Part 3: Beast Mastery
To be perfectly honest, this is an article I’ve been putting off writing. Why? Because it’s a topic that’s been widely covered elsewhere, and I’ve had a difficult time determining what else there could possibly be to say about this tree that people aren’t already well aware of. The Beast Mastery tree is widely accepted as “the best leveling tree” for hunters, which is arguable, but it’s still a good place for burgeoning young hunters to start, and it’s a good tree to teach hunters the finer points of the class. Beast Mastery is a detail-oriented tree that places great emphasis on the bond between the hunter and their pet. On top of that, Beast Mastery has also come into it’s own as a viable raiding spec, especially with the somewhat recent changes to the mechanics of Mend Pet and the addition of Avoidance. There have always been die-hard Beast Mastery hunters out there since the game’s release, and these days they’re really starting to get a lot of press, so it’s hard to know what else there could possibly be to say about this spec, when someone, somewhere, has probably already said it, and said it better.
But, rather than cop-out, I’ll continue this article in the same spirit as the other two already posted. If the information isn’t anything new to you, congrats, you get a gold star. If it’s new information to you, then consider this merely a starting point, and a spring-board to discovering all the nifty things this tree has to offer you. Let’s get started!
Notable Talents
Focused Fire – All damage caused by you is increased by 2% while your pet is active and the critical strike chance of your Kill Command ability is increased by 20%. This talent, in tandem with Endurance Training (increases your pet’s health by 10% and your health by 5%), is great for increasing your total dps. Not only are you increasing your own damage by 2%, but you’re also increasing your pet’s damage by increasing it’s crit chance with Kill Command (where a good chunk of your pet’s damage comes from). Stacking +crit gear and/or gems with this talent will make you and your pet’s damage sky rocket.
Thick Hide – Increases the armor rating of your pets by 20% and your armor contributions from items by 10%. The longer your pet lives, the longer it does damage. The more armor your pet has, the longer it lives. See where I’m headed with that?
Improved Revive Pet – Revive Pet’s casting time is reduced by 6 seconds, mana cost is reduced by 40%, and increases the health your pet returns with by an additional 30%. For most hunters, this may not seem that great. But, the real meat and potatoes for this one is for raiding hunters. If your pet dies during a boss fight, you’re gimped for about 40-45% of your overall damage, so it would behoove you to attempt to rez your pet during the fight, if possible. By reducing the casting time, mana cost, and increasing the health your pet comes back with, you’re greatly reducing the downtime caused by rezzing your pet mid-fight, and you’re back up and running at full capacity that much quicker.
Unleashed Fury and Ferocity – Increases the damage done by your pets by 20%. Increases the critical strike chance of your pets by 10%. These two talents account for a lot of the disparity between the amount of damage a BM hunter’s pet does and the damage another type of hunter’s pet does. Because you personally lose some damage-boosting talents by going into the BM tree, the BM tree offsets this change by increasing the amount of damage your pet does by a significant amount, which makes it that much more important for you to also focus on talents and abilities for you and your pet that will help keep it alive. With these two talents alone, a BM hunter’s pet goes from contributing about 32-35% of the overall damage to contributing about 40-45%. (These numbers are based on my own observations when separating my damage data from my pet’s damage data with various talent specs, using DamageMeters.)
Intimidation – Command your pet to intimidate the target on the next successful melee attack, causing a high amount of threat and stunning the target for 3 seconds. This talent is great in a number of different situations. One good example: in 5-mans, if your trap mob gets loose before your cooldown is up to re-trap, pop Intimidation. You’ve stunned the target for 3 seconds, reducing the amount of damage being taken from the loose mob, and you’ve likely also given your pet aggro on the mob, rather than taking hits from the mob yourself until you can re-trap it. You can always rez your pet mid-fight. You cannot, however, rez yourself. Which means better chances of survival not only for you, but also your party members because you haven’t been taken out of the fight, and you’ll be able to re-trap the mob momentarily and go on about your business.
Spirit Bond and Bestial Discipline – While your pet is active, you and your pet will regenerate 2% of total health every 10 seconds. Increases the Focus regeneration of your pets by 100%. Free health regen for both you and your pet could never be a bad thing. As for Focus regen, Focus is where your pet gets it’s “oomph”. Without Focus, you pet cannot use abilities like Claw, Bite, Dash, Dive, or Growl (to name a few). Which means your pet is running on purely white damage. If you run Scrolling Combat Text, and pay attention to it, you can easily see the difference between your pet’s white damage and the damage it does with special abilities. By robbing your pet of Focus, you’re likely robbing it of about 50% of it’s potential damage output. Lets get those pets some Focus regen, shall we?! The more Focus your pet has to work with, the more damage it can do.
Frenzy – Gives your pet a 100% chance to gain a 30% attack speed increase for 8 seconds after dealing a critical strike. More attacks mean more opportunities for crits, which will trigger other BM talents such as Ferocious Inspiration and gives your pet more burst damage output in general.
Bestial Wrath – Send your pet into a rage causing 50% additional damage for 18 seconds. While enraged, the beast does not feel pity or remorse or fear and cannot be stopped unless killed. Were more beautiful words ever spoken? PvP hunters liken this ability to their pet shaking clothies like rag dolls. It’s a no-brainer.
Ferocious Inspiration – When your pet scores a critical hit, all party members have all damage increased by 3% for 10 seconds. Say hello to the BM equivalent of Trueshot Aura or Expose Weakness. While the one talent of the three that gives the most benefit can be argued (to great extent), what it really comes down to is that of any of the three trees you choose to specialize in, there is a party/attack buff to be had that your party members will thank you for. With that in mind, depending on your tree (in this case, BM, duh), you should at least make an attempt to stack some gear and/or gems/enchants that will increase the frequency of the proc of the buff. In this case, the conditional is pet crits, which you really increase through other talent choices in the BM tree, as described above.
Serpent’s Swiftness – Increases ranged combat attack speed by 20% and your pet’s melee attack speed by 20%. As mentioned above with Frenzy, faster attacks means more opportunities to crit in the same span of time. More crits mean more conditional ability procs (like Ferocious Inspiration). Good stuff!
The Beast Within – When your pet is under the effects of Bestial Wrath, you also go into a rage causing 10% additional damage and reducing mana costs of all spells by 20% for 18 seconds. While enraged, you do not feel pity or remorse or fear and you cannot be stopped unless killed. Say hello to Berserker status. Upon triggering one ability (Bestial Wrath), you are not only increasing your pet’s damage by 50%, but yours by 10% as well. Both you and your pet, enraged, are a force to be reckoned with. Pop attack power trinkets and Rapid Fire in tandem with Bestial Wrath and you become an army of two. (Just please keep in mind, watch your aggro!)
Gearing Up for Beast Mastery
A lot of the viability of this tree comes down to the survivability of your pet. While there are talents that will increase your pet’s survivability in and of themselves, you’ll also want to do your part to help. Stack some +Stamina to keep both you and your pet rolling. Also, you’ll want to give yourself a bigger mana pool to work with because you’re missing several talents that would otherwise augment that. Stack some +Intellect. This will not only help you maintain a decent amount of burst damage from shots, but also aid you in reducing downtime from rezzing/healing your pet as needed. Aside from those two stats in particular, you would want to stack +Agility/+Attack Power just as any other hunter might to increase your overall damage output.
I know I’m missing many of the finer points of this tree, and to be honest, I’ve done that intentionally. These articles have merely been an attempt to familiarize folks with the cool tricks and talents each tree has to offer, and give a brief overview of how they might be utilized. My main goal here has been to provide a fly-by of each tree that might help young hunters pick a path that fits their personalities, or provide some insight for more experienced hunters into trees they hadn’t tried yet. Especially with the BM tree, there are many other articles out there that work on the specifics, which are out of the scope of these articles anyway. So, I’ll leave the minutiae for another day.
I hope you’ve found this series helpful! 
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“increasing it’s crit chance with Kill Command (where a good chunk of your pet’s damage comes from). ”
Maybe, at 70 or whatever level one gets it! My hunter is 62 and yet to have that!
“Improved Revive Pet” – You’re quoting the 1/2 value instead of the 2/2 or 5/5 value as you do for other talents.
“Free health regen for both you and your pet could never be a bad thing.” – Unless, of course, you can put 2 TPs to better use elsewhere. I know some who use SB, but I personally find it a waste of TPs: the benefit is sooo small that it hardly saves my or my pet’s butt…
As for BD, now that’s a MUST for every leveling BM hunter! It’s unbelievable how much better grinding several mobs gets after 2/2 in BD!
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improved aspect of hawk is missed. its a nice talent to have
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@ Shake… I think Imp. Aspect of the Hawk is sort of a personal preference thing… I, personally, really like it and use it all the time because it procs all the time for me. Other people have bad luck with it proc’ing and might want to put their points elsewhere. But that’s just my take on it.
@ Lassirra: Very awesome series, I’ve enjoyed reading it and it’s been very educational. Thank you!
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Someone–
“Improved Revive Pet” – You’re quoting the 1/2 value instead of the 2/2 or 5/5 value as you do for other talents.
Mis-click FTW.
“Free health regen for both you and your pet could never be a bad thing.” – Unless, of course, you can put 2 TPs to better use elsewhere. I know some who use SB, but I personally find it a waste of TPs: the benefit is sooo small that it hardly saves my or my pet’s butt…
Then on your blog, you can say so.
Shake–
improved aspect of hawk is missed. its a nice talent to have
Yes it’s nice. But it was missed intentionally.
Pike — As always, good to see ya.
Glad you liked it. 
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“Then on your blog, you can say so.
”
And I have in the past!
What’s with the quoting chars, btw? Whenever you quote something it’s with ??? instead of ” or ‘ …
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Hmm… I haven’t seen that happen, but it could be MS Word formatting. I know I’ve turned off automatic conversion of special characters in my copy of Office, though, so it’s not from anything I’ve posted directly.
/shrug
Dunno, honestly.
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Pingback: Pet Health » Hunter Talent Trees: Know Your Role (Part 3)
Great series, thanks a bunch!! oh, and the know-it-all series is terrific.
I’ve had SB and am currently w/o it….I miss it on my Dwarf, but not so much on my Draenei due to the racial Gift of the Naruu. But, it definately comes in handy when grinding solo on the Dwarf.
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Yeah, I get the question marks too, they also show up when you shorten two words, for example: “I am” to “I’m”. Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to say.
Just wanted to be one of the few (?) to express my appreciation of your big walls of text. I think it’s very good that you, instead of cutting the text down do make it more “user friendly” and accepted, make it just as big as it needs to be to get the point across without being misunderstood. Better safe than sorry, right?
I do that myself all the time, hehe.
Oh, and gratz on the High King Malugar kill. Go and make a pin-cushin out of Gruul now.
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ok, you have some things wrong with bm. first, i realise that you havent tried it much and all that but, they are indeed good for leveling, but also GREAT for pvp and arena. i usually end up surviving longer than anyone else in my group for raiding and for pvp i also do quite well…so plz b4 you present something like this…get the facts straight…but i also believe that in this you are only talking about leveling a bm hunter
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Stradon — First of all, the majority of this article is based on quoting tooltip text for the different talents. Not much to get wrong there, is there? Second of all, I HAVE tried BM for extended periods of time. Third, never did I say that BM was not viable for PvP or arenas. In fact, I have always felt it’s extremely useful for both. So….. wtf are you talking about?
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Until last week I swore by MM. There was no way you could make me change, but slowly as more and more hunters swapped to BM I decided to at least consider it.
Well it took some doing, five attempts to actually “accept” the 50g cost of wiping talents (no, not 5x50g but 4xforget it and 1x50g).
Obviously I’ve been tweaking a lot for it to be that much – but that’s a pvp / arena / raiding thing.
End result I lost 450 AP – ‘nerfed’ I hear you cry. Your AP is reduced from 2000 unbuffed to 1550, go t o the corner and worse, your crit lost 0.5%.
Screw you I answer, even without my pet bonuses my dps went up 5 per sec on the char page. With the pet active it went up 11. I lost my beloved “pull that mage/warlock’s ass out of the fire” scatter shot, and the awesome “pull any caster” silencing shot – not to mention my roll in gruuls as an interrupter – but my overal dps for the raid – every raid – went up 60. No longer maxing out at 500-520 on everyone’s dps meters I went to 570-600. Half the time my pet was down less than 50% of the way thru each boss fight, so that’s still an awesome jump.
New gems and weapon enchantments later and my crit is now 1% higher, but my AP lost another 50. No matter because my raid dps is now a minimum of 600.
Let’s move on to Arena and PVP. I rule, haven’t lost a single arena match since I switched (err duh, really? obviously). Well not so obviously because I was a sort after hunter in my guild for arena just because of my stonking AP (to 10 on the server I’ll have you know). So even tho 3/4 top ranked hunters are BM I still thought I could be one of the 1/4 MM. BS. The “beserker” mode is a warlock murdering tool – fellow guildee informed me he couldn’t kill a hunter, and till last week I laughed and said I couldn’t kill a lock. Or a rogue. Or a DPS warrior. Now I laugh in the face of all of them.
PVP is even better and in AV farm mode I’m strictly ‘D’ to maximise my honor.
BM is the way forward, sure you lose some great bonuses, but as long as you grab the 5 crit at the top of the tree, throw 41 into BM and 15 into SV (longer traps are your raid party’s best friend, and who can say no to a bit more damage and some extra health).
Nuf (too much probably) said. I’m converted.
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I commented this same reply on another forum here but, once again………
If anyone who is Mark’s or anything else and doing PVP thinks that it does well (especially arena). I urge you ALL to spec BM. I was spec’d Mark’s and once I respec’d to 41 BM to get my Wraith and 24 MM, give or take a few points?! I have not been class A material in Arena, but done some major improvments in the PWNAGE category!!
18 sec. of unstopable Dmg is off the hook.
At times I swell us up, put my pet on the enemy and run in circles if I have to, and you would be AMAZED at the DMG your pet will put out. Also snake trap is a hunters BESTFRIEND when doing these Kiting methods. Best I have seen yet!
I am undoubtably the #1 man in my 3v3 and 5v5 teams…….I am top on dmg 95% of the time and the ole pet does me right. Not only can you Intimidation, Trap, Wing Clip, and Kite the crap out of your oppent. Its hard enough when they have a enlarged pet beating the crap out of them, interupting cast’s, and such. The thought of the pet that can not be feared or stopped is intimadating and frustrating in it’s self. I here this all the time.
If you are a big PVP’er and insist on Marks, give into the urge and at least try BM with mixed MM. Give it a nice firm try, not just a week. I think you will be satisfied with the outcome.
Hope this was informal.
Cheers Love the site! Best ive seen yet. Will be visiting alot.
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Great articles!
I chose beast mastery because I play along with my husband, who’s a squishy (frost) mage. Intimidation is great when he grabs a little too much agro. I’m amazed at the situations we come crawling out alive of!
I’m looking forward to reading your other posts to see where I want to put my leftover points. Very good information, and well written as well. Thank you for taking the time to put it all together.
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Thanks for this series of overviews! Very helpful to a nascent hunter like me.
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Thanks for the articles, read them a bit ago and just wanted to tell you that they were very informative. I am a die hard BM hunter, I just like having the idea of my pet being able to withstand all that abuse while I sit at range and burn mobs down! I thought it was great how you went through each tree and picked out the most useful talents and told us how to maximize those talents through gear. As for length, whatever it takes to get your point across effectively. Good work!
Vanzant
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