First of all, I think the BM Mastery is just terrible. “Increases damage done by our pets”, but our pets only make up 40-50% of our damage. Meanwhile, Marks Mastery increase range and damage of every ability. Not just niche abilities, but everything.
Because of this, Mastery is easily the worst stat for BM Hunters. I’ve seen arguments otherwise, but the sims agree with my real gameplay experience. Mastery simply doesn’t help as much as the other secondary stats.
To add insult to injury in Shadowlands, the majority of gear available to BM Hunters seems to focus on Mastery. There are only 4 or 5 pieces in Castle Nathria without Mastery. In dungeons, Mastery should only make up half the available gear, but by my count is a bit over 70%.
If Blizzard is going to push Mastery so hard, they need to change/fix Mastery of Beasts. That’s just my opinion, but figured I’d share on the off chance Blizzard actually reads these posts.
Yet another slap in BM hunters faces. They really did everything they could to make this spec bad in this expansion. I just can’t understand why. BM Hunter was the most popular class and spec. Why go out of your way to piss off so many customers? BM Hunter tends to be a class that casual and new players gravitate to. Why the hell would you nerf it into the ground? Very dumb from a player retention standpoint.
In my opinion, that’s why. The most popular spec of each expansion is usually mostly ignored in the next expansion. Two theories on this…
Blizzard wants the classes balanced in terms of how many are being played. By ignoring BM, they are pushing many players to try other specs or classes and evening out the graphs. Doing so gives the illusion of class balance, which they can point to when people point out balance issues.
The excuse Blizzard would likely use if we could get an actual answer is that the popularity of BM in BfA means the class was already “good enough” and didn’t need much attention. This is clearly a garbage excuse, because the drastic changes introduced in Shadowlands throw that all out the window.
I can understand some tuning happening but BM Hunter just got blasted with multiple nerfs and changes. The only good thing added was Kill Shot which is a very small benefit. Everything else took away a lot of the fun in playing Beastmaster. Why make a popular class LESS FUN. The point of playing a video game is to have fun. Why turn people off to the game. I really don’t understand their mindset.
If they want to tune the damage a little that’s fine but don’t make our pets die easily and at the same time double the res time. Don’t take our best pet skill from our BEASTMASTER class away (spirit mend). Don’t make our only AOE ability only hit 5 targets. Those things are just fun killing. Why?
I’ve often wondered over the years (I’ve been playing since early 2005) if this is something Blizzard thinks/does as an ongoing policy in regards to class balance to keep the game healthy. They have never (to my knowledge) explicitly said so, but after awhile, you start to see this as a fairly strong pattern…
BM mastery also scales faster. MM gets 1.375% per 35 mastery, while BM gets 1.875% instead.
Masteries that only work on part of your damage are not unusual. Frost DK’s mastery boosts their frost damage but not their physical. Frost mage’s mastery boosts only Icicle and Frozen Orb damage. Assassination’s boosts on their poisons and bleeds. Retribution’s boosts only holy damage.
MM’s is actually the oddity, in that it basically effects everything. And honestly, when they implemented this version of the mastery in BfA alpha, it only benefitted focus consumers. We made noise that that meant that Rapid Fire, which at the time was our highest-damage ability by AP coefficient, wouldn’t scale with mastery. We were trying to get Rapid Fire turned into a consumer, but Blizzard took the lazy way out and just made our mastery affect everything instead.
It’s also worth noting that it’s quite intentional for certain stats to be weaker for certain specs than for others. Mastery is one of MM’s best stats, and that’s intentional, just as it’s intentional for haste to be one of our worst (RF’s cooldown not scaling with haste is a factor in that). Mastery does not appear to be intended to be BM’s best stat, which is fine, since the spec is clearly intended to work the best with crit and haste (due to the mechanics of Barbed Shot and Frenzy uptime).
Honestly, mastery is not what’s holding BM back right now. Tuning is.
Well, yes and no. Mastery also affects the animal companion, so while it nerfs your primary pet, you can a second one to help make that up. Nets out to about the same. It’s still incredibly dumb to me that animal companion nerfs literally everything else classified as a “pet”, though. Seems like such an easy thing to fix.
To my knowledge, most Masteries boost about 60-80% of a spec’s primary abilities, resulting in a noticeable increase in their output. Beast Mastery only affect our pets, which are usually 40-50% of our damage and ONLY with a sizable amount of Mastery.
I’m sure it’s intentional, but that just makes my other point stand out. Why does the majority of BM gear in Shadowlands stack Mastery? Literally 80% of the gear available to us has Mastery and many of them aren’t even a balanced amount of Mastery with other stats.
My neck has 127 Mastery with 44 Haste and I just replaced a ring that had 143 Mastery with 38 Crit. With stats over 25% scaling down proportionately, that really hurts. I actively try to replace Mastery gear and I’m still sitting at 37%.
It seems as though Blizzard is really pushing Mastery on most Shadowlands gear, so classes/specs that benefit a lot from Mastery are reaping the benefits and we’re being left behind. The lack of balanced gear options hurts.
Tuning is definitely a problem, but there are countless threads about that already. I was just trying to point out that our Mastery should be one of the first things considered when/if that tuning comes.
Because there is no BM gear or MM gear. Hunter gear is hunter gear. Yes the raid gear is mostly crit and and mastery, but there is plenty of crit/haste gear in M+.
So BM is hardly unique here. And that’s ignoring a number of specs where the mastery doesn’t cleanly lend itself to such an analysis (ex. Outlaw, Elemental, Enhancement, Frost mage, etc).
Some specs are simply not intended to have a strong mastery.
Nathria has a solid amount of mastery gear, but not really Shadowlands as a whole. Part of the problem, I believe, is that MM and BM are not complete opposites in that regard. MM wants crit and mastery, while BM wants crit and haste.
Nathria has:
Helm - Haste/mastery (only option, kinda bad for both BM and MM)
Neck - Mastery/Crit and Mastery/Haste (oddball slot, both option are very heavy in mastery)
Shoulders - Mastery/Versatility (better for MM than BM, but still not optimal)
Back - Vers/Mastery, Haste/Vers, and Crit/Mastery (of those, the no-mastery option is also the one with a higher itemlevel)
Chest - Vers/Haste and Mastery/Crit
Wrists - Crit/Mastery (ok, this one is just straight perfectly itemized for MM)
Hands - Crit/Mastery and Crit/Haste (of these, the one perfectly itemized for BM is the higher itemlevel one)
Waist - Haste/Vers and Vers/Mastery (neither option is good for MM)
Legs - Crit/Mastery and Haste/Vers
Feet - Crit/Mastery (ya, another MM slot)
Ring - Vers/Mastery, Haste/Mastery, and Haste/Crit (of those, the haste/mastery one is higher itemlevel. And none of them are optimal for MM)
Weapons - One is Crit/Mastery, the other is Haste/Vers
Honestly, of those, the only slot that really sticks out to me is the necks. It seems silly that both necks that drop are super heavy in mastery.
That said, M+ is also a rational path for gearing here. There’s a Crit/Vers neck and a Crit/Haste weapon from SoA, a Vers/Haste helm from HoA, Crit/Vers shoulders from PF, Haste/Vers wrists from SoA, Haste/Crit boots from DOS, and a Haste/Crit ring from Theatre for that second ring slot.
That gives you an option for every single slot that has no mastery. And frankly, MM has to do the same thing when seeking Crit/Mastery gear, since there’s a lot of haste on Nathria gear as well.
Simply the nature of itemization. I mean, for me as MM, haste is worth ~74% as much as crit, while for me as BM, mastery is worth ~69% as much as haste. Those aren’t that different, tbh.
To be fair, I’ve been trying to do the same with my haste, with little luck so far. RNG is RNG.
This brings up another issue I’ve been having. My entire mythic group actually. I don’t know if it’s a widespread thing, but we rarely get keys for anything outside of Revendreth. My key swapped from Sanguine to Halls and back to Sanguine six straight runs. Every member of my five person group experiences the same thing.
When we do get something else, we run it immediately and without fail the new key is Sanguine or Halls. Both dungeons are full of Mastery gear, which has contributed to my 37% Mastery problem.
The problem is that BM got very few changes, while other classes got massive changes. Marks is massive burst. Many other classes got huge burst ability all of a sudden. A lot of that is covenants, but some of it is class changes.
As for the changes BM did see, we got some utility back, but lost pet survivability. Pet resurrection cast time was doubled to four seconds and our pets die much faster than we can heal them in many circumstances. BM pets get Avoidance, which reduces AoE damage to them by 80%. This was supposed to help us keep our pets alive.
Unfortunately, there are now certain abilities that instagib our pets - specifically in PvP. If a boomkin uses convoke against me, my pet just keels over dead as a side effect. DKs will attack me and spread their diseases, which kills my pet within seconds. Used to be, you had to specifically attack my pet to kill it. Now it just dies for the hell of it.
they pretty much gutted BM because they based it off numbers with azerite abilites and they buffed MM… they further nerfed BM even more. Bascially if you want to play BM you might as well sit out for 2 years and hope they fix it next x-pac
You realize if I give 1% effect per 50 points of stat to MM and 1% effect per 20 points of stat to BM, those two Masteries scale perfect evenly even if MM covers 100% of its damage and BM’s covers only 40% of its damage?
Each spec has its own stat-per-percent-effect.
By all means, argue that the scaling factor is too strong for one, overly obliging Mastery, or too weak for another, overly punishing poorly optimized tiers of loot, but % of damage covered by the Mastery, by itself, is meaningless. You might as well seek out 100% of a reward of 1 dollar over the 1% reward of 1 grand. All that matters is the actual product, not the one part of the equation alone.
None, but given what the other two specs have to offer, especially to burst AoE (MM, especially), that may itself be a problem.
You’d think with this expansion we’d have seen something simple in language but drastic in effect, such as Beast Cleave instead applying to all but auto-attacks , such that it then target-scales Kill Command (and by extension Killer Cobra and the like) and is better bankable via Bite/Claw/Smack, etc. — ideally with a bit of added microAI for the pet’s focus management.