class="textBodyLargestDark"> src="http://wow.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/album75/hunterheader.jpg"
align="middle" height="75" width="555">

bgcolor="#fefdc7" border="0" cellpadding="5"
cellspacing="0" width="555">
bgcolor="#ffffff" height="29" valign="middle"
width="100%">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26134">Hunter
Guide: href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26135">Basics
| href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26138">Quests
| href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26140">Equipment
| href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26141">Spells
and Talents

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26142">Roles +
Tactics | href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26139">Trainers
| href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26143">Pet Info|
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=152">Hunter
Forums

Sub-Spec Guides: href="http://wow.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=597"
target="_blank">Marksman
(Pre 3.0.2), href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26137" target="_blank">Beastmaster
(Pre 3.0.2)

Ability Guides: href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/34408" target="_blank">Chain
Trapping, href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/34829" target="_blank">Misdirecting

style="width: 600px; height: 50px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/49935">

Hunters skills are broken down
into three areas or trees. They are Marksmanship, Survival and Beast
Mastery. Marksmanship skills focus on ranged damage dealing, beast
mastery focuses on your pet, and survival focuses on traps and melee
abilities. As you level you learn skills in all three of these areas.

Marksmanship spells include
many of what everyone defines as hunter base abilities. These are your
Auto shot, Arcane shot, Multi-shot, and Aimed shot. In addition to all
of these shots that cause damage, marksmanship also has spells such as
Hunter's Mark that grants additional attack power against that target,
and Distracting shot that causes additional threat allowing you to get
a creature off of a cloth wearer and into a trap.

Beast mastery spells include
spells that affect animals, such as scaring beasts, or causing your pet
to enrage. A very underused spell that is from the beast mastery school
of magic is eagle eye that allows hunters to scout out areas ahead of
them for danger.

Survival spells tend to focus
on close combat and surviving in it or escaping. For example there is
disengage which lets you jump back out of melee range to provide range
to attack the opponent. There is also feign death, which allows you to
play dead and hopefully have the enemy ignore you, this is used in
groups to drop threat and allow the tank to hold threat even when you
are doing large amounts of damage. For melee spells survival adds
Raptor Strike, Wing Clip, Counterattack, and more.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/34327" target="_blank"> src="/image/view/34327/preview" alt=""
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 145px;"
border="0">

Trapped!

A
creature caught

in a freezing trap.

Hunters also have traps that
allow you to either cause damage, slow or stop your enemies when they
come near it. Traps are special spells that are placed on the ground
and then activate when an enemy is near. Learning to use these can
really save your life in many situations. The main traps that you use
are:

Frost
Trap - Places a trap that
slows all enemies in its area of effect.

Freezing Trap
- Places a trap that freezes one enemy in place for a period of time.

Immolation Trap
- Places a trap that burns the enemy causing fire damage.

Explosive Trap
- Places a trap that explodes causing damage to an enemy and further
damage to all enemies over time that are nearby.

Snake Trap
- Places a trap that contains a number of snakes that when released
attack nearby enemies.

In addition Hunters have
Aspects that can and should always be used. These are essentially
spells that are cast once and then stay in effect until you change
them, clear them, or die. These aspects allow you to take on some of
the special abilities that you have learned from various animals such
as Aspect of the Hawk that improves your sight and therefore your
Attack Power, or the Aspect of the Cheetah that increases your running
speed. There are many different ones and you should learn to use the
proper one at the proper time, not just sit with the same one active
all the time.

style="width: 600px; height: 50px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/49931">

Talents are how you customize
your Hunter and allow him or her to do what you would like. Putting
points into the various talent trees makes the hunter play vastly
differently. A Hunter that puts most of their points into Marksmanship
will hit far harder with each ranged shot than other hunters. A hunter
that specializes in Beast Mastery will quite literally have a beast of
a pet, causing huge amounts of damage and allowing the hunter to attack
fast than other hunters. Lastly a survival Hunter will be far better
able to trap, slow down, escape, and generally survive combat.

A very important thing to note
about talents is that you can unlearn them if you need to. This allows
you to build your character one way for early levels and then change
mid-way or even late game to a different style. This is a general tip
and works for all classes not just paladins.



To unlearn all your talents, the first time only costs 1 gold, the
second time only costs five gold, and it increments from there. This is
a very nice bonus, it means you do not have to play your end-build from
level 1 (well... level 10 since that is when you get your first talent
point).

Plan on using the re-specs,
the first few don't cost that much. Do not use them as an excuse to
just throw points anywhere, as that would waste your re-specializations
and make you spend much more money, but rather take advantage of your
ability to switch between proven existing builds at certain levels.



It may seem obvious to some, but we see people running around in the
20s doing things that are not really optimized, and they know it, but
they always do it because they think it will be 'better in the end'.
Well, in this game, you can wait until 'the end' to do that if you
wanted.

A complete talent calculator
can be found on the official href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/hunter/talents.html"
target="_blank">World of Warcraft site here.

You can also find a full guide
to all the talent trees and which talents are worth putting points into
here: href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/26157">Hunter
Talent Guide.

This section covers the many different ways that you can specialize a hunter through talents. These builds are fairly standard builds that you will see used by many Hunters in the World of Warcraft. No specialization is ever perfect to each and every player though. Personal preferences, play style, etc will dictate what works best for you as a player. These are all good starts though and should be viewed as a baseline to work from. Find one that suits your style and tailor it to your exact play style.

A note on the builds, they are all built for a level 80 Hunter and show an end state talent tree. It is important to remember that when placing you talent points when leveling, where they go is not critical. It is important however to keep moving your way down the talent tree as quickly as possible to gain new abilities. This means that initially you can skip many of the talents on your way down the tree until you have either reached the bottom or have to place more at a higher level to keep moving down.

Marksmanship Builds

Talent points into marksmanship will improve your single shot ranged damage. As a marksman your shots hit harder than other hunters and you gain additional types of shots. This tree is generally the first talent tree Hunters start to explore and feel comfortable with. As a result most hunters are marksmanship hunters.

Marksmanship PvE - This build is a fairly standard PvE marksmanship build meant for group or raid play. In it you go all the way down to the bottom of the Marksmanship tree to get Chimera shot so that you can use a very standard sting-steady-steady-steady-chimera shot rotation. It also makes sure to grab silencing shot so that you can assist and pull in ranged casters by silencing them. 

Marksmanship PvP - This build is similar to the above PvE build however since you are unable to assume that your stings will remain on a target for long, it drops Chimera shot in favour of more stuns and survivability. It keeps many of the same abilities including silence, which is golden against casters.

It also moves into the survival tree to get additional range on your shots so that you have time for an additional shot before opponents get into range. Lastly in the beast master tree it adds in extra health for you and your pet and the ability to revive your pet faster. 

Survival Builds

Want to be different? Try making a Survival based hunter. While not the highest DPS build out there, Survival adds many things that can make being a hunter a lot of fun.

Survival Build - Many Hunters have started using this type of build to get huge attack power numbers. In groups this type of build allows constant trapping, and the ability to get out of or survive melee better than most other builds. You also help by being able to sleep a target with your Wyvern Sting, and to return mana to players using your Hunting Party ability. All that before one of the true bonuses of the survival tree, Expose Weakness which greatly lowers the armour of your target allowing everyone in your group to cause more damage. 

Attack Power Build - Many Hunters have started using this type of build to get huge attack power numbers. In raids this type of build can do large damage and help out with the exposed weakness debuff on enemies. It does not go all the way down in the survival tree though and misses many of what would be considered normal survival talents. I does dip into the other two trees far enough however to pick up some big attack power boosts and Aimed Shot from the marksmanship tree.

Beast Master Builds

You think all hunters are pet based? Think again. With these builds your pet can become your most critical component instead of just a handy tank. With a pure beast build and the right pet, it can be possible to take out opponents with no intervention. If you wanted a Tasmanian devil as a pet, and think you can handle playing second fiddle, check out this section. Beast Master builds have almost become the de-facto raiding build as well, due to the huge amount of damage they can turn out.

Maximum Beast Build - This is the maximum damage beast build. If you are a Horde player you can make it even better by combining this build with being an Orc for their racial bonus to pet damage.

This build creates the strongest pet and the damage dealt by the pet holds target's attention nicely. The Hunter can spend all of the battle at range doing damage with their basic shot or aimed shot which you get from the marksman talent tree. In addition it will allow you to get many different pets as you will go all the way down to the bottom of the Beast Mastery tree to get the ability of the same name, which allows exotic pets and additional pet points.

Because of all the talent points put into your pet, you have a very high dependency on your pet. You will however when combined with the proper pet and gear, be able to out damage all other hunters. 

Have comments or suggestions? Thought of something that has been missed? I would love to hear from you! Please post in our Hunter Class forum or email Byron Mudry at [email protected]