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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.

A complete list of skill can be found here: TenTonHammer Hunter Skill Lists

Talents are written out in much the same way as spells. Talents have ranks though so are listed as name, rank, talent, points required in tree, description. A very important thing to note about talents is that you can currently 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 hunters. To unlearn all your talents, the first time only costs 1 gold, the second time only costs five gold, the third 10 gold and up. This is a very nice bonus, it means you do not have to play your end-build from level 1 (well.. 10).

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.

You can find a complete Talent Calculator at Blizzards site.

This section covers the many different ways that you can specialize a hunter through talents. These builds have been submitted by players that use them in WoW. No specialization is ever perfect to each and every player. 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.

Talent points into marksmanship will improve your ranged damage, but your pet will have a harder time keeping the target's attention. If you want to sit back and shoot at the target while it attacks your pet, you may want to consider beast mastery - this will make it less likely that the target will attack you instead of your pet.

Marksmanship Build

This build takes as much as possible from the Marksmanship tree for damage and then adds Beast Master talents to allow it to function well as a PvP or PvE build.

For details on each talent in this build visit the talent calculator for this build here: Marksmanship Build.

Want to be different? Try making a Survival based hunter. Remember to get stamina, agility and strength gear. Some use spirit bond for the healing, others prefer counter attack and melee specialization.

Survivalist Build

This build aims to turn you into a more CC orientated hunter. Most of the point are put into survival to allow you to dodge attacks and get critical hits, and reduce trap times, while the other points are put into marksmanship to up your damage output.

For details on each talent in this build visit the talent calculator for this build here: Survivalist Build.

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 tazmanian devil as a pet, and think you can handle playing second fiddle, check out this section.

Maximum Beast Build

This is the maximum damage beast build. To make it even better, combine it 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. PvP opponents that ignore pet will be surprised by pet strength.

Because of all the talent points put into your pet, you have a very high dependency on your pet. You are fairly weak on your own and in a group or solo the Hunter needs to be alive for pet to deal damage/tank.

For details on each talent in this build visit the talent calculator for this build here: Beast Master Build.

We have put together the basics to playing a Marksmanship hunter. Read the guide here.

We have put together the basics to playing a Beast master hunter. Read the guide here.

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 Messiah@tentonhammer.com