Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.
There are a lot of reasons hunters want to top the DPS charts: because the view is better from up there, because we’re a DPS class and it’s our job, because it makes killing bosses easier, or just because it makes your man parts appear larger.
We talk a lot here on Scattered Shots about optimizing your hunter and keeping track of the little changes that happen with every patch and hotfix, but after a while all those little changes add up into a very different optimization picture. Today, we’re going to do a quick review of exactly what is the optimal way spec and play your hunter right now. We’re getting a handful of minor buffs and changes in 4.3.2, and this optimization review will take those into account.
These 10 tips are the quick and dirty answers to the current state of hunter optimization. Bookmark this page and pass it along to that guy with a hunter alt as a one-stop shop for what he should be doing right now. As always, things change with gear and group composition, and there are often choices that are almost as good, but this rundown will get you where you need to go: the top of the charts.
Top 10 tips for topping the charts
1. Spec If your only motivation is going as much DPS as hunterly possible, then SV is the current spec of choice. Recent buffs (and 4.3.2 buffs) put the SV hunter on top, along with the tier 13 set bonuses that favor the SV hunter over MM.
If you want to play MM and know it well, then it is very close to SV in single-target DPS. If you want to play BM, you can do that too, but you will do noticeably less damage than SV does. SV does great DPS on both single and AoE but suffers from lower survivability (ironically) and poorer burst DPS for burn phases.
2. Talents Your standard cookie-cutter SV spec is 3/7/31. This will optimize your damage in raiding environments, and there isn’t a whole lot of variation on this build. The Survival Tactics points can go anywhere you’d like, and you could choose Bestial Discipline over Sic ‘Em, but you aren’t really drowning in choices.
3. Rotation Like all hunter specs, SV has a priority-based rotation. You want to start the fight in Aspect of the Hawk, with Hunter’s Mark and Serpent Sting on the boss. Your priority is then: