With a fine-tooth comb

After picking up a nice cloak from Ulduar, I found myself over hit cap and worried that Mijikai was getting more focus than she needed. So I took a look at our Heroic Auriaya kill to get a better idea of what could change.

I initially meant to keep an eye on Mijikai’s focus myself during the fight, to see how she was handling focus, but ended up concentrating too much on the actual fight to do so. Instead, I picked apart the WMO log to try to extrapolate the information I wanted.

First things first: I had to figure out how much focus Mijikai used overall. According to the log, she used Bite (25 focus) 272 times during the fight, which ran 546 seconds (9:06), effectively once every two seconds. She used Monstrous Bite (20 focus) 60 times during the fight, effectively once every nine seconds.  Doing a bit of math gave me the final number: 8000 focus used over the entire fight.

The next part was slightly easier: figuring out how much focus Mijikai had gained. I have two points each in Bestial Discipline and Go for the Throat, netting Mijikai 43 focus every 4 seconds, and 50 focus every time I get a ranged crit. With a total of 94 ranged crits during the fight (Volley doesn’t count), this all added up to Mijikai gaining 10,560 focus during the fight.

Big, impressive numbers overall…until you realize that means Mijikai wasted over 2500 focus.

Now, some extra focus is preferable. I don’t know exact numbers, but you want your pet to have a little bit more than necessary to allow for a fuller focus bar during the fight. Better too much focus than too little. But 2500 extra focus goes beyond that rule of thumb. By a lot.

So I started working out alternate situations. I switched up my talents on paper and did the math to see how much focus Mijikai would have gained with different combinations during that fight:

BD 2/2, GftT 1/2   –   219 wasted focus
BD 1/2, GftT 2/2   –   1716 wasted focus
BD 1/2, GftT 1/2   –   633 focus short
BD 0/2, GftT 2/2  –   24 focus short

The last one seemed worth trying at first – yes, I’d be short focus, so Mijikai would do less damage, but that would give me two talent points to slide around to give me more damage. It could work out – until I realized that I needed both points in BD for my talent distribution to work. I wasn’t willing to take the risk and put the liberated points into talents I didn’t need, so I scrapped that idea.

That leaves the first one as my only current choice – two points in BD to keep my BM build solid, a point in GftT to help keep the focus up, and that will give me an extra point to rearrange. Since I’m over hit cap, I’m going to yank a point from Focused Aim to put somewhere else as well. Now the question is where?

There were three  accessible damage talents that stood out to me as I poured through the talent tree: Cobra Strikes (currently at 1/3), Improved Stings (0/3), and Improved Tracking (0/3). I picked through each one, using the Auriaya log as a base, to figure out which would benefit me the most.

Cobra Strikes: Maxing this out would give my Arcane, Steady and Kill shot crits a 60% of having Mijikai’s next two special attacks hit. Since Mijikai uses Bite 450% more often than Monstrous Bite, I used that for my calculations to be on the safe side.

I had 32 qualifying crits for Cobra Strikes during the fight. At a 60% rate, 19 of them would proc Cobra Strikes, and theoretically 8 of them already did (from my one point in the talent). That leaves 11 potential additional procs, equalling 22 Bite crits.

Bite did average damage of 727 per hit, and 1548 per crit. Doing the math (which I won’t bore you with here) indicated that the two extra points in Cobra Strikes would have resulted in 18,062 extra damage, an overall increase of 0.8%.

Improved Stings: Two points in this talent would increase my Serpent Sting damage by 20%. This calculation was easy – Serpent Sting did 58,719 damage, so the 20% results in a 11,743 damage increase. That would make it an increase of 0.6% overall.

Improved Tracking: Putting two points in this talent would increase all of my ranged damage against the tracked creature types (Beast, Demon, Dragonkin, Elemental, Giant, Humanoid, Undead) by a straight 2%. In the Auriaya fight, my ranged attacks did 1,146,721 damage to the targets, which were a Giant and her Beasts. Two points in Improved Tracking would have increased that by 22,934 – an overall increase of 1.1%.

At first glance, it looks like Improved Tracking would give me the highest damage output. The problem is, it wouldn’t be consistent. While there are mods out there to help me keep the correct tracking up (I normally track mining nodes), there are still a good number of mobs out there that aren’t an affected type. The Deconstructor and even Yogg-Saron himself are two good examples of that. So my damage would go up on many mobs, but not all.

In the end, it looks like a toss-up between Improved Tracking and Cobra Strikes. Due to my lazy and ultimately stubborn nature, I’m going to max out Cobra Strikes and hope that Mijikai doesn’t end up focus starved after all. It just seems like a better bet to increase my damage consistently than only in certain situations. 🙂

Tags: game mechanics, hunter, pets, raiding, theorizing