I’m curious to try a beastmaster as it’s one of the few builds I haven’t tried yet. I am however reluctant to try it because of frenzy totem. Is this a huge increase to your dps and thus mandatory? I’ve played druid and shaman already, and both of those specs I already used totems so I was hoping for a build that didn’t need one.
Warcry itself is pretty much mandatory because of all its great boosts. Warcry totem is very rarely used in any build.
Asking about frenzy totem, not warcry.
Totally right, completely misread that.
Well, I think about half the builds use them. Or did in the last cycle anyway. It really depends on your build, because beastmaster has many ways to sustain frenzy without them. So it’s a good boost for many of them, but they’re not mandatory.
My first ever character and build was a Shaman full minions build (Wolves, Storm and Thorn Totems, Spriggan summon and Form) with no Frenzy totem. I had no idea about the game’s mechanics (for example, I tried stacking 150% resistance on everything because I thought it would stay at 75% resistance on high level areas 
). I still was able to reach something close to 200 corruption back then.
If I was able to make that work with the incredibly shitty defences I had, I can say confidently you don’t need Frenzy Totem.
Probably not. But this is my first ever beastmaster, and I am using it. But I’m not using it to get frenzy (I took the node that converts it into applying armour shred). The only real reason I’m using it is there is no other better 5th skill. I’m a wolves build with howl of the west wind unique. Me and my companions (all wolves) have frenzy near 100% of the time anyways because of their howls.
You NEED frenzy totem with wolves because frenzy resets the cd on the wolves’ howl. Frenzy totem allows for 100% uptime on it. Frenzy, the effect, in itself is almost nothing. That isn’t why you get the totem. The totem then also buffs the wolf howl ability with 250% increased crit chance. This is huge.
A good beastmaster wolves build will look like wolves/swipe/leap slam/warcry/frenzy totem
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I already have 100% uptime on howls if I want it. I have the node on swipe that activates the companion ability of nearest companion (always a wolf). This has 2 second cooldown, and howl lasts longer (3 I believe). Plus I get incedental howls from me or my wolves killing things, or wolves hitting elites.
But, yeah, I’m using the totem for the other benefits, including the crit chance you mentioned.
My build is the same as you put, except warcry is swapped with gathering storm. My swipe has 2s cooldown, so I needed the other melee ability for in between.
My 2 cents, cd swipe is good on stuff like lone scorpion. Using it with wolves is going to be a huge damage loss since you should be spamming swipe to proc spirit wolves.
So you’re saying go with Wild Calling instead of Lupine Attunement? With Wild Calling, the max you can get is 45% chance, while Lupine is 100%. With 1 hits/sec weapon spead it would be around even, so I would need more for it to be worth. Probably would need at least 2h/s to be worth. I don’t think I’m anywhere near there right now. When I have a faster weapon and some added attack speed, I’ll try it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
The base speed for Swipe is 1.57 per second. As long as your arrack speed is above something like -37% you’re getting lmore than 1 attack per second. To get 2/sec you only need an increased attack speed of 27.3% which should be fairly trivial.
And, if your calculations are correct then anything faster than ~1 hit/sec would be an improvement & therefore “worth”. A 2 hits/sec weapon would be almost double the proc rate over time which i think is quite a bit better than “worth”.
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also notice that you can proc Wild Calling, say, 5 times in a row if you’re lucky, while with Lupine Attunement you are always restricted by 2sec cooldown.
@Llama8 Thanks for showing the math on that LLama. I’m unaware of how attack speed works in this game. I thought it was based off your weapon speed for melee attacks. So my question now is, how does the speed of your weapon factor in? And how does all the math work out in the end (with base speed, weapon speed, and any modifiers)?
Yes your weapon base attack speed is multiplicative. So it does matter a lot.
(e.g. a weapon with 1.1 Attack Rate would be a 10% more attack speed multiplier. While a weapon with 0.9 Attack Rate would be a 10% less attack speed multiplier)
All other increases to attack speed, like %inc. melee attack speed or frenzy are all additive with each other.
So it’s Base Speed of skill * Base Attack Rate of Weapon (if you are DW 2 weapons it takes the average) * all combined %Inc attack speed
Each melee attack has its own individual base speed.
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Scorpion and Storm Crows don’t use Frenzy totem and they are pretty good options for a Beastmaster. I think if you are going for DoT wolves/Raptor would also skip it (Although these minions prolly work best with crit where frenzy totem is BiS). I don’t know if they fixed the Sabertooth Flurry swipe doublecast bug because then it would be non-mandatory for a DoT Sabertooth (which again typically goes crit where Frenzy totem is BiS)
Something like a melee Beastmaster (Swipe/EQ or Tempest Strike/EQ) can manage without Frenzy totem but its always gonna outshine the other options (Fury leap, Maelstrom and Wolf Howl) in terms of damage(Although fury leap is better for utility when clearing).