LolHuntard?
First, an announcement: Mokrigosh is no more until Cataclysm, when I will totally reroll him on Icecrown-US and level him from scratch. In his place, I have Xanthelei of Suramar-US, level 80 BM Huntard. It’s kinda a nice feeling of coming home, where at least I have an idea of who might stab me in the back.
*ahem* Anyway.
So it’s been a while since I’ve actually done any major theory crafting, but there are some… interesting… bits of news out there that I just can’t pass up. One is that, at some point, Hunters still want to stack Armor Penetration; the other is that Rowan’s Rifle of Silver Bullets, a tanking gun, is essentially BiS for Beast Master Hunters until something better than a 264 ilevel gun/bow/crossbow drops in a raid. A 25-man raid. I also thought I should revisit buff food, since that seems to change every patch as well.
Well. I doubt I’ll get pugged into many 25s as BM, so I guess I better look at this Rifle. Besides, it’s a gun.
First things first though. I wanted to know if I should be gemming ArPen at this very moment. So I jumped over to Zeherah’s Hunter Spreadsheet of Awesome and loaded Xanthelei up. I didn’t drop any raiding buffs since I don’t know what I’ll have (and I figure, probably wrongly, that any added buff is just more dps in the bank), but I did add food and flask. And of course put in a 2000 ms buffer since actual ms is anywhere from 1800 to 2000. Yes, I’m still on satellite.
Fish Feast (80 AP): 3700.26
Blackened Dragonfin (40 Agi): 3699.09 (-1.17)
Hearty Rhino (40 ArPen): 3692.69 (-7.57)
Good to know I don’t have to start bringing my own food to the party. This also gives me a baseline of what I do now, 3700.26 DPS, which I feel is fairly accurate. Now let’s play around and see what happens if, say, I start trying to match socket bonuses by dropping in some green or orange gems for my +8 or more AP sockets:
With All AP Gems: 3700.26
Matching Socket Bonuses with AP / AP and Crit: 3699.83 (-0.43) / 3697.86 (-2.4)
Matching Socket Bonuses Only Worth +12: 3702.98 (+2.72)
Matching my lone +12 AP socket bonus nets me almost 3 DPS – which surprised me actually, but I’ll go with it. So that change is now going baseline for the spreadsheet, and we continue on with a new baseline theoretical DPS of 3702.98. And do please keep in mind, this is very, very theoretical.
Next I want to look at that Rifle. It’s the most likely thing to make a difference in my DPS, and I have to say it intrigues the hell out of me. I can’t remember a time Hunters actually seriously considered a tanking ranged weapon as a gear *upgrade* short of adding stam for pet tanking. So let’s take a look, shall we?
Njordnar Bone Bow: 3702.98
Rowan’s Rifle of Silver Bullets: 3773.62 (+70.64)
Holy… ‘Scuse me one sec, I have a robot to visit in Dalaran. And a few DPS tests to do on a dummy in Darnasus.
Brb in a few days, mkay?
