Having a stat priority debate for BM hunter

Classes Hunter
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Let me preface this by saying this character isn’t my main. As the topic title states, I’m having a bit of a disagreement with someone else regarding stat priorities for a BM hunter, and I wanted to ask here on the forums and get more opinions on the matter as I’m starting to feel like I’m going to be rocking the boat so to speak if I directly push the matter more.

Right now, my guild is pushing for our first completion on Normal Nath. I’d say we’ve mostly got the mechanics down, but right now our key issue is DPS. Going back over some logs, I noticed we have a BM hunter that was a bit low in DPS. Not only that, but their pets are doing about 65% of their overall damage. I’ll admit upfront that I’m not overly familiar with BM, but when looking at other hunters, that split between the player damage and the pet damage didn’t seem right to me, so I looked into things. Player in question is mainly in M+ gear, but it’s weighted heavily towards mastery (character has about 50% mastery). Due to the nature of diminishing returns on stacking too much of one stat, I feel like the player in question can improve their DPS by getting gear with the same item level that isn’t so focused on mastery.

From there, I looked at stat priorities and saw that the Wowhead guide in particular said that mastery was the least desired stat. A little more research and from what I can see the secondary stat priority should be this:

1-Crit
2-Haste/Vers
3-Mastery

From what I can see, crit is desired for those Wild Call procs that reset Barbed Shot. Haste helps smooth out the rotation a bit, but is pretty much on par with vers. Meanwhile, the pet inherits the player’s secondary stats, meaning both get a DPS boost. Mastery on the other hand is strictly a boost to the damage the pet does.

Here’s where the debate really takes off.

We’ve got another player running with our group. This player is a higher geared player from another guild that’s been helping our own on the normal progression. They are saying the key issue is rotation and that BM priorities should be haste/mastery and that crit is NOT a highly desired stat for BM hunters. Someone else mentioned that the hunter needs to be using Barbed Shot more often, to which the person saying stack haste/mastery agreed.

I brought up my concerns considering that is the exact opposite of what I was reading in guides, and the fact that lower crit means they aren’t getting those Wild Call procs as much (which also means less chances to use Barbed Shot, a fact that they even agreed with). At this point they once again insisted that the issue is rotation (something I won’t disagree with as poor rotation/ability management can affect all classes), and that while crit can help get more uses on Barbed Shot, that it’s lackluster and haste is the #1 stat. They also said that while 50% mastery is “a little high” that the player is not overcapped on the stat, then proceeded to defend their stance as someone that has mained BM “on and off.”

Honestly, I feel like that last bit is telling to me, because I personally feel if you main a class/spec “on and off” that you aren’t going to be nearly as up to date on the changes to the class. Meanwhile, I’ll admit as someone who has never touched BM hunter (my own experience with the class comes from MM and survival once it was made a melee spec), that I might be reading a bit too much into what guides say.

So, with all that said: what’s the deal here? I know there’s a rotation issue. That part isn’t in question. However, I feel like this debate on stat priority might not be helping matters as I’m sitting in Discord linking guides/screenshots saying one thing, then the other player comes along, says the opposite, then says “I have experience” (psst: off and on)

Can some folks that main the class/spec full time chime in on all this?

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First of all: Mastery is your weakest stat as BM. This is mostly because it buffs your pet damage, but nothing else. Your own damage, covenants abilities, trinkets, soulbinds are all not included. Haste is generally your best with crit and vers between them.

That being said, the stats alone will never make a big difference. Mastery is still an ok stat, so even if you shifted all stats to the perfect theoretical setup, you would only gain a small amount of damage.
So, you are right that rotation is the big player here and it is also what you should focus on, because you can gain a whole lot more there. Now, i dont mean this in a demeaning way, but if you have issues with dps in a normal raid, there is usually a lot that you can improve on your rotation even with minor corrections. Sometimes people get a core element of your rotation wrong and just dont realise it until someone from outside comes in to tell them that they can improve something.

The hunter that comes with you from the other guild seems to know his stuff. If you could get him to look over your logs and check if he can find some easily solvable issues, you could help your hunter a lot better than with switching his stats around.

PS: 65% pet damage is a little much, but not completly off. In Aoe it could go that high.

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BM is ok-ish … I like the mobility and being generally time limited I’m not going to develop another spec or class. generally,

(1) haste
(2) everything except mastery
(3) mastery

I use resources like icy veins and sims (raidbots). The information there is generally correct and should be followed. Certainly in the beginning.

But later on, with more gear and more gear and gem options, one can find stuff works out differently in practice.

Initially I pushed the conventional wisdom with haste but eventually I found that I was stepping on the GCD a lot of the time. You add in lust and that weapon proc (green reflex something something) and maybe another buff and the ability bar and GCD can get unrecognizable.

Learning a damage intensive fight with the guild had me think about more defensive arrangements. Both stats and conduit. I was shocked that sacrificing haste to add verse was a deeply minimal dps change. I’m guessing because I was well beyond “having enough haste”.

I’ve moved more to a stat-balance setup and the way I think about haste is I don’t let it lag behind. And in general, mastery is last in line. But not 100%. I simmed a piece with a lot of mastery and surprise, my dps went up. Why? My mastery was too low. So low that it overturned the stat rules.

In the beginning it does have that challenge doesn’t it? How to keep up the frenzy. Haste and crit both work together to help that very much. I also used one-with-the-pack very early on. But later I realized scent-of-blood is way better and it incentivizes better gameplay -> more bWraths.

And of course, it depends on what gear you get. Like, initially I got bumped up to 33% crit … just because that’s what happened to drop. Later on, dumping some of that crit (at 26% now I think) for other stats did help my dps.

So the general answer is “follow the rules” and the more specific answer is “sim it” (raidbots) and then try it out yourself.

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Most of your damage is by your pet, so I usually go Mastery, Crit, then Haste

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I’ll try to add what I can here.

  • Stat priority, especially at the normal Nathria level is haste>crit>=vers>>>>>>>>>mastery, although sometimes the gear selects you and you gotta roll with the drops you get.
  • Not sure what leggo they use, but Rylaks is going to be the best choice as there’s no “management” to it and if dps is an issue, you don’t want to add more complexity to the rotation.
  • Knowing the fight is going to be top priority. BM is great sustained dps, but lacks burst outside of the wild spirits window. Knowing when to use CDs effectively will go a long way.
  • From what I understand on the Sire fight, BM has all kinds of pathing issues and requires some very intense pet management to parse well. Probably should spec marks for this fight if you’re battling progression dps.
  • A few mods will help tremendously as a big part of the dps that no one else has mentioned is managing frenzy stacks on the pet, and this is why haste is such high priority at those gear levels. Frenzy Tracker is a good one, found here: https://wago.io/VJJKTGtlm

Also, don’t look at my logs for help outside of m+, my only Nathria parse is a sire kill for a chance at a weapon token when I dinged 60. Happy to help otherwise.

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I don’t mean to be rude, but this is bad advice for a BM hunter.

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You are not rude at all, but your main source of damage is your pet?

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It is but mastery is still our worst stat. The reasoning is the same as what has already mentioned by a few others.

The other stats affect both you and your pet, increasing overall damage. Mastery only affects your pet. Mastery would need to have a higher per point DPS benefit to make up for the fact that it only affects your pet.

Overall, rotation and perfecting things will make a bigger difference that optimizing completely on the stat front, but if we’re valuing stats it is crit >= haste > vers > mastery.

Crit will help you get more wild call procs, which means more barbed Shots which in turn means a lower CD on your Bestial Wrath. Haste means more overall attacks and smooths out the rotation by lowering CDs and will help ensure you keep frenzy at x3. Vers because it affects both you and pet (and has the added benefit of reducing damage taken very slightly), and then mastery which only affects your pet.

Edit: This is also just a rule of thumb. As stats increase, the value of other stats you have less of will increase. You should always sim yourself to gage your current stat priorities.

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Yes, BM’s damage comes from the pet, but Mastery is our worst stat by far, especially at the normal Nathria gear level. More haste = more barbed shots = greater Frenzy and BW uptime.

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On my alt he averages 7k dps with Mastery as my highest stat, but yeah I could be wrong.

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Impressive if that’s single target since that’s BM leaderboard dps. I’d like to see some of those logs so I can see what I’m doing wrong.

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Umm, what? Weak or no, that’s not going to be because of the portion of your damage it affects, alone. Any useful talk of Mastery’s strength must include not only (1) its typical percent-of-overall-damage in general meta builds but also (2) its scaling factor, (3) its typical percent-of-overall-damage in the context of builds based in that high stat, and (4) the relative costs, if any, of swapping to such a build.

Mastery is close enough in value that the faintest buff to its scaling factor would likely put it above Vers and cause it to more quickly take slack from Crit and Haste outside of Embers lego.

:: Note, also, that RPF doesn’t favor Crit nearly so much as it’s often made out to, as increasing your chance to receive that increased damage bonus necessarily reduces how much that damage would ultimately be worth (through lost Vers/Mastery) or is merely even in GCD based frequency (relative to Haste), while anything but Crit would get further multiplicative value out of baseline bonuses like First Strike. Yes, it will typically push Crit ahead, but not enough to be able to forgo frequent simming.

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You’d likely see some chunkier crits with a mastery / vers build, but yeah. Overall damage will likely be lower, assuming same legendaries / performance.

That said, as I noted earlier, the difference in stats isn’t really a big enough difference to make or break you. Optimizing your priorities / rotation will yield better results than any focus on the stats.

Basically, this.

Always sim yourself guys.

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Cmon guys, youre completly off track here.

There is a player who is struggling with dps in Normal Nathria. It is completly pointless for him to start a deep dive into stat weigths and scaling. All those posts are not helpful for the op and will only make him focus more on the stats, which will help him the least. Even with perfect theoretical stats, the gain will be small in comparison to what he could much easier achieve by ironing out some mistakes in playstyle.

The focus for the op should be the rotation.
If you and your hunter are confortable with it, you could post a log here or send it to me on discord (Rondok#6372) and i will gladly look over it and try to find the best improvements he could make.

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To be fair, the thread title is a stat priority debate :smiley:

But yeah, I already posted that learning the fights along with managing your rotation is the biggest dps gain they’ll see.

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You’re not wrong, which is why I mentioned focusing on optimizing their rotation will help them see much bigger improvements.

Though I don’t think answering the original question is entirely off base either lol.

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Well, true. Now, the thread itself painted a pretty specific problem and my answer was tailored to this specfic problem. Also, stat weights isnt really something you can “debate”. ITs a mathematical question that has a mathematical answer which doesnt rely on “but it increases your pet damage, and you do most of your damage with the pet, so its the best stat!!”

I boldened the important part of my quote. I never said anything to the contrary.

This sounds all nice and dandy, but at the end of the day, mastery is still your weakest stat. You can see it in sims, you can see it logs. If you wanna prove something different, show a sim or something comparable where mastery beats out the other stats. Your whole bunch of points isnt much more than a smoke screen. Maybe mastery becomes better when you can stack 2000 of it for some reason, but its irrelevant at this point.

Yeah, i guess… Basically i wanted to give the op what he needed, not what he specifically asked for…

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That’s fair.

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This thread is mind-numbing.

Stat weights are inter-dependent and highly dynamic. Having more haste increases the value of the other stats, for example. You also have stat DRs. There is no static priority. Generally mastery is the weaker stat for BM. It’s still of value; it’s just weaker than the others for the most part. It CAN become desired, though, e.g. if you reach diminishing return territory for haste or crit.

This reminds me of the debacle with MM haste. You had a lot of people avoiding haste entirely as MM because they read on Icy Veins that it’s our least-valuable stat. In fact, Haste still had value and this value increased as you got more crit and mastery to the point where haste became a good stat to seek out.

Your best bet is ALWAYS going to Raidbots, plugging in your character, and using the gear comparison tool (NOT the stat weight tool). This isn’t complicated or advanced; there’s no reason to not do this even if you’re only in normal. Don’t make guesses about the stat priority; there’s no reason to speculate when there’s an easy-to-use tool that will tell you the right answer every time. In modern WoW stats are strongly inter-dependent and you can’t apply a general x > y > z priority in most cases.

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/thread

If I where you, I would worrie less about the minimaxing that is stat distribution and focus on the meat, rotation, uptimes, movement etc.

Im sure if you can get a log to us we can point out any number of things that would (more than likely) on their own yield larger dps gain then any gear switching he may have available.

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