First off, I wanted to apologize for having not updated this site in quite some time. I've been extremely busy during the day with work projects, which leaves me very little energy to want to continue working in the evening. When I first started this blog, I had hoped that I could quell some of the arguments that Beast Mastery is a poor choice for talent specialization. Why did I even want to do this? Surely I could just roll Marksman or Survival like all the other "good" players and force myself into a cookie cutter build of what the perceived ideal hunter should be. The World of Warcraft community would have you believe that Beast Mastery is really only good for heroics, leveling and world PvE. They'd tell you that it's "not raid viable." Before I continue with that, I'd like to tell you a little story about a game I used to play.

Back before I played World of Warcraft, I was hooked on the much more painfully harsh game of Lineage II. When I say harsh, I mean that it was, well, kind of the opposite of WoW in terms of player expectations, punishments, rewards, time needed to advance, and just general gameplay. Now, I'm not putting WoW down, because after all, I'm only playing one of the two games right now and it's certainly not Lineage II. One thing I've found from World of Warcraft though, is that it encompasses a particularly unforgiving community of "hardcore" players who fancy themselves experts in doing the highest amount of damage per second in strictly Player vs. Environment settings. I put hardcore in quotes because World of Warcraft is arguably one of the most easy-on-players MMOs to date. The amount of time required to hit max level is miniscule, so much so that nearly everyone who's played for more than a few months most likely has at least one max level alt character. There is no penalty for a PvP death aside from the minor inconvenience of walking back to get your corpse, and the repair costs of PvE deaths are insignificant compared to the XP and potential item loss from a multitude of MMOs. The point of all this is I simply want to set the stage for what a truly hardcore game expects from players. One of the key things to note about all this is that in Lineage II, once you picked a character race and class, you pretty much stuck with it because max level was a true grind. Additionally, character "specialization" was fairly limited in comparison with WoW, as there were only a select few things you could change about your characters stats as you progressed. You picked your character and stuck with it, through thick and thin, which would create a level of expertise that I have yet to see in WoW.

The Story of the Treasure Hunter and the Wiff Walker

Back in my Lineage II days, I was in a guild named Berserk on the Bartz server. Bartz was the main US server, and if you played on that server back in the days of open beta and Prelude, you knew who Berserk was. It was a tight knit group of players who all knew exactly what they were doing, mostly due to the fact that many of them had played the Korean open beta together extensively, which had been released long before the US release. These were hardcore players. I was lucky enough to observe and play with them, choosing an archer class that left me basically on my own leveling for most of my experience with that game, aside from raids, sieges and massive world pvp.

Out of this guild, there were two skilled players who both struck me as very interesting in terms of their class choice, and how they handled them. The first was a Treasure Hunter by the name of Rug. The treasure hunter, being the human version of the dagger character, was the "balanced" of the three potential dagger choices, as it was equally effective in critical damage as well as the likelihood of critical strikes, both something a dagger character at the time needed. The other was an Abyss walker by the name of Kivek, which was the Dark Elf's dagger character. The Abyss walker's strength was in critical damage, with a significantly noticeable decrease in critical chance. Everyone called them Wiff Walkers for a reason. Of the three dagger races, they were the most likely to miss their essential critical dagger skills. However, when they hit you, they would hit you harder than a ton of bricks being thrown at you by a two hundred foot tall brick throwing machine. Complimentary to this attribute, they were also harder to hit than the human Treasure Hunters, which meant that your blows would miss more on them, theirs would miss more on you, but when they landed a hit you would probably be asking for a resurrect.

Rug arguably happened to choose the most balanced and probably most effective dagger class overall. However, he was also probably one of the most skilled players in the game, which made his character all that more effective and dangerous. Kivek, while having chosen a class that was considered by many to be "inferior" to the human Treasure Hunter in situations where he wasn't getting critical chance buffs, was still extremely skilled and respected throughout the community.

Any time there was a raid, you'd be happy to see either one show up to help kill the boss while simultaneously fighting off the rest of the server trying to stop you from accomplishing this task. He knew how to play his class, he played it well, and it added to the guild as a whole. Even with an arguably inconsistent character, he still brought something extremely significant to the guild in both PvP and PvE, benefitting everyone as a whole while also playing the role he had chosen from the beginning. If there was ever a need for a dagger player, either one would be an excellent choice depending on who was available. It was their skill that made them valuable, not their class.

Now, to the point. World of Warcraft allows players to quickly change their specialization for a nominal in-game fee, building their character however they want, built after any character they want. Players quickly shift from one "best" specialization to another with little regard or concern for their previous spec as new patches are released, or even simply re-roll an entirely new character since max level is so easy to reach. There's no respect for the choices made early on in the game, and while there certainly are a lot of characters, there's a lack of character within this community. The Marksman and Survival hunters you see today talking about how great their specialization is would likely change trees the second they thought they could pull higher DPS with another tree. They don't care about their class, their character, and they lack the character to roll with the punches and build their expertise with their chosen build. No one cares about working with what they have and making it as effective as possible, they just jump ship as soon as there's any sign of a nerf. The rest of the community is witness to this, often using it as justification for perpetuating the idea that anyone who continues to play it is therefore bad at the game.

We could all roll Marskman and call it a day, but I don't think I'm comfortable with that, both from the standpoint as an individual player and as a part of the community as a whole. Even within a guild, there needs to be some variety, as every class holds their strengths and weaknesses, but behind every character lies a player whose skill will be the final determinant for whether a raid is cleared or wipes, and whether a team wins or loses.

With this rant aside, I'd like to discuss some of the Beast Master's strengths that are often forgotten due to the perpetuated concept that "Beast Master hunters are bad."

Bestial Wrath: Unleashing the Beast

The fundamental skill of every Beast Master, this skill is what makes big red kitties, well, big and red. It's an effective and powerful skill that has different strengths that can be played on depending on the situation. It's a huge damage boost for your pet, who should be dealing a large percentage of your damage anyway. If you have it, it's almost certain that you have the complimentary talent Longevity to reduce its cooldown time which, when coupled with the Bestial Wrath glyph, will drop your cooldown time to 1.17 minutes. When combined with other cooldowns, this is where pet skill management, player attentiveness and skill coordination comes into play on how much more DPS you can get out of it.

I Fear Nothing

The damage increase is fairly significant, and depending on how you use it can be extremely effective. However, the true benefit with this skill comes from the fact that it works like a pvp trinket in that it not only prevents Fear and CC effects during its duration, but also interrupts them when cast on both the hunter and the pet, fully preventing any DPS loss during what could potentially cause a complete loss of character and pet control for several seconds. Onyxia's Bellowing Roar and the disabling effects from the Faction Champs are two instances that come to mind where Bestial Wrath is extremely effective and useful. The minor DPS lost in waiting a few seconds to cast Bestial Wrath can far outweigh the loss of DPS while completely disabled, and can even save your life.

A Boy and His Dog

Another great advantage of playing a Beast Mastery hunter is the low threat because you and your pet are working more effectively as a team. I can hear the Marskman and Survival hunters shouting "Because it's the lowest damage!" No, because unlike the other two specs, your damage is more equally distributed amongst both the Hunter and the pet, which count as two separate entities as far as threat is concerned. Where the Beast Master will probably have their damage split anywhere from 55/45% to 65/35%, Marskman and Survival hunters can often pull a lot more threat going even as high as 90/10%. What good is having the "best" DPS if you can't go all out from the very beginning of the fight to the very end? Misdirection's recent changes have made this less of an issue at the very start of a fight, but even within about 10 seconds of the fight (after the first 3 are up) you can see the Survival and Marksman hunters pulling a lot more threat even if they're pulling less DPS. It keeps you alive and makes the tanks lives easier.

I'm a Ramblin' Man

One of the other great things about having distributed damage amongst you and your pet is the fact that you as the hunter can move around while still maintaining a large percentage of your damage. The Deathbringer Saurfang is a great example. Where Survival and Marksman hunters will lose a large amount of their damage while they're busy kiting, the Beast Master can maintain a solid amount of damage on the boss with their pet while they kite and trap the Blood Beasts. DPS loss isn't as significant in fights like Lord Jaraxxus where you're forced to continue moving with Legion Flames as well.

Ferocious Inspiration

While it doesn't stack with Sanctified Retribution or Arcane Empowerment, nearly every Beast Master should have Ferocious inspiration at 3 points which means the entire raid should have a constant 3% damage increase. This includes casters, melee, and other ranged dps! Is there anything about Ferocious Inspiration that isn't raid viable?!

Some Misconceptions

While it's arguable that at the peak of endgame, where every piece of possible new gear has been acquired, Beast Master hunters might not pull the same DPS as Marksman hunters (I can't test this because I'm not there yet in terms of gear), I've come across the misconception that the spec pulls less DPS overall in nearly every case, including AOE. It is NOT deficient when it comes to AOE. Quite the contrary. Given the fact that you'd only be sacrificing roughly 55-65% of your single target damage and converting it to multi target damage with Volley, the Beast Master is quite capable of delivering some extremely high AOE damage, coupled with simultaneous, effective, single target damage delivered from your pet. I can assure you that out of the many perpetuated weaknesses of Beast Mastery, Area of Effect damage is not one of them.

In closing, like every spec, Beast Mastery has its strengths and weaknesses, but the final determinant is not which cookie cutter build works best, but which player has enough skill and intelligence to use their class to the best of its abilities. With a large number of variables coming into play such as user input lag time (i.e. user error), server ping, disabling effects, required player movement and threat management, spreadsheet data can only go so far. It's a shame that this community has become so heavily invested in finding a "best" single solution rather than respecting the individual talent and skill of players who choose to play what they play, regardless of reason, and play it to the best of their abilities. It's these players, not the prebuilt specs, who are viable for raids. Let's not forget that.