Hunter Redesigns (Beastmaster); 1-100

Below you will find my concepts for a BM Hunter rebuild, 1-100; Talents from 15-115. Eventually I will move through all the specs/classes, but this is to give an idea of what kind of things I feel make a ‘complete’ class, combining classic wow designs with some modern mechanics and philosophies. Thanks!

If interested in other class rebuilds, check my post history. None of them are particularly short.

TLDR: Continued focusing BM towards the pet, and integrated a few QOL talents into the core spec, and fleshed out some abilities. BM already has a lot of interactivity between abilities, so needed to tease some of that out.

Beastmaster Advancement and Core Abilities: 1-50

1: Ranged Weapon Proficiency (Passive): You may equip Ranged weapons
1: Dual Wield (Passive): You may equip one-handed weapons in your off-hand

1: Pet Commands: Gain the commands required to tame, call, heal, feed, revive, and control your pet.

1:Raptor Strike: A vicious slash using your mainhand weapon to deal Physical damage.
3: Beast Lore Gather information about the targeted beast, displaying abilities and tameability.

5: Feign Death: Feign Death, causing enemies to ignore you.
8: Flare: Fire a flare that reveals enemies within its boundary.
8: Aspect of the Cheetah: Increases movement speed by 90% for 3 seconds, and then 30% for the next 6 seconds.

10: Exotic Companions (Passive): You learn to tame and command exotic beasts

10: Master of the Hunt (Passive): Whenever you summon a pet companion, you also summon the next available pet from your stable. This additional pet will attack the same target but does not respond to Kill Command or benefit from Bestial Wrath. The additional pet does not have access to other abilities.

10: Kill Command: Command your active pets to attack, dealing physical damage to the enemy. Consumes Hunter Focus.
10: Barbed Shot: Fire a shot that causes the target to Bleed over 8 seconds. Generates Hunter Focus.

10: Hunter’s Mark: Hunter’s Mark increases the damage you deal to the target by 5%, and if the target dies while affected by Hunter’s Mark, you instantly regain 20 Focus. The target of a Hunter’s Mark can always be seen and tracked by the Hunter. Limit 1.

13: Tar Trap: Hurls a tar trap to the target location that creates an 8 yard radius pool of tar for 30 seconds, and is triggered when the enemy approaches. All enemies have 50% reduced movement speed while in the area of effect. Trap will exist for 1 minute.

15: Disengage: Leap Backwards
18: Cobra Shot: Fire a shot that deals Physical and Nature damage to the target. Consumes Focus. Reduces the cooldown of Kill Command by 1 second.

20: Exhilaration: You heal yourself for 30% of your maximum health and your pet for 100% of its health.

23: Kindred Spirits (Passive): Increase your maximum focus and your pet’s maximum focus by 30.
25: Stomp: Your pet slams down, dealing damage to enemies near it. Consumes Pet Focus
25: Multi-Shot: Fire several missiles, hitting your current target and all enemies within 7 yards for Physical damage. Consumes Hunter Focus

28: Freezing Trap: Hurls a frost trap to a target location that incapacitates the first enemy that approaches for 1 minute. Damage breaks the effect and has a maximum of one creature under its effect. The Trap exists for 1 minute.

30: Baited Arrow: Fire a bait covered shot at the enemy, dealing Physical damage and marking them as Bait for 8 seconds. Any of your pet’s attacks against the target cause the pet to enter a Frenzy, gaining 30% increased attack speed for 8 seconds, up to 90%. Each pet can maintain 3 stacks of Frenzied at a time, with subsequent attacks refreshing the duration until they attack a target without Bait, losing all stacks. Frenzied attacks generate Focus for the Hunter.

33: Ankle Bite: Command the pet to maul the foe, dealing Physical damage and slowing the target by 30% for 6 seconds. Consumes Pet Focus.
35: Muzzle: Your pet interrupts the target’s spellcast, preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 3 seconds. Consumes Pet Focus.
38: Roar of Sacrifice: Activate to cause your pet to protect a chosen ally, taking 20% of the damage meant for the target for up to 12 seconds. Consumes Pet Focus.

40: Aspect of the Turtle: Deflects all attacks and reduces all damage taken by 30% for 8 seconds, but you cannot attack.

43: Born to Be Wild (Passive): Critical strikes with your Shots cause the cooldowns of your animal aspects to be reduced by 5 seconds.
45: Chimera Shot: Fire a shot that hits the primary target, and another nearby target, dealing Nature or Frost damage to those struck. Generates 5 Hunter Focus for each enemy hit.

48: Scavenged Supplies (Passive): Your auto-shots have a chance of resetting the cooldown of Baited Arrow, Barbed Shot, or Chimera Shot


Beastmaster Advancement and Core Abilities: 50-100

50: Hunting Companion (Passive): While you have a pet active, you gain the companion ability of their spec.
53: Frenzied Strikes: Your pet leaps to attack foes within 8 yards of it, dealing Physical damage and marking each one with Bait for 8 seconds.

55: Kill Command (Rank 2): Kill Command critical strikes generate 50 focus for your pet, Kill Command’s critical strike chance increases by 5% against enemies below 30% health.

58: Eyes of the Beast: You take direct control of your animal companion while continuing to fire at whatever your companion is targeting for up to 30 seconds. If you or your companion fall below 50% health, you immediately snap back to your senses. You can continue to use targeted shots against your pet’s target so long as the target remains within range.
58: Misdirection: Misdirects all threat you cause to the targeted party or raid member for the next 8 seconds.

60: Heads of the Hydra (Passive): Cobra Shot causes your next Chimera Shot to fire at up to two additional targets, generating 3 focus for each additional target hit. Your next Cobra Shot’s focus cost is reduced by 5 for each target Chimera Shot hits.

63: Ankle Bite (Rank 2): Your pet’s basic abilities renew the duration of a Ankle Bite on their target.
65: Intimidate: Your pet mauls an enemy, Stunning the target for up to 6 seconds.
68: Bestial Wrath: You and your pet enter a rage, increasing damage dealt by 25% for 15 seconds.

70: Beast Cleave (Passive): After you Multi-Shot, your pet’s melee attacks also strike other nearby enemy targets for 75% as much for the next 4 seconds.
73: Barbed Shot (Rank 2): Barbed Shot reduces the cooldown of your Bestial Wrath by 6 seconds.
75: Stomp (Rank 2): Stomp/Thunderstomp deals an additional 10% damage for each enemy it hits, up to a 100% bonus.

78: Mastery – Master of Beasts (Passive): Increases the damage done by your pets by %. The % is increased by your Mastery and the number of pets you have active at once.

80: Aspect of the Wild: You gain Focus every second and a 10% bonus to your critical strike chance for 20 seconds.
83: Born to be Wild (Rank 2): Critical strikes with your shots and auto-shots have a chance of reducing the cooldown of Bestial Wrath by 3 seconds.
85: Kindred Spirits (Rank 2): While in a frenzy, your pet’s Focus regeneration increases by 20%.
88: Misdirection (Rank 2): Misdirecting to your pet reduces the cooldown by 90%.

90: Natural Mending (Passive): Every 10 Focus you spend reduces the cooldown of Exhilaration by 1 second and Disengage by 3 seconds.
90: Stampede: Summon your remaining pets to attack your current target for 20 seconds. During the Stampede your additional pets do not respond to Kill Commands, use abilities, or benefit from Bestial Wrath. If you have no remaining pets, you instead summon animals from the environment. Consumes Hunter Focus.

93: Master of the Hunt (Rank 2): Your summoned pets and additional companion respond to your Kill Commands, dealing 20% damage, and gain the benefits of Bestial Wrath.
95: Aspect of the Turtle (Rank 2): You gain 5 focus for each attack deflected by your shield.

98: Compassion (Passive): While taming a beast you take 20% less damage from the creature being tamed. Your Mend Pet lasts twice as long, and Revive Pet’s casting time is halved and cannot be interrupted.

100: Beast Cleave (Rank 2): Beast Cleave’s radius is increased by 3 yards, and your pet’s critical strikes while Cleaving causes them to strike a second time at 25% damage.


Beastmaster Talents
Tier 1 (Level 15):

Hunting Whistle: Your auto-shots have a chance of summoning the next available pet currently in reserve to attack your target for up to 10 seconds. This additional pet does not respond to Kill Commands and does not have access to its other abilities.

Bestial Bond (Replaces Master of the Hunt): Your pet’s damage increases by 1% every 2 seconds, up to 10%, every second it is your only pet active.

Dire Beast: Summon a powerful wild beast from the local environment to attack your target for 8 seconds, roaring when summoned to also grant you 5% Haste. Consumes Hunter Focus.

Tier 2 (Level 30):

Hooked Shaft: Barbed Shot deals additional Physical damage at its conclusion. If Barbed Shot is refreshed before dealing its final damage, the damage at its conclusion is increased, stacking up to 3 times.

Great and Small (Replaces Tar Trap): Every 10 Focus you spend on a shot has a 10% chance of summoning a critter from the environment that will defend you for up to 15 seconds, latching on to enemies that come within 6 yards and dealing damage over 6 seconds, slowing them by 30%. You can have 3 critters following you at a time. Using Kill Command causes all of the critters you have accumulated to attack your target instead.

Murder of Crows: Summon a flock of crows to attack your target, dealing Physical damage over 15 seconds. If the target dies while under attack, Murder of Crow’s cooldown is reset.

Tier 3 (Level 45):

Aspect of the Viper: Your Cobra Shot has a chance of resetting the cooldown on Kill Command and to cause your next Kill Command to cost no Focus.

Thrill of the Hunt: Your focus spending shots have a chance to refund 50% of their spent focus whenever they critically strike.

Feeding Frenzy: Frenzied attacks against an enemy with Bait generate an additional 2 Focus per attack and each attack against an enemy with Bait heals the pet for 1% of its maximum health.

Tier 4 (Level 60):

Trailblazer: Your movement speed is increased by 30% anytime you have not attacked for at least 3 seconds.

Leap: Your pet is commanded to Leap to the target location, ending all movement impairing effects on it.

Camouflage: You and your pet blend into the surroundings and gain stealth for 1 minute. While camouflaged, you heal for 2% of your maximum health every second. Dealing or taking damage disrupts your Camouflage.

Tier 5 (Level 75):

Hydra Shots: Your Cobra Shot causes your next three Multi-Shots to deal additional Nature damage to each target, while your Chimera Shot causes your next three Multi-Shots to deal additional Frost damage to each target.

Thunderstomp (Replaces Stomp): Your pet stomps down, dealing Nature damage to nearby enemies and slowing them by 50% for 6 seconds. Consumes Pet Focus.

Pheromone Trap: Hurl a trap to the target location that creates an 8 yard cloud of pheromones for 30 seconds, and is triggered when an enemy approaches. All of your pets gain an additional stack of Frenzied while in the area of effect, allowing them to gain up to 4 stacks. The trap can exist for 1 minute.

Tier 6 (Level 90):

Posthaste: Disengage frees you from all movement impairing effects and increases your movement speed by 30% for 4 seconds.

Big Scary Teeth: Intimidate’s cooldown is reduced by 1 second each time you use Kill Command.

Wyvern Sting: Fire a poison barb at your foe that puts them to sleep for up to 30 seconds. Any damage will wake your target up.

Tier 7 (Level 100):

Packleader: Roar of Sacrifice now applies to all allies within 12 yards and your pet generates focus whenever it absorbs damage, however the roar ends if your pet falls below 30% health.

Bestial Vengeance: If you are dealt fatal damage, you take control of your pet for up to 30 seconds, until it is killed, or until you are revived. This can only occur once every 6 minutes. While taking its vengeance, your pet gains Bestial Wrath.

Obedience Training: Your pet’s special abilities are enhanced, granting an additional 5% Leech from Predator’s Thirst, 5% additional health from Endurance Training, and an additional 5% movement speed from Pathfinding. Additionally the cooldown of Master’s Call, Survival of the Fittest, and Primal Rage are reduced by Born to Be Wild.

Tier 8 (Level 115):

Big Game Hunter: Increase the critical strike chance and damage of your auto-shots by 15% on targets who are above 80% health. Using Kill Command against a target below 30% health has a 50% chance of refunding its Focus cost.

Aspect of the Predator: Cobra Shot, Baited Arrow, and Chimera Shot gain an additional 15% damage from Bestial Wrath and your movement speed increases by 30% while Bestial Wrath is active.

Packmaster: You gain a 10% bonus to your damaging shots for each pet you have active, including summoned pets and critters.

1 Like

Its a good change, more alike to legion, how we could use 2 pets and Dire Beast was base.One of my only concerns is how summoning a pet from your stable can be too overpowered with the right pets out or circumstances, so if they weren’t able to say use family abilities or something it’d be good. Even now Dire Beast is pretty unused because of how little it gives compared to other talents so it needs to be buffed.


Alright, let’s see about BM^^

1-9

Same as with MM really.
Still not overly thrilled about not being able to use ranged weapons before level 10.

Additional feedback:


Baseline/Core

Stable, as in your actual stable(like the Animal Companion talent)?
Or is this meant to pick your second pet(out of the 5 you can have with you at all times)?

What’s the reason for splitting the mechanics of Barbed Shot into two different abilities?

Is this now intended to be a separate ability as opposed to a passive added onto Barbed Shot? Looks like it.
Also, will it consume your Focus or your pet’s Focus?

A replacement for Concussive Shot? But with a damage component?
Concussive Shot is also a 50% slow, up from this one at 30%.

This appears to be a melee based interrupt. Why not keep Counter Shot?

Interesting passive tbh. Though depending on if it benefits from both yours as well as your pet’s critical strikes, then this will be insanely good.
Would it have an internal cooldown?
If not, then it should probably be somewhere around a 1-2 second CD reduction. Down from 5 seconds.

Interesting passive on it’s own. Though, the name is a bit odd if you ask me^^

Sorry if I missed it somewhere but…what is “Bait” in this situation?
Is this referencing “Baited Arrow”?

A bit confusing really as to what you intend for Baited Arrow to do.
Is it intended to make your pet fixate on that particular target for 8 seconds?

Also, the stacking component, is it now stacking up automatically for as long as the pet keeps attacking that enemy target?(until the Baited Arrow effect falls off that is), as opposed to on live where you use Barbed Shot to stack it up manually.

There is no need to add in that focus component for your pet. On live, our pet’s never run out of focus. Unless you intend for the pet focus system to change going forward. Similarly to how it used to work in the past. Where Basic Attacks had no CD and pets kept using them until they ran out of Focus.

Also…

The description is a bit confusing overall.

Kill Command critical strikes causes the next Kill Command your pet uses against the target of your Baited Arrow to be a guaranteed critical strike?
Which then means, the next Kill Command used against that same enemy will also be a guaranteed critical strike as long as you have the Baited Arrow effect active on the target. And so on…

Please clarify the above a bit.

Does this extend to the Focus generation-mechanic of Chimaera Shot as well?

Why only 6 seconds when it’s 12 seconds on live? Reason for changing this?

Have I missed the “Wild Frenzy(Rank 1)”?

Is this connected to the Frenzy attacks from Baited Arrow?
Or is it meant for the passive “Born to be Wild”?

Also, why have both this for cd reduction on Baited Arrow when you have "Scavenged Supplies(Passive)(48) that’s intended as a RNG reset mechanic for that ability, amongst others?

Like earlier, unless the Focus-system for pets(in connection to focus spending abilities) change going forward. This effect is not needed at all.

Is the intention that this would work like the talent we have on live does?

While this being an interesting idea, the RNG-nature of Hunting Whistle in itself, risks making this a very frustrating effect.
If you’re lucky with procs, this would essentially be a quite insane bonus to damage(assuming the damage component is anything worth noting ofc).


Talents

Master of the Hunt/Animal Companion 2.0 - should work like a reverse Lone Wolf option for BM. It should NOT be a talent option.

You should manually be able to call out either 1 main pet, or…, call out 2 separate permanent pets(the first one you call out, will be the “main” pet).
If you have 1 pet active, it deals 100% of the damage intended.
If you have 2 pets active, they split the total damage dealt between them. Either 50/50 or 60/40 or 70/30 even.

Bestial Power - This talent goes straight against the current design intentions with pets in WoW. With a talent like this, anyone who would want to think about damage output, will basically be forced to use a Ferocity pet.

And since you can no longer manually choose what spec your pet should have, this would only further upset players.

Big Game Hunter - This would ofc depend on tuning/balancing but currently, this talent would most likely be the only option worth taking in this tier.

Packmaster - Might be worth taking depending on if it scaled with companions other than your main pet/pets. If it also scaled with Hunting Whistle pets and Dire Beasts.

Currently, this row is extremely unbalanced in it’s setup/design.

Also, in response to the “Thrill of the Hunt”-talent, the Focus model we have on live combined with the Focus regen elements you suggest, with this talent, would risk having you sitting at a capped Focus bar most of the time.

As for “Feral Recuperation”: Much like what I said above with “Born to be Wild(Passive)(43)”, 1 bonus where you have the 5sec CD reduction for aspects is a bit too much on it’s own. Having a second option you can combine here, is just…waay out of anything else.

Combine the two and your Aspects would essentially never have a CD longer than 30 seconds max.

Leap - is essentially a second Master’s Call ability. IMO, it would be better to just put Master’s Call back as a baseline option, as opposed to now where it’s restricted to Cunning pets.

Eyes of the Beast in the way you describe it, is a bit confusing as to how it would work. What is it meant to do?

Chimera Sting would be quite a bit too powerful.

Why would you have both Aspect of the Serpent here + the Tier 3 talent “Aspect of the Cobra”?
Combine them both and you wouldn’t be able to do pretty much anything but spam Cobra Shots + Kill Commands until you run out of focus, then you would have to wait/rebuild focus while at the same time watching CD resets occur that you cannot make use of due to lack of Focus.

Tightening Coils needs some further explaining.

Currently appears to be a bit unbalanced in it’s setup as well.

A bit of an odd tier but ok. For PvE, there’s essentially only 1 talent out of these that you would want to take. That being Bestial Vengeance. Assuming that you’re out of CRs or assuming that you don’t want to use CRs on a hunter at the time.

For PvE, the only option you would really want here is Aspect of the Predator.

Obedience Training would never be wanted above AotP.

Wrath of the Wild - same as earlier, this design goes straight against the philosophies of pet design in WoW today.


Additional thoughts

Much like what I said in your post about MM.

Your suggested design for BM allows you to, with talents, have I think 17 different damage dealing abilities/CDs that you would consider being a part of your “rotational” setup.
You can also add in defensive abilities, CC, other utility-based stuff and so on.

BM on live, I would agree, lacks a few things baseline. Most of the abilities you can get from talent options are fairly worthless or otherwise not really connected to the core playstyle of the spec.

But your design above, is taking it a bit too far in the opposite direction. Giving you way too much to think about/manage during combat. You simply wouldn’t have enough globals(GCD resets) to be able to make use of everything.

And depending on how you choose talents, you wouldn’t have time to regain focus enough to use on abilities. Or the opposite, you would have too much Focus to be able to spend before capping out.


1 Like

How about keeping Serrated Shot for the bleed and increased pet attack speed but bring back Steady Shot for focus regen. Also, bring back Hunter’s Mark baseline.

1 Like

One of my appreciations is the ability to keep it Melee(DW specifically) or ranged to be neutral.

Now all you have to do is figure out how to get the brain-fungus-afflicted developers (a misnomer if I ever heard one: they don’t develop they flail) to adopt some of these changes. Good luck.

Thanks for the great input, and patience, from everyone here!

Made some major revisions to the talents to both put them in line with the revised MM talent options, and to take advantage of folks great comments. Greatly increased transparency in focus spenders and gainers.
To answer your feedback in a couple of places:

I split the core abilities into Barbed Shot/Baited Arrow because it was/is a really packed ability. One of the comments I always hear from other BM players is that they want more to do themselves, or more of the damage attached to themselves. By splitting these, it spreads the damage a slight amount, but it also allows more complex interactions with the abilities themselves. Unpacking them allowed me to focus on what makes each part of that unique, and focus a talent or two on that. Because Barbed Shot would be used more often, or rather there are more things that encourage the player to use it more often, the effect on BW is reduced per shot.

Also, I liked the thought of HS Baited Shot.

I want Focus to be something moderately important for both the Hunter and the pet. If we have the simplified pet abilities now that don’t really interact with Focus, then you can increase some elements of complexity with other pet abilities costing pet focus. So, for example, Muzzle/Ankle Bite/Stomp. This makes them not bound by cooldown, but instead on pet focus.

Ankle Bite is intended as a Conc replacement, the slight decrease in slow amount is because this deals damage, and can be subject to damage bonuses from the pet. Also, unlike Conc it naturally reapplies if you leave fuzzy to attack the target, allowing for splitting your attention.

Bait/Frenzy has been clarified.

The Wild Frenzy bit was temp name for Born to be Wild. You missed nothing.

Stampede, in hindsight, would work better in its pre-legion state.

Eyes of the Beast is just a reintroduction of the classic concept, but allowing for players to keep pewpewing from the perspective of their pet instead.

Anyways, be safe everyone!

Nope. We already had two pets baseline in Legion and many of us hated it. This should be a talent and nothing more.

It should not be a talent.

It should work like a reverse Lone Wolf passive, baseline function.

You can choose to have 1 pet active. It would work like normal.
You can also choose to call out a second pet and they’ll both share dmg dealt.
Your first pet called out will still act as the main pet. The Command Pet-ability is determined from that.
Only the main pet uses Growl.

Otherwise, both pets would do the same things.

If you’ve chosen to have 2 active pets, the game will always call both of them, every time you dismount or get of a flight path, or zone out from somewhere/zone in.

If you want to go back to using only 1 pet again, simply right click on either of your pet’s unit frames and dismiss the one you don’t want out.


Note: The function we currently have where the second pet is called from the stables is not working all that well. It takes unnessecary time as the game needs to check multiple registers/places to find and call both your pets.