Playstyle & Rotation
General Priority Rotation:
- Cast Barbed Shot when the Frenzy buff on your pet is about to expire or when you're close to 2 charges of Barbed Shot. Refresh it as late as possible without dropping it. This is a higher priority than not wasting Bestial Wrath cooldown reduction. If Frenzy is not up and Bestial Wrath is active, cast Barbed Shot regardless.
- Cast Kill Shot on cooldown if the target is below 20% health.
- Cast Bestial Wrath on cooldown (if talented)
- Cast Bloodshed on cooldown (if talented)
- Cast Death Chakram on cooldown (if talented)
- Use all of your Barbed Shots before using Bestial Wrath if you are using the Scent of Blood talent.
- Cast Kill Command on cooldown.
- Cast Dire Beast on cooldown.
- Cast Cobra Shot when you have a lot of Focus spare and when Kill Command is not coming off cooldown within 2.5 seconds.
Opener:
- Cast 2x Barbed Shot
- Cast Bloodshed
- Cast Bestial Wrath
- Use your Racial / Pot / Trinkets
- Cast Death Chakram
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Dire Beast
- Proceed with general rotation
Multi Target:
- On 2+ targets keep up Beast Cleave by pressing Multi-Shot
- Proceed with general rotation
Remember that you are pressing Multi-Shot just for your pets to gain the Beast Cleave ability, not for its damage. You shouldn’t spam it and push it ONLY if Beast Cleave is about to fade or is not already active.
In a Multi-Target situation, you want to use Barbed Shot on as many different targets as possible to spread the DoT (I recommend you to use a mouseover macro to avoid losing your stacks with Neltharax, Enemy of the sky).
Playstyle
Frenzy Stacks:
Sometimes keeping track of your Frenzy stacks is not always that easy. That's why I recommend using weakauras to help you out. The best option is to go to https://wago.io/search/Frenzy and find a fitting weakaura for your UI. Some weakauras show you how many GCDs you can do before losing your stacks, depending on your haste (Afenar's WAs are doing it).
Pet Management:
In AoE situations, 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 has a short range.
Try to have a /pet attack macro so your pet can switch targets and start hitting instantly. You should also keybind your Follow, Passive, and Assist ability as your pet can get blocked by something. Spamming Pet Follow can solve the issue. It's also sometimes needed to ask your pet to follow you and not hit the useless mobs at the back (remember Sylvanas Phase 2).
One extra thing you can bind is the "Move To" ability. It can be used to order your pet to go where you want or to stay somewhere (it was used in Mechagon Junkyard on the last boss, so your pet is ready to hit the machine as soon as it lands, for example).
While mounted, you can summon your pet, and it doesn't aggro.
Pet Choices:
In most fights, you want to have a spirit beast with Spirit Mend ability and Tenacity as a Pet Family for the 8% bonus hp and the Fortitude of the Bear ability (replaces Survival of the Fittest that was the Tenacity ability in Shadowland, and that is now baseline in Dragonflight).
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). They are other niche second abilities that your pet can have, like the wounds to reduce enemies' healing done.
I highly recommend the WoW Petopia site to find your new pet!
Hunter's Survivability:
Hunters are one of the weakest classes regarding defensive cooldown and survivability.
In Dragonflight, we have gained Survival of the Fittest baseline and Fortitude of the Bear if we have a Tenacity pet. Survival of the Fittest can now be reduced to 2 mins thanks to the Lone Survivor talent or can have an extra 20% damage reduction with Nature's Endurance. The choice of these two talents is fight-dependent; for example, I would have picked Lone Survivor on Lords of Dread because we are taking spike damages every 2 mins. We can now have Born To Be Wild and Posthaste simultaneously, which is really nice and allows you to use Survival of the Fittest and Aspect of the Turtle more often! We also have baseline avoidance with Hunter's Avoidance talent, and we are keeping Exhilaration with additional healing on it.
On the other hand, we are losing the Marksman's Advantage and Resilience of the Hunter conduits from Shadowlands, which is consequent.
In conclusion, we now have more cooldowns reduction for spike damage but are even weaker on fights with damage taken over time.