Hunter builds
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| Class races: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Quests: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Abilities: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Trainers: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Talents: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Talent builds: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Tactics: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Armor sets: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Starting a: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| PvE guide: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| PvP guide: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
| Useful macros: | Dk | Dr | Hu | Ma | Pa | Pr | Ro | Sh | Wl | Wr |
Contents |
Overview
Hunters are known for their pets, their long-range, sustained DPS, and their traps.
The three trees of a Hunter are all viable for a hunter to choose for leveling, player versus player combat, or end game raids or instances, but since only two of the three trees allows for the complete use of talent points the player is forced to cross trees, hybridizing into other talent trees. The three trees all have options to offer for utility, open DPS, and survivability.
Beast Mastery
Beast Mastery offers the highest potential personal DPS in the game for hunters in the raiding environment. This statement is only true if said hunter can use his pet effectively and understands the importance of ranged attack speed in rotation. BM is also the fastest leveling build, as uptime is limited only by the health of your high-armor pet.
Builds
Well, as we all know...the potential builds have changed significantly since the patch. The builds are much more varied than ever before. Without having gone into all the math to figure out exactly how much damage can be caused by each talent, I've put together what seems to be a logical build for level 70 since this is where the cap remains until the release of WotLK. The changes in the structure of the trees allows us Hunters to invest more heavily in the BM tree and still maximize our damage. With previous patches, a BM hunter needed to have significant points in the Marksman tree to be viable as a raid participant. Here, I've developed a build that goes deep into the BM tree, and uses only eight point into the focus aim which gave a moderate boost to your attack power.
Flaws of Beast Mastery
A large part of the Hunter's damage is imbued in the pet, who must be alive in order to use Bestial Wrath/Beast Within. This is frequently seen as a fatal flaw to the build. This is especially the case in arenas, where your pet will often be the main target of the opponent. Seeing as it does not scale with resilience and only very little with your armor and stamina, it makes an easy target which severely cripples a BM hunter. In raids, the hunter alone should have no trouble keeping their pet alive with Mend Pet and careful control of the pet's actions (treat your pet as a player, do YOU draw aggro from the Main Tank?). Should the pet die, the Beast Master can recover quickly and cheaply with Improved Revive Pet. Nevertheless, Beast Mastery play-style requires a significant amount of diligence in managing the pet's actions and threats on top of managing threats to the hunter.
Marksmanship
This strength of this tree lies in burst damage. Your shots are far slower than that of the BM hunter, but you hit quite a bit harder. This tree is also the land of PVP talents.
MM raid build
standard raid build with steady shot steady shot steady shot chimera shot rotation 5/51/5
Flaws of Marksmanship
This is a PvP Talent tree, yet the best Raid Specs all include at least 10 points from this tree. A design flaw yes, but as far as any actual flaws, the core Marks Builds have less sustained DPS and are less mana efficient than BM builds.
Survival
Due to the fact that Trueshot Aura does not scale with gear and Marks DPS seems to falter on longer fights, Survival is often touted as "The Alternative to BM." This tree is about Agility, which always has been the PRIMARY Hunter Stat.
Survival hybrid maxium ap build
This a build to get the maxium ap from talents such as carefull aim, expose weekness, and aspect mastery. [1]
Flaws of Survival
Every raid only needs one. This spec is very useful, and has relatively high DPS (although BM hunters will put you to shame- MOST of the time), but the highlights disappear if you are the SECOND Surv Hunter in a raid. Expose Weakness does not stack, and the Surv Hunter with the Highest Agility in the raid is the ONLY one that needs to be there.
Summary
The most important thing to realize about hunters is that you can choose any build and find success with it. As long as you know how to play your class well, you can get invited to raids as just about any spec with any intended purpose. Your class' job is to DPS. All the specs do this in a different way with different amounts of efficiency and greatness.
Which build is best for ___?
Heroics
In heroic instances a hunter is required to CC targets, forcing them to either excel at kiting, or spec into a build with redundancy in case a trap is resisted. The main talents that give this are Readiness and Wyvern Sting, and to a lesser extent Scatter Shot. Note that having Trap Mastery can make things easier, but a trap being resisted or breaking is the biggest danger and it doesn't help with that at all.
Raiding
Beast Mastery is the first and foremost DPS raiding build. In fights where Pet Survivability is really difficult (and with higher gear levels), Survival becomes about equal. Survival scales well with the Agility your gear has on it, increasing your personal DPS very much through high Crit percentages and high Attack Power. If Surv Hunter with 800 Agility and a BM Hunter were in the same raid on Leotheras, but the BM Hunter's pet dies, and sometimes more than once, the advantage of Surv on that fight becomes clear. While Marks is also viable at high gear levels, Survival is THE alternative to BM.
PvP
The Hardcore PVP Hunters are generally Marks/Surv and may or may not take the health talent from the BM tree. Marks was designed as the PVP tree for hunters, and the design holds true, as it offers more burst DPS, less crit-reliant DPS, and the very utile Silencing Shot and Scatter Shot. Improved Concussive Shot is also a must-have for PvP.
Solo DPS
Beast Mastery and Marksman builds are both very viable soloing specs. Survival not completely bad, but killing can be slower, since you miss out on the Improved Multishot damage. Scatter shot is also very useful in soloing.
Specifics
To find specific opinions on the location of each and every talent point (or to provide your own), please visit Hunter Talent Discussion. Dramatically different builds than the ones listed in this article may be added to this article in the same style and neat format.
Level 80 Builds
- Until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is actually released, all talent info is subject to change, especially over level 70.
Marksmanship
- http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cE0hzZceAcRhzMxoguVoc (Snowlord of Thrall)
Beast Mastery
- http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cEb0zxxRiuMest0xVbM (Fitz of Terenas)
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