Hunter has always been one of the strongest leveling classes in Classic, and WoW Forever only makes that better. You still get the same very strong ranged damage, the best mobility in the game, as well as one of the best toolkits in the game for anybody running Solo. But now
Hunter have a lot of quality of life changes and new tools that make the class feel much smoother to level.
The biggest power spike comes at Level 10 when you unlock
Tame Beast and finally get your first pet. From that point on, your pet will be doing a huge amount of the work for you. Send it in with
Growl on and it will tank anything for you while you sit back at range hitting the enemies with
Serpent Sting,
Arcane Shot,
Aimed Shot and dropping Hawk pets on them with the new
Summon Hawk, all without taking much damage yourself. This becomes even safer at Level 30 when you learn
Feign Death, allowing you to drop all threat and making all enemies ignore you.
Beast Mastery is the recommended spec to level with. Both
Marksmanship and
Survival are viable as well, but Beast Mastery is untouchable due the new pet scaling and some insanely strong talents.
Beast Mastery leans heavily into what already makes Hunter so good while leveling by making your pet significantly stronger and eventually giving you access to a new pet
Summon Hawk at Level 25.
Summon Hawk summons down a Hawk that attacks your target for 18 seconds, with a 6 second cooldown, but you can only have two active at once. This sadly shares a cooldown with
Arcane Shot, so once you unlock it you will start choosing between using Arcane Shot for immediate damage or keeping your Hawks active for more damage over time (DoT).
Pets are also much more important in WoW Forever than they were in original Classic. Your pet now scales with your stats, and every pet family brings its own strengths and very unique abilities. Some are better for damage, others are better at tanking, and some bring very strong utility for PvP or group content. For leveling, we are going to focus mostly on Cats because they deal the most damage right now, attack ridiculously fast and you can get some of the best ones very early without wasting a ton of time camping rare spawns.
Hunter also has some really nice quality of life. Traps can now be used in combat, which means you won't have to blow your
Feign Death just to get a Trap down. Your abilities no longer clip
Auto Shot the way they did in Classic, and with the Beta cap being Level 30 you get powerful abilities like
Aimed Shot,
Rapid Fire, and
Feign Death. As always, you'll still need to manage your positioning and stand still for a brief second when it is time for Auto Shot to fire, but you are no longer fighting against your own rotation every time you press an ability and losing out on all that damage.
The biggest strength of
Hunter is how little downtime you have. Your pet tanks while you deal damage from range, you can start setting up the next pull while your pet finishes the current one, and you have enough crowd control and utility to recover from pulls that would kill a lot of other classes. Keep your pet happy, keep it upgraded with new abilities as you level, and get comfortable controlling it early. Once you do,
Hunter becomes the fastest and safest class in the game.








