Pet Skills that Benefit from RAP
Since I was testing how Scorpid Poison scales with a hunter’s Ranged Attack Power recently, I decided to extend those tests and see what other pet skills scale with RAP. My results were … mixed.
Pet skills that appear to scale with the hunter’s RAP include:
- Fire Breath
- Lightning Breath
- Scorpid Poison
Pet skills that do not appear to scale with the hunter’s RAP include:
- Bite
- Claw
- Gore
- Poison Spit
- Screech
- Thunderstomp (?)
Bite, Claw, and Gore are no surprise, and since the damage part of Screech seems to be pretty straightforward physical damage I expected that one as well. But I am rather surprised that Poison Spit doesn’t scale with RAP. I re-tested it several times just in case I was missing something, but … no, it just doesn’t seem to benefit.
I think that Thunderstomp does not scale, but I don’t feel that I can say that conclusively yet. Because of the wide range of damage with Thunderstomp and the idiotic 1 minute cooldown, I don’t have as much data on this as I’d like. Preliminary data suggests that if it does scale it does it so gently as to be worthless, but … I need more data. [Note: When I first posted this I did the math wrong and Thunderstomp was listed with the scaling skills.]
Pet skills that I am unable to test include:
- Charge: Since this skill adds to normal damage, and RAP adds to normal damage, you can easily argue that RAP adds to this skill indirectly at the very least. But since I haven’t figured out exactly how RAP causes normal damage to scale, I can’t differentiate the inputs well enough to say anything here.
- Prowl: Similarly, this skill also multiplies normal damage and so has at least an indirect benefit from RAP. But I can’t yet tease out the various effects.
- Shell Shield: Since this skill has no damage component, I didn’t bother testing it.
- Warp: Again, no damage component to test.
- Furious Howl: Theoretically the hunter’s RAP might add more damage to everyone with this buff, but that seems fairly far-fetched to me. More importantly, I failed to work out a good way to test this myself before I had to give up for the night.
Methodology:
With no talent points spent, I tamed a low-level pet with the skill I was interested in. (Low-level skills deal less damage, and I theorized that they should show a larger bump percentage-wise from RAP — if they get anything at all.) Then I stripped naked (with apologies to other players!) and had the pet use the skill on a target repeatedly while I recorded the damage. Then I put all my equipment on and had the pet attack another target of the same level and type repeatedly while I recorded that damage. I repeated this several times, then compared the damage done by the skill with and without my equipment. Note that I didn’t try to figure out exactly what the scaling factor from RAP was at this point, just whether the damage scaled with RAP or not.
9 Comments
What about Growl? Does it scale with RAP too?
Fire Breath is scaling extremely poorly, if you remeber the email I sent you a while back. It seems like Blizzard just didn’t get it done with th “owner scaled pet damage”. First they nerfed warlock imps (whose fireball was hitting absurdly high back when it scaled normally with warlocks +spelldamage), then they bummered our nice wind serpents and now the evenly absurdly high scorpid poison ticks. I guess they just don’t really know how to balance it all out…
The best info I’ve found on growl scaling is here:
http://forums.tkasomething.com/showthread.php?t=8518&highlight=growl+scaling
At post #10 there’s even a little tutorial on how to do it.
Someone: I didn’t think to include Growl or Cower. *sigh* There goes my Thursday …
Znodis: Ooh, thanks! That will save me some work figuring out how to test Growl. I can have my Thursday back!
I was also recently sent this link to the WoWWiki article on Growl. I’m going to have to compare this article to the thread and see if a consensus emerges.
Tiiaa: Yeah, I actually did some further testing with Fire Breath. (I was up until 5 am this morning.) I’m seeing scaling of about 2 damage per 100 RAP, which is just about where post-nerf scorpids are. On the other hand, what with it being AOE you could theoretically get some interesting use out of it, but …
Reverse-engineering some threat meter, here’s what I found about Growl:
– Most of theses data come from KTM’s pet module
local skillData = {
– Scaling skills
[BS["Growl"]] = {
rankLevel = { 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70},
rankThreat = {50, 65, 110, 170, 240, 320, 415, 664},
apBaseBonus = 1235.6,
apLevelMalus = 28.14,
apFactor = 5.7,
},
Now, I did a search for apLevelMalus and apBaseBonus to see what those were, and didn’t find it used elsewhere. As for apFactor, I found a formula like this one:
local baseAP, posAPBuff, negAPBuff = UnitAttackPower(”pet”);
local petAP = baseAP + posAPBuff + negAPBuff;
threat = threat + (max(0, petAP - (baseThreat + petLevel)) * skill.apFactor)
where baseThreat is the value lookup from rankThreat for the proper rankLevel (and thus I found a flaw in Omen as it assumes that you have the highest level trained on your pet because it only looks it up by pet level!).
I don’t know if this helps or if it just adds to the confusion, but from these add-ons (KTM/Omen), it looks as if Growl scales with pet attack power (and thus indirectly with hunter’s RAP).
Not the best place, but I trust you’ll read this (or maybe someone else will): where on earth (meaning, internet!), can I find a table listing pet base AP for each level? I vaguely remember seeing something like that, but I didn’t link it and I can’t seem to find it now…
Yes Growl does scale quite well with the pet’s AP, so having more RAP will increase it, though I can’t say by how much. The best proof though is with the boars and their Charge ability. It adds AP to the boar’s next attack, but since Growl is always the first thing to go off, it generates a LOT of threat while the boar has that AP buff on it. It’s even crazier if you add Trueshot Aura to it.
My hunter isn’t MM though, and my boar is still sitting at lvl 61 (damn me for testing out Outland pets all the way to 70), yet he still manages to generate at least 4k threat, which is pretty sweet.
As for the other abilities, I’m surprised about Poison Spit not appearing to scale. I thought it would seeing as it’s similar to Scorpid Poison and Fire Breath. Oh well, that’s Blizzard’s funky programming for ya. o.o;
actually Poison Spit did scale last I checked (about 3 weeks ago) but it was very very very miniscule. I think throughout my tests the damage per tick did change 4 damage per tick from least to most ap on the hunter (somewhere from 500-2k AP range).
Somone: Thanks for the reverse-engineering. :> I thought I had a table of base AP I could share with you, but it looks like I lost it somewhere.
Shinryu Masaki: Interesting point about Charge and Growl. I hadn’t thought of it like that.
Tiiaa: Yeah, I thought I remembered it scaling a tiny amount also, but I went from naked (278 RAP) to fully decked out (err .. 1400+ something) and saw no change in damage at all. I’ll re-test when I get a chance — maybe I just fooled myself.
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