Beast Mastery Hunter Guide - Talents, Rotations, Races & More

Playable Races

Alliance - Human, Night Elf, Dwarf & Skyborn

Horde - Orc, Tauren, Troll & Skyborn

Recommended Races

Dwarf provides 3 useful abilities and is probably the best race for leveling to 30 as Alliance. Mace Specialization gives you 1% crit when using a mace. Stoneform grants you immunities and Physical Damage Reduction and Big Game Hunter increases you damage to beasts (which you'll see a lot of while leveling up)

Night Elf provides you their new ability Elune's Light which provides 10% increased Critical Strike Chance for 15 seconds. They come with passive movement speed and dodge chance as well, making them great for moving through the world a bit faster and providing a bit more survivability when enemies start hitting you. Wisp Spirit grants you 75% movement speed which hopefully you don’t need often, but is great for getting back to your body and back into the action.

Troll is great since you’ll be fighting a lot of beasts in the early game and they have 5% increased damage to beasts. Their Berserking buff grants you 10% attack speed for 10 seconds and they also have Rapid Regeneration which allows you to restore 50% of your health every 3 minutes. Add in Regeneration which allows 10% of health regen to continue in combat and they’re the only race in the game that has 4 directly beneficial buffs for the leveling journey 1-30.

For every race's full ability list, check our racial abilities guide.

The primary Skills you’ll use are Auto Shot, Multi-Shot, Arcane Shot, Summon Hawk, Raptor Strike and Intimidation. Tame a Boar early on, it's charge ability is great for engaging with enemies quickly and building threat. Boars aren't picky eaters either which makes it easy to keep them happy. Once you can, tame a Strider. Tallstriders get Dust Cloud providing Armor Penetration which synergizes with the Hunter very well.

1. Send your pet in to start the fight, apply Hunter's Mark and be max range to start attacking with your ranged weapon.
2. Summon Hawk right away (once you obtain it). You can have 2 Hawks, so make sure to cast it again after the 6 second cooldown to keep 2 up at all times.
3. Auto Shot then follow it up with a Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot & Multi-Shot once you obtain them.
4. Keep your Pet and Hawks going and use your Abilities between Auto Shots to take down the enemies quickly.
5. If you pull threat, you simply finish them off with Raptor Strike/ Mongoose Bite and Melee Swings.
6. At level 30 you’ll unlock Intimidation, this can be used right away in combat to generate a lot of threat with your pet.

Summon Hawk has an 18 Second duration and 6 second Cooldown. This means you can have both Hawks active for 6 seconds before having to cast another one. This is your chance to add Arcane Shot into your rotation if you desire, since they share a cooldown. We don’t know for sure but having the Hawk engaged is likely more DPS than Arcane Shotting, so we’ll only use it when we have both Hawks up and have downtime between having to recast our first one.

You can use Rapid Fire on harder encounters, but keep in mind It’s going to generate a lot of threat for you quickly, and might pull enemies off your pet. These skills are better used in group play or Dungeons since a tank is much harder to pull threat from.

You can “kite” enemies that you aggro off your pet by moving away after you take a shot. Shoot, move a little, repeat. You can use Concussive Shot or Wing Clip to further increase the gap between enemies when they’re coming after you.

Make sure to visit your Hunter Trainer at levels 10, 18 & 26 to acquire key skills like Tame Beast, Multi-Shot & Rapid Fire!

A Hunters Favorite Stat is Agility, followed by Strength and Intellect. Agility increases your Ranged Attack Power, Attack Power and Critical Hit Chance, Strength is another Attack Power boost and Intellect helps quite a bit with your mana. Always look for items with Agility on them as the priority and take the other stats when they show up. Remember Ranged Attack Power and Attack Power are different and only agility increases your Ranged.

When playing in a party the gameplay mostly stays the same. You'll likely have someone tanking the enemies for you so you don't to worry about pulling threat as easily, and can unleash your power much more freely.

Make sure to keep Hunter's Mark up on the main target and allow your tank to get threat on a few mobs before you start using Multi-Shot on cooldown. Understanding the capabilities of your party's tank is important to make sure you aren't constantly pulling enemies off of them that they haven't build threat on yet.

Frost Trap and Explosive Trap are great to use when fighting multiple mobs at once. You can slow the entire group down to help your tank kite and prevent the strays from reaching your ranged party members. Explosive Trap is a great way to deal AOE damage to the group while you keep blasting them with projectiles.

See how Beast Mastery compares to Marksmanship and Survival on our WoW Forever tier list.

Auto Shot Macro

This macro allows you to spam a button as you change targets to keep shooting with no interruption.

#showtooltip Auto Shot
/cleartarget [dead]
/targetenemy [noharm]
/cast !Auto Shot

Melee Macro

This one button macro will go through you melee abilities to do maximum damage when being attacked.

/startattack
/cast Raptor Strike
/cast Mongoose Bite

Pet Attack

I love putting this on mouse wheel forward to send in my pet. You can also macro this into your auto shot macro, but I prefer to have more control of my pet at all times.

/petattack
/cast Charge
/cast Dash

Pet Passive/Follow

Great for mousewheel backwards. This will make your pet passive and come to you to get out of danger.

/petpassive
/petfollow