Class Talents
The Class tree Talents contain essential spells and passives that are mandatory for any situation, as a BM hunter, other situational talents, and others that are just not good enough to be picked.
Mandatory Talents
- Kill Command and Kill Shot: core spells of the spec
- Improved Kill Shot: a talent that gives you more damage on Kill Shot's critical strikes. There's just no reason not to take it because most of the upper tree's talents don't increase DPS
- Posthaste and Pathfinding: two talents that give you movement speed, which is needed for pretty much every situation. Posthaste can also dispel you from some movement-impairing debuffs
- Counter Shot: Hunter's kick is needed for pretty much every situation
- Survival of the Fittest paired with Lone Survivor or Nature's Endurance (fight dependent), Born To Be Wild, and Hunter's Avoidance: talents that give the Hunter mandatory decent survival skills.
- Beast Master, Improved Kill Command, and Alpha Predator: this branch at the bottom of the tree is essential. It will give you pet damage and 2 charges + more damage on Kill Command.
- Serrated Shots: more damage on bleeds and stronger execute.
- Keen Eyesight and Death Chakram: flat critical strike chances and a strong cooldown that is good in pretty much every situation.
- Master Marksman is a strong talent due to the fact that critical strike is our main stat.
Situational Talents
- Misdirection, Camouflage, Tar Trap, Tranquilizing Shot, Intimidation, and Binding Shot: most likely used in Mythic + content or if needed on some boss encounters. They provide you with a threat redirection (although very minor), a stealth, AoE slow, offensive magic and enrage dispel, Single target long stun, and a 3s AoE stun (Binding Shot does not root anymore)
- Sentinel Owl and Sentinel's Protection: the latter being a “go to - choice” for most raid encounters. It provides you with a field that lets you ignore Line of Sight for several seconds, similar to the Kyrian-Covenant ability from Shadowlands. It also buffs your party’s leech for that duration. Your healers will love you for this.
- Entrapment: a niche ability, that enhances your Tar Trap, to root enemies in place. Very useful for the Spiteful affix, or keeping mobs in place in general.
- Scare Beast and Improved Tranquilizing Shot have their uses for certain Mythic+ affixes. Not necessary by any means. Still decent options to pick up in those weeks.
Bad Talents
- Trailblazer: does not provide any combat benefit. It is a solid choice for farming world content and leveling.
- Wilderness Medicine: we basically never need to heal our pets, and if we do, we have Mend Pet and Exhilaration
- High Explosive Trap: is a super niche talent that will probably never be used outside of open world PvP.
- Killer Instinct: Having 2 charges of Kill Command with Alpha Predator is way better, so this talent won’t be used
- Steel Trap and Improved Traps: Not good enough in any situations
- Arctic Bola, Explosive Shot, Barrage: while the last two talents are decent in AoE situations, it requires you to spend 2 useless points into Arctic Bola. The fact that it’s Cobra Shot that triggers the talent is really bad because we barely use it in AoE
- Serpent Sting, Hydra’s Bite, and Poison Injection: these talents are not that bad. It’s just that with the Alpha Predator and Death Chakram branches that overall have stronger talents, you don’t have enough points to spend
Talent Builds
Single Target Burst
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The key here is to get Bestial Wrath, which is going to be your main small cooldown, so you will have to follow the Pack Tactics, Aspect of the Beast, and Thrill of the Hunt path to get it (we are in ST, so we don’t want to take Multi-Shot or Beast Cleave).
Animal Companion is also a strong choice because it will allow our pets to do more damage with their Kill Commands.
To the right, we take Barbed Shot, one of our core spells, then Training Expert, an excellent talent considering that our pets are doing an essential part of our damage. Next, we chose Killer Command, which synergizes well with our new tier set bonus, then Bloodshed, a 1 min cooldown that can line up easily with the orc racial.
War Orders is a powerful talent that will allow us to press way more Kill Commands. With this talent, we need to pay attention not to press Barbed Shot (unless we are about to lose our Frenzy stacks) if our Kill Command is recharging the 2nd stack because we will lose some value here.
Below Bestial Wrath, we pick up 1 point in Scent of Blood, and Wild Call that is mandatory if we want to keep your Frenzy stacks, which will significantly increase the value of Critical Strike.
We also want to pick up the newly redesigned talents Savagery and Master Handler. Savagery is increasing our Kill Command damage by 10% and providing a longer buff duration on Frenzy, while the latter provides us with 12,5% cooldown reduction on Kill Command in Single Target. Follow down the path towards Call of the Wild, your main 2 minute burst cooldown, which is getting even more powerful when we pick Wild Instincts on top of that
To finish with, we take Dire Beast, then we will follow the branch to the left by taking 2 points of Stomp, 2 in Dire Command, 2 in Dire Frenzy and finally Dire Pack. The uptime of the Beasts we are summoning is really high and will allow us to keep the 5% Haste buff during most parts of the fight. Also, every 5 beasts summoned, we will have a 8s buff that will allow us to cast a lot of Kill Commands, thanks to Dire Pack.
Furthermore, high Dire Beast uptime is essential to make use of our new Tierset which is giving one of our summoned Dire Beasts the ability to follow our Kill Command and Beast Cleave.
If your encounter requires burst AoE, but is mostly a single target fight, you can also switch Wild Instincts for Blood Frenzy (the AoE Capstone). This switch removes around 2% single target damage, but boosts up your AoE Burst potential significantly during Call of the Wild.
"Classic" Single Target Build
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If your Raid encounter does not need any single target burst damage (mostly the bosses that don’t provide any %damage increase for a short period of time), you want to go for a slightly different build that focusses more on Bestial Wrath and less on Call of the Wild.
The main difference to the “burst” variant is, that we take away out points from Wild Call and Wild Instincts, to invest them into a second point in Scent of Blood and Piercing Fangs, which significantly buffs our Bestial Wrath cooldown.
AoE Raid encounters
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The difference in AoE here is that we are dropping Dire Beast, Thrill of the Hunt and Bloodshed and to get Multi-Shot, Beast Cleave, and Kill Cleave, three massive AoE talents that will allow our pets to cleave.
We obviously pick up Blood Frenzy as well to further enhance our burst AoE potential.
To finish with, keep in mind that with this build, we don’t lose that much in ST, but we do gain a lot in AoE. Because of that, it can be interesting to play this build even if we have just a few moments of cleave/AoE.
In this build, we take Misdirection, Tar Trap, Tranquilizing Shot, Intimidation, and Binding Shot which are essential for M+. We can also add Camouflage depending on the situation. If you are raiding, and a stun and a dispel are not needed, you can put 2 points into Rejuvenating Wind, for example.
Mythic+
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For Mythic +, we change a bunch of utility points in the Class-side of the tree.
We take Tar Trap, Tranquilizing Shot, Intimidation, and Binding Shot which are essential for M+. We also add Camouflage for a nice and easy way to skip past mob packs.
Depending on the Key you can switch around a few points, to get access to talents like Entrapment for Spiteful weeks, Scare Beast for the Incorporeal affix, or switch the choice node on Binding Shot to Scatter Shot for an additional interrupt. Take away the point from Pathfinding to achieve that.