In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Beast Mastery Hunter (WoW MoP 5.3). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Beast Mastery Hunter guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Kennyloggins, a leading figure in the Hunter community, who raids in Blood Legion.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents offer a choice between 3 means of improving your movement and mobility (although they also have some secondary benefits).

• Posthaste causes Disengage to free you from all movement-impairing effects and boost your movement speed by 60% for 8 seconds.
• Narrow Escape places a web at the location from which you Disengage, which roots all enemies within 8 yards for 8 seconds.
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera reduces the cooldown of Disengage by 10 seconds, and the cooldown of Deterrence by 60 seconds.

Given the amazing usefulness of Deterrence, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera is the top choice for most encounters.

Posthaste is better for fights where you need extra mobility more than you need extra survival (or if Deterrence is not particularly useful in the encounter).

Narrow Escape can probably be quite useful in situations where you have to kite adds, but the number of such situations is quite low.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents offer you a choice between 3 talents that provide you crowd control and utility.

• Silencing Shot interrupts the target and silences them for 3 seconds, with a 24-second cooldown.
• Wyvern Sting puts the target to sleep for 30 seconds. The ability has a 45-second cooldown. Any damage done to the target will break the effect.
• Intimidation commands your pet to stun the target for 3 seconds, with a 1-minute cooldown.

None of these talents are likely to ever affect your DPS performance or even your raid utility. They prove useful in dungeons or on trash, in which case you should simply choose which ever talent suits the situation.

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of improving your survivability.

• Exhilaration is a self-heal that heals you for 30% of your maximum health, and your pet for 100% of its maximum health. It has a 2-minute cooldown.
• Aspect of the Iron Hawk replaces your Aspect of the Hawk, adding a 15% damage reduction component to it.
• Spirit Bond causes you and your pet to regenerate 2% of your maximum health every 2 seconds.

In our opinion, the choice for maximising your survivability will come down to either Exhilaration or Aspect of the Iron Hawk, but Aspect of the Iron Hawk takes the lead in most situations.

Aspect of the Iron Hawk provides you with a constant 15% damage reduction. This is a great asset, especially on fights where there are prolonged periods of intense raid damage. For progression raiding, this is undeniably the best choice.

Exhilaration gives you a great on-demand self-heal, which will undoubtedly save your life and help out your healers many times. This should be chosen when you want more control over your survivability, but there is generally never a situation when this is a good choice. The fact that you have to actively use (and keybind) this spell is a further inconvenience, considering how many active abilities Hunters already have.

Spirit Bond can be useful on fights where you are constantly taking damage (so that it does not overheal), but where the damage is too low for Aspect of the Iron Hawk to be efficient. In any case, we deem this talent to be lackluster in its current incarnation.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents offer you a choice between 3 talents that increase your DPS.

• Fervor grants you and your pet 50 Focus each, as well as an additional 50 Focus over 10 seconds.
• Dire Beast summons a beast to attack the target for 15 seconds. Each time the beast deals damage, you gain 5 Focus.
• Thrill of the Hunt gives you a 30% chance to reduce the Focus cost of your next 3 Arcane Shots or Multi-Shots by 20, each time you use an attack that costs Focus.

Dire Beast is the best talent for single target situations.

If you take Blink Strike as your Tier 5 talent (see below), then Fervor becomes very appealing for single target (though probably still not better than Dire Beast). Fervor is the best choice for AoE DPS (again, assuming that you take Blink Strike).

Thrill of the Hunt is quite lackluster, and should never be taken.

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents offer you a choice between 3 DPS cooldowns:

• A Murder of Crows summons a flock of crows to attack your target for 30 seconds, with a 2-minute cooldown. If the target is below 20% health, the cooldown of the spell is reduced to 1 minute.
• Blink Strike grants your pet a passive ability, causing its Basic Attacks to deal 50% increased damage. Moreover, when Blink Strike is taken, the pet uses its Basic Attacks from up to 30 yards away from the target, instantly teleporting behind the target.
• Lynx Rush causes your pet to apply a bleed effect to the target, which lasts for 15 seconds, and deals damage every 3 seconds. The pet will perform 9 applications of this bleed effect (which stack). If there are multiple targets, then the pet jump from target to target, applying the bleed effect on each of them. Note that it will only apply 9 stacks in total, so if it jumps to multiple targets, it will not apply 9 stacks to each.

A Murder of Crows and Blink Strike provide essentially the same amount of DPS, so you can choose either one. That said, we advise choosing Blink Strike, because it is entirely passive and cannot, thus, be used incorrectly (and it is one less thing to worry about). Blink Strike ends up pulling ahead in certain situations (if your pet has to do a lot of running from one target to another during the fight, or if you need to deal AoE damage).

Lynx Rush lags behind both of the other two talents.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 DPS abilities.

• Glaive Toss throws two glaives at a target ahead of you. The glaives deal damage to all enemies in their path towards the main target, and then return to you, dealing damage on their way back. The main target takes 4 times the damage that secondary targets take.
• Powershot is a powerful shot with a long cast time and a 1-minute cooldown. It deals 800% weapon damage to the target, as well as 400% weapon damage to all enemies between you and the target.
• Barrage is a channeled spell that fires a barrage of shots at the main target, dealing 640% weapon damage over 3 seconds (a total of 16 shots in quick succession), while also dealing 320% damage to all other enemy targets in a cone in front you (a total of 8 shots in quick succession to each target).

Glaive Toss provides the biggest single target DPS increase, and should be the default choice.

Barrage is the best choice for any AoE situations.

Powershot lags behind both Glaive Toss and Barrage, and it should really never be taken.

8. Pet Talents↑top

Pets no longer have talent trees (as they did prior to Mists of Pandaria). Instead, you can simply choose one of three specialisations for your pet (Ferocity, Cunning, and Tenacity). You can change your pet's specialisation at any time (while out of combat), free of cost.

Each specialisation grants your pet a few specific abilities. Currently, Ferocity provides the highest DPS in a raid environment, so it should be the default choice. Choosing Ferocity grants your pet an important active ability, Rabid. We discuss this in the rotation page.

9. Major Glyphs↑top

There are several Major Glyphs that provide you with survival and utility improvements. You should choose these based on the encounter and based on your own personal needs.

• Glyph of Animal Bond increases the healing you and your pet receive by 10%. This is a valuable asset during raids, and this is the only practically mandatory glyph.
• Glyph of Deterrence increases the damage reduction offered by Deterrence by 20%. This glyph is very useful and should be taken in practically all situations
• Glyph of Disengage increases the distance you travel while disengaging. This glyph is very useful, but you must be aware that in some cases traveling farther when Disengaging might not be beneficial.
• Glyph of Liberation heals you for 5% of your maximum health each time you use Disengage.
• Glyph of Distracting Shot sends the target of your Distracting Shot to attack your pet instead of you. The usefulness of this remains to be determined based on which bosses are susceptible to Distracting Shot.
• Glyph of Mending increases the amount of healing done by Mend Pet by 60%. This can prove very useful for keeping your pet alive.
• Glyph of Mirrored Blades causes all spells cast against you during Deterrence to be reflected back to the attacker, but it does not work against raid bosses.
• Glyph of Tranquilizing Shot removes the focus cost of Tranquilizing Shot, but gives the spell a 10-second cooldown. This could prove to be a very minor DPS boost in fights where you need to seldom use Tranquilizing Shot.

Finally, Glyph of Endless Wrath prevents your pet from being killed while Bestial Wrath is active. This glyph may come in handy in some situations.

10. Minor Glyphs↑top

Minor Glyphs do not provide any improvements to your performance, but there are a few that we believe are still worth mentioning.

• Glyph of Direction makes the target of your Misdirection appear larger, and has the (apparently unintended) side-effect of resetting the cooldown on your Misdirection.
• Glyph of Aspect of the Cheetah removes the dazing penalty when you are attacked while Aspect of the Cheetah is active. Instead, your Aspect is removed and all your other aspects are placed on a 4-second cooldown. This can be useful when you want to take the chance of being able to out-run something, as being hit will not slow you down beyond your normal movement speed anyway.
• Glyph of Aspect of the Pack increases the range of Aspect of the Pack by 15 yards, making it more convenient to use in raid groups.
• Glyph of Fetch teaches you the Fetch ability, which allows you to have your pet retrieve the loot from a far-away corpse. This ability is excellent while questing or farming, significantly reducing the amount of time you spend running around to loot corpses.
• Glyph of Lesser Proportion reduces the size of your pet, slightly. This can be useful in raids, so that other raid members (especially tanks and melee healers) can have a better view of the boss and the boss mechanics.
• Glyph of Tame Beast reduces the cast time of Tame Beast by 4 seconds making it easier to tame some rare or damaging pets.

11. Changelog↑top

• 23 May 2013: Updated the Tier 4 and Tier 5 talent discussions. We have given more value to Fervor and Blink Strike than they previously had, and clarified certain aspects.
• 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 updates.
  • Replaced Binding Shot with Intimidation among Tier 2 talents.
  • Updated the description of Blink Strike to account for the changes made to the talent, and changed the discussion of that tier's talents to reflect their current value.
• 13 Apr. 2013: Made several updates.
  • Emphasised the importance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera more among Tier 1 talents.
  • Emphasised the fact that Aspect of the Iron Hawk should be the top choice in most situations.
  • Reworded the Tier 4 talent section slightly to mention that Fervor is useful for AoE, and that Thrill of the Hunt is the worst choice.
  • Reworded the Tier 5 talent section slightly to emphasise the fact that Blink Strike is the weakest talent. Also added a clarification that Lynx Rush applies 9 stacks of the bleed in total, and not 9 to each of its targets (in case there are multiple targets).
  • Reworded the Tier 6 talent discussion to emphasise that Barrage is the best choice for AoE situations, and that Powershot is the worst choice.
  • Made slight adjustments to the descriptions of Glyph of Animal Bond, Glyph of Deterrence, and Glyph of Disengage. Added a mention for Glyph of Direction.
• 07 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Removed mention of Glyph of Marked for Death following its removal from the game (the effect is now baseline).
  • Updated cooldown of Silencing Shot from 20 to 24 seconds.
  • Updated cooldown of Wyvern Sting from 1 minute to 45 seconds.