3/2/31 – Best Hunter DPS Build Patch 4.0.3a

This is going to be your best build as a Survival Hunter.  Tweaks to this build can include things like removing 2 points from Efficiency and choosing Point of No Escape for enemies that can be effected by your traps.

If you’re looking for AoE dmg you’re definitely going to want to max out Point of No Escape plus Serpent Spread.

Then the same rules apply, you can nerf out all of those points and just go ahead and get Go for the Throat and Bestial Discipline if for some reason you want your pet to do more dps, but honestly, just stick to the script here bro and use this talent build.

3/31/2 – Best Marksmanship DPS Build

There aren’t really any alternatives to this build that are worth a crap, some minor modifications we can make to it.  For example, instead of Improved Serpent Sting you can pick Pathing which increases your haste, you may find this more beneficial, I don’t know you’d have to try it.

You could also drop the 3 points in One with Nature and put that into Pathing and if for some reason you want to enhance your pets you can move the points out of Improved Serpent Sting and One With Nature and move those points into Bestial Discipline and Improved Kill Command, but really…this one is probably the best.  But do test out for yourself!

31/5/0 - Best Hunter DPS Build for Beast Mastery

A 31/5/0 talent build is currently the best dps for a Hunter in Beast Mastery spec.

Having Go for the Throat from the Marksmanship tree is a great compliment to your pet dps and choosing Improved Kill Command over Bestial Discipline is questionable but you’d have to test it yourself for your setup on a target dummy or in a real instance.

Swap the two points from Improved Kill Command to finish off Bestial Discipline and see how that does.  Some players have suggested going with a 32/2/2 build instead.

Alternative Beast Mastery Raiding Build 32/2/2

With this build you get to max out Improved Kill Command and Bestial Discipline at the cost of losing Efficiency, but also picking up Improved Serpent Sting.  So between those variations see which one works best for you.

Playing a Beast Mastery Hunter for raids is probably one of the easiest things to do.  The rotation is simple and there’s not all that much to it, besides the fact, that the typical Beast Mastery Hunter is not capable of doing as much DPS as a Survival/Marksmanship Hunter; it can still put out an okay amount of DPS.  Even Shandra’s sheet at Elitistjerks has Beast Mastery lagging way behind in DPS.  If you still want to play Beast Mastery on raids for whatever reason, this is one of the better ways you’re going to want to do it.

In the older days, when you could easily lead raid DPS with a Beast Mastery Hunter, (this was even possible toward the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King), the challenge was in keeping your pet alive.  Now they’ve standardized all the pets, gave them some buffs, made the game really easy, it’s really rare that your pet dies unless it gets direct aggro, and it’s can be really easy to get your pet back into combat with instant resurrection abilities you can take inside the pet talent tree.

There are many variations of the Beast Mastery Build you are going to use for raiding.  The best one that’s been tested is 53/14/4 but the one that I use and have had the most luck and best results with is this 53/18/0 talent build.  Yes, I actually weave in Aimed Shot, for the gear I had at the time it netted the best DPS results, infact, my DPS was as much as 500 higher in most cases just from Aimed Shot being in the rotation.

So then that gives us a Beast Mastery Shot Rotation Priority of:

Kill Shot > Serpent Sting > Aimed Shot > Steady Shot

Always make sure serpent sting is up.

The glyph choice then puts us at:

Bestial Wrath, Steady Shot, Serpent Sting; and you could put in Kill Shot instead of Serpent Sting if you wanted.

For Beast Mastery Macros I actually have a one button Macro I spam, this is the only tree that you can kind of get away with this and be efficient at the moment, although I’ve created some pretty efficient, and I am still working on macros for the other trees.

The best talent build for Marksmanship Hunters has been 7/57/7 as I discuss in my Best Hunter Raiding Builds guide. I’ve really not seen anyone else with a spec different from that doing any significant amount of dps on raids.

There are 57 points in Marksmanship that you will have available to you, the 7 in Beast Mastery and the 7 in Survival seem to be almost mandatory, you may have some flexibility in the marksmanship tree.

The shot rotation order you’re going to want to take with your Marksmanship Hunter will be:

Kill Shot > Aimed Shot > Chimera Shot > Serpent Sting > Arcane Shot > Steady Shot as shown below in the image.

Now, before you go and get ahead of yourself, I want to point out that you want to have Serpent Sting applied before you use Chimera Shot.  The reason it appears to the right of Chimera shot is after the first application, you won’t ever really have to use it again until you switch mobs, so I gave it position 4, easy enough to reach with one hand but not up there in the first 3 shots.  You’re going to actually end up pressing 4, 2, and then 3 to start a fight and then spam whatever comes available (besides serpent sting) from left to right.

You’ll also notice all 6 of the shots in the image are macros, that’s because each one contains something similar to the following text (Swap the correct tooltip/cast for the proper skill):

#showtooltip Chimera Shot
/cast Rapid Fire
/cast Kill Command
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Chimera Shot

This allows me to not have to worry about any cooldowns ever.  Rapid Fire, both my trinkets, and whatever else you might have can go into these macros.

Marksmanship Glyphs

Major: Serpent Sting, Hawk, Kill Shot

That’s it, have fun raiding in patch 3.3!

I’m currently specced into a 0/18/53 build that focuses on improved stings as I mentioned in my other Hunter Raiding Builds post.

Some people will use a slightly different or an altered shot rotation priority on their Survival Hunters and it’s perfectly okay to do so, however, I’m going to tell you the one that works best for me for just about every situation. Sometimes I start the fight differently though (situational) but once the fight is started I’ll work back into this rotation.

Kill Shot > Explosive Shot > Black Arrow > Serpent Sting > Aimed Shot > Steady Shot

What I do for raids, because I haven’t created an automated macro yet for the survival rotation because of the changes to castrandom in a recent patch (don’t worry eventually I’ll create a nice macro), is I mirror 6 macro buttons to the first 6 positions of my hot bar to emulate this rotation, as you can see in this picture.

The priority simply goes from left to right, I always choose the furthest left skill as it comes available (minus serpent sting obviously because it has no cooldown). It’s fairly simple. You’ll notice all 6 of these keys are custom named macros, that’s because each key contains the following macro text:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast Rapid Fire
/cast Kill Command
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Steady Shot

For every key you make, change the name and skill out of this macro and place it on your hot bar.

Survival Glyphs

The glyphs I’m using are: Kill Shot, Serpent Sting, Explosive Shot. The alternatives are Improved Aspect of the Hawk (if you take talents) or Steady Shot. That’s pretty much it, so good luck to you and have fun raiding in patch 3.3

Most of you are anxious to raid the Ice Crown Citadel in the Fall of the Lich King patch 3.3 and you’re looking for the best Hunter talent build you can find to use, well, I’m going to give you the main specs that are used in Raiding and you can tweak them from there.

Beast Mastery

Beast Mastery is rarely ever used for raiding, however, I’m still going to provide you with the best spec that has been tested out there.

53/14/4 – Highest DPS Beast Mastery Raiding Build Patch 3.3
Pet Choice: Devilsaur
Shot Rotation Priority: Kill Shot -> Serpent Sting -> Multi-Shot -> Steady Shot

That’s it, it’s actually very simple, but I doubt you’ll want to raid as a Beast Mastery Hunter. Depending on your playstyle you can move the 1 point in catlike reflexes into Improved Tracking.

Survival

This build is usually the most popular raiding build for Hunters out there. It allows for a high output of DPS while you are working on building up your raid gear, once you have a decent set of gear, most Hunters will switch to Marksmanship but this build is great for a Hunter that is gearing up or even one that is fully geared.

5/15/51 – Highest DPS Survival Hunter Talent Build Patch 3.3
Pet Choice: Wolf (for buff)
Shot Rotation Priority: Kill Shot -> Explosive Shot -> Serpent Sting -> Black Arrow -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot

This shot rotation get’s a little bit more complex and also situational. This is the recommended shot rotation order, but honestly I do it a bit differently. I usually open up with Black Arrow, then Serpent Sting, Explosive Shot, Aimed Shot, Steady Shot. I try to time my Aimed Shot to hit just before I launch Explosive shots.

I also do not use this build on my Hunter, I use a 0/18/53. I moved all the points out of Improved Aspect of the Hawk and put them into Improved Stings and Hunting Party for replenishment because I don’t always raid. You can tweak this to how you play.

Marksmanship

Marksmanship is typically used by higher geared Hunter’s that stack a lot of haste. It seems to underperform Survival builds without high end gear, but Survival doesn’t seem to scale as well as Marksmanship. It’s also a little bit different of a play style.

Highest DPS Marksmanship Hunter Talent Build Patch 3.3
Pet Choice: Wolf (for buffs)
Shot Rotation Priority: Kill Shot -> Serpent Sting -> Aimed Shot -> Chimera Shot -> Steady Shot

Remember that when you use Chimera Shot it automatically refreshes your Serpent Sting. This shot rotation is almost as boring as the Beast Mastery rotation, but hey it works. You can also throw in Arcane Shot if you’re bored, it’s going to depend on your gear and how good you are at pressing buttons. I’ve not seen many variations of this Marksmanship Build, but I’m sure you can be creative and figure something out.

Well,

I’m proud to announce that I figured out the best possible automated one button (two with shift) macro for Beast Mastery raiding. I’m hitting DPS of 3700+ on Heroic Test Dummies with a Gear score of around 4700, I’ll have to see how that scales in raids yet (I’m locked from them all this week already).

The spec I’m using with this that has resulted in the highest DPS relies on Aimed shot, although, because of how I have it macroed I don’t actually keep Aimed shot up as much as possible but on rotation with Serpent Sting.

So here’s the Macro:

/use 13
/use 14
/cast Rapid Fire
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Bestial Wrath
/cast kill command
/castsequence reset=shift/target serpent sting, aimed shot, null
/cast steady shot

The talent spec I use is a 53/18/0 build with Glyphs of Bestial Wrath, Hawk, and Steady Shot. By weaving in Serpent Sting and Aimed Shot every 15 seconds we are basically just giving a passive boost to steady shot damage so we can do this one button macro. The efficiency of this one button macro is outperforming a manual weave of arcane shot, aimed shot, steady shot by as much as 10%.

So basically just press this macro as fast as you can and every 15 seconds make sure you hit shift plus the macro to reset the cast sequence and enjoy! This spec is only 300dps behind my Survival Manual Rotation macro setup right now that hits 4k+ on the Heroic Training Dummies and is beating out even a Marksmanship Manual Rotation. With the efficiency of this Macro you can actually show up to a raid as a Beast Master Hunter and not be laughed at, while you’ll still be laughed at but not so much when they see the dps meters.

Well, Beast Mastery has to be the easiest thing to automate as far as one button mashing, there’s just nothing to it. This macro works the same as the other ones, press shift + macro to refresh serpent sting. You can also add in Rapid Fire if you want into this macro. I was able to hit about 3000 DPS on the Heroic Target dummy with a Devilsaur using a 4000 Gear Score Hunter, which tells me that my Marksmanship and Survival Macros are going to need more work.

/use 13
/use 14
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Bestial Wrath
/cast kill command
/castsequence reset=shift/target serpent sting, null
/cast steady shot

Well, here is what I have come up with so far for Survival Hunter Shot rotation macro.

The only testing this macro has received is on the Heroic dummy I plan on taking it out to try on some raid bosses when I get the chance but it seems to run pretty smooth.
/use 13
/use 14
/cast kill command
/cast [modifier:ctrl] Black Arrow
/cast [modifier:alt] Explosive Shot
/castsequence reset=6/Shift  Serpent Sting, Null,
/castsequence reset=6 Steady shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Explosive Shot

It’s pretty self explanatory, if you’re an Orc or you want Rapid fire you can put that in near the top too.  But what happens is it tries to fire off both trinkets and kill command then moves onto cast Serpent Sting.  Because of the Null that comes after Serpent sting it locks up the first castsequence, meaning it will not repeat and has to be reset by pressing shift, which is good because you don’t want to chain fire off Serpent Sting.  So when Serpent Sting needs refresh you simply press shift.

It continues to do the second cast sequence unless you press shift, alt, or control.  I threw in 3 steady shots before Explosive shot because it seemed to work, you can figure out how many need to go there yourself for your Hunter.

When Lock N Load procs you can press alt to fire off more explosive shots, this will by pass all cast sequences, and to refresh Black Arrow simply hit control.  If you’re not concerned with Explosive Shot you can change the Alt modifier to Kill Shot, either way you are going to have to weave one of those in manually outside of this macro for now.  It is possible to add Black Arrow to the first cast sequence and reset it with Shift.  You could make the first castsequence go something like: Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Black Arrow, Null.

What I’m thinking is that you might lose out on too much Explosive Shot DPS while you’re toying with it but I’ll keep working it, for now this is Version 1.0, I’ll keep updating it as I try it out and make it more efficient.