Edrawr wrote:I may be a complete and utter noob here, but could someone explain to me how pets benefit more from straight AP than agility? I know that when you mouse over the stats in your character pane, it says that pets gain x amount of your attack power, and that currently they don't gain anything directly from agility. However, doesn't agility affect a hunter's attack power, which would then affect the pet's attack power? So, agility indirectly gives pets more AP? I guess I'm just confused in that agility gives you attack power, and attack power gives you attack power, and pets get your attack power. So...it looks the same to me.
Pets get a percentage of attack power from us from our RAP (Ranged Attack Power) stat. They do not get anything at all from our Agility stat, beyond any contribution to RAP it gives us. So for a beast master, it can be better to go for straight AP gems and enchants because the pets get a greater contribution from that stat. Simply put, a BM hunter can get more "mileage" or "bang for your buck" (pun intended) from a +40 Attack Power Bright Cardinal Ruby, because they get 40 AP and the pet gets, say, 20 of that (I am not 100% solid on the actual scaling percentage, so this is just for purposes of illustration). The 20 Agility Delicate Cardinal Ruby gives us 20 AP, a little crit, a little dodge, and a little armor, so the pet would only get perhaps 10 AP from that gem.
Is that a little clearer? Really, the difference between the two winds up being rather minute. I gem and enchant for AP rather than Agi, and I ran my stats on the spreadsheet today to see if I perhaps needed to switch to gemming Agi. The result? Totally regemming would net me a whopping 2 DPS improvement. I don't know about you, but 2 DPS is not enough for me to totally redo every slot's worth of epic gems.