate the claim. Although it's tempting to see the additional focus as simply an extra attack, owing to the nature of focus, it's better to look at it as permitting you to replace a steady or two with a higher cost shot. (MM would be close to being able to replace two steadies with arcanes with 30 focus.) Would that be worth more than 10% more AP for both hunter and pet for 20 seconds? Also, cunning pets *do not* have spider's bite. Spider's bite not only increases pet dps, but it increases uptime of 'Culling the Herd'. Although it's difficult to model all of the differences, especially for raid conditions, the WHU analysis is inadequate.

[harky]

You can test it pretty easily on live. Go do a dummy test and just auto-attack in melee while your pet goes nuts. Test for a few minutes with each and the Cunning pet will win. Use Call of the Wild on another Ferocity test and voila, the Ferocity pet wins. The WHU post didn't really do any research beyond that it seems, if they even did the Call test.

[3clipse]

Yeah, I think we'll just need to see testing at 85 to get final numbers and know for sure.

[Zeherah]

A test dummy won't allow you to include the value of feeding frenzy.

My initial math is also showing that cunning and ferocity are fairly close at 85. Gear levels and the length and type of the fight will likely have an impact. I will need to do retesting on live though after the expansion hits, especially since the wolverine bite nerf hit really late and the numbers may be off a bit. It's hard to fully estimate the value of Call of the Wild though, since you get more out of it with cooldown stacking.

In my initial version of the site as SV with 1/9/31 spec, using the premade gear from beta, here's the numbers I get for the various pet bonuses on a 4 minute fight

Ferocity: (using 1 pt in shark attack 1 pt in wild hunt which gives best dps results)
Call of the Wild: 148.02dps
Rabid: 240.02dps
Spider's Bite (3 pts): 221.54dps

Cunning: (comes out as 13.78dps above Ferocity)
Roar of Recovery: 29.28dps (obviously the value of this will vary a lot depending on circumstances)
Wolverine Bite: 138.33dps
Owl's Focus (2 pts): 374.71dps
Feeding Frenzy (2 pts): 168.33dps

Obviously these are estimates, but it should give you some idea of where the math is coming from that indicates they're close in dps and that cunning might win out. It's mostly a matter of Owl's Focus allowing for much higher gains from wild hunt, but the other talents in the tree help compensate for the loss of what you get from ferocity. As crit rates get higher it might be possible to get 2 points in wild hunt in ferocity, which would probably help it win out, but at the early gear levels Owl's Focus is just worth a lot.

[3clipse]

Interesting. Zeherah, as always, is Master of DPS.

[Djinra]

I'm actually curious now for this thread, but what comes to mind is Dragon hawks / Wind serpents for SV. (They are Cunning and grants 8% nature damage to affected target)

[Vurrin]

Honestly all this thread really states is that the personal dps loss of switching between cunning/ferocity to provide a missing raid buff/debuff is negligible and so you should do so. For solo questing Cat/Spirit Beast is best for Roar of Courage, for Extreme soloing you'll use a tenacity pet, and for raids you'll use whatever provides something thats missing.

Sure there may be a situation where everything is provided and you get a choice, but even they it probably comes down to boss mechanics. Is there a Hard Burn Phase or a Phase where the boss takes significantly more damage outside of execute range then Call of the Wild will likely contribute more to victory. Does the fight have a significantly extended execute phase ( a la vael) then cunning pet would be better there. Otherwise its fairly even and you can use the prettiest one or the one that provides the same buff as the player who always stands in fire.

[harky]

That's nice if you're in a 10 man guild, or something. Anyone in 25s knows that they can just use whatever pet they want to use. There are so many built in redundancies that relying on a Hunter for buffs is silly. If you need to supply a buff by all means do it, but outside of your static buffs like Pathfinding, TSA, or FI a good guild won't have you in charge of supplying an important raid buff. Pets are too prone to letting those buffs drop. Especially the percent armor reduction, which requires a macro to maintain. The situation where everything is provided is the norm in decent guilds.

[Vurrin]

If you think the number of raiders in 25 man guilds out numbers those in 10 man you're sorely mistaken. And even in 25 man guilds there are plenty of bosses where people can out range totems. Does that mean shamans should stop providing buffs? Or what about encounters like Halion where the raid is split in half. I know when my guild did Heroic Halion we didn't have all the buffs inside and out ( usually this meant hunters were SoL for sat least one of Windfury, SoE, 5% crit, mangle or Battleshout or rogues/enhancement shamans wouldn't have CoE, or Healers inside could be missing 5% spell haste/crit etc etc. Or what about simply encounters where DPS is split between multiple adds ( ranged adds/melee adds for example) Having redundancy on rare debuffs ( 4% dmg, 20% melee slow in particular) can make encounters easier.

Sure the impact is less if you're missing a buff for only a portion of the fight, but providing redundancy doesn't hurt your DPS. Additionally, If you can apply 4% melee dmg with no dps loss compared to a rogue having to lose 10% of his DPS playing a sub optimal spec ( for example not saying combat is inferior)... i know what I'd go with as a raid leader. Or what if your new boomkin app keeps dying and you lose earth and moon... boy sure wish the hunter could pick up that guy's slack.

In any event you're naive if you think even in 25 man raiding there won't be a large number of encounters where the hunter bringing a "redundant" buff or Debuff won't be a netgain for the raid.