Playstyle & Rotation
Dark Ranger
Single Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Dire Beast
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Bestial Wrath
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Call of the Wild / Bloodshed
Use your combat potion as well as racials alongside your major cooldown whichever talented.
Single Target Priority:
- Use Barbed Shot to maintain Frenzy, or if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
- Use Dire Beast
- Use Kill Commands before Call of the Wild
- Use Black Arrow
- Use Call of the Wild / Bloodshed
- Use Bestial Wrath
- Use Kill Command
- Use Barbed Shot
- Use Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath
- Use Explosive Shot (only outside of Bestial Wrath)
- Use Cobra Shot
Multi Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Dire Beast
- Cast Barbed Shot on a different target.
- Cast Bestial Wrath
- Cast Multi-Shot (if Call of the Wild is not available)
- Cast Call of the Wild
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Barbed Shot on a third target.
Use your combat potion as well as racials alongside your major cooldown whichever talented.
Multi Target Priority:
- Use Barbed Shot to maintain Frenzy, or if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
- Use Black Arrow with Beast Cleave active
- Use Multi-Shot to keep up Beast Cleave
- Use Dire Beast
- Use Call of the Wild
- Use Bestial Wrath
- Use Kill Command with Beast Cleave active
- Use Barbed Shot on different targets
- Use Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath
- Use Explosive Shot
- Use Cobra Shot
Pack Leader
Single Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Bestial Wrath 1 seconds before combat.
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Dire Beast
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Kill Shot (if you get a Deathblow proc)
- Cast Call of the Wild
Single Target Priority:
- Use Barbed Shot to maintain Frenzy, or if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
- Use Dire Beast
- Use Kill Commands before Call of the Wild
- Use Call of the Wild
- Use Bestial Wrath
- Use Kill Command
- Use Kill Shot to apply Serpent Sting when it’s about to run out.
- Use Barbed Shot
- Use Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath
- Use Explosive Shot (only outside of Bestial Wrath)
- Use Cobra Shot
Multi Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Bestial Wrath 1 seconds before combat.
- Cast Barbed Shot
- Cast Dire Beast
- Cast Barbed Shot on a different target.
- Cast Multi-Shot (if Call of the Wild is not available)
- Cast Call of the Wild
- Cast Kill Command
- Cast Barbed Shot on a third target.
Multi Target Priority:
- Use Barbed Shot to maintain Frenzy, or if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
- Use Multi-Shot to keep up Beast Cleave
- Use Dire Beast
- Use Call of the Wild
- Use Bestial Wrath
- Use Kill Command with Beast Cleave active
- Use Barbed Shot on different targets
- Use Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath
- Use Kill Shot to apply Serpent Sting to different targets.
- Use Explosive Shot
- Use Cobra Shot
Playstyle
The 3 most important things of BM rotation in order are:
- Keeping up Frenzy on 3 stacks.
- Cast as many Kill Commands as possible.
- Try to maintain your DoT effects for Basilisk Collar.
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 arguably weaker on Beast Mastery compared to Marksmanship, since it procs on every third usage of Bestial Wrath. This is quite hard to properly play around for certain AoE raid fights, since you should almost never delay a Bestial Wrath by more than a couple of seconds.
Nonetheless make sure to track your stacks of Withering Fire to know when it’s active, since you do not need to react to Deathblow procs during it.
Bleak Powder lets Black Arrow deal a significant amount of our AoE damage, as long as Beast Cleave is active. Make sure you have Trick Shots running before pressing Black Arrow.
Cooldown Stacking
Bestial Wrath serves as your bread and butter cooldown in all the Hunter Builds. Your goal is always to maximize its uptime. If possible you want to sync it with your other cooldowns, such as Call of the Wild or Bloodshed.
Since Bestial Wrath has a dynamic cooldown, dependant on how many Barbed Shot resets you recieve from your various sources, it’s not always guaranteed that it will line up with your other major cooldowns.
In general, you should never delay your Bestial Wrath by more than a couple of seconds.
Scent of Blood
Another important mention about Bestial Wrath is, how your playstyle changes when playing with or without Scent of Blood talented.
Scent of Blood refreshes your stacks of Barbed Shot when using Bestial Wrath.
When not running Scent of Blood, you would try to preserve a stack of Barbed Shot, given that your Frenzy doesn't run out, to use after you pressed your next Bestial Wrath, in order to profit from the cooldown reduction effect from Barbed Wrath. If you would use up all of your charges before going into Bestial Wrath, you will miss out on valuable uptime of that cooldown!
On the other hand, when running Scent of Blood, you would try to get rid of your stacks beforehand, since they are going to be replenished anyways, once you press Bestial Wrath.
Frenzy management and Wild Call
Your highest priority is always to keep Frenzy up on 3 stacks or to get to 3 stacks as quickly as possible. One variable in your opening sequence is Wild Call, which can easily proc during your first few globals.If Wild Call does proc in your opener, you want to use it immediately to get to 3 stacks of Frenzy.
Frenzy management in general has gotten a lot easier due to the fact that Savagery is increasing Frenzy duration as well as Thrill of the Hunt duration to 10 seconds. With enough Haste rating you should have no problem keeping Frenzy up.
I still 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. You can find a Barbed Shot WeakAura in my package, linked in the WeakAura section of the guide.
Multi Target
On 2+ targets you want to keep up Beast Cleave by pressing Multi-Shot.
Remember that you are pressing Multi-Shot just for your pets to gain the Beast Cleave ability, not for its damage. Only use Multi-Shot if Beast Cleave is about to run out or if it is not already active.
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.
In a Multi-Target situation, you want to use Barbed Shot on as many different targets as possible to spread the DoT and profit from as many Master Handler cooldown ticks as possible. Don’t forget that with Blood Frenzy talented, you do not need to reapply Beast Cleave as long as Call of the Wild is still running.
Defensives
Hunters have a really solid kit of healing effects and defensive cooldowns.
We have 2 charges of Survival of the Fittest as our main defensive and Fortitude of the Bear when using a Tenacity pet. Tenacity pets also grant you 5% more maximum HP due to their passive Endurance Training. This can be boosted up to 8% with Aspect of the Beast. On top of that we can use Aspect of the Turtle as an immunity.
Exhilaration is our self healing skill, it comes with a neat Heal over time effect.
Hunter’s Avoidance gives us 5% passive Avoidance to reduce the damage taken from a variety of AoE effects.
In general Hunter defensives are strong with a shorter duration. Most of the time you are looking to use your defensives for single hard hitting abilities in Raid and Mythic +.
Pet choices
In most fights, you want to have a spirit beast with Spirit Mend ability and Tenacity as a Pet Family for the 5-8% bonus hp and the Fortitude of the Bear ability.
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 second abilities that your pet can have, like Mortal Wounds to reduce enemies' healing done.
Good choices for pets with Mortal Wounds are:
- Carrion Birds with Primal Rage
- Raptors with Master's Call
I highly recommend the WoW Petopia site to find your new pet!