A Look Back at Beast Mastery Hunter in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

wowhead.com:

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Beast Mastery Hunter Writer, Preheat, offers a retrospective highlighting Beast Mastery's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists

A Chronological Run-Down

Hello! This article aims to outline the development and evolution of Beast Mastery Hunters throughout the Dragonflight expansion: what has worked, what hasn't worked, what still needs fixing and so on. We'll start off by doing a rundown of events starting with the Dragonflight Alpha. After this we'll summarize these events and finally look forward into the next expansion.

Alpha and Beta

The story of Beast Mastery Hunters in Dragonflight starts in the Alpha and Beta, with the class receiving a large amount of attention during the period. This was somewhat necessary, as the class and spec talent trees started off in a rather rough spot, which included Improved Tranquilizing Shot costing 2 points, a talent increasing dodge chance, two charges of Barbed Shot not being baseline, among several other things. The initial version of the tree broke down the spec into its most basic components and put them into the tree. These were later combined or made baseline as more interesting and new stuff was put into the tree where possible.

Despite receiving a large amount of attention, the trees still ended up in a rather rough spot on release, with there not being enough new ideas to not have a fair few very basic passives or basically-mandatory abilities in the tree. Many of the new ideas were also not entirely functional, such as the original version of Bloody Frenzy. Abilities such as Aspect of the Wild felt a bit misguided in what they