There’s been some heated discussion recently in the Hunter community pertaining to the viability or acceptability of playing–or more specifically, raiding–as a Beast Mastery Hunter which was reignited recently as the result of the last Scattered Shots column. Many felt the article was a bit condescending (and as a proud Night Elf, I’m inclined to agree), but rather than focus on the personal agenda behind the article, I’d rather focus on the issue it presents: Is it acceptable to raid as a Beast Mastery Hunter? The answer is, of course: …

In a recent post, we talked about possibilities for spending your first talent points and provided some suggestions for talent builds to use as you level. Of course, that begs the question: what about pet talents? What should we do with those as we level? Unlike our own talents and builds, pets are pretty straight-forward and often the build your pet uses while you level isn’t very different from the build it will be using at the level cap. The reason for that is that, rather than three talent trees …

The end of an expansion is always a common time for players to be leveling alts, and of course there are always those Johnny-Come-Lately players that join the game long after the party’s already well under way that could benefit from a bit of direction. We’ve received questions recently about where to spend your first talent points and far be it from us to leave you guys hanging!

Whether you’re a new player to the game or a player rolling a Hunter alt for the first time, you no doubt have some questions about possible leveling builds and which specs will perform the best. The short answer is that you can easily specialize in any of the three talent trees and be successful. As a pure-DPS class, we have the advantage of being able to use any spec we want to level and the results will be largely the same. Of course, certain configurations will be more efficient …

In a recent discussion on the official forums, a poster suggested that Beast Mastery as a primary spec was all but unheard of in the Hunter community, particularly among those raiding, saying: “There are very few ‘BM only’ hunters left, you have made sure of that.” To which Ghostcrawler replied: “BM is actually more popular than MM among level 80s. BM is also the most popular secondary spec, though maybe it could just be to play Pokemon with Spirit Beasts.”
This brings to mind a few different questions. First, while it’s …

It’s always a challenge trying to take in all of the information thrown at you and discern what is actually best for you and your spec, especially when it comes down to Glyphs. There are many glyphs, and of course each one sounds good, but it varies from spec to spec and person to person, making decisions quite difficult. Oftentimes people wonder “Is the 10% worth losing 6 seconds?” and it’s always hard to tell, so I’m going to be looking at the most popular hunter glyphs and explaining what’s …

It’s been two weeks since we last looked at the combination of Black Arrow and Lock and Load procs. In that time the tooltips have been adjusted and I’ve taken part in some raids to get some actual data on the proc rate of Lock and Load. Overall I still find Lock and Load to be an interesting and rather beneficial talent/proc for hunters, even if it only happens a few times per raid. Let’s go through the data and take a look.
On average it seems that Lock and Load …