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

For Hunters, Beast Mastery is the overall least viable PvE spec. While Beast Mastery can do excellent burst damage, in the vast majority of situations they will be lose to both Survival and Marksmanship at similar levels of play.

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

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 4/5 points in Frenzy. 4 points is all you need to maintain 100% uptime on the buff, making the 5th point unnecessary. Other talents such as Catlike Reflexes and Cobra Strikes actually have similar issues, although there is still benefit in the 3rd point 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. You could opt to take 3/3 in Improved Arcane Shot instead.

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.

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 Serpent Sting increases the duration of your Serpent Sting by 6 seconds. Since you need to maintain a 100% uptime, this will save you multiple casts over an encounter.

Glyph of Bestial Wrath reduces the cooldown of your Bestial Wrath by an additional 20 seconds. With your talents, this brings your Bestial Wrath to just over a 1-minute cooldown, making it an even more powerful cooldown.

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.