MMQB: /target horse

Top of the Monday to you folks. okay, here we go,

PTR Musings – Is Beast Mastery Back?

If you listened to the Hunting Party Podcast over the weekend, you know that we had some fun with this. Yes it’s the topic that never ends – Beast Mastery vs. the world.

I spent a little bit of time on the PTR banging away on the target dummies trying to compare MM, SV and BM. I’m not the best person for this, as I’m never quite sure what to make of the results. I tried multiple five minute fights in each spec, and every time it came out like this MM > BM >= SV. I’m not surprised that I did more dps at MM, but I was surprised that I did more dps as BM. I know Ghostcrawler indicated that BM should be closer to SV in patch 3.3.3. I just didn’t expect to see it on the training dummies.

Training Dummy dps isn’t always the best for a variety of reasons. Most notably you don’t have all the raid buffs and debuffs that affect our dps. Also, five minutes on the training dummy requires a lot more Viper time than say five minutes of raid time. I suspect that alone favors BM over SV.

In the end all I really learned was this,

1. BM has a really boring rotation, and “big red” as an ability isn’t what it used to be. The pets are cool though.
2. Lock and Load is still fun, and I miss it.
3. I really enjoy trying to get the best possible serpent sting with my T9/T10 combination.
4. I tried four pieces of T10 for a couple of SV tests. In 10-minutes of testing I got three four-piece procs. Maybe it was just bad luck, but it seems somewhat lackluster.
5. If you want to work on Viper management, training dummies are an excellent tool.

So does that mean BM has finally arrived with patch 3.3.3? I think it will be better, but if you have a lot of ICC gear, you’ll want to give MM a serious look.

Raiding

Raiding was a mixed bag this week. A lot of guilds on our realm are having attendance issues with ICC (25). We had to call a couple of raids, and I heard the same from friends in other guilds. I’ve maintained that our realm is over guilded and under populated. It might be time for the heads of the families to get together and whack somebody.

Our 10-man team finally defeated Sindragosa. That’s the good news. The bad news is I wasn’t there for the kill. I was there for the many, many wipes though. Oh well, at least we’ve gotten to the Lich King and I look forward to defeating him soon. I took a sneak peak and tried one solo attempt. He one-shot me. I probably should have had a tanking pet :P.