Hunter Talent Points

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.

• Beast Mastery (52/19/0)

  • Well, as we all know...the potential builds have changed significantly since WotLK was released. 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 80. The changes in the structure of the trees allow 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 Marksmanship tree to be viable as a raid participant. Here, I've developed a build that goes deep into the BM tree, and uses only 19 points in Marksmanship to maximize DPS. The important thing to remember here is that your pet is the focus of most of your damage. This is why I chose to invest in Endurance Training instead of Improved Aspect of the Hawk.

Disadvantages 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 (5/51/5)

  • Standard raid build with steady shot steady shot steady shot chimera shot rotation

Disadvantages 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

Out of the three Talent Trees available to a Hunter, Survival is the least chosen spec. Survival Tree is mostly considered as the PvP tree due to the many abilities that help with Survival and Melee combat. But this Talent Tree if points are spent wisely can hold its own against the other Trees in terms of DPS and damage. Survival plays on the Hunter's main stats: Agility, Attack Power and Crit Chance.

• Survival (7/13/51)
  • This build is designed to give the Hunter maximum DPS for PvE. By dodging around abilities that increase Hunter's melee capabilities, which would be useless in PvE, this build is able to give the Hunter the three main stats needed by a Hunter. Because of Lightning Reflexes this build is optimal for high agility Hunters, and this in turn giving more Attack Power and Crit Chance to the Hunter. With Careful Aim and Hunter vs. Wild also giving more Attack Power to the Hunter these Talents in turn improve the effect of Expose Weakness which is activated when a Hunter Crits. So that the Hunter crits more to activate Expose Weakness and deal out more damage points have been put in Lethal Shots, Killer Instinct and Survival Instincts aswell as the possible +10% crit chance ability of Master Tactician.

Disadvantages of Survival

Expose Weakness is now only applicable to to the Hunter. Also, you may notice a slight decline in your damage compared to other builds because it takes more of an effort to be a good Survival DPS Hunter.

Which build is best for what purpose?

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.