Legion Beta: One with the Pack and BM Focus Updates

One with the Pack

Earlier this morning, I was playing around with creating a BM build based on getting the most focus possible.  In most tiers, there are either obvious winners: Chim Shot giving 10 focus; Big Game Hunter increasing the chance to crit, thus increasing your Dire Beasts from Wild Call procs; or Stampede and aMoC simply requiring you to use the least amount of focus.  In the level 15 tier, however, we have two talents that can increase our focus.

• One with the Pack -- The chance for Wild Call to reset the CD of Dire Beast is increased by 10%.
• Way of the Cobra -- For every pet or guardian you have active, Cobra Shot deals and additional 5% damage. 
• Dire Stable -- Dire Beasts generates 4 extra focus when they attack.

Of course, for this little experiment, Way of the Cobra is out, as for the moment, we're only looking for the greatest focus. Unfortunately, for OwtP to be worth while, it would have to double the number of resets you get. Because Dire Stable doubles the focus generation from each DB hit, we need twice as many DBs to make up for it. We simply aren't going to get that when switching from a 30% chance to reset DB on crits, to 40% chance to reset DB on crits.  

BM Focus was gutted in Alpha Build 20810

If you follow the datamining sites fairly closely, you no doubt saw that there was a new build earlier this week, which included a lot of changes for the BM artifact traits.  We lost the three traits from the old tree that would have greatly affected our focus:

• REMOVED: Call of the Wild -- When Wild Call resets the Cooldown of your Dire Beast, the duration of all active Dire Beasts is increased by 8 seconds.
• REMOVED: Unleash the Hounds -- Dire Beast has a chance to summon an additional beast.
• REMOVED: Focus of the Titans -- Maximum Focus is increased by 40. 3 levels.

Focus of the Titans was replaced by a trait that will still have some effect on our focus, in AoE situations, at least:

• Focus of the Titans -- Multishot focus cost is reduced by 15. 3 levels.

Basically, it looks like BM is just a very incomplete spec so far (which I suppose is fair, considering it's still not playable on the Legion Alpha). I expect to see some pretty big changes coming for BM, perhaps returning to Cobra Shot generating focus, or greatly increasing the focus regen of Dire Beast attacks.