Beast Mastery Hunter DPS Spec, Builds, Talents, and Pet Talents — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Note that these builds are generic recommendations for various content. Check out the dedicated pages below for more specific recommendations for the Raid and Mythic+.

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Best Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter in The War Within

Single-Target — Dark Ranger Mythic+ and Delves — Pack Leader Single-Target — Pack Leader Mythic+ and Delves — Dark Ranger

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Best Dark Ranger Single-Target Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter in Midnight Pre-Patch

This build is optimal for all things single-target.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

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Best Pack Leader Mythic+ Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter in The War Within

This is the optimal build for all things Mythic+, and other AoE-focused content.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

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Best Pack Leader Single-Target Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter in The War Within

This build offers competitive, though slightly worse single-target compared to Dark Ranger.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

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Best Dark Ranger Mythic+ Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter in The War Within

Dark Ranger has fairly weak AoE, but decent single-target, but ultimately comes out behind Pack Leader for Mythic+.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the best build directly into your game!

On this page, we generally offer three types of builds; Single-Target, Mythic+, and Raid AoE. Here is a brief explanation of what each build is optimized for and how they should be used.

Single-Target builds are straightforward — They do as much damage to single target as possible. Cleave and AoE are totally ignored here. Many raid fights are either wholly or predominantly single-target. In many cases, even if a fight has AoE moments like add spawns, if those add spawns are not especially important or dangerous, playing a single-target build can be optimal, even on such fights.

Mythic+ builds are optimized for completing Mythic+ dungeons as quickly as possible. To obtain them, thousands of builds are simulated across both single-target and AoE, and math is used to analyze this simulation data and arrive at the build that performs the best across both single-target and AoE, without disproportionately preferring AoE as many other methodologies tend to. Open-World and Delve Builds are often variants of this, as these disciplines also contain a healthy mixture of single-target and AoE, both of which ought to be optimized.

Raid AoE builds try to maximize single-target first, while also doing respectable AoE. While many raid encounters do have AoE in the form of add spawns and so on, the value of this AoE is often finite. Meaning, as long as they die within a certain, reasonable timeframe, extra damage done beyond this critical point is often worthless, and should not come at the cost of increased single-target damage, which tends to have infinite value, in that a faster-dying boss is nearly always easier. These builds pick up the bare minimum in terms of AoE proficiency, to not be completely useless for these add spawns, but are predominantly single-target optimized. If Mythic+ is weighed 50/50 on single-target and AoE, Raid AoE builds are weighed 75% in single-target's favour.

Your best Hero Talent depends on the content you are doing.

For Raiding, we prefer Dark Ranger for its superior single-target damage. Even on fights that have some measure of AoE, with the exception of the Soul Hunters (a Pack Leader fight), single-target is still usually the single most important thing.

For Mythic+, we prefer Pack Leader for its vastly superior AoE damage.

To better understand our Talent Builds and the Talents within them, it is helpful to understand all of Beast Mastery Hunter's spells and abilities in detail to get some context. For that, check out our dedicated Spells page:

Some talents will require you to play in a particular way to get the most out of them. You can find more information on how your rotation will look after selecting your talents on our rotation page below.

We have made a dedicated page for Hunter Pets information that we recommend you check out!

War Mode offers several benefits for you in the open world.

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• At least 10% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended to enable the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will be available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being "ganked" while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of all PvP Talents for Beast Mastery Hunter

1. Dire Beast: Hawk causes a hawk to circle a target area, damaging all targets within. This greatly supplements your AoE damage when doing big pulls in the open world.
2. Dire Beast: Basilisk is a powerful choice for bursty single-target damage. It is useful for world PvP if you can keep your opponent slowed enough for the Basilisk, and it is potent for rare mobs and quest mobs with much health.
3. Chimaeral Sting offers a good amount of opening damage for single targets and is very useful against most enemy players.

You can consider the other options essentially down to preference.

For details on how to play in Beast Mastery Hunter PvP, please visit our Beast Mastery Hunter PvP page.