Beast Mastery Hunter Talents Guide

Beast Mastery Hunter has different builds for single target and AoE for both Hero Talent Tree choices. Pack Leader is generally ahead of Dark Ranger in Single Target and AoE.

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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.
• Harmonize with Blackrock Munitions: flat 6% increased pet damage.
• Trigger Finger, Keen Eyesight and Serrated Tips which are passive stats.
• Unnatural Causes: Increases your damage over time effects.

Mandatory defensive nodes are:

• Hunter's Avoidance for a passive 5% avoidance.
• Natural Mending, Rejuvenating Wind and Wilderness Medicine to buff your Exhilaration.
• Survival of the Fittest with Padded Armor and Lone Survivor to get the maximum value out of your main defense.
• Born to Be Wild to reduce the cooldown of your Aspects, most notably Aspect of the Turtle.

Apart from those mandatory nodes and the nodes you have to pick along the way, you have a couple free talent points to put into whatever utility you might want to pick up. Intimidation, Binding Shot, Implosive Trap or Bursting Shot are strong options for crowd control. There is also some niche utility in the form of Scout’s Instincts to get rid of slows, or Emergency Salve if you are in need of poison/disease dispels.

The Beast Mastery tree has received a lot of changes, leaving us with a couple of different build options.

Most of our talent choices are pretty straight forward active or passive damage increases. We still received a bunch of build variety depending on the situation or Hero Talent choice.

The newly changed talents on the bottom right side are all quite powerful, making us pick up all of them until and including the new capstone Wildspeaker.

When playing Pack Leader, our increasing amount in damage dealt by pets wants us to pick all of the talents leading up to Piercing Fangs, giving us a huge amount of Critical damage for our pets with high uptime.

Dire Cleave has become a new staple AoE talent, giving us a lot of passive Cleave, that does not necessarily require to be specced into Multi-Shot, Beast Cleave or Kill Cleave. This is allowing for builds that completely get rid of the “active” part of our AoE rotation and solely use Dire Cleave to damage multiple targets.

Dark Rangers’ Withering Fire only triggers on Call of the Wild, effectively forcing us to invest into it if we want to play it.

Dark Ranger:

Dark Ranger replaces Kill Shot with a stronger version called Black Arrow, that we can use above 80% and below 20% HP. We also receive a different variety of ways to reset Black Arrow, with Auto-Shots and Black Arrow itself. Withering Fire is our capstone node for Dark Ranger. When chosen, Call of the WIld will proc Deathblow automatically every 4 seconds, on top of enhancing Black Arrow to cleave to 2 extra targets for the duration, passively spreading Black Arrow for us. This interacts very well with The Bell Tolls, stacking up to high amounts during Call of the Wild, allowing for high burst windows.

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 Lead From the Front. Those allow our Kill Command to occasionally summon very strong Beasts. The rest of the nodes all play really well into this fantasy, by either increasing the effect of those beasts, or making you summon more of them.

Noteworthy mentions would include Pack Mentality, which grants you a Barbed Shot reset, whenever you summon a Beast, and Horsehair Tether, a powerful utility note, that pulls enemies that walk out of Binding Shot back into the center.

The defensive trait in the Hero Tree is Shell Cover. It automatically triggers, up to once every 90 seconds, when dropping below 60% of your Health, granting you a dynamic damage reduction that increases in value the lower your Health is. This is a lot weaker than the Dark Ranger counterpart.