Wild Hunt vs. Shark Attack for Survival

So far, choosing pet talents has been pretty clear cut for the Ferocity Tree. Come 3.1, however, this is not quite so clear.

Between Wild Hunt and Shark Attack, there are four fresh spaces to spend talent points, each requiring 15 points in pet talents. For Survival and Marksmanship Hunters, this leaves one point. For Beast Mastery, all four can be taken, but there are some significant costs to doing so.

For Survival, that one point is best spent in Wild Hunt. The scaling benefit from Wild Hunt outstrips Shark Attack's 3% damage increase right around 2500 hunter attack power.

Here's an illustration:


The blue is the pet DPS you're likely to see now, based on your attack power, although this chart does not include the bonus from Hunter vs. Wild (which grants 30% of your Stamina to your pet as Attack Power). Currently, my 1050 Stamina grants 315 Attack Power to Imeut, granting an additional ~22.5DPS - yours is probably similar. This chart does include the benefit from the two piece set bonus, but the results aren't drastically different either way.

The issue with taking this talent point, however, is that you'll lose some pretty substantial benefits from elsewhere in the tree. This build, with Rabid and Heart of the Phoenix is a nice one, but something has to give in order to fetch that last point in Shark Attack. I'll go with this build, exchanging the points in Rabid for Spider's Bite and Call of the Wild. For a spec without Improved Mend Pet or Improved Revive Pet, HotP is tough to pass up - even if your pet is a measly 14% of your DPS... I'll still be doing some DPS tests to see whether the loss of Rabid is made up for in Call of the Wild.

I imagine the same holds true for BM if you don't choose to go for the 51-point talent, Beast Mastery - but, given the shiny new talents, why do that? I'll take a closer look at the scaling with Beast Mastery's talents in the next few days, but I'm guessing it will be similar.