Beast Mastery Hunter Review of Dark Ranger Hero Talents – Thematic But Unrewarding

This past week, Blizzard revealed another round of Hero Talent Trees in a Sneak Peek at the upcoming War Within system. Our Beast Mastery Hunter guide writer, Tarlo, offers an early review of the Dark Ranger Hunter Hero Talents that elevates the archer class fantasy but feels unrewarding and lacks integration with pets.

Beast Mastery Hunter First Impressions: Dark Ranger Hero Talents

Hello! The aim of this piece is to do a rundown of the Dark Ranger tree for Beast Mastery Hunters. All in all, it’s a decently thematic tree that does about as much as you can within the scope of a Hero Talent Tree. While there’s some disagreement on whether the theme fits Beast Mastery it’s nevertheless an anticipated theme that fits within the vague commonality of Beast Mastery and Marksmanship being “archers”. But without further ado:

Talent Breakdown

Keystone

: A relatively simple ability that is a callback to the older Black Arrow, but with a fairly different effect. This mostly works on a rotational level but more Barbed Shots is a fairly boring reward all things considered, as it’s already such a frequent button in our rotation. I will break down why this is an issue further in the conclusion. We also already have quite a few “minor cooldown” type of abilities, so having yet another one to add to the mix does mean our rotation takes a little bit longer to get going.

Row 1

: A fairly boring passive that is mostly “filler”. Buffing these abilities further cements the weakness of Kill Shot. A slightly more exciting alternative would be to instead make these abilities deal a certain amount of extra Shadow damage, which fits the theme and works better with other talents.

: Closer to the original functionality of Black Arrow. It’s mostly passive but decently thematic. It’s ok but nothing exciting.

: Very weak with current tuning of Kill Shot. It somewhat fills up your rotation quickly as you’re also generating Barbed Shots. Other talents encourage you to overlap with Call of the Wild, which means you might not even want spend the Hunter’s Prey proc because you’d more rather cast Barbed Shot and Kill Command. This simply means Kill Shot needs a buff, either from this talent, or baseline.

Row 2

: Not very exciting at all and somewhat risks focus capping as Barbed Shot already generates focus. Beast Mastery also cannot do much with extra focus so this might just get spent on extra Cobra Shots, which is not the most exciting reward. You are able to press Kill Command on cooldown already. It is a little bit better on AoE due to the fact Multi-Shot gets more prominently involved but not by a massive margin.

: This sort of reset effect results in some decent gameplay implications, making you carefully chose which target to cast on. This makes sense on a choice node as it can be useless on certain raid encounters.

The usability of this in Mythic+ depends somewhat on tuning, as if is a decently hard hitting ability, it makes sense to put this on the priority target with a lot of health so that mobs in the pack die more evenly. If most of the value is meant to come from its proc effects, then it might make better sense to aim for mobs that’ll die earlier in the pack to gain more uses of the ability quicker.

: While we cant tell how much or will do, it’s most likely not enough for this talent to be very powerful, as even if you generously add together this value to about 10-15% of your overall damage, this only amounts to effectively 1-2% passive leech, which is not a whole lot. This needs a buff and/or we need additional sources of shadow damage. This seems like an attempted replacement for pet leech not affecting the Hunter, but I would rather have pet leech transfer than this attempt.

: This is quite powerful and fairly exciting, giving us a lot more additional defensive options and flexibility. While it’s not always super relevant to “double up” on defensives, often you want more heals or damage reductions than you can generate. Natural Mending amplifies this further, giving us Exhilaration and 3 seconds of Survival of the Fittest every 60-90 seconds. This gives you a lot of options, simply put.

One example would be high-end Mythic+ keys on Tyrannical, where you sometimes want more damage reductions because of large hits from bosses. Conversely, if you are needing to be more self-reliant, an extra heal can be useful instead. The former effect is the much more useful one, simply due to it occurring more frequently and the overall bonus also being stronger, but both together makes for a very strong talent.

: While this could have some decent applications in PvP, this is fairly usless in PvE, or could even be annoying given it can desync individual mobs from a pack you’re trying to kite. It is also not powerful enough to be a realistic Crowd Control option in PvE.

If we are to have a crowd control option tied to Disengage, you need to be able to not talent into it, as otherwise you risk throwing out crowd control when you do not want to. This means this either needs to be a choice node, or be redesigned.

Row 3

: Encourages syncing with Call of the Wild, which is an alright gameplay function, but has some awkward gameplay synergy as the extra Barbed Shots generated by the increased tickrate won’t be very useful during Call of the Wild, as you already have more than enough.

: While an extra source of AoE is cool, this has anti-synergy with Bloody Frenzy which makes it unclear whether we want to use Multi-Shot or not. This needs to be addressed. Other than that interaction, there is not much else to say about this.

: This is fairly boring and weak given our only shadow damage sources are from this tree and Wailing Arrow, which means this is probably only around 1% of your overall. Might still be the better choice in its choice node, but still quite weak.

: Incredibly weak given the low proc chance and the weakness of Kill Shot. To break down why:

Over a 5-minute encounter, you will cast Kill Shot about four times without any additional procs, but only a portion of these will be during . For arguments sake, let’s say two of these casts are during . adds one cast of Kill Shot every 30 seconds, with every fourth cast potentially being wasted due to overlap with Call of the Wild. This adds the total to nine Kill Shot capable of proccing . A 15% proc chance means that this generates an average of 1.35 additional Barbed Shots over the course of a 5-minute encounter. This is very bad.

Capstone
: This is alright enough but basically amounts to 10% increased damage during cooldown windows and some passive damage. More burst is nice but this is not very interactive. Assuming has a decent proc rate, this would be up for most of its duration, which means it would have somewhere in the realm of 50-60% uptime. This means that this is not as much a burst tool as a passive damage amp, that you can’t realistically play around.

Conclusions

Overall, this tree aims to tie most of its talents around its central ability. This is not a bad concept in practice, as the dot from would be up 60% of the time, resulting in natural ebbs and flows in the rotation in theory.

One issue with this might be the rewards of these talents. Additional Barbed Shots, more focus or Kill Shot are not very satisfying rewards from the ability. Even with a relatively high proc chance, these seem unlikely to fundamentally change up the rotation during . Making these windows feel noticeable will be a significant aspect of giving the tree a unique gamefeel.

To exemplify why Barbed Shots feels unsatisfying as a reward, we currently have Scent of Blood, Wild Call, One with the Pack and Call of the Wild available to generate Barbed Shots, several of which are capable of proccing at the same time. We also have , and from the talent tree. This means we often have way too many procs than we know what to do with occuring at the same time. While Barbed Shot is powerful, we already have enough to fill our entire rotation, especailly during cooldown windows. This is why this reward needs another consideration. This is slightly less of an issue early in an expansion, as we have lower Haste and Critical Strike, which means fewer Barbed Shots, but this is still something to think about. Extra Kill Command might be slightly better but largely runs into similar issues. Beast Mastery generally lacks big rewarding spells whcih means that designing something like this can be difficult.

Some of this comes down to tuning, of course. Buffing Kill Shot and making it proc more frequently would improve that side of things significantly. Talents such as interact awkwardly with the rotation at the moment. Of course, this is all assuming there are no baseline changes to the spec, which could of course happen.

One aspect that is missing here is that there’s no significant utility tied to these talents, which is fairly disappointing given the general weakness of Hunter utility options. I think I’d gladly give up one of the more boring talents for some exciting utility option. An expansion of Wailing Arrow could work for instance.

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.

Black Arrow
Fire a Black Arrow into your target, causing it to take Shadow damage every 2 seconds for 16 seconds.

Each time Black Arrow deals damage, you have a chance to reset the cooldown of Barbed Shot.

Active – 30 second cooldown.

Ranger’s Finesse
Barbed Shot and Kill Command deal 15% increased damage.Dark Hounds
Each time Black Arrow deals damage, you have a chance to manifest an undead hound to charge your target and deal Shadow damage.Death Shade
When you apply Black Arrow to a target, you gain the Hunter’s Prey effect.Dark Empowerment
When Black Arrow resets the cooldown of an ability, gain 15 Focus.Grave Reaper
When a target affected by Black Arrow dies, the cooldown of Black Arrow is reduced by 12 seconds.Embrace the Shadows
You heal for 15% of all Shadow damage dealt by you or your pets.Dark Chains
Disengage will chain the closest target to the ground, causing them to move 40% slower until they move 8 yards away.Intense Darkness
When Call of the Wild is active, Black Arrow deals damage 50% faster.Smoke Screen
Exhilaration grants you 3 seconds of Survival of the Fittest.

Survival of the Fittest activates Exhilaration at 50% effectiveness.Shadow Surge
When Multi-Shot hits a target affected by Black Arrow, a burst of Shadow energy erupts dealing moderate Shadow damage to all enemies near the target. This can only occur once every 6 seconds.Shadow Assassin
Kill Shot has a 15% chance to generate a charge of Barbed Shot when used on a target affected by Black Arrow.Darkness Calls
All Shadow damage you and your pets deal is increased by 10%.Withering Fire
When Black Arrow resets the cooldown of Barbed Shot, a barrage of dark arrows strikes your target for Shadow damage and increases the damage you and your pets deal by 10% for 6 seconds.