Distracting Shot

Can Beast Mastery Raid, Part 2 February 14, 2010

This seems to be the most interesting thing anyone can talk about this week!

Brigwyn has made a followup post, arguing that raiding BM “doesn’t result in DPS loss”.

I’ve made my response there, and I encourage you to read his post, and everyone else’s responses in detail. In short, I argue that Brigwyn is wrong because he is considering “maximum potential” of a raider to be spec-dependent, and I’m considering “maximum potential” of a raider to be dependent only on class and gear. He has included a thought-provoking analogy, which I won’t respond to because analogies have a way of getting out of hand.

In a comment, Hesson argures that MM and SV hunters have a greater potential to ‘lose’ DPS due to user error. Well, yes. User error happens, and that’s why we like to have a nice safety margin over the minimum required DPS. He goes on to argue that due to the fact that hunters have a potential for failing at their class, the less chance for error, the better off we are. He fails to remember that one of the assumptions is that a raiding hunter is somewhat more serious and more learned than your average casual. If we expected it to be easy, we’d go buy a ton of gold and powerleveling from gold farmers. But if you’re raiding, you should know enough about your class to not be losing 30% of your DPS due to user error. He’s right that a BM hunter has to do more than respec to be effective in SV or MM. He might need to regem some gear to ArPen for MM. More importantly, he needs to learn his new spec. And right off the bat, before getting used to MM, he might even see a DPS decrease.

To make this argument at all productive, we need to consider maximum potential DPS. You can’t factor in “most hunters are idiots, and MM is too hard for them”. You can’t factor in “I haven’t got used to MM yet”. Learning your spec is not only free, but should be considered mandatory.

Let me apply some of what I said. I raid as SV. That is because I reach my maximum potential raiding as SV. I don’t have enough ArPen to raid as MM, so by combining my class and gear, I get my most DPS from a SV spec. I lose a lot of DPS in movement intensive fights like Rotface. Now, a BM hunter wouldn’t see as much DPS loss – a BM hunter would do better when compared to a BM hunter standing still than I would when compared to myself standing still – but I’d still perform better than a BM hunter when our DPS is compared to the best possible hunter DPS with each of our gear while standing still.

I’d like to move on from this to something more interesting, and there are a few posts in the pipeline, somewhere. Oh, and there’s a new about me page up, but it isn’t completely finished. Or even proofread. Seriously, it’s 1 in the morning, I’m just going to post it and look at it in the morning. I hope it makes sense >.>

Can Beast Mastery Raid? February 12, 2010

Conventional wisdom is that BM is not a viable raiding spec. But what’s that all mean anyway? 500 less DPS? Enough for top raiding guilds to care, and the min-maxers to go MM with an ArPen build, but does it really affect the average hunter?

Frostheim of WoW.com crunches the numbers and finds that raiding as BM can give you, at top gear, a 30% damage reduction. That’s like being in Aspect of the Viper for more than half the fight. That’s worse than a non-BM hunter forgetting to bring a pet. In fact, that’s worse than a MM hunter wearing all green gems, not bringing flasks or food, AND refusing to wear pants. I’m not sure what insanity brought Frostheim to try that last one out, but I for one am not surprised. He also goes on to add some commentary, and apparently thought it’d be a good day to offend most of the BM population.

Click on the link for all the details.

From Frostheim at WoW.com

Of course a few hunters have weighed in on this debate:

Lassirra from The Hunter’s Mark supports player’s “personal freedom” to play whatever spec they please, with the caveat that your “level of involvement” with another player impacts their right to criticize your spec – if you’re raiding with a guild every night, they have more right to say you can’t be BM than a PUG heroic. It’s your $15, and you can do whatever you want – just don’t expect people to put up with you if you ignore their criticism.

I’m going to have to disagree on merely where the line stands. Your performance needs to be as good in a PUG raid as it does in a nightly guild raid. If you want to get into endgame raiding content, whether you do it once a month or four hours a night, other players have the right to expect you to take steps to help the raid succeed. If you’re not willing to improve your DPS by 50% (and yes, a 30% reduction is the opposite of a 50% increase) by getting a raiding offspec – you can still PvE solo or in heroics in BM with your fancy spirit beast – then you have no business bringing a team of 10-25 players down. ICC, TotGC, are genuinely challenging for PUGs, and that DPS that you’re wasting could be significant.

Brigwyn of The Hunting Lodge (and the podcast of the same name which really ought to be on my blogroll box) argues much the same thing as Frostheim addresses in his post – Brigwyn argues that BM is raid viable, but not raid optimum. There are obviously two sides to this, there’s the “make the boss dead” crowd, which is just fine and dandy as long as you’ll never be in a raid with a few undergeared people, and you can succeed by doing less than your maximum, and there’s the “do the best you can do, within reason” crowd, which is where I (and Frostheim, it seems) fall. I would argue that you need to be prepared to make up for mistakes and for people not pulling their weight. I’ll admit that on easy fights, I’ll use the flask of endless rage instead of the elixirs of thoughts and agility. On non-progression nights, I’ll go with a fish feast instead of blackened dragonfin. But I’m still prepared to step up my game if the fight demands it – it just costs me a bit more. The same way, I have a MM and an SV spec. I usually raid in the SV spec, but there are fights where my MM spec will just wind up better, and I can switch to that if we’re having trouble. Come Cataclysm, I’ll set up two new specs, and get used to them, and use them. I don’t see any reason to bust the bank to get through Ulduar when your group is more than competent, but why just give up 30% of your DPS?

Brigwyn goes on to get offended on behalf on BM hunters everywhere at the thought of being compared to the melee hunter or “Bob” who raids in green gems and no pants. I don’t really see the distinction between raiding in no pants and raiding in BM. If you really want to, if you really get that extra kick out of  having an empty slot on your character screen, or that kick out of having a different set of talents purchased and pressing buttons with different pictures on them, then fine. But getting a pair of pants is simple – it’s a one-time thing, unlike the examples of flasks and food. Flasks can be expensive, rightclicking a pair of pants is free. And respeccing is pretty close to free – there’s no special ‘maintenance cost’ to having the extra DPS of a MM or SV spec, like there is for a flask, or the repair costs on those nice pants. If your goal is to beat the content, why wouldn’t you take that respec?

This isn’t me saying that “MaxDPS…defines what is valuable or not”. You don’t need to have the best in slot gear to get into a raid. You don’t need the absolute best spec, and one point off means you get the kick. You just need to do the best that you can with the time you have to invest in the game and with the resources you have. If you don’t want to do that, then I don’t want to raid with you, because my goal is to kill the boss, and yours is (clearly) to run around showing off your spirit beast (and your underpants), at the cost of being able to down some of the content, or get some of the achievements.

But one of the comments on Lassirra’s post is important. While we do all have a little bit of hunter pride, and pride that we’re doing the best we can to help our raid, Will notes that our choice of spec is just another playstyle decision. People posting on blogs and trolling /trade and running pugs need to remember that BM hunters are not inferior human beings. They bring much of the same utility to the table, and a good BM hunter can easily hold their own against many of their PUGmates in most content. The bosses would die. Not as fast as possible, and you might not be able to do hardmodes, but the bosses would probably die.