How To Improve As Beast Mastery Hunter — Shadowlands 9.0.2
On this page, you will find out how you can improve at playing Beast Mastery Hunter in World of Warcraft — Shadowlands 9.0.2. We list the common mistakes that you should try to avoid and the small details that can greatly improve your performance.
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.
For more information about Bestial Wrath's usage, please refer to the Bestial Wrath section of our rotation page.
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.
For more information about Kill Command's usage, please refer to the pet contribution section of our rotation page.
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.
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.
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.
Changelog
- 23 Nov. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Page updated for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
More Hunter Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Azortharion, a theorycrafter of all things Hunter-related for many years. He is an accomplished player with dozen of top parses for all specs throughout the game's history. He is also the Admin of Trueshot Lodge, the Hunter Class Discord, and you can watch his stream on Twitch. He even has his own personal Discord channel where you can get notifications about when the guides get updated and have direct communications with him.
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