Beast Mastery Hunter Playstyle and Rotation Guide

• Pack Leader
• Dark Ranger

General Playstyle

The general Playstyle of Beast Mastery revolves around the usage of Barbed Shot and Kill Command, both of which have 2 charges. In general you try to maximize the amount of casts without wasting their cooldowns by overcapping. Keep in mind that there are several Talents that reduce the cooldown of either of those abilities, but this “problem” mostly gets solved passively during your normal rotation.

Multi Target

The previous existing Multi-Shot got replaced by Wild Thrash, which functions like a baseline AoE version of Kill Command, providing the Beast Cleave / Kill Cleave buffs, while also doing a bunch of damage. Simply by pressing Wild Thrash on cooldown, you can make sure that you have full uptime of Beast Cleave and therefore your AoE.

Try to have your pets hit targets in the middle of the pack to maximize the number of targets hit by Beast Cleave since it only has a short range around your pets. The same goes your abilities that cleave baseline, like Wailing Arrow or Wild Thrash.

When talented into Master Handler, you want to make sure that you apply Barbed Shot on different targets, to increase the cooldown reductions gained by the talent.

Cooldowns

Bestial Wrath serves as your bread and butter cooldown in all the Hunter Builds. Your goal is always to maximize its uptime. Bestial Wrath itself does a huge chunk of damage.

It also procs the Capstone Talents of both Pack Leader and Dark Ranger, giving us access to an even bigger burst of damage. Since it is on a set 30 second timer, we want to use it as often as possible with minimal delay.

Pack Leader and Stampede

With Pack Leader your goal is to summon as many empowered Beasts as possible. This can be achieved in two separate ways.

On one hand you have the “passive” iteration of Howl Of The Pack Leader, that is on a 30 second timer. This timer is reduced every time you use either Cobra Shot, or Kill Command. Once the timer hits 0, your next Kill Command will do bonus damage and summon the next Beast in the rotation.

On the other hand you have the “active” iteration of Howl Of The Pack Leader, which automatically triggers when you press Bestial Wrath, making your next Kill Command summon the next Beast in the rotation.

The timer based iteration is completely separate, and unaffected by the active part. If you receive Howl Of The Pack Leader by pressing Bestial Wrath, the timer will continue to tick down as usual, until the next Beast is ready to be summoned.

This interaction also allows for multiple instances of Howl Of The Pack Leader to be active at the same time, allowing you to summon the next 2 Beasts of the rotation with the same Kill Command! This will naturally happen throughout your rotation, but can either be enforced or prevented by altering your rotation.

Dark Ranger and Black Arrow

While playing the Dark Ranger Hero Talents, Black Arrow turns into a very high priority spell for both Single Target and AoE.

Withering Fire is now active for the first 10 seconds during Bestial Wrath. During this time, Bestial Wrath turns into Wailing Arrow and allows you to cast it once during that time.

Since Black Arrow does around triple damage during during Bestial Wrath, it is best to maximise the amount of Black Arrow you cast by consuming Deathblow during Withering Wire. By default you will get one Deathblow proc when you press Bestial Wrath, and a second guaranteed proc after casting Wailing Arrow. On top of that every Barbed Shot or Kill Command you cast has a high chance of proccing Deathblow, so keep an eye out for Black Arrow procs, and always consume them as fast as possible!

Defensives

Hunters have a really solid kit of healing and defensive options:

• We have 2 charges of Survival Of The Fittest as our main defensive wall.
• Aspect Of The Turtle functions as an immunity, with an inbuilt damage reduction against damage types you can not deflect.
• Exhilaration is our self healing skill. When playing Dark Ranger it even grants us Survival Of The Fittest for a short duration, essentially functioning as a third independent stack of our main defensive.
• Hunter's Avoidance granting us 5% passive avoidance against AoE damage.
• Roar Of Sacrifice as a damage redirection ability that is also usable to allied targets / Guardian's Hide for a passive 3% damage reduction.
• Touch Of Grass to increase our HP pool by 10%
• Endurance Training from a Tenacity pet, granting us 5% more HP, boosted to up to 8% when running the Aspect Of The Beast talent.
• Fortitude Of The Bear, also gained from a Tenacity pet, granting us an additional 3% damage reduction

Pet Choices

Since patch 11.1 we can finally change the family of our Pet’s, regardless of the type it “usually” had before. That means you can turn any Pet into a Tenacity pet for example.

In most fights, you want to have Tenacity Pet for the 5-8% bonus hp and the damage reduction from Fortitude Of The Bear.

There is a couple of interesting choices in Pet’s since they bring a “unique” passive that sets them apart from other Pets.

The Aqiri-family brings a passive 30% pet-movement speed with Dune Strider.

The Stone Hound-family brings a passive revive on a 8 minute cooldown with Eternal Guardian, in case your pet dies by accident.

Be sure to have at least one pet from the 3 families. You might need to use Primal Rage in Mythic + if no one else can Blood lust or in raid if the others are dead. Master's Call is a niche ability and can be used to remove or prevent the application of impairing movement debuffs (works like a paladin's freedom). There are other niche secondary abilities that your pet can have, like Mortal Wounds to reduce enemies' healing done.

Good choices for pets with Mortal Wounds are:

• Carrion Birds
• Raptors

I highly recommend the WoW Petopia site to find your new pet!