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
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.
- Animal Companion is now extremely mandatory, rather than just very strong. It is now intended to be a baseline pick in every situation.
- The bug where Call of the Wild pets also get nerfed by 35% is no longer in effect.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
Animal Companion already. If you dislike playing with two pets you are now taking a massive loss not to.
Kill Command has also not been nerfed as of writing despite the initial bluepost claiming it would be.
Barbed Shot
Barbed Shot has seen a major rework, in summary:
This has an effect on the playstyle and our talent choices. For one, you now need to actively manage your
Frenzy stacks again, as you'll have notably fewer
Barbed Shots overall and your buff uptime doesn't match the cooldown as neatly. You can no longer guarantee permanent uptime on
Frenzy with only
Savagery and a decent amount of haste. Due to
War Orders, this also means fewer
Kill Commands, which lets you fill your rotation with more
Cobra Shots and
Black Arrows. Seing as your rotation had been dominated by
Kill Commands and
Barbed Shot for quite some time, this might be a nice change of pace.
Savagery is still likely picked due to the
Kill Command damage increase. Talents which reset the cooldown on
Barbed Shot are also stronger, such as
Wild Call,
Scent of Blood and
Call of the Wild. We also lose some focus regeneration but this is compensated for with a buff to
Pack Tactics from 100% to 125%.
Cobra Shot talents also benefit due to the aforementioned new gaps in your rotation.
As for losers of this change:
Barbed Wrath is much less impactful as you get fewer
Barbed Shots total, meaning your
Bestial Wrath uptime is overall lower, which in turn translates to
Killer Cobra and
Piercing Fangs being slightly weaker. Talents which relied on high
Frenzy uptime to work are also impacted, mainly
Thrill of the Hunt and
Brutal Companion, both of which are at risk of becoming too weak to ever pick.
War Orders and
Stomp are also made a bit weaker due to less frequent
Barbed Shots.
Deathblow and Hunter's Prey
The one change to our base tree is that we've lost improved
Kill Shot and gained
Deathblow, which has the same effect as the old version of
Hunter's Prey.
Hunter's Prey has seen a significant redesign, now causing your
Kill Shot 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
Call of the Wild, so you will spread to 3 targets by default and 5-7 targets during
Call of the Wild. This in turn makes
Call of the Wild a stronger burst cooldown on AoE, especially if you play Dark Ranger or
Venom's Bite. 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
Explosive Venom is if we now can spread
Serpent Sting on AoE much more easily with other methods.
One notable issue with
Hunter's Prey 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
Cobra Shot:
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
Barbed Scales. Pack Leader generally plays better with these talents than Dark Ranger as it has more natural gaps in its rotation to cast
Cobra Shot, 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
Cobra Shot is that
Explosive Shot feels increasingly pointless in the Beast Mastery rotation, and its place might need to be revised.
Basilisk Collar
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
A Murder of Crows and
Venom's Bite. 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
Kill Command 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.
- Multi-Shot being buffed by 300% sounds like a massive change but in practice this still does very little damage.
- Training Expert 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
Black Arrow, stronger AoE, new visuals and a strengthened theme.
Main Changes
The first thing to note about the new Dark Ranger is that
Black Arrow is no longer its own button, but it instead replaces
Kill Shot. This is overall a positive change as
Kill Shot has had a bit of an identity crisis for Beast Mastery. It also removes some button bloat the spec has had. This iteration of
Black Arrow 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
Kill Shot in that can only be used below 20% health by default, but
The Bell Tolls 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
Cobra Shot-related talents.
There are luckily a lot of ways to reset the cooldown of
Black Arrow.
Deathblow is the baseline way, but you also have
Bleak Arrows,
Ebon Bowstring,
Withering Fire and
Soul Drinker. These all add up to create a fairly dynamic rotation overall even outside of the specific enemy health ranges.
Bleak Arrows and
Ebon Bowstring are just fairly RNG effects that provide additional procs.
Soul Drinker is a bit weird as it only procs off enemies dying, which often means
Black Arrow 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
Withering Fire 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
Black Arrows would be automatic rather than taking up a gcd, some issues with this are:
- On AoE, you are heavily incentivized to sync this with Call of the Wild due to Hunter's Prey. This can be very awkward given the dynamic timer of Bestial Wrath, and we generally do not like holding Bestial Wrath.
- You will never have Withering Fire at the start of a mythic+ dungeon or raid boss, which feels bad when this is generally when you use Bloodlust and where you benefit from The Bell Tolls.
- The targeting of the additional Black Arrows 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
Deathblow 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
Hunter's Prey, which allows
Black Arrow to fire at many additional targets. This has notable synergy with
Call of the Wild, 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.
Shadow Surge has been redesigned to also function in single-target and overall does more relevant damage than previously.
Bleak Powder 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
Wildfire Bomb). This means you might want to be aware of where you stand in relation to the enemies.
Bleak Powder also opens the door for maintaining
Beast Cleave on single-target while in AoE builds, such as when facing Mythic+ bosses. This feels somewhat wrong but
Bleak Powder does a lot of damage, even on single-target. In pure single-target this could also make
Bloody Frenzy more valuable.
Shadow Hounds has been made to interact with
Dire Beasts and now uses
Beast Cleaves. Finally,
Phantom Pain is somewhat underwhelming, essentially working as a 8% buff to
Kill Cleave, 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.
Shadow Dagger provides an on-demand slow, which could be annoying when you don't want it but is at least possible to talent out of.
Banshee's Mark provides an additional dot for
Basilisk Collar, but is mostly a passive effect and cool thematic element.
Banshee's Mark, alongside
Bleak Arrows, also help convert a larger portion of our damage to shadow, which is great for the overall theme and helps
Embrace the Shadows a little bit.
Embrace the Shadows could still use a fair bit of help to be comparable to
Smoke Screen.
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:
Bugs
Here are the current relevant bugs for Beast Mastery:
Conclusions
Overall, the changes to
Barbed Shot 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
Barbed Shot, 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
Withering Fire, 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
Basilisk Collar 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:
And then there's
Explosive Shot: What does it do, and why is it here, I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not confident anyone else is either.