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I'm faced with a dilemma with a beast mastery talant build I'm going to experiment with. I'm not going to go into the specifics how I got to this dilemma and I'm not interested in feedback on the build as a whole. This is a strict theorycrafting question.

I have two options:

  1. 18% boost to critical damage (Note: damage, not rating)
  2. 3% total increase in DPS overall

My crit % is 35-45% depending on buffs. Which of these options would give me the best return on my points spent?

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2 Answers

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Let's say your average crit chance is 40%. That means an 18% boost to your crits is an 18% boost to 40% of your total damage. I'm assuming here that when they say "30% boost to critical strike damage bonus", what they really mean is "instead of your crits doing 200% damage, they do 230%." This would be consistent with other similar talents.

18% * 40% = 7.2% -- you get a 7.2% boost from Mortal Shots. This easily beats the 3% from Improved Tracking.

To calculate the break-even point (the crit chance you'd need for the two to be worth the same), where C is your crit chance:

  • C * 0.18 = 0.03
  • C = 0.03/0.18
  • C = 0.1666...

So as long as you have higher than a roughly 17% crit chance, Mortal Shots is better.

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This is exactly the kind of answer I wanted, thank you. – Wridel Jan 20 at 20:36
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A correction to eliah's answer: as of WotLK, Mortal Shots does not affect Auto Shot. So, considering it attributes to 40 to 50% of the BM hunter's personal DPS output, the damage boost from Mortal shots is approximately half of what eliah calculated. Still, Mortal Shots has very beneficial interactions with the Relentless meta gem and a series of raid buffs (Horn of Winter, Kings, Rampage/Leader of the Pack and so on), so in my opinion 14 points in the Marksman tree remain mandatory for all hunter specs.

Edit: OK, let's start from the top. 5/5 Mortal Shots means special critical hits do 230% normal damage, 2/5 means they do 212% normal damage - an increase of 8.5% to special critical damage. Multiplying that to 0.4 (only 40% crit rate) and to 0.6 (60% of total damage coming from specials) leads to a total DPS increase of 2.04%, which, as Rilgon mentioned, is worse than the 3% provided by Improved Tracking.

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+1 to be able to make this a comment next time. =P – Nehi Feb 7 at 15:03
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 +1 as well, although I have seen no gearset where filling out Mortal Shots out-DPSes Improved Tracking for BM. Furthermore, I've seen no gearset where Improved Arcane is even worth putting points into. The commonly accepted "raid-acceptable" BM builds are 53/11/7 and 54/12/5. – Rilgon Arcsinh Feb 7 at 21:54

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