How To Improve As Beast Mastery Hunter — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.1

1. Not Wasting Bestial Wrath Cooldown Reduction

Whenever you use Barbed Shot, the cooldown of Bestial Wrath is reduced by 12 seconds. This means that whenever you use Barbed Shot with less than 12 seconds of Bestial Wrath cooldown remaining, you are getting less cooldown reduction out of it than you otherwise would. This is partly unavoidable, but you want to minimize the impact. Try not to cast Barbed Shot when there are only a few seconds remaining on Bestial Wrath's cooldown. With that said, you do want to prioritize refreshing Frenzy at the last possible moment with Barbed Shot.

2. Starting Bestial Wrath With High Focus

Most of the good damage that Beast Mastery Hunters do occurs when Bestial Wrath is up. In order to maximize the actual damage bonus you get out of each Bestial Wrath, you want to maximize the Focus pool that you have available during Bestial Wrath. You should always ensure that you have around 100 Focus or above when you enter Bestial Wrath. With that said, we do not recommend delaying Bestial Wrath until you have high Focus. You should predict when it is about to come up and pool some Focus ahead of time, without overcapping it.

3. Casting Kill Command on Cooldown

Kill Command is the most efficient spell that Beast Mastery Hunters have available, meaning it does the most damage for the least amount of Focus, besides certain cooldowns and special abilities. Because it is so much more efficient than Cobra Shot, it is extremely important that you cast it on cooldown, every cooldown. Generally speaking, you want to be spamming your Kill Command button a little bit before it actually comes off cooldown to ensure that you are getting the most use out of it. Every second of delayed Kill Command is a tiny DPS loss that adds up as you repeat the mistake throughout the fight, even if it just by 1 second.

4. Proper Pet Control

At an absolute minimum, all Beast Mastery Hunters should have a macro with a /petattack line in it, or have this macroed into an existing ability. Typically, macroing it into an ability that you would only ever use on a target you want to deal with right here and now is good practice, such as Kill Command. Not doing this can cause your pet to run off your current target after you have cast Kill Command on it or similar, causing it to run aimlessly between targets, losing attacks and therefore damage. Macroing other pet abilities like petpassive (which will cause your pet to teleport to you when it is stuck) and the pet Move To ability is also recommended for fights where pets have to travel long distances otherwise.

5. Knowing How to Sim Yourself

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Beast Mastery Hunter without using Raidbots to sim your own character, as there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

Simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

6. Analyzing Your Mistakes as a Beast Mastery Hunter

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.