Beast Mastery Hunter DPS Stat Priority — The War Within Pre-Patch
On this page, you will find out the optimal stat priority for your Beast Mastery Hunter. We first present the stat priority, before delving into more complex explanations. Our content is updated for World of Warcraft — The War Within Pre-Patch.
If you were looking for WotLK Classic content, please refer to our WotLK Classic Beast Mastery Hunter stat priority.
Best Stats for Beast Mastery Hunter in The War Within
Beast Mastery's Stat Priority generally breaks down to "Anything but Versatility is pretty good", and the finer details are usually left up to sims, which I highly recommend.
Stat Priority for Beast Mastery Hunter in Dragonflight
Beast Mastery Hunter Single-Target Stat Priority
- Agility;
- Critical Strike, to around 44%;
- Haste, to around 30%;
- Mastery, to around 5400 Rating;
- More Crit/Haste/Mastery.
- Versatility.
It is worth stressing that all stats are very close in value, and that this is merely a rough guideline. At the breakpoints mentioned, you are hitting points of diminishing returns beyond which more rating will give 10% less benefit. There are innumerable exceptions to this stat priority, which is why I recommend simming your character if you want to optimize it.
Beast Mastery Hunter AoE Stat Priority
- Agility;
- Mastery;
- Critical Strike, to around 44%;
- Haste, to around 30%;
- Versatility.
- More Crit/Haste.
For pure AoE, Mastery is the superior stat and should be stacked.
Diminishing Returns on Stats
There are points at which certain stats will start offering less benefit. These are the points of diminishing return. After this point, stats will give progressively less benefit. This does not necessarily mean that a Stat will no longer be good past its point of diminishing returns, but if you find yourself crossing them, you should pay special attention to your sims and find out if you should look for different stats.
- 5400 Crit, or 44% (due to
Keen Eyesight)
- 5100 Haste, or 30%
- 6150 Versatility, or 30%
- 5400 Mastery Rating
How To Choose Gear For The Beast Mastery Hunter
If you are ever in doubt about what items to wear for any given situation, the only way to truly figure it out for your character is to use Raidbots (click for a guide on how to use it). This website allows you to easily compare gear you already have, as well as gear you do not have.
Gearing decisions will not always be clear-cut. This is obvious if you have ever had to choose between a high item level piece of loot with bad stats, and a lower item level piece of loot with perfect stats. These decisions and more are the reason we recommend using Raidbots to help simulate your character.
Raidbots takes everything into account including procs, RNG elements, your specific gear, racials and more. If you have made sure you performed the simulation correctly, then you can generally trust Raidbots' results to be accurate.
Best Gems, Enchants, and Consumables for Beast Mastery Hunter
The gems, enchants, and consumables you will use are directly derived from your stat priority and you can find our advice on this topic in our dedicated page.
Stat Explanations
Agility is your primary stat. It provides you with Attack Power, which determines the damage your abilities do across the board.
Mastery, through Mastery: Master of Beasts, increases the damage
done by all the pets and creatures that you summon. This includes your main
pet, Dire Beasts and more.
Haste increases your attack speed and Focus regeneration, reduces
your
Global Cooldown from 1.5 seconds to a minimum of 0.750 seconds, and reduces the
cooldown on your Kill Command and
Barbed Shot abilities.
Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit with all
spells and
abilities, causing them to deal double damage. For Beast Mastery, in particular,
Critical Strike increases the frequency of Wild Call procs, which
gives auto-shot critical strikes a 20% chance to reset the cooldown of
Barbed Shot.
Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.
Changelog
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Updated for Season 4.
- 19 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Updated for Patch 10.2.5
- 23 Nov. 2023: Updated the stat priority and clarified when Versatility can take over.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2
- 04 Sep. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.7
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 15 Feb. 2023: Updated the generic stat priority.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Hunter Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Azortharion, a Hunter Theorycrafter and Guidewriter since 2014 who is widely considered one of the best Hunters in the world. He is an accomplished player with hundreds of top parses for all Hunter specs throughout the game's history. He is also the Founder and Admin of Trueshot Lodge, the Hunter Class Discord. You can find him on his stream on Twitch and his channel on YouTube. He also has his own personal Discord server where you can freely ask him any Hunter questions you may have!
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