Best Cataclysm Ferocity Pet DPS Build – Level 85

Reviewed 2/2/2012 Patch 4.3.2

View other WHU WoW Cataclysm hunter guides here.

This guide will detail the best dps spec for your ferocity hunter pet for MM, SV, and BM hunters at level 85 in Cataclysm. We’re assuming a raid environment where you need the best possible dps from your hunter pet. Which pet you bring to the raid will depend on what pet buff your raid needs, but if it’s ferocity, this is the spec you’ll want to use.

We’ll be covering beast mastery spec here as well, but we’ll be starting with the marksman and survival ferocity pet spec. The poor guys have four fewer pet talents, so the least we can do is let them go first.

MM and SV Ferocity Hunter Pet Spec

When you’re just looking for dps abilities for your ferocity hunter pet, the majority of the options are clear-cut. We only took Dash because we needed three talent points to get to the 2nd tier, and giving our pet the ability to close faster at least has some dps gain potential.

Likewise Bloodthirsty isn’t a dps increase, but was needed to access lower levels. The fact that it heals our ferocity pet a bit makes it nicer than the alternatives. You could just as easily grab another non-dps talent to open up the tree.

The big question with your Cataclysm ferocity pet spec is the choice between Wild Hunt and Shark Attack. The new Wild Hunt is beautifully designed and keeps our pets from capping out on focus. However, the value of this depends a lot on our pet’s focus regen (which, in turn, depends a lot on our crit chance).

For the level 85 MM or SV hunter, it looks like we’re really only getting the best use out of one rank in Wild Hunt, and the 2nd talent point is better spent in Shark Attack. We’ll have to watch this closely to see if it chances as our crit chance increases with higher tiers of raid gear than are currently available.

BM Ferocity Hunter Pet Spec

BM hunters have the luxury of picking up every possible dps talent for their ferocity pets and still having a couple talent points left over. I prefer to put these points into the movement-increasing Boar’s Speed and Charge (Charge also technically boosts damage by a tiny little amount). Combined with Dash your pet should be incredibly speedy at target-switching fights, losing less dps time to travel.

If you have issues with keeping your pet alive despite its Avoidance AoE damage reduction and Cower, you could instead make your way down to Heart of the Phoenix for the instant pet rez.

There is some debate about the value of Heart of the Phoenix: one one hand a dead pet does no dps, and on the other hand the odds of your pet dying in a raid if you’re paying the least attention to it is rare. That said, as long as you have the extra talent points — and BM does — why not have the insurance. Even if it’s used super rarely, the dps loss when you have to manually rez your pet is huge. Just be sure you wait until there’s no aoe damage happening before you trigger this, or your pet could die in one tick while you’re waiting for it’s max health to recalculate.