First Impression of New Beast Mastery Hunter Hotfixes - Single Target Nerf Still, AoE Buff

Tarlo, our Beast Mastery Hunter Guide writer, has provided a first impression of the updated Beast Mastery Hunter hotfixes, breaking down the expected Single Target and AoE DPS changes tomorrow.

Beast Mastery Hunter Guide

About the Author

Hello! My name is Tarlo and I am the writer for the Beast Mastery Hunter guide here on Wowhead. I have mained Hunter since the Burning Crusade and currently do high-Level Mythic raiding. I also sometimes dabble in Mythic+. You can find me as a moderator in the Trueshot Lodge discord if you have any questions or other inquiries regarding the guide or anything else hunter-related.

Special shout-out to the various theorycrafters, Simc implementers and other Hunters who help make this guide possible.

Tarlo

Basilisk Collar was a controversial talent which massively buffed our single-target, yet did relatively little on AoE. This discrepancy made Beast Mastery difficult to tune properly, as any buffs to our AoE outside of very specific spells meant our single-target would go through the roof. Removing power from this talent was therefore the right way to go, while buffing our other spells. It is still a massively powerful talent.

In spite of these change intending to be «relatively neutral», they do result in a decent single-target nerf of 4-5%, which is a little disappointing. Beast Mastery was very powerful in single-target, albeit partially inflated in statistics due to being a popular target of Power Infusion, which we still should be. Overall we should be fine enough off in terms of our single-target damage in raid. We make a small swap in our talents from a point of Basilisk Collar to a point in Wild Instincts, which is why our Power Infusion value is largely maintained.

In terms of AoE, the changes result in a net ~14% buff, as well as a few talent changes, similarly swapping off a point in Basilisk Collar in favor on other talents, depending on the build. These changes aren't necessarily sufficient to make Beast Read more on wowhead.com