Hunter
Overview
This is the beginning of a Hunter 101 series, to welcome new hunters into the class and steer them in the right direction from the beginning of their hunter career.
So you’re thinking about playing a hunter? Good news — you are considering playing the greatest class in WoW: hunters have the greatest community, most versatility of any pure dps class, and are the best looking class to boot. This guide will give you a broad overview of the hunter class and how it fits into WoW as a whole, with a look at the strengths and weaknesses of the class.
We'll cover:
Hunter Specs (Marksman, Survival and Beast Mastery) Stats, Rotations, Pets and much more!
Specs, Stats, & Rotations
STATS
The stat priority for Marksmanship is as follows: Ranged Weapon DPS > Agility > 8% Hit > Critical Strike > Haste > Mastery
Ranged Weapon DPS: Our ranged weapons increase our damage the most. The reason that ranged weapon damage means more to Marksmanship more so than Survival, is that our shots scale on weapon damage. This means that if you have a 333 agility weapon, a 359 strength gun will most likely put out more dps. Luckily, since patch 4.2, there are many agility ranged weapons available to us and we do not generally have to worry about using a strength ranged weapon.
Agility: Agility is our best stat by a wide margin since it increases attack power (1 agility = 2 attack power), as well as critical strike.
Hit: You need to get 8% hit first and foremost. It is the largest DPS increase over any of the other secondary stats. To get 8% hit, you need a Hit Rating of 961. The reason why we get “hit capped” is so all of our shots, traps, and pet hit 100% of the time against bosses.
Critical Strike: This is our next stat due to the talents Piercing Shots, Go For the Throat, and Sic'Em. Piercing Shots adds a bleed whenever we crit with our three most used shots (Aimed, Steady, and Chimera). Go for the Throat causes our pet to gain 10 focus whenever we get any auto-shot crit, and Sic'Em reduces are pet's attack by 100% focus whenever we get a critical strike with Arcane Shot or Aimed Shot.
Haste: Haste is a tricky stat for most beginning hunters. Mostly due to the fact that there is two haste plateaus which we must aim for depending on gear. The first haste plateau is set at 5.4%. Assuming you have Pathing (talent in the Survival tree), you will need a haste rating of 299. NOTE: Only get this haste plateau if you have the 4 piece T11 bonus. You will need to move to the second haste plateau if you do not have the 4 piece. The second haste cap is 12.93% or 1235 haste rating. This is the plateau that most current hunters will be going for since most will not use T11 anymore. Hunters need to get a particular amount of haste because we are trying to make our Steady Shot be as fast as possible during other haste effects (Blood Lust or Rapid Fire) without going under the GCD (1 second cast time). We also get these haste percentages so we can cast more Steady Shots in our rotation, which increases our overall DPS.
Mastery: Our mastery is called Wild Quiver and essentially, it has a percentage chance on any of our ranged attacks to fire an additional ranged shot. NOTE: The shot fires on it's own and we don't get to choose. Each point of mastery increases this chance by 2.1%. Mastery as Marksmanship is a good stat to have, but we really only get it when we reach haste plateaus and can't reforge into critical strike, or the static mastery on gear.