My BM hunter's DPS needs a boost

Classes Hunter
1

Hey guys a little help here…
Probably its been posted a lot. although i have the game the game about a year my game a experience is about 2 months or so. Last time i tried it was back in draenor expansion but never commited or had the time. But now i m back and love the grind and stuff. Dont really care about PvP.

BM is my favorite char and my first hunter ever got to 120 and doing heroic right now dungeons. I think i m ilvl 372.
Today i downloaded a damage meter to check how i m doing cause i d like to try mythic later on. And its BAD. I mean i did around 8 to 10k and everyone else did at least 15k and most times 20-30k. And the real low point was when the healer did at some point 3k more than me!!
Any advice please? Should i prioritize a different sequence of skills or something?

Thanks for taking the time!

2

As BM

Focus on keeping the Frenzy-buff on your pet up as much as possible.
You want it at 3 stacks for as long as you can keep it there. If you notice that you can’t refresh it again before it falls off, save your Barbed Shot charges until you have almost 2 charges ready to be used again.

In order to get the most out of it, you generally want to delay using Barbed Shot again until the Frenzy-buff on your pet is about to expire. Or, if you’re about to reach two full charges of it, then use one of those immediately.
Barbed Shot also lowers the remaining CD of Bestial Wrath every time you fire it.

Bestial Wrath should generally be used on cooldown, but in some situations you might want to time it to get more damage on specific priority targets or AoE.
You’ll get the hang of this eventually.

Aspect of the Wild(major CD) should be used at the same time as when you activate a Bestial Wrath.
If you have an azerite armor-piece with the Primal Instincts-trait on it, using Aspect will grant you a free charge of Barbed Shot. Meaning: don’t have 2 full charges when you activate your Aspect of the Wild.
If you don’t have this trait then see the above.

Other than this, Kill Command should always be used on CD as long as the Frenzy-buff is kept up.

Cobra Shot should be used to spend excess focus and for lowering the CD of Kill Command in order to get more uses out of it. As long as the above is managed then focus on this.

For AoE, keep Beast Cleave up constantly(activated by using Multi-Shot).
Keep Frenzy(Barbed Shot) up on your pet at 3 stacks as much as possible. Same as above.

Always try to pool Focus so you have close to a full Focus-bar every time you activate Bestial Wrath.
Avoid capping your Focus bar as, time spent with it at max/full is time wasted and resources lost.

Keep track of where your pet(s) is/are, especially for AoE it can make all the difference if your pet can hit all enemies intended or not.
Beast Cleave is designed for stacked AoE so try to keep it in the middle of the pack of enemies.

For target switching during fights, keep in mind that you have built-in charge mechanics on both Barbed Shot as well as Kill Command.
Don’t tell your pet to switch to another target that is far away unless you have one of the above ready to use, to get the pet there faster.

As for gear and other improvements, simming your character whenever you get new items is the best way to determine whether something is an upgrade or not.

There are many guides out there showing how you go about using simulations to determine upgrades.
Raidbots(google this) is an easy site to use for this.

If you want a more in-depth guide, I would recommend you checking Icy Veins for BM hunters.

https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/beast-mastery-hunter-pve-dps-guide

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3

That was very helpful.
I checked raidbots. saw some things i could get like enchantments for weapons and stuff. Also about barbed shot i did used it anytime i had one without thinking about buffs etc.
i ll check the icy-veins too.

1 Like
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Hey there, I have mained hunter for years and only recently decided to play mine as alt again, but it’s quite low ilvl atm (405 or so).

But here’s a few tips i can give you as I’ve lots of guildies and m+ friends that play hunter and really, really pump a lot of high numbers.

On any 2 or more targets pull, make sure you have Beast Cleave active. You achieve that by casting Multi-shot and its a 4 second aura on your pet. Best get a Weak Aura that shows you when its active and just keep refreshing it.

Also as the above poster said, keep frenzy stacks at 3 at all times possible. Use Bestial Wrath on cooldown as Barbed Shot reduces it and you can almost cast it every 20-25s or so, if you have good procs.

Aim to get as much crit gear as possible, to be able to get more Barbed Shot charges. Keep Kill Command on CD and basically that’s it.

Beast Mastery is pretty straight-forward at the moment and easy to play if you get the hang of it, just keep watching some guides and eventually you will get used to it :slight_smile:

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5

What were the ilvls of the other people in the dungeons? I’m not saying you can’t improve your dps because pretty much all of us can, but if they were significantly higher ilvl than you, that would explain their higher dps.

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6

First of all guys thanks a lot for your answers. I did read all you said and ofcourse i raid the icy-veins site. But i have a couple of questions.

Are you talking about macros here? Because if any of you guys have a useful one i d like to hear it. I did tried a bit myself but failed lol.

I know its a noob question here but had never noticed it before. where i see the 3 stacks that you guys talking about.

And never thought about it man but i believe it was too much of a difference so i dont know. To tell you the truth till i mostly used barbed shot, kill command and cobra shot mostly everything in CD, never thought about buffs and stuff. For example Bestial Wrath was used once in every fight and usually i dungeons.

Also i hate to admit it but i usually am pretty much all out attack in everything i play. I didnt even knew how great is Feign Death is. Didnt even have it in my skill bar till 4 days ago.

So for starters, i did get my some weapon and ring enchantments, i ll change my Killer Instinct talent with Animal Companion and try use your advice how to use my skills and see if it goes better. Also i downloaded Weak Aura so i ll check that out too.

Finally i have 2 more questions:
i) Primal Instincts or Dance of death? I thought later on to have 2 different set of armor, One with Dance of death for dungeons or raid and one with Primal Instincts for all the other.
ii) Havent understand what essenses are… I think you have to complete war campaign first right? How you get it? Farm it?

Oh man i really asked you guys a lot! Sorry about that lol

7

Sorry, bit of a long post here :slight_smile:

No macro needed for this.

Basically, press the ability when you have an enemy targeted, and if your pet is within range(50 yards req for Kill Command, 40 yards req for Barbed Shot), then your pet will charge them and perform the attack.

Kill Command cannot be used unless your pet is within 50 yards of the target enemy.

Barbed Shot has a double range indication/condition. It is a ranged attack based on your own position, so even if your pet is not in range of the target, you can still fire the ability if you are within range of it.
For your pet to get the charge, it needs to be within 40 yards of the target.

As for macros, you’d do well to attach a “cast pet-basic attack” command to each of your offensive abilities.

Like this:

#showtooltip
/cast Barbed Shot
/cast Bite

#showtooltip
/cast Cobra Shot
/cast Bite

(or Claw or Smack, depending on which type of pet you have and what Basic Attack it comes with, check your spellbook(pet tab) to find out which it is)

And so on…

Why would you want this type of macro?
Because the Pet UI is quite horrible when it comes to the execution of some auto-cast abilities for w/e reason.
If you look at your pet’s Basic Attack(Bite/Claw/Smack) when it’s on auto-cast, while your pet is attacking an enemy, you’ll notice how it can take between 0.5-1sec after the ability comes off CD before the pet actually casts it again.

Meaning: Macroing basic attacks into your own abilities/actions will, as long as you continue to press buttons, guarantee that your pet uses Basic Attacks as soon as they are ready.

The Macro’s below aren’t for DPS but as a BM hunter especially, they are incredibly useful for just general gameplay. As they take away the need to switch targets during combat to use certain abilities.

Misdirection

/showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [target=mouseover,help,exists,nodead][@focus,help][@pet,exists] Misdirection

This one has 3 conditions

Prio 1: Cast Misdirection on any friendly unit(frame or ingame character) that you have your cursor placed over.

Prio 2: If no friendly mouseover unit is available, Misdirection will be automatically cast on any friendly unit you have set as a Focus-target(Focus frame).

Prio 3: If none of the above are met, then Misdirection will be automatically cast on your pet if alive and within range.

The next macro is exclusive to BM hunters as, they are the only ones who can tame Spirit Beasts as pets.

Spirit Mend

#showtooltip Spirit Mend
/cast [target=mouseover,help,exists,nodead][@player]Spirit Mend

It has 2 conditions

Prio 1: Spirit Mend will be cast on any friendly unit you have your cursor placed over.

Prio 2: If no friendly mouseover unit is available, then Spirit Mend will be cast on you(the player).

You can change this one to “@pet” or basically any specific unit you want that is friendly to you.

The Spirit Mend-ability itself is a fairly strong instant heal + heal over time effect on a fairly short CD.
So you’d do well to make use of it in case you run with a Spirit Beast as a pet.

By default, you can see it on your Pet Unitframe. It’s called “Frenzy”.

If you have any addon that alters your UI(unit frames) somehow, I’d recommend you to check where your unit-specific buffs are displayed. As, some mods change things like Buff-placement.

Specifically, where your pet’s buffs are displayed.

You’ll learn these things eventually. :smiley:

Just keep looking at everything and read what individual abilities and effects do.
Then try to manually test them out if you’re not sure how they work.

People learn in different ways.

Both.

Azerite armor you equip, as you can see, comes with 2 outer rings that contains various damaging traits that are spec-specific, for the most part.

Try to find azerite armor which has Primal Instincts on one ring and Dance of Death on the other.

For more details/specifics, check Icy Veins.

Essences are a end-game progression system for our characters to up our power levels.

Essentially.

You can get Essences from various activities, such as Island Expeditions, PvP, Raids etc.
Each essence come with multiple Ranks for you to upgrade your essence with.
Essences are permanent(for now) and are character-exclusive(not account-wide).

https://www.wowhead.com/guides/heart-of-azeroth-essence-overview

Here you got the full rundown on what Essences are and how to obtain them.

2 Likes
8

Long but awesome! And thanks for your quick responses!
Well havent tried it yet in a dungeon but testing it with a silver elite mob i did get 9-10k my lowest and i even got to 19k. i think in mobs like that i had at best around 10k.
Now i ll try some of the macros you said to check them out and try hitting a heroic dungeon to see what i can do.
And still i think i have pretty low stats
critical strike 22% (how much you should have to go with Dance of death traits?)
haste 11%
mastery 26%
versality 10%
and to think that now i m 386ilvl… isnt those pretty low??

btw a general rotation that you usually use to start with? to use it like a guide. i read somewhere this
(Worldvein Reanance [dont have essenses yet still questing for pathfinder])
Bestial Wrath
Barbed shot x2
Aspect of the wild
Kill command
Cobra shot
Kill command

Well havent tried that exactly. after reading all those articles and your posts its a bit different but close nevertheless

9

Glad it helps^^

Compared to current end-game gear, sure, it’s fairly low.

But you’ve just started out so, just keep working on it really.

For your gear level and with the lack of Essences or Corruption-effects(new effects randomly given to gear since 8.3), I would say that the output you’ve mentioned here is more than fine.

If you want to do more, at this point, keep working on getting better items and don’t worry too much about enchants or gems or about min-maxing everything you can.

If you want specifics towards how to manage your abilities for various encounters and such, there’s nothing I can add that you cannot find in the Icy Veins-guide for BM which I linked in the first reply above here.

It has everything you would want to know about opener-sequences or general “priorities” depending on the fights, and so on.

Just checked your character profile again.

Noticed that your neck is level 14(if the site is updated).

Make sure you finish the main story/campaign for the expansion. Both in Nazjatar and for the 8.3 stuff with N’zoth.

Think this alone will bring your neck up to level 50, for only about 5 hours of work. Depending on where you are currently in the story.

Finishing the campaign for 8.3 will also result in a nice Legendary-cloak for you to equip. Good stats and a massive upgrade to what you currently have equipped.

Also, your trinket: Highborne Compendium of Storms.

I don’t recall if that works for you as a Hunter but, based on what it says, I would recommend for you to replace it whenever you can. It’s a caster trinket based on the stats.

You want trinkets that give Agility + secondary stats or equip effects.

Keep the second trinket though(First Mate’s Spyglass). That’s fairly good for you as BM. At this stage at least. Again, to figure out upgrades, the easiest way is to simulate it, using for example Raidbots.

Note that it has an “on-use”-effect, meaning you will only benefit from it if you manually right-click on it.

I would recommend for you to macro that trinket’s on-use into your Aspect of the Wild. Since they share the same baseline CD of 2 minutes.
Something like this:

#showtooltip
/cast Aspect of the Wild
/use First Mate’s Spyglass

1 Like
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Well i played a dungeon just to check out my dps. at starters couldnt do much we had a super tank was running like crazy and even the bosses were going down fast. Had to wait everybody to lave after we finished to go find some mobs to try it.
I was about 14-22k i believe although i did died lol (they were 3)

this actually didnt work. i had to put spyglass icon somewhere near to push it together.

i bought it in AH just to help me lvl to reach heroic. i know its not for me

then i go to finish the warcamp. only 5 hours or so? i ll do later the pathfinder

11

When I had that trinket I macro’ed together with Aspect. I recall it working just fine.

Odd.

Depends a bit on where you are currently in the story. But yeah, around that time.

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12

I just got to zandalar. but i have bfa autopilot addon so i already finished 5 quests and got me a 420ilvl trinket to replace the one you mentined above.

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Keep working on it mate^^

You’ll get there.

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