Hunter Raid Utility Talents: What Can Your Hunter Do For Your Raid?

Hunters are a 'pure' DPS class, known for their ability to bring pain, and lots of it. In most PvE situations, the hunter doesn't tend to get much of an assignment -- we stand and pew pew away. However, as a raid member (or raid leader), it may help you to know what talents hunters can bring to the table that can help your raid perform better.

Each tree brings a specific talent that is designed to provide raid utility. Depending on the makeup of your raid, ensuring that your hunters take these raid utility talents can give your raid a significant boost in damage.

Hunting Party -- In the Survival tree, this talent offers a bonus to the hunter's agility, and offers a Replenishment buff. This buff is also provided by:

• Retribution Paladin, via Judgements of the Wise
• Shadow Priest, via Vampiric Touch
• Destruction Warlock, via Improved Soul Leech
• Frost Mage, via Enduring Winter

The replenishment buff offers 1% of maximum mana every 5 seconds to up to 10 party members. The party members who get it are the players with the lowest amount of mana at the time the replenishment buff takes effect. A full Hunting Party gives 100% chance for this buff to occur on critical hits of Arcane, Explosive, and Steady Shots.

A well-geared raid buffed hunter at this point tends to sport 50%-70% critical strike chance. With a 1.5s global cooldown, you'll be able to hit about 8-10 shots -- with a 50% crit chance, you'll see 4-5 different opportunities to refresh or create new replenishment buffs for your raid or party with 3 points in this talent during the 15 seconds it is active. This means that -- depending to some extent on crit -- going to only one or two points in this talent will probably be sufficient to maintain 100% uptime for your biggest mana hogs.

When to Use It: Generally, you will not need more than one replenishment provider in your party. If you do not have replenishment through another source, ensuring that your hunter can maintain uptime through this talent as much as possible will help your mana using classes significantly, both in DPS and healing. Most Survival builds include Hunting Party with 2 points, which should be sufficient to keep near 100% uptime on replenishment with current crit ratings.

What You Give Up: Trading 1% agility for a point in another tree -- such as Improved Aspect of the Hawk -- may confer a slight DPS loss in some situations, depending on gear. If you have enough sources of replenishment that you can give up the talents and spend them somewhere else, you may see a small personal DPS gain by picking up another talent. (As always, refer to the Hunter Spreadsheet to test this out.) However, if you don't have another source of replenishment -- or possibly if you only have one, in a 25-man with many mana users -- you will see a personal DPS loss due to more time spent in Aspect of the Viper.

In short, you'll want to make sure you have replenishment. If you don't, it's worth it to get it, either through a Survival hunter, or some other mechanism.

Trueshot Aura -- A talent in the Marksmanship Tree, this offers a 10% Attack Power boost to everyone near the Hunter. This buff is exclusive with:

• Enhancement Shaman's Unleashed Rage
• Blood Death Knight's Abomination's Might

When to Get It: A 10% AP buff will offer a significant boost to any AP-using class. For a well-geared hunter, this buff can provide a 5% gain in DPS. However, spending this talent point is not going to offer any other buff to the hunter other than the Aura itself -- unlike Hunting Party, it does not offer any other passive stat increase other than the AP gain. Enhancement Shamans and Blood Death Knights both gain passive stat bonuses by picking up this talented buff -- Death Knights, in the form of 2% strength, and Shamans in additional expertise. With the difficulty of staying near expertise caps, shamans will likely pick up Unleashed Rage in all situations. Most Blood Death Knight builds also include Abomination's Might. However, if you don't have either of these in your raid -- not unusual, with Blood and Enhance being somewhat less common specs to see in a raid environment -- you will definitely want to have your hunter pick up this Talent. The buff is worth the talent point, even if the hunter who picks it up is the only attack power based player in the group.

Ferocious Inspiration -- A Beast Mastery talent, Ferocious Inspiration increases damage raidwide by 3%. This benefit is exclusive with the buff provided by:

• Retribution Paladin's Sanctified Retribution
• Arcane Mage's Arcane Empowerment

For anyone raiding without an Arcane Mage or Retribution Paladin, this talent will almost completely recover most raid DPS lost to having a Beast Mastery hunter in 25-man raids. (Of course, with the popularity of Arcane Mages since 3.2, this is less likely.) On a simple fight like Koralon, 25-man groups will often see DPS in excess of 70k raidwide. This buff will, in that case, be providing a bonus of more than 2000 DPS to the raid.

When to Get It: Any Beast Mastery hunter will pick up these talent points, so if you have a BM hunter in your raid, there is no need to have them specifically pick up these talents. The same is basically true for all three classes which provide this buff: there is no significant DPS loss for the player by picking it up. In some cases -- where Replenishment and 10% AP buff are both provided by other members of the raid -- it may actually be worth it for a hunter to switch to Beast Mastery for the DPS buff, even though the end result is lower DPS for the hunter, because of the significant gain that this buff can provide.

When Not To Get It: In smaller groups, or fights with lower DPS, the Beast Mastery penalty of lower DPS will play a more significant role not overcome by Ferocious Inspiration; another spec may help more, with increased Hunter DPS making up for giving up the 3% damage buff.

In the end, each Talent Tree offers a specific buff that can help with raidwide DPS. These buffs are also provided by other classes. Depending on your makeup, you may wish to offer to your raid leader to give up some personal DPS in order to help the raid: consult your buff uptime on sites like WoW Meters Online and World of Logs to make such decisions, both on which buffs to get, and whether uptime is sufficient for points spent.

In some cases, a hunter will gain significantly by picking up talents not grabbed by other players in the raid, helping to turn that 1% life left into a kill. We all know that killing is what hunters do best.

Beast Mastery in ToC

Finally got back into ToC 25 today, for the first time in more than a week. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've really had a go at it since I picked up my 4-pc Tier 9 -- and the results were good.

As a reminder to everyone: Yes, I raid Beast Mastery (Except for Twins). I don't concentrate on DPS at the cost of everything else: On Jaraxxus, I'm chasing adds. On Anub, I'm backup on permafrost. On Beasts, I'm ready to Tranq, and on faction champions, I'm hitting aimed shot and tranq shot every time they're up. I interrupt/stun any time I can. I'm using my fear, I'm not standing in the fire, I'm bringing down snobolds.

My DPS is at the top of almost every fight; even on fights with better geared players, and players who have been playing much longer. These are not scrub players; we are slowly pushing into ToC hardmodes, and it is the strongest group of people I have played with during my time in WoW, both gear-wise and skill wise.

Min/Maxing is useful for a lot of things. It's useful for gear upgrades, gem considerations, and a great tool to look at playing with your spec. However, what it is not is a measure of how you will perform in a given scenario, and it is also not the end-all be-all answer. Player skill will *far outweigh* the potential differences between theoretical DPS.

A side note to all you people out there wanting to play Beast Mastery in a raid environment: Try it! BM provides a different play style, and still provides excellent burst, a useful tool to have when raiding high-end raid content. (Nether portal go boom.) Additionally, depending on your composition, it may provide a significant raid-wide DPS boost: Unless you have a ret pally (or in 3.3, an Arcane Mage) you'll get a unique buff from Ferocious Inspiration, giving a 3% raid-wide DPS boost.

Measure performance in raiding, not on spreadsheets. Spec and Gear can help determine where you'll end up, but a good player will be able to far outperform a bad player 100% of the time. Learn where you perform in the various specs -- you may surprise yourself.

Beast Mastery vs. Marksman on XT-002

A common thread among hunters is that Beast Mastery provides lower DPS than other hunter specs. Recently, I've been trying to test this, by way of using Marks on some 'stand still and do nothing but shoot' style fights, to test whether there is a chance that I am missing DPS that I could be taking advantage of.

Although I find Marks to be a big win on Onyxia (phase 2 is a BM hunter's worst nightmare), Twin Valkyr (pets don't get the damage buff), and Koralon (two rapid fires to start, plus it coming off cooldown again right in the 20% range, is a big win), I find that Marks DPS is something that can only really be optimized with specific fight lengths that stack up with rapid fire and readiness cooldowns. If a fight mechanic -- like the heart on XT -- doesn't line up well with your cooldowns, you lose a lot of DPS. For example, last night on Ulduar 25, I got to use rapid fire four times, on the first and third heart phase. However, on the middle heart phase, I had no cooldowns to burn.

Beast Mastery, on the other hand, with a 1.17 minute cooldown on TBW/Bestial Wrath, always has a cooldown to burn. On XT, I combine Rapid Fire + Bestial Wrath on the first heart phase, and usually get it back up in time to use on the second and third heart phases (depending on raid DPS).

On a recent Ulduar 10, I was able to put out 7800 dps on XT as BM. (This number is obviously inflated as a physical DPS class: My damage is mostly physical, and generally mitigated by armor, which XT's heart doesn't have, or so I'm told.)

Last night, in Ulduar 25, I was able to put out only 6900 dps as MM, with three rapid fires used.

I'll be the first to admit that this could be better, but the biggest issue I had on this fight was the feeling that my cooldowns did not line up with heart phases well.

I'll be the first to admit that my gear is not ideal for Marks -- I'm not a high-armor pen build, and I don't have an armor pen trinket. (I only picked up a new ranged weapon last week, after killing 35 different raid bosses that drop ranged weapons and never seeing one drop.) However, I spreadsheet at 900 DPS higher in Marks than my BM build (7000->7900 fully raid buffed), so there is no reason that I can think of to expect that the gear difference is the real reason that I'm having problems.

I've doubted for a long time that Beast Mastery DPS is as poor as people seem to think it is for many fights: the mechanics of the fight, lining up of cooldowns, and other factors in a fight *far* outweigh the theoretical benefits that a default spreadsheet build will be able to compensate for. A great Marksman hunter may be able to handle these differences, perhaps, but for me, I'm going to continue sticking to BM for most fights, with the exception of ones that are rigged against pet damage like Onyxia and Twins.

Just keep in mind that spreadsheets aren't everything. There are a lot of factors in a fight, and you may find that for you, Beast Mastery can be a great DPS boost, rather than a DPS loss.