Beast Mastery Hunter

Is Beast Mastery worth levelling?

Yes, and nothing beats it. The published verdict on taming a pet at level 10 is blunt: "the single greatest leveling tool that any class gets without exception."

The reason Beast Mastery specifically is the answer at low level is Deadly Aspects — "one of the best 5 point talents you can take" — and the fact that the tree's other early points are movement speed and pet reliability, which is exactly what levelling wants.

One thing to learn immediately: the dead zone. Below level 10, walk backwards between shots. You want the maximum number of ranged attacks in before the enemy closes.

Your talent points

Level 20 — 10/1/0 or 11/0/0. Hunter is the one class with no single obvious level-20 capstone, so the published advice is genuinely flexible.

1. Deadly Aspects, 5 points — this is the outlier. A 2%-per-rank chance on Auto Shot of +30% ranged attack speed for 12 seconds, while Aspect of the Hawk is up
2. Pathfinding, 2 points — +6% to Aspect of the Cheetah and Aspect of the Pack, taking Cheetah to +36%. It does nothing while you are in Aspect of the Hawk, so it is a travel talent rather than a combat one — which is the honest case for it before a mount: "so much more noticeable than anything else while you run around the world"
3. The last 4 points are subjective. Named options, with what each is for:

- Improved Revive Pet — makes bringing your pet back reliable in combat. The safe pick

- Focused Fire — "the strongest DPS talent available at this point"

- Lethal Attacks — "a close second"

- Hawk Eye — extra range, for kiting and PvP

- Bestial Swiftness — if all 10 go into Beast Mastery, your pet closes on targets far faster

Rotation

The honest version first: early Hunter is mostly Auto Shot, and that is by design.

1. Aspect of the Hawk up before you engage — unless you are kiting, in which case Aspect of the Cheetah
2. Hunter's Mark before the pull
3. Send the pet in first, abilities on auto-cast
4. Once the pet has the target's attention, Serpent Sting
5. Aimed Shot on cooldown
6. Auto Shot the rest of the time
7. Disengage if you pull the target off your pet
8. Arcane Shot only with mana to spare

Multi-target: Multi-Shot in place of Aimed Shot.

The mana rule that matters most: "Even if you are out of mana, it will always be more efficient to just attack the next target and regenerate your mana slowly while using basic attacks." Spend what mana you have on Mend Pet and Serpent Sting first.

Stat priority

Weapon damage, then Agility — and past that, take the higher item level.

Weapon damage is "far and away your most important stat", and there is a subtlety worth knowing: prefer the slower weapon. Aimed Shot calculates from your weapon's damage per hit, not its DPS, so a slow high-damage bow makes your abilities hit harder. Hit is strong but barely exists on gear at this level.

Your pet

Forever changed pets more than it changed the Hunter.

• Forever normalised pet attack speed, not pet damage. Every pet swings every 2.0 seconds and gets its family's speed back through a passive — but families still carry their own damage, armour and health modifiers, and the spread is real. A Raptor deals +10% damage, a Bat +7%, a Bear −9%, a Boar −10%, all measured against a beast of no family at the same level. Pick for the family's abilities and its stat line
• Pets inherit some of your stats, so they scale as you gear up
• Happiness and loyalty still exist — feed your pet
• Focus regenerates at 10 a second, about twice as fast as Classic, and every pet uses the same system
• Ability ranks are taught, not inherited. Tame a beast that already knows the rank, take your own pet back, and teach it with Beast Training at a training-point cost. Loyalty gates training, and it rises slowly. Note the September 24 build nerfed Tame Beast so it no longer works on beasts above your own level
• There is a new family, the Fox

The early recommendation is a Bear, for one specific reason: its Swipe is a 5-second-cooldown frontal cleave, and "one of the rare pet abilities capable of dealing consistent AoE damage to hold aggro on multiple targets."

What defines Beast Mastery

What Forever changed for Hunters

• Pet attack speed was normalised, not pet damage (above) — family damage, armour and health modifiers are still live — and pets scale off your stats.
• Improved Serpent Sting and Improved Scorpid Sting were folded into one new talent, Improved Stings (Marksmanship, tier 2, 3 ranks) — it keeps the +6% Serpent Sting damage and adds a Viper Sting cooldown cut and a longer Scorpid Sting. Stale lists naming the old talents cannot be entered as printed; the points belong in Improved Stings.
• The utility kit is intact and still the class's signature: Feign Death usually drops you out of the fight entirely ("one of the most valuable leveling spells" — though enemies keep hitting your pet), and cancel it: left running its full 6 minutes it actually kills you, Freezing Trap, Frost Trap, Concussive Shot, and Disengage as a threat dump rather than a leap.

At level 60

Unknown — including how much of your gear actually reaches the pet, which is the single number Beast Mastery's endgame case rests on.