If you thought the BM shot rotation was boring before, wait ’til you replace Glyph of Bestial Wrath…

It affects the hunter only, and translates into a 2-3% dps boost. Right now BM hunters — if really well played — ends up within about 10% of a MM or SV hunter. In other words: if your raid is hitting enrage timers and you’re BM, then it’s partially your fault.

Kylandis: My arguement for why BM shouldn’t be equal raid dps as MM or SV is that BM has the simplest rotation, the easiest to play, is the best in solo (even with a raid build, you are amazing at soloing), most mana efficient, and excellent at pvp. The only thing MM and SV hunters are better at than BM is raid dps and complexity.

I suspect that if Blizz adjusted BM so that it wasn’t much easier to play, phenomenal at soloing with raid spec, and all the other advantages – you would hate your new BM spec, because it would be nothing like it is right now. However if that change happened so BM was more or less equal to the other specs in all other regards, I’d be fine with it being equal in dps too.

As long as BM is better than the other specs is almost every regard, it’s hard to justify making it just as good in that one last (very important) regard too – especially since dual spec lets you keep BM for warm fuzzies while you play MM for dealing death.

Priests and warrior can easily have 3 viable raid specs – but no pure dps class has 3 viable *dps* specs.

I agree with this statement from Pike. The thing about the BM tree is that it’s like speccing in the Feral tree for Druids. I know some people have said that you have great solo capabilities and potentially great pvp abilites and potentially good pve abilities in the BM tree, but the problem is that you can’t have all 3 at once, because you only have a limited amount of Talent points, and you have to make sacrifices and tradeoffs to make your BM Hunter good at something, and these sacrifices force you to be not quite so good (and even bad) at the other things you potentially could be in the BM tree.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Hunters to have 3 viable raid specs, as long as they’re pretty close to each other in power. Now if BM were to be tweaked so that it’d have a competitive Raid spec, then I wouldn’t that spec to solo or PVP better than MM or SV specs (that would be overpowered), BUT I can also say that it probably wouldn’t take Blizzard all that much work to make BM a competitive raid spec. At least… more competitive than it is right now.

I don’t care if BM remains the lowest DPS raid spec as long as it’s competitive (not markedly inferior the way it is now) to SV and MM hunters. And I agree with Nakaya_Kilrogg. I heard that Ghostcrawler said that BM had lower DPS because it was “too easy to play”. Well let’s just sit back a minute and think about whose fault it is that BM is too easy to play. Is it us the Players, who didn’t design or tweak or make BM too easy to play… or is it Blizzard, the developers who made BM too easy?

Well obviously it’s Blizzard, who in fact CAN easily change the way BM works and add another shot or ability that has to be timed carefully, or change an existing ability or two to add extra complexity.

And to Nakaya’s list of classes with 3 viable raid specs, I have to add ROGUES, who have -3- viable PVE DPS specs, and who like Hunters, are also a pure DPS class.

Seriously, well played BM PVE DPS is so close to being competitive right now, that a few more tweaks from Blizzard and it could easily be made competitive. Like I said, I don’t want BM to have the best of all worlds, I just think it’s irrational to think that it shouldn’t have a viable PVE Raid spec just because it can be good at some things MM and SV can’t be as good at. MM and SV Hunters can also be good at things BM can’t be good at, and they still have viable raid builds, so I don’t see why BM can’t be more viable.

Let any hunter use/tame any pet (get rid of the “exotic” classification), and let the 51 point BM talent be the 4 (maybe buff it to 6?) pet talent points.

The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.

I don’t know if that means hunter damage, or hunter and pet damage. If it’s just hunter damage and it includes all shots, that’s roughly a 5% dps boost. If it includes the pet, that’s the full 10%.

It seems like that puts a well-played BM hunter right in line with a well-played SV or MM.

Either that, or make BM (more) tank-viable. Lord knows my server could use a few more tanks.