Beast Mastery Hunter DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (11.0.5)

• Casting Kill Command as much as possible, both on single-target and AoE.
• Managing your Focus — Never capping it but also ensuring you have enough Focus to cast Kill Command off cooldown.

• All the same goals as the single-target Rotation.
• Maintaining Beast Cleave (by using Multi-Shot) at 100% uptime, ensuring that all your pet abilities are constantly dealing AoE damage.
• Being extra careful with Focus management to ensure that you can always refresh Beast Cleave as late as possible while simultaneously casting all your Kill Commands on cooldown.

Important Note: Because the in-game "auto-cast" system for Hunter pets is very slow, it is recommended to put these 3 lines into macros for all of your offensive spells.

• /cast [@pettarget]Claw
• /cast [@pettarget]Bite
• /cast [@pettarget]Smack

We recommend adding these 3 lines to the end of your macros.

This ensures that you will always cast your pet's Basic Attack on cooldown since Blizzard's automatic cast will delay each cast by up to 0.1 seconds. It is a very small but real DPS increase. There is no reason not to do this, even if Blizzard eventually fixes it. For more macros, please refer to our Beast Mastery Hunter macro page.

I recommend that you grab my Barbed Shot Helper WeakAura. It will pop up when it is time to cast Barbed Shot automatically, and it lets you focus on the rest of the Rotation.

In the Single-Target and AoE sections, you will find a highly detailed priority list breakdown of the Rotation, as well as optimal openers.

1. Ensure Hunter's Mark is active on the target from you or another Hunter in the group!
2. Pre-cast Bestial Wrath at around 1.7s on the pulltimer.
3. Use Barbed Shot — Gets our pet sent in and gets Frenzy rolling.
4. Use Dire Beast
5. Use Bestial Wrath
6. Use Black Arrow
7. Use all of your Kill Commands and Barbed Shots in alternating order, until you run out of both of them.
8. Use Call of the Wild alongside your Potion and stat-granting on-use Trinkets.
9. Use Bloodshed alongside your Potion and stat-granting on-use Trinkets.
10. Proceed with your normal Rotation according to the priority list below.

This priority list describes the optimal single-target Rotation for Beast Mastery Hunter

1. You should use damage-dealing Trinkets like Mad Queen's Mandate and others as often as possible throughout the fight, firstly. The last use of the Mandate should also be used when the boss is as close to dying as possible for the extra damage.
2. Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg usage is mostly about ensuring that you do not exceed 20 stacks of either the Primary (standing still) or secondary (moving around) stat buffs. The perfect distribution to target and suspend with its on-use is 20/10 Secondary/Primary, which generally means moving a lot. Luckily, Beast Mastery is very good at that.
3. Use Barbed Shot to refresh Frenzy when it is about to fall off. If Bestial Wrath is off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing it if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks. If Bestial Wrath or Call of the Wild are off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing them, if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks. If Call of the Wild is off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing it, if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
4. Use Black Arrow if Serpent Sting has less than 6 seconds remaining, or is down.
5. Use Kill Shot if Serpent Sting has less than 6 seconds remaining, or is down.
6. Use Call of the Wild on cooldown. Make sure to dump all of your Kill Commands first.
7. Use Bloodshed on cooldown.
8. Use Bestial Wrath on cooldown.
9. Use Kill Command on cooldown.
10. Use Dire Beast on cooldown.
11. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
12. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
13. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
14. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
15. Use Barbed Shot to prevent it from reaching 2 charges. With Wild Call specced, cast Barbed Shot at just "1.4" charges, meaning when its second charge is about halfway towards coming off cooldown. You should simply use it on cooldown when Call of the Wild is active. You should also cast Barbed Shot if doing so would reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath 1 Barbed will take off 12 seconds, and 2 of them will take off 24 seconds.
16. Use Kill Shot whenever possible.
17. Use Black Arrow whenever possible.
18. Explosive Shot is not worth the button-press on single-target.
19. Use Cobra Shot when you have nothing else to do.

1. Ensure Hunter's Mark is active on the highest HP target from you or another Hunter in the group!
2. Pre-cast Bestial Wrath at around 1.7s on the pulltimer, or as the pull is about to be gathered.
3. Use 2 Barbed Shots on two different targets.
4. Use Dire Beast
5. Use Multi-Shot to activate Beast Cleave
6. Use Call of the Wild
7. Use Bloodshed
8. Use Bestial Wrath
9. Use Black Arrow
10. Use Multi-Shot to refresh Beast Cleave
11. Proceed with your normal Rotation according to the priority list below.

This priority list describes the optimal AoE rotation for Beast Mastery Hunter

1. Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg usage is mostly about ensuring that you do not exceed 20 stacks of either the Primary (standing still) or secondary (moving around) stat buffs. The perfect distribution to target and suspend with its on-use is 20/10 Secondary/Primary, which generally means moving a lot. Luckily, Beast Mastery is very good at that.
2. Use Barbed Shot to refresh Frenzy if it is about to fall off. You should always multidot it, as this is a huge DPS increase, particularly with Master Handler specced. As a top priority, you should also ensure that Barbed Shot never reaches 2 charges. If Bestial Wrath's cooldown is less than 12 seconds, you should also use a Barbed Shot to bring it off cooldown as a high priority. If Bestial Wrath is off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing it, if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks. If Bestial Wrath or Call of the Wild are off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing them, if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks. If Call of the Wild is off cooldown, spend all of your Barbed Shot charges before pressing it, if Frenzy has fewer than 3 stacks.
3. Do not use Barrage for DPS. It is only ever used to gather together mobs in solo-content.
4. Use Multi-Shot to apply and maintain the Beast Cleave buff on your pet. You should try to refresh it as late as possible, generally, but without wasting other globals. This is not an exact science — Sometimes it is sensible to refresh early if you know that another, urgent global is coming up like a Frenzy refresh. Typically, it is best to leave the refresh as late as possible and squeeze other globals in ahead of it. Remember that Multi-Shot's actual damage is quite pathetic, and its only use is to get Beast Cleave going.
5. Use Black Arrow on cooldown, provided that Beast Cleave is active.
6. Use Dire Beast on cooldown.
7. Use Call of the Wild on cooldown.
8. Use Bestial Wrath on cooldown.
9. Use Bloodshed on cooldown.
10. Cast Kill Command on cooldown. You should try to "snipe" targets below 35% HP with your Kill Commands, as they (and the resulting Kill Cleave) will deal 50% increased damage thanks to your Killer Instinct Talent. It is also technically optimal, but a very small gain, to cycle your A Murder of Crows debuffs on different targets, by ensuring that every 5th Kill Command is on a target that has no Crows active. The amount of brain-power required to do this optimally, considering its small gain, is probably not worth the effort.
11. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
12. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
13. Use Barbed Shot on cooldown.
14. Barbed Shot to prevent it from reaching 2 charges. With Wild Call specced, cast Barbed Shot at just "1.2" charges, meaning when its first charge has recently come off cooldown. You should simply use it on cooldown when Call of the Wild is active. You should also cast Barbed Shot if doing so would reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath 1 Barbed will take off 12 seconds, and 2 of them will take off 24 seconds.
15. Cast Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath to generate Kill Command resets.
16. Use Kill Shot on cooldown.
17. Use Dire Beast on cooldown.
18. Use Explosive Shot on cooldown.
19. Use Cobra Shot when you have more than 75 Focus.