Hunter • Beast Mastery • PVE
Beast Mastery Hunter (PVE)
Top-tier PvE DPS masters of the wild who unleash devastating ranged damage while commanding ferocious beasts that fight as true partners on the battlefield.
Talents
Beast Mastery Hunters use a fixed 41/20/0 talent setup in PvE with virtually no deviation. This build is entirely focused on maximizing single-target DPS by amplifying both the Hunter and their pet, which together form the highest sustained damage profile available to Hunters in The Burning Crusade. Due to the importance of [Mortal Shots], all PvE Hunter builds are locked into a minimum of 20 points in the Marksmanship tree. The remaining 41 points are spent in Beast Mastery to unlock powerful pet-scaling talents and core DPS cooldowns.
Build Overview
This is the standard and optimal Beast Mastery PvE build used in all raid and dungeon content. The build maximizes pet scaling, attack speed, and cooldown synergy to produce exceptional single-target damage. There are no alternative Beast Mastery raid builds that outperform this setup in sustained DPS scenarios.
Key Talents
Ferocious Inspiration
One of the most important Beast Mastery talents. This provides a 3% damage increase to the Hunter’s party and stacks multiplicatively with other Beast Mastery Hunters. Raids typically aim to bring multiple Beast Mastery Hunters specifically for this buff.
Serpent's Swiftness
Grants a permanent 20% attack speed increase to both the Hunter and their pet. This talent is fundamental to the Beast Mastery rotation and dramatically improves overall DPS efficiency.
The Beast Within & Bestial Wrath
These cooldowns define Beast Mastery burst windows. When combined with consumables, trinkets, and Heroism/Bloodlust, they enable some of the highest damage spikes available in PvE.
Go for the Throat
Ensures consistent pet Focus generation from critical strikes, allowing pets to use damage abilities without downtime and maintaining stable pet DPS throughout an encounter.
Beast Mastery Tree Notes
Most talent points in the Beast Mastery tree are mandatory damage increases. [Frenzy] is intentionally taken at 4/5, as this provides effectively 100% uptime on the attack speed buff, making the fifth point unnecessary. Optional survivability talents such as [Thick Hide] and [Endurance Training] can be adjusted slightly based on preference, but these changes have no meaningful DPS impact.
Marksmanship Tree Notes
The Marksmanship tree is primarily taken to access [Mortal Shots], which is a massive damage increase and mandatory for all PvE Hunter builds. The only flexible choice in this tree is whether to invest points into [Improved Hunter's Mark] or [Efficiency]. If you are responsible for maintaining [Hunter's Mark] in your raid, Improved Hunter's Mark is required. Otherwise, Efficiency can be taken to slightly reduce Mana usage.