Hunter Leveling Guide from 1 to 80

Welcome to our Hunter leveling guide. Here you will find all you need to know to level up your Hunter efficiently. In addition, you may wish to check out our general Leveling guide, complete with detailed information on XP, mounts, addons, consumables, tips, and more. We encourage to read it to increase your leveling speed even more.

Hunters have always been one of the strongest leveling classes, and one of the strongest specs for soloing difficult content. Their pets can be their own personal tanks, and they have many tools that make combat easier and more fun, on top of being one of the more mobile classes in the game.

We recommend Beast Mastery for most of your Hunter Leveling needs. This is because its pet does a lot more damage, allowing it to sustain itself via the Leech it brings, and therefore letting you make larger pulls and fight more dangerous enemies with no trouble. Just make sure that you keep Growl enabled when out in the world, and disabled in dungeons!

Both Marksmanship and Survival are decent leveling specs as well, but Marksmanship suffers in particular from being rather slow to play, on top of having the weakest pet of all the specs, meaning you will have to do a lot of the tanking yourself.

You unlock your first ability of interest at Level 3.

Essentially all of your Ability Unlocks while Leveling as a Hunter in The War Within are from the Talent System. Starting at Level 10, you will start gaining 1 talent point per level, alternating between gaining a point in your Class Tree, and your Spec Tree. On our dedicated spec leveling guides above, you can find our recommended Talent Tree builds, and therefore the best abilities to unlock.

When purchasing Heirloom Items for Leveling in general, we recommend picking the Heirloom items that have the highest amount of Haste possible. Haste speeds up the spec in almost every way, allowing you to quickly breeze through your rotation, and move on to the next mob more quickly.

Haste is also useful for being a little bit quicker to tag mobs around you. A split second can make the difference between you getting a tag, or losing it to another player.

Once you've reached Level 80 and your leveling journey has found its end, you definitely want to check out the in-depth information on how to excel in all types of PvE content by checking out our Hunter Specialization Guides!