WotLK Classic Beast Mastery Hunter Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

The Beast Mastery Hunter talents focus on damage output. Beast Mastery unfortunately has very little choice; you are locked into every obvious damage increasing talent with little to no variance.

This is the standard talent build that you should take for raiding and dungeons as a Beast Mastery Hunter. Beast Mastery has several weird interactions with certain talents that can make the tree particularly non-intuitive at first glance.

The first thing you might notice is only 3/5 points in Frenzy. 3 points is all you need to maintain 100% uptime on the buff assuming current raid gear. Other talents such as Catlike Reflexes and Cobra Strikes have similar issues, although there is still benefit in the extra points for each talent. Finally in the MM tree, Go for the Throat has the same issue, where 1 point is all you need to essentially give you pet limitless Focus.

For filler points, the points in Spirit Bond and Endurance Training are only taken to progress up the tree. Everything else is required, although again there is some debate about the effectiveness of the third point in both Catlike Reflexes and Cobra Strikes.

One common question is why does the tree skip Aimed Shot? Beast Mastery's tree offers no damage increases to Aimed Shot, meaning Multi-Shot actually does exactly the same damage as Aimed Shot, just for slightly more Mana. That Mana efficiency is not worth a talent point. The only reason to take Aimed Shot would be in a situation where you need the healing reduction for a fight mechanic.

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Hunters.

While most of these talents are pet-based, there are several critical damage talents that increase both you and your group's damage as well.

Bestial Wrath is the most powerful cooldown that any Hunter specialization has access to, and is the main selling point of Beast Mastery. This is an amazing cooldown that increases both you and your pets damage substantially, more importantly giving you access to on-demand burst that is otherwise inaccessible.

Ferocious Inspiration is your primary raid buff as Beast Mastery, giving your full raid group 3% more damage done. This is an absolute requirement for the raid buff alone, but it also provides some other shot damage as well.

Frenzy is a powerful talent that gives your pet basically 30% more attack speed with 100% up-time, but that up-time is achievable at only 3/5 points.

Beast Mastery is an absolutely incredible talent that has probably the most class flavor and power out of any other final talent on any specialization in the game. This allows you to tame exotic pets, but also gives you additional pet talent points. In the normal pet talent tree you only have 1 point to place in the final row, but this opens you up to filling the whole final row plus an additional point elsewhere.

Go for the Throat is a 1-point wonder. A single point in this talent gives your pet unlimited focus, which is a huge increase in the number of abilities it can cast. Do not miss this talent.

Glyph of Steady Shot increases the damage of your Steady Shot by 10% while Serpent Sting is active. Steady Shot is your main filler spell, and this is a solid DPS increase for all Hunter specs over other glyphs.

Glyph of Kill Shot reduces the cooldown of Kill Shot by 6 seconds. Kill Shot is far and away your most powerful attack, and a 6 second cooldown reduction is meaningful enough that you should get multiple extra casts in a normal fight.

Glyph of Explosive Trap is your final best option and is notably the best for AoE as well. Now that we have Trap Launcher, you will always take this glyph in all situations.

Glyph of Mend Pet slightly increases your pet's happiness, which means you should not need to feed it anymore. It is a nice quality of life glyph.

Glyph of Feign Death reduces the cooldown of Feign Death by 5 seconds.

Glyph of Revive Pet makes it so you no longer get spell push-back when taking damage while casting Revive Pet.