Beast Mastery Hunters are expert trackers and form tight bonds with the animals of the wild, training great hawks, cats, bears, and many other beasts to fight alongside them.. They enhance their own abilities by attuning themselves to the feral aspects of these creatures. More than the other Hunter specs, Beast Masters make an excellent team with their chosen animal.
This guide will show you how to do as much damage as possible, in a raid setting with your Beast Mastery spec.
Beast Mastery Hunter DPS Builds
Glyphs:
Glyphs come in three varieties, Prime, Major and Minor. One of each can be obtained at levels 25, 50, and 75, three total of each at level 75. Glyphs are learned permanently and can be swapped in and out with either Vanishing powder (up to level 81) or Dust of Disappearance (level 81+.) This allows you to change your glyphs as the situation changes.
Prime glyphs enhance core aspects of your class and generally provide the greatest benefit of the three types.
Major Glyphs, while not quite as powerful as Prime Glyphs, are still useful and continue to provide a myriad of benefits.
Minor Glyphs often times provide small quality of life improvements or visual changes, such as the glyph of Feign Death, which reduces the cooldown of that ability by 5 seconds.
Mandatory glyphs (below) are clearly the best in class and really are the only worthwhile ones to use.
Prime Glyphs:
- Arcane Shot – Mandatory
- Kill Command – Mandatory
- Kill Shot – Mandatory
Major Glyphs:
- Bestial Wrath
- Disengage
- Trap Launcher
- Mending
- Raptor Strike
- Ice Trap
Minor Glyphs:
- Revive pet – for those rare times when you absolutely, positively have to have your pet back.
- Feign Death
- Pick one
Rotation:
Here are your highest priority abilities.
- Hunter’s Mark – Keep active on target
- Serpent Sting – Keep active on target
- Kill Command – On Cooldown
- Kill Shot – When target reaches 20%
- Arcane Shot – With extra focus
- Cobra Shot – When low on focus
Keep your Hunter’s Mark and Serpent Sting applied to the target at all times. Your highest priority damage ability is kill command, and then kill shot when a mob is at 20% health or lower. Arcane shot is used to avoid capping your focus, but should only be used to around 40 focus so that kill command can continue to be used on Cooldown.
Cobra shot is used to regenerate focus
AoE Rotation
- Multi-Shot
- Explosive Trap
Your primary damage for multi-target fights comes from explosive traps and Multi-Shot, as well as a pet with an AoE ability. A multi-target rotation of Multi-Shot and Explosive Trap should only be used in situations of more than 4 or 5 mobs, otherwise continue your single target rotation.
Cooldowns
- Bestial Wrath
- Fervor
- Rapid Fire
Stat Priorities:
Agility > 8% Ranged Hit > Critical > Mastery > Haste
- Agility increases your attack power and critical chance, and is your primary damage dealing stat. In your case Ability is by far your best stat.
- Hit rating increases your chance to hit with attacks. A hit rating of 8% makes it so that your special abilities will no longer miss on bosses.
- Critical rating increases your chance to critically hit with attacks.
- BM Hunter Mastery increases the damage done by their pets.
- Haste reduces cast time for abilities, makes you shoot faster, and increases focus regeneration speed
Reforging
When reforging gear, it’s important that you look to reforge from your least effective stat into the most effective for whatever gear goal you are currently aiming for. See our stat priority list for more information.
8% Ranged Hit > Critical
When reforging look first for 8% hit rating before maximizing your critical strike chance. On any gear without critical already present, reforge the weakest stat, Mastery and Haste, into critical rating.
Gems:
If you can’t afford the new (as of 4.3) epic gems then dropping down one level is not a big DPS loss and you will save a lot of gold.
- Red – Delicate Queen’s Garnet/ Delicate Inferno Ruby – +50/40 Agility
- Yellow – Deadly Lava Coral/ Deadly Ember Topaz – +25/20 Agi & Crit
- Blue – Glinting Shadow Spinel/ Glinting Demonseye – +25/20 Agi & Hit (even less useful if you’re already at 8% Hit.)
- Meta – Agile Shadowspirit Diamond – +54 Agi, +3% crit damage
Unless a socket bonus offers lots of agility, it’s more effective to ignore socket bonuses and gem for pure agility than for anything else. Figure at least +20 Agility per gem slot in order to gem for anything else.
Enchantments:
Agility is King. Agility is so much better than the other stats that the cheaper Wrath enchants outperform the expensive Cataclysm enchants. Profession specials are not included in the list. Each profession has an ability that, on average, offers about +80 Agility. As of the release of 4.3 and the introduction of Epic gems, Blacksmithing pulls ahead. It allows you to slot two +50 Agility gems (one wrist, one glove) for +20 gain over the other profs.
If you don’t have the gold for some of these enchants then either earn more gold or go for a lesser enchant that’s as close to Agility as possible.
- Helm: Arcanum of Ramkahen
- Shoulders: Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal
- Cloak: Enchant Cloak – Major Agiltiy
- Chest: Enchant Chest – Peerless Stats
- Bracers: Enchant Bracer – Agility
- Gloves: Enchant Gloves – Major Agility
- Belt: Ebonsteel Belt Buckle
- Leggings: Dragonscale leg Armor
- Boots: Enchant Boots – Major Agility / Enchant Boots – Assassin’s Step
- 2H Weapon: Enchant 2H Weapon – Mighty Agility
- Ranged: Flintlocke’s Woodchucker – Gnomish X-Ray Scope
Beast Mastery DPS Build
(view this build here)
- Pretty much the only optional talents are Efficiency and Sic’em (recommended, not required) in the Marksmanship tree. That potentially frees up 5 points to move around into things that better suit your team, play style, or situation.
- One example is to drop a point in Sic’em and put it into Pathing (Survival tree) for the Haste.
- Using one or two of those points to put into Improved Mend Pet, for example, might be a good idea. Especially if your pet ever does any light tanking duties. Another option is to drop only one point from Sic’em to put into Improved Mend Pet.
If you need the gold to pay for repairs, gear, potions, gems, enchants, mounts, 310% flying speed, pets, frivolous vanity gear, etc., then take a look at our gold guide or a far more extensive gold (and more) guide: WoW Crusher.
Our class guides for whichever class you’re playing:
Death Knights – Druid – Hunter – Mage – Paladin
Priest – Rogue – Shaman – Warlock – Warrior
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