Hello! The goal of this article is to analyze the wide breadth of changes to the Beast Mastery Hunter spec in the coming 11.0.5 patch, mainly focused on the main rotation, spec tree and Dark Ranger Hero Tree. In summary, these changes aim to mix up the formula for the base spec rotation, remove a couple of useless talent choices and vastly improve Dark Ranger, which has largely been a disappointment in terms of theme and rotational integration up until this point (although it has been doing decent output on single-target). Without further ado:
Base Spec Changes
Animal Companion
no longer reduces all pet damage by 35%. To compensate for this, they have nerfed all relevant pet abilities by 35%. This keeps overall damage similar but has three noticeable effects.
- is now extremely mandatory, rather than just very strong. It is now intended to be a baseline pick in every situation.
- The bug where pets also get nerfed by 35% is no longer in effect.
- Pet melees now do more damage as they weren't nerfed.
Most Hunters will notice a small damage gain from this change. Everyone was running
already. If you dislike playing with two pets you are now taking a massive loss not to.
has also not been nerfed as of writing despite the initial bluepost claiming it would be.
Barbed Shot
has seen a major rework, in summary:
- The damage of has been buffed by 100%.
- The baseline duration of , and the bleed from have been increased to 12 seconds.
- The cooldown of has been increased to 18 seconds.
This has an effect on the playstyle and our talent choices. For one, you now need to actively manage your
stacks again, as you'll have notably fewer
s overall and your buff uptime doesn't match the cooldown as neatly. You can no longer guarantee permanent uptime on
with only
and a decent amount of haste. Due to
, this also means fewer
s, which lets you fill your rotation with more
s and
s. Seing as your rotation had been dominated by
s and
for quite some time, this might be a nice change of pace.
is still likely picked due to the
damage increase. Talents which reset the cooldown on
are also stronger, such as
,
and
. We also lose some focus regeneration but this is compensated for with a buff to
from 100% to 125%.
talents also benefit due to the aforementioned new gaps in your rotation.
As for losers of this change:
is much less impactful as you get fewer
s total, meaning your
uptime is overall lower, which in turn translates to
and
being slightly weaker. Talents which relied on high
uptime to work are also impacted, mainly
and
, both of which are at risk of becoming too weak to ever pick.
and
are also made a bit weaker due to less frequent
s.
Deathblow and Hunter's Prey
The one change to our base tree is that we've lost improved
and gained
, which has the same effect as the old version of
.
has seen a significant redesign, now causing your
to become more powerful and spread to more targets, the more pets you have summoned. This only works with your two main pets and pets from
, so you will spread to 3 targets by default and 5-7 targets during
. This in turn makes
a stronger burst cooldown on AoE, especially if you play Dark Ranger or
. It also allows for further "hybrid" build options which drops minimal single-target for burst AoE. This does call into question what the point of
is if we now can spread
on AoE much more easily with other methods.
One notable issue with
is that it's somewhat slow to update the pet count, so if you have to dismiss your pet for whatever reason, it can take a few seconds before it realizes you have one again.
Cobra Shot
They have replaced four talents we never really picked, with a couple of talents related to
:
- is perhaps the most interesting out of the bunch, as it allows for notable easier maintenance of , and can sustain three stacks of the buff by itself alongside .
- provides a potential reward for a lot of s. It's not the most exciting thing ever but is in a notable spot in the tree which paths easily to .
- and are essentially just passive damage increases. provides some neat synergy with other talents without actually having to press , which can be beneficial during windows with .
All in all these talents don't necessarily provide a new playstyle but they do provide a couple of interesting options to support our main playstyle, mainly
. Pack Leader generally plays better with these talents than Dark Ranger as it has more natural gaps in its rotation to cast
, although neither have any direct synergy with the new talents. It does however feel like these are potentially not tuned well enough.
A side-effect of these effects buffing
is that
feels increasingly pointless in the Beast Mastery rotation, and its place might need to be revised.
Basilisk Collar
has been a massively problematic talent that, in short, adds a lot of value on single-target but relatively little on AoE. The changes to this talent were recently pushed a bit ahead of schedule, nerfing the talent massively in exchange for some compensation buffs, which were overall a 2-3% nerf to the spec on single-target but a 14%+ buff on AoE. This opens up the possibility of dropping points in the talent, especially on AoE, and changes the value of several talents which would be valuable only because they provided an additional damage-over-time effect, such as
and
. It also benefits Pack Leader over Dark Ranger as the former have no additional DoT effects while the latter does.
One source of confusion is that the ptr has a different set of compensation buffs. It does not have the 8% flat damage buff we got on live but instead has a slightly larger
buff. It's unclear what will go live.
Other Changes
Here are a few other changes that didn't fit into either of the above categories.
- being buffed by 300% sounds like a massive change but in practice this still does very little damage.
- being reduced to 1 talent point is a nice bonus, giving us a free talent point to be spent elsewhere in the tree, which can be surprisingly impactful.
Dark Ranger
Dark Ranger has seen a complete redesign of its hero talent tree, outside of defensive traits. It features a different
, stronger AoE, new visuals and a strengthened theme.
Main Changes
The first thing to note about the new Dark Ranger is that
is no longer its own button, but it instead replaces
. This is overall a positive change as
has had a bit of an identity crisis for Beast Mastery. It also removes some button bloat the spec has had. This iteration of
does a large chunk of damage up front followed by a very small DoT which is mostly supposed to interact with other talents. It has the same restriction as
in that can only be used below 20% health by default, but
also allows it to be used above 80% health. The frequency of which you're able to press this button somewhat clashes with the new
-related talents.
There are luckily a lot of ways to reset the cooldown of
.
is the baseline way, but you also have
,
,
and
. These all add up to create a fairly dynamic rotation overall even outside of the specific enemy health ranges.
and
are just fairly RNG effects that provide additional procs.
is a bit weird as it only procs off enemies dying, which often means
is already usable on other enemies anyway. It seems a little confused design-wise and only really usable in very specific raid-scenarios.
Withering Fire and its issues
is probably the most problematic talent of the new Dark Ranger tree. In theory, it provides decent AoE burst with some single-target benefit, as your
s would be automatic rather than taking up a gcd, some issues with this are:
- On AoE, you are heavily incentivized to sync this with due to . This can be very awkward given the dynamic timer of , and we generally do not like holding .
- You will never have at the start of a mythic+ dungeon or raid boss, which feels bad when this is generally when you use and where you benefit from .
- The targeting of the additional s does not feel intuitive and seems prone to ninja-pulls. It often selects targets very far away from the initial one.
They have already made some adjustments to the talent like adding a default
proc to reduce RNG, but more could still be made.
New forms of AoE
The most notable interaction for Dark Ranger on AoE is with
, which allows
to fire at many additional targets. This has notable synergy with
, and encourages syncing the two for large AoE Packs. This unlocks a lot of AoE potential for Dark Ranger and allows for crazy burst damage.
The kit features a few other tools for AoE as well.
has been redesigned to also function in single-target and overall does more relevant damage than previously.
provides a notable burst in an AoE around the target as well as a cone shooting out from the target in the opposite direction from where you shot it (much like
). This means you might want to be aware of where you stand in relation to the enemies.
also opens the door for maintaining
on single-target while in AoE builds, such as when facing Mythic+ bosses. This feels somewhat wrong but
does a lot of damage, even on single-target. In pure single-target this could also make
more valuable.
has been made to interact with
s and now uses
s. Finally,
is somewhat underwhelming, essentially working as a 8% buff to
, which isn't all that spectacular outside of pure AoE.
Other Changes
Here you have a few talents which don't really fit into the above categories.
provides an on-demand slow, which could be annoying when you don't want it but is at least possible to talent out of.
provides an additional dot for
, but is mostly a passive effect and cool thematic element.
, alongside
, also help convert a larger portion of our damage to shadow, which is great for the overall theme and helps
a little bit.
could still use a fair bit of help to be comparable to
.
Another thing which helps the overall theme is the plenty of new animations, which you can find
here. These are generally great and cool.
Pack Leader
Pack Leader has seen very few changes despite it desperately needing them, and it's still left with a non-existent theme, a passive hero tree and no animations to speak off. To speak a bit on the changes it did receive, indirectly:
- being buffed indirectly affects and buffs , although it is still extremely weak.
- works with but it is still so extremely weak, it makes pretty much no difference.
- also works well with , providing a small but respectable AoE increase.
- The changes are a mixed bag for Pack Leader. On one end, resetting is stronger now, but on the other end is a fair bit weaker now when you cast fewer s overall. To a greater extent than Dark Ranger, the rotation will have space for s.
- is now weaker which also makes and weaker.
- The changes have somewhat helped the tuning of Pack Leader relative to Dark Ranger, as it has fewer damage-over-time effects and therefore lost less from the nerf.
Bugs
Here are the current relevant bugs for Beast Mastery:
- Our Season 1 4-set does not affect s, Fenryr or Hati.
- does less damage than the tooltip implies, doing around 5.5% rather than 8%. It's possible it's not ignoring enemy armor unlike most bleeds.
- does not count towards .
- does not apply if you are further than 25 yards away from the target.
- A lot of tooltips are not properly updated for replacing .
- The two effects of , increased damage from critical strikes and a guaranteed critical strike, are de-synced from one another in practice. This means the benefit is slightly lower than it should be.
- does not heal the player from damage dealt by .
- The of deals physical damage despite the original hit being shadow damage, and thus does less damage than it should due to armor.
- This one is not properly understood as of writing, but will sometimes be maintained on AoE even after fades for a random amount of time. will also start striking the main target that you are using on.
- The -procced from triggering does not trigger .
- will reroll the chance of applying to your target per extra fired via . This means that if you fire six s at the same time, like during , you will have six chances of 25% to apply to your current target, which is roughly 82%. This makes it pretty easy to multi-dot during your cooldowns.
- does not cleave via unless you have .
Conclusions
Overall, the changes to
are most likely a positive thing long-term, while possibly feeling a bit awkward to play with short-term. Beast Mastery has somewhat had an overflow of resources for quite some time, resulting in a fairly spam-y and mindless playstyle. The changes invite back some consideration to how you press
, while giving space to other spells in your rotation.
The new Dark Ranger hero tree adds a fairly dynamic new playstyle that, despite removing a button, feels a fair bit more involved. You have to consider the enemy health, the amount of targets available and the current state of your cooldowns. It adds more thematic elements and improves animation by a lot. No complaints here. There are some minor concerns with
, but overall it plays well. Of note is that the tree is notable less single-target focused than previously, but instead scales better into AoE. Current testing suggests there will be a notable single-target loss for the tree but a sizable AoE gain, especially when combined with the
changes. On the other end, Pack Leader is expected to gain single-target damage when accounting for all the new talents and changes. This might mean the two trees swap roles in terms of how they function and where you play what. Pack Leader unfortunately remains a bit disappointing compared to Dark Ranger in terms of how it functions, feels to play and is themed.
Ultimately there is also a lot of uncertainty which makes it all a bit hard to predict, which includes:
- Do they add the 8% compensation buff we have on live to 11.0.5?
- Do they fix the various problems?
- makes us possibly maintain on single-target in some situations, does this stay?
- Does the current implementation stay where we multi-dot ?
- Are they actually gonna nerf to compensate for being buffed like they said they would?
- Do any of our other bugs get fixed?
And then there's
: What does it do, and why is it here, I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not confident anyone else is either.