WoW: Forever
Hunter
Hunter is the easiest class in the game to level alone and one of the hardest to play well in a group. Your pet tanks while you shoot, and Forever made pets scale with your own gear.
Which spec?
| Spec | Role | Levelling | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beast Mastery | Ranged DPS | Best in the game | Deadly Aspects procs 30% haste, and your pet does a real share of the work |
| Marksmanship | Ranged DPS | Poor solo, strong in dungeons | Lone Wolf at exactly 20 for +20% damage — a Multi-Shot talent |
| Survival | Melee DPS | Worst of the three | Parry, Deterrence and nastier traps. A PvP spec right now |
Level Beast Mastery. Taming a pet at level 10 is described in the published guides as "the single greatest leveling tool that any class gets without exception", and Beast Mastery's early talents — haste and movement speed — are exactly what levelling wants. The Marksmanship guide says of its own level-20 build that it is "not a good general play build", and the Survival one says outright "you should not go Survival if all you care about is damage or leveling quickly."
Respec when your goal changes: Marksmanship for dungeon pulls, Survival for duels.
Is Hunter for you?
Play Hunter if you want to kill things above your own level from the first hour, and you do not mind managing ammunition, a quiver and a pet.
Levelling milestones
| Level | What you get |
|---|---|
| 1 | Auto Shot, Raptor Strike — now scales with weapon damage |
| 4 | Serpent Sting |
| 6 | Arcane Shot, Hunter's Mark |
| 10 | The class quest, and the whole class. Tame Beast, Call Pet, Feed Pet, Revive Pet, Beast Training, plus Aspect of the Hawk |
| 12 | Mend Pet, Wing Clip |
| 16 | Immolation Trap, Mongoose Bite |
| 18 | Multi-Shot — now a single rank, 3 targets, sharing a cooldown with Aimed Shot |
| 20 | Aimed Shot is now trained and baseline (it was a talent), Aspect of the Cheetah, Freezing Trap, Disengage. Polearms trainable |
| 22 | Scorpid Sting — now reduces the target's hit chance by 2% |
| 26 | Rapid Fire — now boosts melee speed too |
| 30 | Feign Death, Lacerate, new, Aspect of the Beast — now +50 melee attack power |
| 34 | Explosive Trap |
| 40 | Mail armour from the class trainer, mount, Volley, Aspect of the Pack |
| 46 | Aspect of the Wild — now raid-wide |
Misdirection is not in Forever. Two published guides mention it; it is a Burning Crusade ability and it is absent from the client. Wyvern Sting is also gone, replaced by Lacerating Strikes.
Which race
Horde — Tauren, and it is called the single strongest Hunter race across both factions. Plainsrunning ramps to +30% movement speed, which lets you stutter-step and shoot from level 1 while keeping Aspect of the Hawk up instead of swapping to Cheetah. Endurance also now gives +1% hit.
Alliance — Human, which is new to Hunter in Forever. Sword Specialization is +2% crit, the largest weapon racial, and it is general crit — so it applies to your shots off a sword carried purely as a stat stick.
Forever changed the answer. Tauren Hunter was the weak vanilla pick and is now the strongest. Dwarf lost Gun Specialization and gained a mace racial it cannot use, which is a genuine grievance.
Quality of life
- Level 10 is the class. Do the pet chain the moment you reach it. Tame a Bear first —
Swipeis one of the few pet abilities that holds threat on several targets at once. Note that in Forever you cannot tame a beast above your own level. - Ammunition and the quiver are real costs. The quiver gives a ranged attack-speed bonus and does not stack, so carry exactly one. Buy ammunition in stacks whenever you pass a vendor.
- Aspect of the Cheetah is your mount until 40 and should be up almost all the time in the world;
Pathfindingpushes it to +36%. - Two trainers matter: your class trainer gives mail at 40, and a weapon master teaches anything you did not start with — polearms only from 20. As a Human, the trip worth making is one-handed swords, for the crit.
What changed from Classic
| Change | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Pets inherit 10% of your attack power and 100% of your crit | Your gear now makes your pet stronger |
| Aimed Shot trained at 20, not talented | Every Hunter gets it, and it shares a cooldown with Multi-Shot |
| Traps usable in combat, cooldowns 15s → 30s | Fire and Frost traps have separate limits, so you can hold one of each |
| Misdirection absent | There is no threat-transfer tool in Forever, for anyone |
| Survival became a melee specialisation | It is not a levelling spec |
| The 8-yard dead zone remains | Forever did not fix it, despite heavy feedback |
One unresolved disagreement: one major guide states your abilities no longer clip auto-shot, which would remove vanilla's hardest Hunter skill; another still advises shot-weaving. Blizzard has said the missing cast time is a bug it intends to fix, so assume weaving will matter.
At level 60
Unknown. Nothing past level 20 has been played, so the 31-point builds, whether Lone Wolf beats a live pet, whether Sniper Shot's four-second cast is a damage loss, and whether melee Survival is viable at all are open questions. Raids open 9 December.