What Treachery is This?!

No, your eyes don't deceive you, that's a Beast Mastery at the bottom of that there tree!

I've decided it's high time I experience the one Hunter spec I've never tried. I leveled as Marksmanship back in vanilla WoW, and have been Survival ever since I returned during the latter part of Burning Crusade. Yes, even during its heyday, I just wasn't interested in trying Beast Mastery.

But now I feel the need for a change. I want to see just how different the BM playstyle is from that of SV. As a Survivalist, I treat my pet like a weapon: I basically fire him at the boss and let him do his thing while I focus on my shot rotation and maintaining my DoTs. Beast Masters, on the other hand (at least as my uneducated mind imagines them), treat their pets as extensions of themselves: the pet is responsible for a greater proportion of overall DPS, so keeping it alive is of much greater importance.

I purchased dual talent specialization, so my SV spec is still ready at hand for raiding (at least until I feel supremely confident with BM), but I'm excited to try my hand at some Big Red Pet wranglin'.

And seriously - Spirit Beast!

I Can't See a Damn Thing in This Tin Can!

So, after tonight's regularly-scheduled lich beating, we decided to give EoE10 a few shots, mainly just to test out our druid's new Key to the Focusing Iris - honestly, you'd think Maly would have changed his locks by now.

We walked, nay, swaggered into his domain - and were repeatedly vaporized. We gave it three good shots, making it to phase three almost flawlessly each time, but we definitely need more practice on the drake riding bit. Also, on the final attempt before our healers had to split, we encountered a bug which ejected us from our mounts, only to re-mount us a few seconds later. Needless to say, that pretty much blew any rhythm we had going (and have I mentioned how much I HATE "vehicle" combat? Unwieldy, buggy, contrived vehicle combat? Occulus, EoE, that storm giant in Zul'Drak, and yes, even Flame Leviathan can all go die in a fire).

I was, however, quite pleased with my DPS and overall performance. I consider this the first meaningful test of my spec and gear post-3.1, and it saw a moderate damage increase, and possibly even better mana efficiency than before (perhaps due to 3/3 rather than 2/4 Hunting Party).

I even managed to pick up two new pieces from Naxx: Heroes' Cryptstalker Headpiece and Claymore of Ancient Power. Very slight upgrades, but upgrades nonetheless.

And shit, they look cool.

The State of the Hunter...

...is in flux.

So, as Broxigar seems to have stabilized, and I'm able to play for more than five minutes without crashing and losing all of my keybinds, I've been able to do some very cursory testing and comparison of my DPS in the current patch build versus the live realms. My testing build looks like this, and here is a representative sample of my DPS in 3.1 (no comments on my DPS as an absolute value, please :P - this is strictly for purposes of comparison):

This is using a shot qeue of Aimed Shot, Explosive Shot, and Steady Shot, while maintaining Serpent Sting and Black Arrow. Compare with my current live build and DPS:

Here I'm using a similar shot priority, albeit with Immolation Trap to proc Lock and Load, and of course lacking Black Arrow.

A few things of note:

• My new DPS is within 75.1 of what I'm pulling now. Not an insignificant decrease, but not game-breaking.
• My Explosive Shots are critting exactly as often as before. This leads me to wonder if the change of the T.N.T. talent from a crit- to a damage increase has actually been implemented yet.
• Finally, and most troubling to me, is the fact that I ran out of mana in almost half the time on test as I did on live. Lock and Load may not account for a huge DPS boost, but without those guaranteed procs, my total damage (before I would have to go into Aspect of the Viper) is more than cut in half. (It is worth noting that some of this mana inefficiency is due to the fact that Glyph of Aimed Shot no longer reduces its cost by 20%, and I simply don't have the gold to pay the obscene prices that glyphs are demanding on the PTR.)

So, that's how things are looking right now. Any thoughts? Have I overlooked anything obvious?