We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Beast Mastery Hunter in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Beast Mastery Hunter!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Preservation Evoker
Arcane Mage
Assassination Rogue
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Hunter Tier Set
Reasons to Play Beast Mastery Hunter in Dragonflight Season 2
The purpose of this article is to discuss changes and developments (or lack thereof) for Beast Mastery Hunters since the release of Dragonflight going into Season 2. Beast Mastery Hunter is a flavorful spec with a lot of fans, but is certainly not for everyone. The previous article goes more in-depth into the specific talent choices associated with Dragonflight. This one will be focused more on Season 2.
In short, not much has changed for Beast Mastery Hunter. It still uses the same builds as it did at the start of the expansion with a relatively simple playstyle and it has more or less the same strengths and weaknesses as previously. We have gotten small improvements in terms of defensiveness but overall there’s still a lack of variety in the spec, and old bugs that have not yet been fixed. In short, if you’ve enjoyed Beast Mastery up until this point, you are likely to keep enjoying it, even if it seems like it might be a little less competitive this time around. The table below summarizes the main positives and negatives discussed in the article.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Beast Mastery Hunter Utility
- The first form of utility Beast Mastery Hunters have access to is Primal Rage, giving your group a large haste buff over a long duration. This is an invaluable form of group utility that every group needs. However, in raid this will frequently already be provided by an Evoker, Mage or Shaman due to the larger group size. This is why it’s a more valuable form of utility in dungeon content, as you’re not able to fit in as many classes, giving Hunters a form of role compression.
- Hunters have a good mix of crowd control options, between Freezing Trap, Binding Shot, Scatter Shot, Intimidation and Wailing Arrow. Nothing has really changed on this front going into season two, expect that Scare Beast might finally become relevant due to the new Incorporeal affix, meaning we’re one of few classes with multiple ways of dealing with it.
- Tranquilizing Shot is still a important piece of our Mythic+ toolkit. This is usually important during Raging Mythic+ weeks and in new dungeons with a lot of purges and soothes, such as Brackenhide Hollow. Tranquilizing Shot is usually less useful in raid as Magic buffs and Enrages are less common there, and there doesn’t seem to be a concrete use case for the spell in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible.
- Aspect of the Turtle is both a defensive and a form of utility. As it is an immunity, it lets us soak dangerous raid mechanics by ourselves and reduce the damage inflicted on the raid, at the cost of a personal defensive. There are some potential uses for this in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, such as Shrapnel Bomb.
- High Explosive Trap gives us the option of a knockback effect, which can be useful on Sanguine Mythic+ weeks and certain raid bosses. It is however quite finicky to use due to its small size and awkward targeting method, which means it could cause more harm than good if you’re not careful.
- Sentinel’s Perception and Sentinel’s Protection are very minor forms of group utility that provides support for line-of-sight pulls and minor defensive utility respectively. These are not extremely impactful.
Decent Damage Profile in Raid
Beast Mastery’s damage profile lends itself to either solid single-target or high-target AoE. The former mostly lends itself to raiding scenarios, and as Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible looks rather single-target focused, this seems rather promising at a glance. Boss damage is almost always an important aspect of raid encounters. You are especially good at single-target raid encounters with high movement requirements such as Magmorax or Rashok, as your playstyle allows you to maintain consistent damage. In Mythic+ you excel at larger dungeon pulls where the uncapped nature of Beast Cleave, Stomp and Kill Cleave can be abused. Our AoE does often come at a great loss to our single-target output, which might become an issue on raid encounters where the two are mixed, such as Scalecommander Sarkareth.
Beast Mastery struggles more in low-target cleave scenarios, such as smaller dungeon pulls or Hackclaw’s War-Band in Brackenhide Hollow. You also do not have any viable spread AoE to speak of, which means you can’t gain any additional value from raid encounters such as Shadowflame Amalgamation. Finally, you do not have access to any form of viable burst damage, which is a major downside in mythic+ or for raid mechanics such as Molten Barrier on Assault of the Zaqali.
Simple and Easy to Learn
The Beast Mastery Hunter playstyle has not developed since launch and from the looks of it won’t develop much further in patch 10.1, which can be seen as a positive. The rotation is still very simple and allows you to move while doing the entirety of it. The rotation is decently engaging but does not ultimately lend itself to much in terms of skill expression. It remains the perfect beginner spec or a spec to use while doing other jobs in raid such as Broodkeeper Diurna egg duty or raid leading.
Improved Defensive Profile
In patch 10.0.7, Hunters got a decent buff to its survivability in making Rejuvenating Wind also increase your maximum health by 4% per rank. As Hunters were mostly lacking in terms of passive defensiveness, this goes a good way in terms of patching up the issues it had in that area. Beast Mastery Hunters are especially tanky now due to their preference for tenacity pets with Fortitude of the Bear, Endurance Training and Aspect of the Beast. Natural Mending also benefits Beast Mastery more than the two other specs, since the spec consumes more focus.
While still not comparable to the tankiest classes of the game, this does mean that Beast Mastery Hunters don’t really have any major issues with surviving raid encounters or m+ currently, aside from maybe in bleeding edge content.
Hunter Flavour
Hunters maintain strong flavor as a class and Beast Mastery is perhaps at the center of that. Collecting pets is the pastime of many hunters. The current playstyle around Dire Pack and Animal Companion accentuate this, especially with Glyph of the Dire Stable, allowing you to summon many customizable pets. Hunters are also fittingly experts at solo content, such as world quests or doing old raids.
Reasons to Not Play Beast Mastery Hunter in Dragonflight Season 2
Not Much has Changed
Many of the problems I discussed in my previous article are still present in 10.1. We still run more or less the same talent builds and don’t really have much flexibility in terms of what we pick for offensive talents. In the current raid we run the same single-target build for nearly every fight and it looks likely the same will be the case in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible. We still also have a problem with raid utility which has not been solved with the new patch. Sentinel’s Protection is so unimpactful that in spite of it coming at no cost to our defensives or output on single-target, it is still only picked 5% of the time on Terros.
Additionally, the playstyle has not really evolved much at all. It is still a very simple and straightforward rotation that will not be for everyone. It does get slightly more dynamic with more haste and crit but not to a very noticeable extent. The new tier set also has little influence over our playstyle as we’ll discuss more below. This is to say, if you tried Beast Mastery Hunter at the start of Dragonflight and didn’t enjoy it, it’s unlikely 10.1 will change your mind.
Tuning Relative to Other Hunter Specs
While there might still be some tuning to come, at the moment Beast Mastery looks noticeably weaker than both Survival and Marksmanship due to their talent changes being more impactful. This might still mean Beast Mastery is in a fairly decent spot overall, but still worst out of the Hunter specs. This might mean that there’s little reason to play Beast Mastery if you want to play a Hunter competitively. Beast Mastery does carry the advantage of dps unhindered by movement and range but this might not be very relevant if the two other specs are still significantly ahead. The overall tuning situation also looks generally worse for Beast Mastery than it was going into Season 1, partially due to frequent nerfs.
Tier Set is Boring
The new tier set for Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible is quite boring. The 2-set bonus gives us an entirely passive damage increase to core damage spells. The 4-set is a relatively boring cooldown reduction effect which doesn’t have the tuning nor interactions to result in a significant change in gameplay. The 4-set bonus does have an interaction with Aspect of the Wild, but this is a very niche talent choice and the effect is still not very noticeable. As far as tuning goes the tier set is still decent but is still weaker and less interesting than our current set. This is disappointing given these tier bonuses were supposed to be more impactful.
Pointless Talent Changes
Beast Mastery Hunters have received a couple of talent changes with 10.1, but none of them are particularly exciting as of writing. Firstly, Roar of Sacrifice has been added to the class tree, which essentially just frees up a PvP talent slot to be used on something else, as the talent does nothing in PvE content (you can’t be critically hit by NPCs unless you take a melee attack from behind).
There have been a handful of large buffs to talents involving Aspect of the Wild. This talent remains extremely niche as it only lends itself to 2-3 target cleave scenarios, which are relatively rare. The only potential usage of these talents looks to be The Forgotten Experiments on Mythic difficulty. It is also not the most exciting talent to play with, as it is either entirely ignored or makes you want to spam your filler, Cobra Shot, over your Kill Command, which doesn’t lend itself to the most interesting gameplay.
Finally, Bloody Frenzy has received a redesign, but as we shall discuss bellow, the talent is still held back by numerous bugs and issues.
Bugs are Still Here
One of the main bugs still plaguing the spec is that Animal Companion reduces the damage done by pets summoned by Call of the Wild by 35%. This is part of why this talent has not been relevant (alongside its tuning). As new talents are being pushed to improve the variety of choices, this bug should become a high priority to fix.
The new version of Bloody Frenzy also has a lot of bugs, which also holds it back from being a viable choice, including:
Pet AI continues to be somewhat of an issue for the spec, seen most recently on the Raszageth encounter where the Animal Companion could frequently get stuck on a previous platform. Pets have a tendency to get stuck on environment, especially when traveling vertically or across platforms, and there might therefore be reason to be afraid of future encounters such as Assault of the Zaqali and Scalecommander Sarkareth. Neltharion‘s Corruption mechanic also puts our pets at risk as they can be cleaved down by allies.
About the Author
Hello! My name is Tarlo and I am the writer for the Beast Mastery Hunter guide here on Wowhead. I have mained Hunter since the Burning Crusade and currently do high-Level Mythic raiding. I also sometimes dabble in Mythic+. You can find me as a moderator in the Trueshot Lodge discord if you have any questions or other inquiries regarding the guide or anything else hunter-related.
For more information on playing Beast Mastery Hunter, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Beast Mastery Hunter Guide
