Thread: 3.3.3 Beast Mastery PvE Raid Guide

This guide has been put together using information from various sources such as, [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], Zeherah's Hunter DPS analyzer ([Only registered and activated users can see links. ]), and my own personal experience.

With the changes to Ferocious Inspiration in 3.3.3 BM should become a much more viable, competitive and acceptable Raid spec.

Contents

1. Hunter Spec/Pet Spec
2. Gear, Gems, Glyphs
3. Shot priority
4. Pet Micro Management and BM in a raid setting.
5. Enchants
6. Useful Links/Resources

Section 1

Beast Mastery

We will take a look at the important talents in the basic 53/14/4 BM build. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Improved Aspect of The Hawk 5/5
10% chance to increase haste by 15% for 12 seconds, while in aspect of the hawk or dragonhawk.

You only have 2 talent choices in the top tier of the BM tree to choose from. One increases DPS one does not. And while haste is low on the list of important stats for a BM hunter it’s still better then Stam.

Focused Fire 2/2
Increases all your damage by 2% while your pet is active and you’re pet’s crit chance by 20% when kill command is active.

Improved Revive Pet 2/2
Lowers the cast time of revive pet from 10 sec to 4 sec, reduces its mana cost by 40% and increases the amount of health your pet returns with by 30%

As a BM hunter your pet is a real power house and can account for up to 40% of your total damage done. Losing your pet in the middle of a boss encounter can be very detrimental to your DPS and having a way to get him back up and into the game quickly is pretty much going to be a requirement for Raiding as a BM hunter.

Now to get to the next tier we have to spend one more point in either the top or second tier. You have 3 other talents to choose from that I won’t go into much detail about. They are

Endurance Training – Increases you and your pets health
Improved Aspect of the Monkey – Increases your dodge chance. (PvP talent)
Thick Hide – Increases your pet’s armor and the armor contribution your pet gains from items.

Improved aspect of the monkey really has no feasible PvE usage unless you find yourself doing alot of kiting. Endurance training and Thick hide are great talents for setting up a pet tanking/soloing spec, but this guide will focus more on raiding than soloing. For right now we need to choose where to spend this one point to open up the next tier of the BM talent tree. Endurance training is probably going to be your best bet simply because you and your pet will take SOME damage and having that little extra health could help in those situations. I wouldn’t suggest thick hide because on the occasions that your pet is going to take damage its usually going to be some form of spell damage which isn't mitigated by armor anyway.

Aspect Mastery 1/1
Aspect of the Viper – Reduces the damage penalty by 10%
Aspect of the Monkey – Reduces the damage done to you while active by 5%
Aspect of the Hawk – Increases the attack power bonus by 30%
Aspect of the Dragonhawk – Combines the bonuses from Aspect of the Monkey and Hawk

Unleashed Fury 5/5
Increases the damage done by your pets by 15%

Improved Mend Pet 2/2
Reduces the mana cost of your mend pet spell by 20% and gives the mend pet spell a 50% chance of cleansing 1 curse, disease, magic, or poison effect from the pet each tick.

ALTERNATIVELY

Spirit Bond 2/2
While your pet is active, you and your pet will regenerate 2% of total health every 10 sec., and increases healing done to you and your pet by 10%.

You may even consider taking 1/2 Imp Mend Pet and 1/2 Spirit Bond

Ferocity 5/5
Increases the critical strike chance of your pet by 10%

Intimidation 1/1
Causes your pet to do a high amount of threat and stuns the target for 3 sec.

This really doesn’t have much use in PvE. Its ok for soloing when you need to get some extra threat on a mob or a quick stun on a mob that’s beating on you, but in a raid setting this ability most likely wont come into use. However, you need to pick this up to get down to Bestial Wrath.

Bestial Discipline 2/2
Increases the focus regeneration of your pets by 100%

Animal Handler 2/2
Increases your pets attack power by 10%, and increases the duration of your master’s call effect by 6 sec.

Frenzy 3/5
Gives your pet an 60% chance to gain a 30% attack speed increase for 8 sec after dealing a critical strike.

3 points will be sufficient for a near 100% uptime

Ferocious Inspiration 3/3
Provides an aura that increases the damage of all party and raid members that are within 100 yards of your pet by 3% and increases the damage of Arcane and Steady Shot by 9%

Bestial Wrath 1/1
Send your pet into a rage causing 50% more damage for 10 seconds. While enraged, the beast does not feel pity or remorse or fear, and it cannot be stopped unless killed.

Serpents Swiftness 5/5
Increases ranged combat attack speed by 20% and your pet’s melee attack speed by 20%

Longevity 3/3
Reduces the cooldown of your bestial wrath, intimidation, and pet special abilites by 30%

The Beast Within 1/1
Increases your damage by 10% and while your pet is under the effects of bestial wrath, you will do 10% more damage. Also reduces mana costs of all spells by 50% for 10 seconds.

Cobra Strikes 3/3
You have a 60% chance when you critically hit with arcane shot, steady shot, or kill shot to cause your pets next 2 special attacks to critically hit.

Kindred Spirits 5/5
Increases your pet’s damage by 20% and you and your pet’s movement speed by 10% while your pet is active.

Beast Mastery 1/1
Allows you to tame exotic pets and gives your pets 4 more talent points.

Section 1.1

Marksman Tree

Lethal Shots 5/5
Increases your critical strike chance with ranged weapons by 5%

Careful Aim 3/3
Increases your ranged attack power by an amount equal to 100% of your total intellect.

Mortal Shorts 5/5
Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your ranged abilities by 30%.

Go For The Throat 1/2
Your ranged critical hits cause your pet to generate 25 focus.

A Note on Focused Aim - Quoted From Elitistjerks.com
Formerly a huge damage loss for BM hunters as the hit gained was not transmitted to the pet, since 3.1 FA affects the pet, making this a viable source of hit. With T9 and T10 level gear, it is in many cases preferable to get hit from FA and use better pieces of gear -- check the spreadsheet to determine if this is the case for you. (It is also useful for new raiders lacking hit on their gear.)
NOTE: There is a bug with the way that hit from Focused Aim is transferring to pet expertise -- raid logs show it is transferring about half the expertise it should. This bug has existed since the introduction of 3.2 and is persisting in 3.3.

Section 1.2

Survival

Improved Tracking 4/5
While tracking beast, demons, dragonkin, elementals, giants, humanoids and undead, all damage done to those types is increased by 4%

Section 1.3

Pet Spec - [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

The best pets to use for pure DPS are in the Ferocity family, so we will focus only on this talent tree.
Pets to consider are:
Devilsaur - Current Highest DPS for BM
or Alternatively a Wolf for Furious Howl

Cobra Reflexes 2/2
Increases your pets attack speed by 30%. Your pet will hit faster but each hit will do less damage.

Dash 1/1
Increases your pets movement speed by 80% for 16 seconds.

Or

Great Stamina 1/3
Increases your pets total stamina by 4%

The choice here is really up to you. Neither of these are going to increase your DPS and in a raid setting your usually going to turn dash off to save focus anyway. It may however have some other non raiding applications.

Blood Thirsty 2/2
Your pets attacks have a 20% chance to increase its happiness by 5% and heal 5% of its total health.

Spiked Collar 3/3
Your pet does an additional 9% damage will all attacks.

Culling the Herd 3/3
When your pets Claw, Bite or Smack ability deals a critical strike, you and your pet deal 3% increased damage for 10 seconds.

Spiders bite 3/3
Increases the critical strike chance of your pet by 9%

Rabid 1/1
Your pet goes into a killing frenzy. Successful attacks have a chance to increase attack power by 5%. This effect will stack up to 5 times. Lasts 20 sec.

Call of The Wild 1/1
Your pet roars, increasing your pets and your melee, and ranged attack power by 10%. Lasts 20 seconds.

Shark Attack 2/2
Your pet does and additional 6% damage with all attacks.

Wild Hunt 2/2
Increases the contribution your pet gets from your stamina by 40% and attack power by 30%.


Section 2

Stats, And Gearing your hunter

Blizzard has done a pretty good job itemizing hunter gear these days. You’ll almost never see leather beating out mail as you have in the past in some slots.

The most important hunter stats for BM are going to be: (Note: The priority in stats will change depending on your level of gear, check the spreadsheet if you are unsure)

Hit Rating (until Capped at 263, 8%)
Agility
AP (Attack Power)
Crit
ArP (Armor Penetration)
Intellect
Haste (almost useless to a BM hunter)

Simply put, until you are hit capped through gear this is going to be your most valuable stat. If you or your pet aren’t hitting, then your doing less damage.

At lower levels of gear when your AP is still below 3500 unbuffed, gemming for AP will generally yield more DPS for you and your pet. At mid range levels of gear gemming for AGI will become a better choice and is really an all around great way to gem for any hunter spec. If you are dual speccing into MM or SV then AGI is definatly going win out over AP. And at high levels of gear you will want to consider gemming for ArP. If your total ArP is above 550 before gems this may be the time to consider ArP. But consult the spreadsheet to be sure.

Intellect gives us mana as well as 1 AP per 1 intellect with the talent Careful Aim, discussed earlier, so it is almost never a good idea to use a peice of leather over mail anymore.

Section 2.1

Gems:

Red gems are going to be our best choice for pure DPS gems and in some cases yellow gems for particular socket bonuses. there are really no good blue gems to use so gemming for blue socket bonuses should be avoided.

If you find yourself under the hit cap then its ok to go ahead and gem for hit as well.

If you are unsure of which gems you should be using then consult the spreadsheet.

As for your meta gem you’ll want to go with a Relentless Earthsiege Diamond, +21 AGI / +3% increased crit damage. This gem requires 1 yellow, 1 red, 1 blue gem in your gear to activate. Use a Nightmare tear to meet the requirement for this meta.

Below is a list of all the relevant gems you will need as a BM hunter. I will only list Epic and Rare quality gems.

Pure AGI Gems:
Delicate Cardinal Ruby +20 AGI
Delicate Scarlet Ruby +16 AGI

Pure AP Gems:
Bright Cardinal Ruby +40 AP
Bright Scarlet Ruby +32 AP

Agi/Crit Gems and AP/Crit Gems for Yellow Sockets with AGI or AP socket Bonus:
(Generally only use these if the socket bonus is +6 AGI or +12 AP or better)
Deadly Ametrine +10 AGI/+10 Crit
Deadly Monarch Topaz +8 AGI/+8 Crit
Wicked Ametrine +20 AP/+10 Crit
Wicked Monarch Topaz +16 AP/+8 Crit

Hit Gems:
Rigid King's Amber +20 Hit
Rigid Autumns Glow +16 Hit
Glinting Ametrine +10 AGI/+10 Hit
Glinting Monarch Topaz +8 AGI/+8 Hit
Pristine Ametrine +20 AP/+10 Hit
Pristine Monarch Topaz +16 AP/+8 Hit

Prismatic
Nightmare Tear +10 to all stats

Section 2.2

Glyphs:

Major

While there are many glyphs to choose from as a hunter, there are only a few that we are going to take a look at for our purposes as BM.

Glyph of Steady Shot - Recommended
Increases the damage dealt by steady shot by 10% when your target is afflicted by serpent sting.

Glyph of the Hawk - Recommended
Increases the haste bonus of the Improved Aspect of the Hawk effect by an additional 6%

Glyph of Serpent Sting - Recommended
Increases the duration of serpent sting by 6 seconds.

Glyph of Kill Shot - Useful
Reduces the cooldown of kill shot by 6 sec.

A great Glyph you may want to consider over the Serpent Sting glyph, however you usually wont be spening enough time on a boss below 20% to make this worth it over the others

Glyph of Bestial Wrath - Less Useful
Decreases the cooldown of bestial wrath by 20 sec.

Due to the changes to Beastial Wrath and The Beast Within in patch 3.2 this glyph has become less useful over other glyphs

Minor

Glyph of Feign Death - Recommended
Reduces the cooldown of your feign death spell by 5 sec.

Glyph of Revive Pet - Recommended
Reduces the push back suffered from damaging attacks while casting revive pet by 100%

Glyph of Mend Pet - Recommended
Allows your pet to gain happiness when using mend pet.


Section 3

Shot Priority

Long gone are the days of shot rotations as they were and one button macros. Now days our shots are prioritized in order of importance and used based on there cooldowns relative to the cooldowns and importance of other shots.

The basic BM hunter shot priority system goes like this.

Bestial Wrath
Rapid Fire
Kill shot
Arcane Shot
Multi Shot/Aimed shot (if you decide to take it)
Serpent Sting
Steady Shot

This will have some variation based on the progression of a given encounter. What I mean here is you may not want to pop BW and RF right at the start of the fight if you know there will be a Heroism/Bloodlust coming sometime in the next 2 minutes. However, if your raid will not be using Hero/BL until later in the encounter. You may have time for 1 or even 2 BW’s before that time comes. Rapid fire on the other hand has a much longer cooldown then BW and should be used with more care. While it will only increase your white damage it is still a decent DPS increase and should be timed to use with a Hero/BL. If you have any on use trinkets use them with your BW and or RF cooldowns.

When the time comes for you to use BW, Switch to aspect of the beast. It will give a nice DPS boost to your pet and will result in more overall DPS for the duration of BW as opposed to staying in dragonhawk. But be sure to jump back into dragon hawk as soon as BW ends.

Kill shot is ranked high on the list, but is only useable when a mob is sub 20%. When this does occur Kill shot will take priority over everything EXCEPT BW and only because BW + kill shot is a pretty nice damage boost.

The rest is pretty standard. The reason you see Serpent sting on the last to bottom of the list is this. When you first start a fight you want to get off your Arcane and Multi before you apply serpent sting because they will gain no benefit from Serpent sting and the GCD of serpent sting while Arcane and/or Multi are available is a DPS loss. However, you want to make sure that serpent sting IS on the target 100% of the time if possible. Particularly before you start using steady shot. Just remember, when looking at your action bar to decide what shot to use next, if either Arcane, or Multi are up for use, use them, and THEN refresh your serpent sting if it needs it, NEVER refresh serpent sting until its last tick has gone off. Doing so is only a DPS loss. After all the above conditions are met, go on to spamming steady shot.

Im sure you’ve noticed in the shot priority list above that Kill Command is not listed. There is a very simply reason for this. Kill Command is not on the GCD. The best way of using Kill Command is to simply macro it to your shots so it will always be used when its up. Here is an example of such a macro:

#showtooltip Arcane Shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/cast Arcane Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

You can use this same macro for all of your shots, just simply replace “Arcane Shot” to which ever shot you would like to use.

There is the possibility that one could try and time kill command with BW but I think in the long run holding off on kill command for an opportunity to use it with BW will net you a DPS loss.


Section 4

Pet micro management

When we use the phrase “pet micro management” it means to be aware of your pet and be able to react quick enough to save him in what ever way necessary at the moment, whether it be a quick heal, or pulling him out of fire, and/or impending doom by way of mechanics like Sarths lava walls. Losing your pet as any spec is bad, but for BM its even worse. You should always be ready to act on a moments notice. Key bind your pet’s abilities such as attack and follow, and even things like defensive and passive. Being aware of where your pet is, what its doing and quick thinking on your part is what will set you apart from bad BM hunters.

When in a raid or 5 man, you should only have a few of your pets abilities set to auto cast. Such as

Bite
Monstrous Bite(in the case of a devilsaur) or whatever other special attack is unique to your pet, such as Smack or Claw or Rake.

Rabid
Call of the wild

Growl should be turned off for obvious reasons, and cower can be used situationally. In most cases it’s not worth the focus to have cower set to auto cast, but on some fights that have a raid wide, unavoidable damage aura or similar mechanic it might be useful to turn it on.

Section 4.1

BM in a raid setting

When you start raiding as a BM hunter be prepared to play to your max potential. BM is the weakest of our 3 trees, So you are going to be expected to bring you’re A game.

A lot of fights these days require lots of movment. When going into an encounter which requires a lot of movement there's not a lot you can really do to keep your DPS up while moving. When possible try to time any movement you may have to deal with, with the cool downs of your instant shots. This doesn’t mean “stand in the fire until arcane shot comes up” it means if your going to have to run in 5 seconds and you have 3 seconds left on your Arcane shot cooldown, or Serpent sting is going to need refreshing in the next 3 to 4 seconds, hold off as long as you can.

Mana shouldn’t really ever be an issue in most 25 man raid comps, but should it become one, proper usage of aspect of the viper and viper sting can really help you maintain your DPS while regenerating your mana.

Our aspects are on there own GCD which means they do not share a global cooldown with any of our other abilities. One way to keep your DPS from dropping to much while low on mana is to swap into Viper only for steady shots. When Arcane or Multi come back up, or if Serpent Sting needs refreshed, get back into Dragonhawk. Then when everything else is on cooldown again and you find yourself about to use Steady shot, go back into Viper. You can do this until you’re back at a comfortable level of mana

Section 5

Enchants

<reserved> will update soon.

Section 6

Useful Links/Resources

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Thanks!

More to come just eating and taking break

ya! i had planed on alot of post today; lol my laptop crased, and i cant find the windows disk . So i am on the netbook! fun

hehe

Thanks