I need some help with Beast Master

[OneHunterOneMoon 0]

Many people claim that Beast Master is so easy to play that you can do it while smashing your head on the keyboard and still do well. I guess I'm mentally slow because I feel like I'm doing something completely wrong when playing Beast Master, and I'm not fully sure what I am doing wrong in the first place.

I understand the concept that you want to keep Barbed Shot with three stacks on your pet as long as possible. I understand that you want to refresh Barbed Shot, if you have charges, around with 1.5s to 2s left. I think I understand that if your stacks fall off, you want to hold Barbed Shot charge until you are 5 seconds away from getting your 2 charge back.

Cast Kill Command on cool-down. Okay. Cast ChimS on cool-down. Okay. AMOC on cool-down? Try to line it up with BW if you can? Okay

The way I have been using Cobra Shot, is casting it twice in a row and then by that time Kill Command is close to being off cool-down and I get ready to use Kill Command.

I'm sorry if I'm not explaining things the best way. Maybe posting my logs would be better help to finding out what I'm doing wrong. Not really sure how to read logs myself. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/whisperwind/memberry

NOW the reason why I even bring this up. I've been practicing on target dummies and the best I can do is 9.6K. Yes, I understand target dummy not the best place to gauge how much DPS you do. Here is what has me scratching my head. I found an addon called GSE where people make these rotation cast sequence "lazy macros". So I grab the addon on curse and then grab one of these "lazy macros" for Beast Master. Pretty much what the "lazy macro" does is that it just willy nilly spams your abilities.

So after comparing my manual play versus using this GSE addon and the macro I grabbed from their forums for about a week now. I am doing about 600 DPS less when playing manual compared to using the GSE addon and macro combo. Why is this macro that randomly spams your abilities willy nilly while not giving two shits about Barbed Shot stacks performing better than me whom is actually trying to keep three stacks of Barbed Shot up? I've come to the conclusion that there must be something I'm doing wrong and I honestly just can't pinpoint it.

Sorry for super long post. ANY help would be awesome.  

[Khallid 110]

Don't pay attention to the meme about face keyboard play. There was a time several expansion ago when that was actually possible, but it's not the case anymore. So it's nothing more than a meme.

Hmmmm, well the log you posted doesn't have anything dramatic that jumps out as being wrong. The parses look fine. You died on Zul so that parse is meaningless too.

10k or so on a dummy is not bad. You're not flasked, you're not using potions, food, you don't have the attack power buff from warriors or the increased damage debuff from monks. You may or may not have Bloodlust if you used it yourself.

I don't have a lot of detailed information about the lazy macro stuff. Generally speaking, it should not do more dps, so it may just be RNG, or you're switching gear between tests, but another possibility is that spamming the macro has less delay than thinking what you need to press, so you may end up simply casting more abilities that way. I'm just speculating though, since I would assume that the lazy macro can't manage focus and could end up stuck trying to hit Cobra Shot while other abilities are ready. I don't know enough about it.

Keeping up the barbed shot stacks is not a massive dps gain in single target. Your pet's autoattacks are only about 10% of your dps, so even screwing up Barbed Shot badly would result in about 3% total dps difference (you would still have 1 stack most of the time if you screwed up badly). Frenzy stacks are much more noticeable when cleaving.

Edited September 10, 2018 by Khallid

[OneHunterOneMoon 0]

10 hours ago, Khallid said:

Don't pay attention to the meme about face keyboard play. There was a time several expansion ago when that was actually possible, but it's not the case anymore. So it's nothing more than a meme.

Hmmmm, well the log you posted doesn't have anything dramatic that jumps out as being wrong. The parses look fine. You died on Zul so that parse is meaningless too.

10k or so on a dummy is not bad. You're not flasked, you're not using potions, food, you don't have the attack power buff from warriors or the increased damage debuff from monks. You may or may not have Bloodlust if you used it yourself.

I don't have a lot of detailed information about the lazy macro stuff. Generally speaking, it should not do more dps, so it may just be RNG, or you're switching gear between tests, but another possibility is that spamming the macro has less delay than thinking what you need to press, so you may end up simply casting more abilities that way. I'm just speculating though, since I would assume that the lazy macro can't manage focus and could end up stuck trying to hit Cobra Shot while other abilities are ready. I don't know enough about it.

Keeping up the barbed shot stacks is not a massive dps gain in single target. Your pet's autoattacks are only about 10% of your dps, so even screwing up Barbed Shot badly would result in about 3% total dps difference (you would still have 1 stack most of the time if you screwed up badly). Frenzy stacks are much more noticeable when cleaving.

Should there be a focus percentage that I should try to never go above during fights? 90%, 80%, 50%? I've been finding out recently that the more time I spent hovering around say 20% focus max, which means I'm casting more Cobra Shots, the higher my DPS seems to be. Where as before, I was trying to pool my focus and stay around 60% focus.

[Khallid 110]

13 hours ago, OneHunterOneMoon said:

Should there be a focus percentage that I should try to never go above during fights? 90%, 80%, 50%? I've been finding out recently that the more time I spent hovering around say 20% focus max, which means I'm casting more Cobra Shots, the higher my DPS seems to be. Where as before, I was trying to pool my focus and stay around 60% focus.

I don't have a definitive answer, but it is probably better to keep your focus low most of the time. Our focus regen seems to be much higher than it was in Legion, and GCDs are so slow at low Haste that we can't burn focus very fast either. My logs say that I often cap focus when using Aspect of the Wild, so focus should be low when activating that.

You're supposed to pool focus for Bestial Wrath, but that's about it. No reason to be above 30 if Bestial Wrath is not about to come off cooldown.

[johnnycool 0]

This is what you should be getting Quick Sim

Edited September 17, 2018 by johnnycool