Hunter loot!

Threads on the forums arguing over whether a ferals should get melee weapon priorities over hunter are fairly common. One popped up recently that got more involved and ran longer than most.

I'll state up front my answer to this question, but that's not really what's at issue here. I'm going to be mostly discussing weapon scaling. My answer, and indeed the ONLY answer to this question, is a simple one:
If hunters receive priority over rogues and warriors for ranged weapons: YES.
If nobody receives priority:  No

That's all there is to that issue in my book.

But people got to talking about situations in which they'd pass, and discussing for whom the weapon would be a bigger upgrade.  Time for MATH.

Fap fap fap
It's well known that feral scales well with weapons (and practically nothing else).  Predatory Strikes for any other class would read "increases the damage of your melee weapon by 5/10/15%", and in fact it scales better and better the further our weapons get from their base 54.8 DPS.  Go back to our old standby Terestian's Stranglestaff (a weapon I love dearly and still have banked), it's a 10% weapon damage increase.  A Heroic Oathbinder, the difference is close to 17%.  And then raid buffs actually affect our weapon DPS as well.  Take a Distant Land, the most common weapon used by raiding ferals right now.  It's 294.6 DPS base, but apply Predatory Strikes, Heart of the Wild, and whichever flavour of the 10% AP raid buff you have, and you've turned it into a 403 DPS monster.  That's 37% more DPS than base - and this is scaling that's mostly unavailable to other classes.  A warrior's 294 DPS weapon doesn't change in base damage because you have an enhancement shaman in the raid.

Then ALL of our damage also scales with this weapon damage, because everything's based on AP.  Rip?  30% of your weapon damage.  Rake?  18% of it.  FB?  35% (the rogue analog, Eviscerate, also gets 35% AP as best I can tell from their spreadsheets, but none of the actual weapon damage).  Of course, all of this ends up coming at the cost of not scaling well with any other gear.  That's the price we pay for FAP - and that's a whole other post that I promise to write one day.  But what are the actual numbers?

I got splinters in these paws!
Well, for this as usual I turn to Rawr and Toskk's.  I ran a couple profiles in Rawr - the best-in-slot pre-raid set, and my own raid gear.  Between an Orca-Hunter's Harpoon and a Distant Land, in full raid buffs, for the pre-raid set, the difference was around 900 DPS, depending on whether I reoptimized the sets around the two weapons (from available pre-raid gear) or not.  For my own profile, the difference was 1080 DPS.

Holy crap.


Of course, hunters on the forums wouldn't believe it, so I verified with Toskk's calc, and ran some dummy tests to confirm the results.  Each test was 5 minutes (apply FFF, stop when it drops), two berserk cycles, alone, self-buffed.  I sadly don't have a 232 weapon anymore, having vendored my very boring-looking Lotrafen some months ago, but I kept my cooler-looking Journey's End (226) and Twin's Pact (245), so I used those.  Imagine that an Orca-Hunter's will fall in between the two.  Here are my numbers:

Journey's End, Toskk's predicts DPS = 6382.2101, Rawr predicts 6523
Actual DPS: 5772 (90% of Toskk's prediction)

Twin's Pact, prediction: DPS = 6752.1063 (+370), Rawr: 6915 (+392)
Actual DPS: 6224 (92% of Toskk's) (+452)

Distant Land, prediction: DPS = 7188.2147 (+806, +436), Rawr: 7365 (+842, +450)
Actual DPS: 6880 (95% of Toskk's)  (+1108, +656)

A little RNG variation, and I re-did a couple runs because of mistakes, bad streaks, or very good ones.  But it shows that the INCREASES the calculators predicted were, if anything, lowballs, unless I just had a particularly bad RNG spread between the runs - each subsequent run favoured over the previous.  Even controlling for my deviation from the original run's 90% of prediction, I end up with the second run at +442, and the third at +1050.

The competition
So what does a hunter get from a melee weapon, anyway?  Let's find out.
I imported our top hunter DPS, who's in pretty comparable gear to myself, into Rawr, but their prime theorycrafting tool - their version of Toskk's - is Femaledwarf.com, so I gave that a try too. 

Both reported that Distant Land was about an 850 DPS upgrade.

... over an EMPTY SLOT.

Assuming you have a feral druid upgrading from, say, a 245 Twin's Pact to a 264 Distant Land, to be an approximately equal DPS upgrade for a survival hunter, the hunter would have to be rocking Lightning Giant Staff.  No, that's not a mistake.  That's for srs.

No, DRUID loot
The blindingly obvious conclusion from the two simulators and the test runs is simple.  If you do item priority in your guild based on largest upgrade, every single hunter gets to wait for every druid to grab a weapon, even if the ilevel gap is enormous.  No question, no arguments, the difference is ridiculous.

As I said up front, if your guild doesn't award priority on anything, then anything goes.  Mine doesn't, and I had to dump an unholy ton of points on my Distant Land, but that's cool - I knew I would have to, and I'd been saving them.  And so should you, if you can't be guaranteed priority, because as you can see, there is absolutely no single piece of gear that will grant you even one third of the DPS increase that you'll get from a single raid tier's worth of weapon upgrade.