I’ve long had my theories on which pets would be the best post patch 3.0. Specifically I believe that ferocity pets will be the best at holding aggro, and devilsaurs will be the highest dps ferocity pets (and for non-bm, I think raptors will be the best).
The time has come to put my theories to the test. I’ve loaded up the new version of Recount and trucked over to the target dummies in IF with a handful of level 70 pets in tow. I’ve got a devilsaur and corehound for dps, and worm for tenacity. I’m bringing the corehound because I met another bm hunter (better geared than me) who insisted that corehounds were better, and thought he proved it by dueling my corehound with his devilsaur. My corehound won every time — but I still think he’s wrong and just didn’t spec his pet ideally.
So, here are the results against a level 70 target dummy:
Max DPS
(no growl, or acid spit for worm)
Devilaur with 263 dps
Corehound with 247 dps
Worm with 182 dps
Max Threat
(growl on, +20% threat from tenacity talents factored in)
Devilsaur with 398 tps
Corehound with 369 tps
Worm with 337 tps
Some Notes
I was in my pvp gear, so lower attack power gear. I currently have +100% focus regen on the pet, but I do not have Go For the Throat (and since I wasn’t attacking, that wouldn’t matter anyway).
The dps pets had This build. The tank pet had This build.
Also note that I don’t know what the formula is for armor reduction threat. So I was unable to count that into the worms tps.
I used recount to calculate damage over a period of exactly 2 minutes. I manually counted the number of growls, knowing that each growl is 800 threat. I’ve verified that ferocity pets get healer aggro when they heal themselves by attacking, so I factored that in (thanks to a kind boomkin who dueled me to take the pet down to 5% health to test this), and we know that 2 healing is 1 threat.
The ferocity pets healed about 36/sec.
The corehound does more damage with his lava activated even though it slows down the bite rate.
The worms acid spit slowly worked up to stacked 5 times, but then stayed there for the rest of the fight (that’s -2,600 armor).
I also checked with the Devilsaur to see what spike tps could be with big red pet: 578 tps
Now that Axe is comin’ back out o’ retirement, I thought I’d run some DPS tests on Test before dusting off Vera in preparation for the patch.
The DPS numbers match the same dispersion I saw on Test just before go-live. DuoDog was 1% lower than BarneyJr. Interestingly, I found Charlotte (spider, of course) was coming in in at only 2% DPS lower than my devilsaur. Both ferocity pets were spec’d like your DPS pet.
This surprised me. The stats and talents shouldn’t have gotten a cunning pet that close to a ferocity pet, even after our gear was included. The DPS beasts had 9% more crit chance and their exotic-beastie direct-attack special ability.
The spider was spec’d thus: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=0kbcb0f0or — I also do not have Go for the Throat.
Also ran tests with a winged serpent. With the following build, Sparky was less than 0.5% behind Charlotte:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=Mf0sb0f0orz
Back t’work!
In the name of science …
I attempted to replicate the DPS experiment — I didn’t care about threat, so I didn’t try to calculate threat options.
My Ferrocity pet build was – http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=cubz0fc0zhoo
My Cunning build was – http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=ccbz00fh0rk
Results (over 5x 2min trials on a target dummy)
Devilsaur avg: 297 dps variation (+- 8dps)
Core Hound avg: 286 dps variation (+- 14dps)
Ravager avg: 284 dps variation (+- 22dps)
The huge variation between trials of the ravager really highlights the randomness of Owl’s Focus.
Also – interestingly enough Feeding Frenzy doesn’t come into play against target dummies, so it is probably a low ball estimate of DPS. Will need to test in the field.
Myr — that’s interesting — your corehound came much closer to your Devilsaur than mine did. Out of curiosity, what is your character talent spec?
Also, they’re making some pet tweaks in the next patch. Some pets getting weaker, but exotic pet talents are getting a +10% dmg to their specials…. but not Devilsaur. So it will be interesting to see if the devilsaur gets outdamaged by the Corehound or others after the patch.
Arust and I are planning to tame every pet in the game and test their dps with similar builds (at lvl65) to check it out.
My Current Spec:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/hunter/talents.html?tal=552001015150120431025313210053000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Hmm… well you do have three points in longevity — that would probably account for the corehound being closer to the devilsaur. The devilsaurs ability usually stacks up without longevity helping, but that’s just plain more damage for the corehound.
Will be interesting to see how they compare with longevity after they boost the corehounds special damage by 10%.
I have a question, I may not have looked hard enough on this site but why cant i find any info on Cunning pets? I mean they cant be that useless can they??
Anon:
They’re PvP pets, for the most part. Their spec tree means that they’ll never be raid dps pets, which is this site’s main focus. You’ll see a lot more about them on a site dedicated to PvP or possibly leveling. But for our purposes, yeah, they aren’t so hot. It’s probably worth keeping one around for BG’s and whatnot, though.
Petopia’s a great site for info on pets, if you’re interested. Talents, spec, where to tame them, etc. It won’t have any “this is better than this” info, but it’s a good starting point.