Talent Builds
Pack Leader AoE / Mythic+
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Dark Ranger Single Target / Raid
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Class Talents
The only “mandatory” talents in the Hunter tree are your defensive and offensive nodes. The entirety of your utility toolkit is interchangeable depending on the situation you are in.
Notable offensive nodes are:
- Specialized Arsenal: a flat 10% damage increase to Kill Command.
- Combat Experience, Precision Strikes, Serrated Tips, Trigger Finger and Keen Eyesight which are passive stats.
- Unnatural Causes: Increases your damage over time effects.
Mandatory defensive nodes are:
- Hunter's Avoidance for a passive 5% avoidance.
- Rejuvenating Wind and Natural Mending to buff your Exhilaration
- Padded Armor and Lone Survivor to buff your main defensive cooldown Survival Of The Fittest
- Touch Of Grass to increase your maximum health by 10%
- Improved Aspect Of The Turtle, Shell Wall and Born To Be Wild to reduce the cooldown of Aspect Of The Turtle and make it reduce even more damage against non-deflectable damage sources
- Roar Of Sacrifice for an extra active defensive button or Guardian's Hide for 3% passive damage reduction
Apart from those mandatory nodes there are a bunch of utility options that you can freely pick, depending on your needs.
- Intimidation with Guttural Roar grants you access to an AoE stun
- Binding Shot with Horsehair Tether grants you a Vortex-like ability
- Tranquilizing Shot can be used to Soothe or Purge enemies
- Camouflage can be used to run past enemies invisible
- Emergency Salve allows your Feign Death and Aspect Of The Turtle to remove poison and disease effects
Spec Talents
The Midnight expansion brings a lot of changes to the playstyle of Beast Mastery.
Bestial Wrath turning into a static 30 second cooldown and the removal of Frenzy is taking away a lot of interactions from our previous Barbed Shot. In return, Barbed Shot now functions as a “rolling DoT” similar to Ignite on Fire Mages. What that means is that casting Barbed Shot on a Target that is already bleeding from Barbed Shot, adds the damage of the new DoT, to the already existing one, instead of just resetting the bleed duration. This allows Barbed Shot to do significantly more damage in single target.
Similarly we got access to a plethora of buffs and talents to make Cobra Shot stronger, turning it into an actual damaging ability.
With the removal of Multi-Shot and the addition of Wild Thrash we finally received a proper AoE spender.
Bestial Wrath has received a huge buff in its damage. Together with the new Bloodshed, pressing Bestial Wrath does make up for a huge chunk of damage.
Hero Talents
Dark Ranger
Dark Ranger gives us access to Black Arrow, a powerful single target ability that we can use above 80% and below 20% HP, or when proccing Deathblow.
We also receive a different variety of ways to reset Black Arrow. Soul Drinker grants Kill Command and Barbed Shot a chance to proc Deathblow, Ebon Bowstring grants Black Arrow a chance to reset itself.
Withering Fire grants us Deathblow whenever we press Bestial Wrath, and Wailing Dead makes Bestial Wrath “recastable” with Wailing Arrow, which also procs Deathblow.
Bleak Powder and Umbral Reach allow Black Arrow to do AoE damage and passively spreads the Black Arrow DoT to every target you hit.
Blighted Quiver with Withering Fire also massively buffs the amount of damage Black Arrow does during Bestial Wrath, turning the spec into a much more burst oriented variant, that does the majority of its damage during the first 10 seconds of Bestial Wrath.
The defensive trait in this Hero Tree is Smoke Screen which allows Exhilaration to be used as a third charge of Survival of the Fittest and vice versa. This is incredibly strong!
Pack Leader
The main nodes of Pack Leader are Howl of the Pack Leader and Stampede!. Those allow our Kill Command to occasionally summon very strong Beasts with an added huge chunk of damage whenever you press Bestial Wrath. The rest of the nodes all play really well into this fantasy, by either increasing the effect of those beasts, or making you summon them faster.
The beasts you summon are set on a rotation:
- Wyvern increases damage done
- Boar does a huge chunk of AoE damage, and is buffing Cobra Shot
- Bear does a huge amount of single target and AoE damage
The defensive trait in the Hero Tree is Shell Cover which increases the damage reduction of Survival Of The Fittest by 10%.