Beast Mastery Hunter Guide
Some of our class writers have written up their first impressions of the 12.1 class changes and tier set reviews. We've listed all of them below.
Some of these articles were released earlier than others, and may be out of date now.
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Protection Warrior
Season 2 Tier Set
2-Set Bonus: Barbed Shot causes your pets to stomp 1 additional time at 50% effectiveness.
4-Set Bonus: Stomp causes your next Cobra Shot to either benefit from Beast Cleave at 20% effectiveness, or strike your primary target for 30% additional damage, stacking up to 4 times.
Fundamentally, this is a pretty decent tier set bonus. It is appropriately powerful and changes the rotation just enough to feel different. While tying it to a "filler" ability can seem a bit weird, the fact that it encourages a weaving between abilities means it still results in a solid gameplay loop. It works well with a few talents such as Cobra Senses, Serpentine Strikes, Thrill of the Hunt and Hogstrider + Hoof and Blade, and effectively locks those talents in. It also makes critical strike a fair bit more powerful. Unfortunately, for this bonus, the devil is in the details:
While this works fine rotationally for Pack Leader, it makes existing rotational issues for Dark Ranger worse (more on this below).
The Beast Cleave check is tied to the player buff for Beast Cleave, which is entirely cosmetic and only exists for uptime tracking purposes. This has a few implications:
In AoE scenarios where you value priority target damage over AoE, it is correct to /cancelaura the player Beast Cleave buff, to trigger the "single target"-version of Cobra Shot.
In burst AoE Scenarios where the window lasts shorter than the duration of Beast Cleave, you will want to /cancelaura Beast Cleave once the AoE is done, otherwise Cobra Shot will NOT return to the single-target version until Beast Cleave naturally fades. This would be relevant on encounters like L'ura, with short and frequent burst windows.
In 2-target scenarios, the Beast Cleaved Cobra Shots hits for less total damage than the single-target one. This would mean you'd always want to /cancelaura Beast Cleave in 2-target scenarios.
The tier set has put Kill Command in a weird spot, making it feel more like a filler ability than your big burst button. While focusing on Cobra Shot for the "snake" tier feels fine thematically, it feels a bit odd for the spec as a whole to have much less of your damage coming from your pets than usual.
So all in all, they've managed to create a pretty decent bonus, which has unfortunate implications in terms of how it plays out in practice.
Class Changes
Ranged auto-shot damage increased by 600%.
Hunter’s Mark can now be applied to up to 5 targets (was 1).
Bleak Arrows damage increased by 300%.
Withering Fire’s Black Arrow damage reduced by 40%.
Heart of the Pack renamed to Razor Sharp and has been redesigned – Increases the damage of your pet’s Bite, Claw, and Smack by 100%.
Piercing Fangs has been redesigned – Kill Command critical damage increased by 15%.
Bloody Frenzy has been updated – Now reduces Barbed Shot’s periodic rate increase by 33% (was 50%).
Kill Cleave has been updated – Kill Command now only cleaves 20% of its damage during Beast Cleave (was 40%).
Barbed Shot damage increased by 25%.
Kill Command damage increased by 20%.
Cobra Shot damage increased by 20%.
Beast Cleave duration increased to 10 seconds (was 8 seconds).
Dire Beast summons can now be tracked on the Cooldown Manager.
Wild Instincts has been removed.
Lethal Barbs has been updated – Auto-attacks now have a very high chance to generate 3 Focus, rather than granting 1 Focus per auto-attack.
Through the Eyes has been redesigned – Increases the damage of Kill Shot and Black Arrow by 10%.
We're going to go through these changes and give some thoughts on them:
The Hunter's Mark change, while solidly impactful from an output point of view, result in a pretty bad gameplay loop of wanting to apply the debuff to as many enemy targets as possible before going into a Mythic+ pack.
The Beast Cleave duration change is mostly good. It does make the /cancelaura shenanigans we discuss above more impactful, and you will want to press Wild Thrash on cooldown anyway, but it helps a bit with the "bloat" of the cooldown windows on AoE, especially for Dark Ranger.
The burst window changes are weird for Beast Mastery. The spec doesn't have an especially flat damage profile, but given how frequent its burst windows are, the individual damage windows aren't that powerful. This means that it tends to struggle on larger Mythic+ pulls and bosses such as Belo'ren, where you'd rather have a less frequent but more impactful cooldown. These changes only make these issues worse, and makes it a bit more difficult for it to find a "niche".
To go into one of the individual changes more in detail, the redesign of Piercing Fangs is very bad. It is significantly weaker than the previous version and when combined with the tier set offering no bonus damage to Kill Command, it makes it very unlikely we will ever touch that part of the tree, as it now lacks a proper capstone talent which reward you for picking the weaker talents pathing into it.
Another unfortunate nerf is that to Kill Cleave. This was a fairly powerful talent but has felt like a part of Beast Mastery's general identity for quite some time. The problem with this talent is that it provides exclusively AoE damage. This means that, when combined with the general weakness of Kill Command, it is now easily sacrificed for more priority target/boss damage.
Lastly we have the removal of Wild Instincts. This helped smooth out the focus economy on AoE by providing more Barbed Shots. As it stands in Season 2, this is somewhat made up by Cobra Shots becoming more frequent (which cost less focus on average than Kill Command), but might become an issue when the Season 2 tier set bonus goes away. It also makes Master Handler a good bit weaker, as you're generating half the Barbed Shots you used to on AoE.
Dark Ranger
The big elephant in the room is how all of these changes impact Dark Ranger, and in particular Black Arrow. To summarize:
Withering Fire has been nerfed to make the burst window weaker. This negatively impacts Black Arrow.
They have buffed every rotational button except for Black Arrow to compensate for the burst window changes.
Through the Eyes has been redesigned, which makes Black Arrow weaker in most scenarios.
The new tier set incentivizes pressing Cobra Shot, which was a button Dark Ranger could previously ignore. This was good because it had an extra button in Black Arrow that you wanted to press. However, now you have FIVE rotational buttons competing for attention during burst windows, and it's not really clear by design which ones you are supposed to prioritize, and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Losing the Season 1 tier set bonus is much more impactful for Dark Ranger due to Corpsecaller and Pact of the Hollow.
The end result in all of this is that Black Arrow is a lot weaker in 12.1, transforming it into more of a filler ability than anything. It doesn't feel like this is by intentional design, but rather an accident as a result of various other independent changes.
However, the main problem for Dark Ranger is that, even if made powerful, the simplicity of Pack Leader is always going to be more appealing with its current design. In Season 1, there were many scenarios where Dark Ranger should have been more powerful on paper, but where the meta still shifted towards Pack Leader. This is to say, even if Dark Ranger could be fixed for season 2, I'm not sure most would want it to be fixed.
