Beast Mastery Mastery

For those who didn't see it, there were a couple of hotfixes affecting hunters on tuesday.  The first was changing the combat rating of Haste, which now takes 90 haste rating to get to 1%.  The second was in regards to Beast Master Hunters' Mastery, which brings me to the reason I'm writing today.

One thing that tends to annoy me, is math that isn't elegant, and this hotfix makes BM's mastery really ugly.  The hotfix is basically a 12.5% blanket buff to BM's Mastery, which doesn't seem too inelegant, but the way that works, is we now have an 18% base mastery, and gain 1% increased pet damage for every 48 8/9 of mastery rating.  Yes that's 48.888 repeating until infinity.  While I'm in general fine with the use of rational, non-terminating numbers in video games or other programming, it seems fairly silly when we can only have whole numbers of stats.

Of course, even though there's no way to write a non-terminating number in binary (or decimal, for that matter), this isn't a real problem, because in the actual game, they're still calculating mastery the same way (16% base, plus 1% per 55 stats), and then multiplying that by 1.125.  Even if that makes the problem technically possible, it's still quite inelegant.

I would like to propose, to Blizzard (all of those blizzard employees who read my blog...) that you hire me as Director of Elegant Maths.  Never again will anyone have to suffer such an ugly hotfix.

For all of you who aren't crazy people,  I went ahead and updated the stat conversions pages, both here and on the Warcraft Hunters Union. Remember, this change isn't expressed in the tooltip in game, so if you'd like to check this out yourself, you'll need to head on over to the training dummies.