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.