100% healing parse 
lol ok the only reason I bring this up is there’s a lot of discussion on whether to use ferocity pets with their leech or spirit beast with their damage reduction cd and small heal. I have 22% leech so I’m healing while attacking but I’m also healing for 1700 health every tick (every 2 seconds for 10 seconds) of my pet heal. That’s an 8.5k heal every time I cast pet heal and I can do that every 10 seconds if needed. On top of that I’m using blood shards that also heal but if you look at my healing there you see the majority of my healing is leech. It wasn’t a kill, it was a point 001 percent wipe (literally had zero health on my screen) but close enough to a kill on mythic Fatescribe to judge the 100% healing parse as a pretty good indicator that ferocity leech is the way to go with helping to keep you alive in raid.
Im not sure how you got that number, but when i only have the 15% from the pet, i get MEnd Pet-leech ticking for about 500. Did you take that out of a log and this is the healing with damage-leech included?
Aside from that, ferocity and spamming pet heal might be the way to cheese a heal log, but if you want to survive and progress, you should definitely go with a spirit beast (unless ofc you need bloodlust for some reason, duh). This is mostly considering raids.
In a raid, you usually dont die just randomly from the average damage that you take, but you die to damage spikes. Tenacity is what helps you the most with that. For starters you get 7% more health, which in itself is already huge. If some big damage hits, you already have this much more leeway to survive the hit and give your healers more time to pick you up.
Then you get Spirit Mend which is a low CD healing that heals for a lot more than just your leech from Mend Pet. Additionally, it doesnt require you use up a global cooldown. If you wanna cheese a healing parse, go wild with spamming your pet heal, but youre always losing a gcd. This is pretty relevant if you want to do this regularly.
And on top of that, you will lose your big def cd, Survival of the Fittest. Its not a great def cd in comparison to what other classes have, but its what we got and mitigating damage is superior to just healing it back up. You can greatly reduce your chances of dying during damage spikes with this cd and its something that Ferocity lacks.
tl;dr: If you want to cheese a healing log, try ferocity. If you want to do the best for your survivability, take a Spirit Beast.
Tenacity + Spirit beast is better, because the higher health, the spirit mend and the active defensive cooldown all have one major advantage over Ferocity: They help you survive at the moment you really need to survive.
Ferocitys healing is nice but most of the time its just healing you through low damage that your healers could manage anyway.
Im looking at the screen and watching it tick for 1700. At my leech percentage the number is always the same. Are you using animal companion? Because apparently that doubles your self healing with mend pet. Was obviously lower when I had lower leech. I went from 15 to 17 to 19 to 22 leech and each time the tick got higher and higher.
I wouldnt be dps parsing as well as I am if I was actively using pet heal on cd lol, cmon who is going to try to cheese healing parses man you got a lot of time on your hands to imagine such things. I use it when I need it and when my focus is low, its a convenient healing tick to help keep me up when I would otherwise be waiting to pool a bit of focus and doing nothing anyway.
Anyway since I started using it I feel like I die alot less, Im usually the last to die in my raid. That 20% damage reduction felt like it did nothing whenever I used to use it, so to me your comparing a ticking heal I can pretty much use whenever I want vs some extra health… to me its a no brainer.
Me and another hunter last tier were testing it out. If you use spirit mend on CD it’s like 1/3 the overall healing you get from a leech pet. But like you or someone else mentioned, its a happening all the time heal as opposed to an “Oh s t!” heal.
It depends on the fight. If it’s a fight that you feel like you need a second Exhilaration: go spirit mend. If not, leech.
Sure the healers should be able to heal you for more than your measly leech at any point in time, but someone else might need that 1k heal more than you.
I, however, default leech now.
The 20% damage reduction is a waste of a keybind, in my opinion. I have mine macroed into exhilaration when I do use a spirit beast just because most of the time if I’m hitting exhilaration I could probably also use that measly damage reduction while my HP gets topped off. Since Survival of the fittest isn’t on the GCD, if I’m mashing exhilaration while it’s on CD at least I’m getting a little shield while I wait the second and a half that feels like eternity.
I mean, tenacity is still the way to go, but there might be an argument for leech.
If you know that you are not that skilled and wont make proper use of the def CD and the Spirit Mend, it might actually be better to just take ferocity and forget about it, since the leech is passive.
This is something you should never do. You use your exhil after you took the damage, to get back up, so when your hp is low. You want to use Sotf before the damage comes in. There might only be a niche case where this isnt true, if you know that a really big hit is coming and youre not full.
The biggest result from ferocity is that your healers will have more overheal since youre just healing some of the trash damage passively, which they would cover with their cheap spells. It is still inferior in the moments where you could actually die, the 7% more hp alone are a way bigger deal than some people seem to realise.
On a sidenote: Resilience of the hunter is a great conduit, which gives you a ~10% dmg reduction after you pressed feign death. You should regularly press this button for any instance of damage thats coming, since its only on a 30 second cd and off the gcd.
Additionally, you can check your raid for Venthyr that run Token of Appreciation (Holy-Pallys for example) and put this is your macro:
#showtooltip Feign Death
/stopcasting
/stopcasting
/cast [@Venthyrplayer] Misdirection
/cast Feign Death
This will not only give you the dmg reduce from the conduit, but also a 4k shield from the other players conduit, making this quite potent for a 30 second cd.
I said it’s situational.
sotf is a waste of a keybind.
I also said it’s keybound into my exhilaration to use in between GCDs since sotf will cast even when exhil is on CD or GCD.
Anything less than 40% damage reduction is a waste of a button.
If a spell hits for 20k, for example, and you reduce it by 20%, you reduced it by 4k. You can get that 4k back in like 2-3 spells with leech, but you still took 16k damage and then need to use your exhilaration.
If you need all these damage reductions you should probably not stand in fire.
sotf has a THREE minute cooldown. THREE. So MAYBE you can use it twice during a fight.
You get better damage reduction using the hunter’s mark conduit and 3x the healing with leech for the entire duration of the fight.
It definetely is not. Maybe you are not playing difficult enough content or you just dont care, but 20% is 20%, duh. This can easily be the difference between life and death.
Sotf is definetly a weak def cd in comparison with the tools other classes have, but it is what we have and if you want to increase your survivability, you should bind it and use it properly.
This really makes you look clueless.
Lol whatever, bro.
Even turtle has/can have less of a CD than 3 minutes and it’s an immunity.
sotf is traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaash.
This is kind of a weird hill to die on, but you do you.
I don’t die on hills because I don’t use useless cds
Just gonna throw in my 2 cents here.
SOTF definitely isnt useless and Hunters pretty much need it pushing progression. If you’re not using it, you are not as good of a Hunter as you could be. Not to mention the health boost too which is huge.
The leech is pretty useless in raids though. The healing is so small that one of your healers aoe heals would cover it anyway.
Ferocity is more viable in m+ because one healer and lust, but you should still run SOTF when you can.