I've been reading a lot of reports regarding hunters experiencing a bug involving their frenzy stacks as Beast Mastery. To summarize, these reports are primarily as follows:
- As BM, hunters pets will not use their special abilities (claw/bite) and therefore will not gain stacks of Frenzy.
- This lack of frenzy causes a decline in Focus Fire.
- Macroing the special abilities will alleviate this discrepancy, meaning the pet is simply not autocasting appropriately.
The interesting part to me is that they claim it is only on some bosses, or that it works fine on a target dummy. Furthermore, there are Survival hunters who claim to be experiencing the same thing. Others still claim that swapping their pet out fixes the issue, or that it stops with Blink Strikes. Moreover, others claim that it works sometimes and doesn't others - meaning that for 30 seconds it won't work, but suddenly will again after and so forth.
As a Marksman hunter I'm in a unique position to offer another alternative to what this bug is caused by primarily just because our damage ratios are different per ability.
Might's second hunter expressed interest in going Marksman in 5.3 when Binding Shot was swapped to spec only. Prompted by this interest, I started doing some napkin math regarding hunters and noticed a very unfortunate issue. Further down I'm going to share a portion of the post I made on the Might hunter forums regarding this, but to get to the nitty gritty:
Murder of Crows.
edit: [This is the bug report thread] I've been trying to discuss this problem in. It may not be solely a result of Murder of Crows, but they both may be facing similar cause and effect from this bug affecting all "types" of pets.
edit: [This is the bug report thread] I've been trying to discuss this problem in. It may not be solely a result of Murder of Crows, but they both may be facing similar cause and effect from this bug affecting all "types" of pets.
If you've been experiencing this pet auto attack bug, I'd like to ask you to share your experience with me so that we can decipher whether or not my hypothesis is correct. Murder of Crows is a strange DoT as the crows act like "pets" - the DoT does not snapshot and the attacks are read separately. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that if "pets" are bugged that it would be affecting MoC in a similar fashion. Alternatively, if it's just MoC that is broken, perhaps it would affect other things with its glitch. That is, Murder of Crows was savagely brutalizing my proc rate on Capacitance, so my theory is that Murder of Crows is also savagely brutalizing our pets auto casts of Claw. I did try to replicate this on a test dummy, but I was still getting Claw casts with Murder of Crows as Marksman.
So some questions for you folks with the bug:
1. Are you using Murder of Crows or Blink Strikes?
2. Is your pet not using Claw/Bite AT ALL or only when Murder of Crows is up?
3. Does this other wise work UNTIL you cast Murder of Crows, breaking it indefinitely until swaps?
3. Does this other wise work UNTIL you cast Murder of Crows, breaking it indefinitely until swaps?
Here is the snippet from my post:
edit:
Some relevant bug report threads:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8891579796
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267604
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267590
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1536255491
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267590
[...] Which is only half relevant, because during this time I had my hunter autoshot casting on a test dummy in the background...
...And that's the part where it gets extremely infuriating. The Capacitance metagem has an RPPM of 21 with an additional coefficient of 1.1 for marksman and 0.95 for both BM and SV. Despite this, whether as MM or SV all and any autoshots procced one stack of capacitance - which is cool. No other abilities whatsoever procced capacitance - it was only proccing on autos, but it was proccing on any auto regardless of specials, extras, etc used in between. In practice that meant capacitance was stacking once on any auto no matter what, regardless of if haste was 20% or 300%. Where this fucks up in the recent 5.3 changes is here: Murder of Crows delayed Capacitance regardless of autoshot fires by half the amount.
If you're following with me here, it means this:
lightning strike -> 5 autos -> lightning strike -> 5 autos ad infinitum.
At regular (approx 20%) haste rates this is around 12 seconds from last strike for each 5 stack.
With domestic hunter haste it continued per 5 autos, thus around 8 seconds from last strike for each 5 stack.
Once MoC was applied, regardless of haste, you were guaranteed to achieve only 5-6 stacks of capacitance during the full 30 second duration. The cooldown on MoC is balls so I sat around all morning dumbfounded testing this in a stupor of this can't be real.
But it was, and the 12-8 second interval between lightning strikes was turned into a 25-28 second interval on any MoC at any haste level. This is TERRIBLE for any hunters opening running MoC because our opening is the best opportunity for our capacitance uptime. The proc is easily as much damage contribution as steady and arcane, so losing it at those critical moments is extremely unacceptable. Especially when you consider that MoC is not dynamically affected by haste: it will hit 30 times each time no matter what.
On the flip side, the new Blink Strikes works in an opposite manner. It is absolutely affected by haste - and, in fact, haste itself provides the focus regeneration needed to ensure the Wild Hunt. In other words, in the same 30 second time frame regardless of haste, your pet will still land roughly the same amount of Claw/Bites. Which at first makes it seem similar to MoC - both readjust based on agi and proc values, but don't gain "ticks" from haste - when in reality, Claw is being bolstered both by these proc values AND gaining at least a 50-60% uptime on an additional 100% damage. The result of this is an average unbuffed claw sitting at 12k, increasing to 18k under strikes, and again increasing to upwards of 70k under wild hunt.
Putting that against MoC worked like this:
Over 30 seconds and domestic haste buffs from 20% gave an approximate 3.75 lightning strikes. With none, it was 2.5. At an average hit of 65k, thats ~244k under 30 seconds of domestic haste or ~162k without. MoC, averaging 10k * 30 ticks with a maximum of one strike regardless of haste is a maximum total 365k.
An unaffected Blink Strikes sequence would average 8 claws @ regular damage for 144k plus the free reign of strike procs: no haste being 144 + 244 or a maximum total around 388k.
In other words, under no affect the maximum of MoC was around 365 versus Blinks 390. It's still pennies in the long string of things, until you consider that these 30 second time frames are in MoCs favour. Blink Strikes, unlike MoC, is active throughout the entire fight - therefore, a 7.5 minute encounter will only have 4 * 30 -> around 2 minutes of up time for MoC with an alternative 100% uptime for Blink Strikes .... And, of course, it would be dynamically boosted by haste. This is otherwise unimportant for hunters not running with the Talisman of Bloodlust because they have predictable uptimes of haste above and below 60% with Rapid Fire having a similar cooldown to MoC (3min for 15s vs 2min for 30s). Berserking only helps. Counterpoint a static 15% haste increase with Steady Focus and ---
Basically, what I'm getting at is fuck murder of crows.
edit:
Some relevant bug report threads:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8891579796
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267604
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267590
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1536255491
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8874267590