Hunter talents for pet focus

Ihlos, I noticed you eschewed GFTT in your recommended tanking build in favor of Bestial Discipline. I definitely have been looking lustfully at Survivalist for my tanking build and dropping GFTT frees up all the points needed to get it.

I'm just wondering, in your experience does 2/2 BD generate enough focus to be able to hit Growl and Thunderstomp every time they're up? I'm thinking you probably can't afford to use a focus dump for extra damage/threat if you go this route, so I'm assuming you leave that turned off.

Here's an applicable section from an article on focus I did a while back, im fairly certain nothing has changed

Your pet generates 24.5 focus every four seconds. Bestial Discipline increases your focus regeneration rate by 100%, or 49 focus every four seconds.

So, we can readily deduce that you can autocast Thunderstomp with or without the focus regeneration talent and be at 80-100 focus perpetually. This also means that you could manually add in other moves and your focus would fill back up.

Now lets throw in growl and see what happens. Growl is 15 focus, 5 second cooldown. With longevity that becomes a 3.5 second cooldown. At this point we have two Growls and one Thunderstomp every 7 seconds, costing 50 focus.

Without Bestial Discipline, the pet generates 49 focus in 8 seconds, or 42.875 focus in 7 seconds. You would slowly lose focus, at a rate of about 1 focus a second. You would see the autocasts delayed sometime around 1 min 30 sec.

With Bestial Discipline you generate 98 focus every 8 seconds, or 85.75 focus every 7 seconds. With Thunderstomp and Growl on autocast, you would be topped off, and have a surplus of about 5 focus per second.

So you are exactly right that the pet can manage without GFTT just casting growl and thunderstomp. If you have your focus dump on, it will just eat everything up, which would only work if you had GFTT. If you need more threat, say for a main tanking build, then you could grab GFTT instead of Survivalist. Its basically a threat vs survivability choice, and once again, you've pointed out my bias towards survivability.

Well, I'm also biased toward survivability. I'm interested in pet tanking because I like to solo challenging content. If I'm soloing, threat is almost never an issue, as I have MD and FD, and I'm also much better at knowing what my pet is capable of than random group members. Without 2pc T5, I find that I'm limited by my pet dying too fast - and it's not in situations where a bit of extra DPS would've helped. I'll be switching to BM/surv post-haste!

After a little quick in game testing, base focus regen is 5 focus/second. With 2 points in BD, that'd be 10 focus/sec.

Assuming 3 points in Longevity, Growl will cost 15 Focus every 3.5 seconds and Thunderstomp will be 20 focus every 7 seconds. That's a total 50/7 or 7.143 focus/sec. That leaves enough focus regen left over to cast a focus dump every ~8.75 seconds.

If you decide to go with that, I'd personally leave the focus dump off to make sure you're not pushing back Growls and Thunderstomps while they wait for focus to regen after a focus dump casts, and just manually trigger the focus dump when your pet builds up an excess of focus.

Edit: Since I'm throwing out some numbers that go against the previous focus regen numbers that we were using, I'll make note of how I did my test.

Crab on a test dummy, 0 points in BD 0 points in GftT. Starting the timer while at 0 focus, my crab cast Claw 60 times in 5 minutes.

60 casts x 25 focus/cast = 1500 focus
1500 focus / 300 seconds = 5 focus/sec

I have no clue if this was a nerf that no one caught, or the hunter community had been using the wrong numbers all long. I made a post about it in the DPS spreadsheet thread at Elitist Jerks, maybe someone will have some insight.

Didn't we already calc that we only need 1 point in Bestial Discipline to get Growl and Thunderstomp on infinite rotation? Any extra point is useless unless you manually want to click the focus dump.

I have tested the stamina build but I am currently trying out this http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cVbGzxgRfuGest0eMo to try and improve aggro generation but I can definitely report that with the focus dump off there is way too much focus. I have macro'd the focus dump onto arcane (which I use for proccing cobra strikes) but it still seems too much. Maybe the GftT point is better spent in Frenzy.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for survivability (hell, my main build is Survival and has been since the beginning of level 70!). However, when it comes to being a main tank, threat is very important to your tanking. DPS may have to hold back a little, but if they are pulling mobs off your tank without trying, then survivability becomes a bit moot since the party you're trying to keep alive is dying.

For this reason, while I would love to get Survival into my build, GFTT was my far and away choice for 'secondary important talent'. When I was tanking as survival, I was finding aggro-pulling to be a big issue. One I would, quite frankly, reeeeeally rather be without. So, yes. For a main tank build, I can't suggest GFTT highly enough for aggro generation on primary target. Having your pet able to spam a 'focus dump' is really good for threat generation.

Hallo, schön dich zu treffen! Ich zum ersten Mal diese Art von Forum, in der Hoffnung, zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt werden Ihre Führer! ! ! Vielen Dank! ! ! ! !