BM Isn’t For Everybody
“Dear BRK, Hi. A bit of background - I’m 61. Physically, anyway.
“I’ve played online games for a number of years - starting with “The Realm” through “Meridian 59″, through EQ and SWG and finally a huge number of hours per week of WoW. What I don’t have is the reflexes/hand-eye of someone who grew up in the Nintendo Generation. This means I suck at PVP but I don’t play on PVP servers too much.
“My main love in WoW is rogues (mine is 63rd level currently) and hunters (mine is 61). I’ve always been MM specced but someone where I work said BM rocks and gave me your web site.
“OK, I admit that after reading a lot of the posts there and replies and so on, I’m befuddled. Last night I dumped all my talents and re-did everything. Now I sit and stare at the things I have and am frankly at a loss as to how to play her now. I do solo quite a bit and I always used traps. I’m not a numbers cruncher and I guess I’m just not keeping up with what the changes are and the “WTF do I do now” part.
“Can you give me a bit of help here, please? You have lots of examples of builds - I just want something that will let me solo BUT help my guild in instances/raids, too. I want to take things down quickly but I’m not a 19-year old who is going to grok the stuff you say as easily as I might have when - well, when I was 19. Thanks, Chenaya.”
Chenaya, we do hereby relieve you of any perceived obligation to roll a Beastmaster hunter. If one wants to solo and help in instances with minimal fuss, one rolls a Marksman. Specifically, a MM with at least 17 points in Survival for the supertraps. But if you’re going to re-respec MM, we want you to do it properly.
The 0/41/20 Marksman Build
What’s distinctive about the Marksman tree is not the great numbers of awesome talents, but the tremendous number of crappy ones. While the BM tree is a great feast of lovely talents from among which we must work hard to choose, the Marksman tree is filled with dungbombs of disgusting talents we must work hard to avoid. Talents that can ruin an otherwise adequate spec.
Concussive Barrage, Barrage, Improved Barrage, Combat Efficiency, and Improved Stings. Junk, from one end of the list to the other. Avoid ‘em at all costs.
This is a cookie-cutter 0/41/20 build that gives nice DPS and supertraps. Your pet is significantly diminished, your ability to complete with a BM hunter in terms of sustained DPS is too. But you are very nicely equipped to provide excellent crowd-control and significant ranged damage for instances.
Now Silencing Shot can be tricky. Most Marksman hunters won’t trade it for anything, but there are those who understand that it has limited uses in PvE and are willing to sacrifice it to build a Hybrid Hunter. Let’s take a look at that.
The 0/31/30 Hybrid Build
We lose Silencing Shot but gain more Agility and Crit. Properly configured - re-gemed, re-enchanted, and re-focused from the high-RAP of a MM hunter to a more pure-Agility SV hunter mode to compensate for the loss of the +10% RAP from Careful Aim and Master Marksman bonuses - a hunter with this build can do more damage-per-shot and crit more frequently than a traditional MM, but still keep the supertraps for those 5-man instances.
The 0/31/30 is called a Hybrid Raiding Spec, but with practice and a good threat meter, it will do fine for soloing, too. It will be a little harder to solo as you’ll crit mobs off your pet much more easily than a Marksman will, but your damage in instances should be significantly increased.
And if you made us choose, we’d go Hybrid over Marksman every day of the week. 
Merry Christmas to all! We’ve forwarded BRK’s Naughty and Nice WoWers List to Santa. To all those who didn’t bribe us sufficiently, yes, you made the wrong list. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
And yes, we made our own Nice-List twice! It’s good to be the Editor.
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18 Responses to “BM Isn’t For Everybody”
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your links to the builds are not working
I am very happy with my bm/mm build but would like to take a look at these builds.
Try clicking the pictures. They should link to a WoWHead talent calculator.
Very nice to see BRK’s opinion of talent builds other than BM… I’ve been wondering about that hybrid spec for a while, it’s very nice to see what it looks like and what I would need to make it work.
Merry Christmas to you too!
Give Hobbes some extra Sporeling Snacks.
(P.S. for purposes of taking the poll, I hearby declare that Linux = The Force)
Very merry christmas to all, and nice that BRK is a know-it-all, even on other specs
Merry Xmas BRK et.al.
Also nice to see someone correctly use the word “grok”.
Man I haven’t heard anyone use the word grok in a long time. Almost makes me want to read Stranger in a Strangeland again but I’ve other books I still haven’t read.
@BRK
I interesting builds. I’m waiting for MM hunters to come on and say that the talents in the MM build are not crap(except for Combat Effciency its an outright horrible talent). I know a lot of PvP MM hunters say you can’t go without using improved stings. Though quite frankly it never seemed to make much difference for me with the stings when I had it.
BRK!
It’s either Efficiency (which i don’t think is crap, but thought you were saying when i read it first) or Combat Experience (which i’ve heard you rant about before, and understand because it ain’t good)
So i guess you mean Combat Experience when you say it’s crap :b
For pve imp stings sucks too, but not if you’re going to arena and want to drain your opponents.. but i guess you could just say it sucks if you only focus on soloing/going some dungeons, as the question poster seems to.
Anyway, just wanted to say that many of the talents in the mm tree are great for pvp but not in pve
Greetings,
Super_Duck
Since there is always a 1% chance for a trap to be resisted. Only putting 1 point in Trap Mastery lowers the chances for any lvl 72 or lower mob to resist to 1% Two points in Trap Mastery only affects lvl 73 mob resist chances. Its not often you’ll be trapping lvl 73 mobs, so just take that extra point for 2% more hp or whatever else might fit your needs.
while I agree wholeheartedly that combat experience is trashy don’t underestimate the barrage tallents big multishot hits and criticals are great in pve and better in pvp
i don’t understand why some people find playing a BM hunter confusing. sick your pet on your target and spam a SS macro, couldn’t get much easier imo. As for solo pve, it seems to me you would want your pet to be a little buffed up through the BM spec to be able to tank just about anything. Ive found this spec to be the all-around best for soloing, raiding and pvp, not to mention the massive amount of sustained dps that ensures i out damage just about anyone over a given period of time.
Merry Christmas!
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodscalp&n=Kroniko
With regard to what Shifttusk said above, I guess the question is which would be better, the extra 8% crit change and 12% damage to multishot from Barrage/Improved Barrage versus the 5% increase to damage from Ranged Weapon Specialization. Not quite sure how to go about doing the math on that.
I concur that Combat Experience and Concussive Barrage are crap. Improved stings isn’t great since sting damage is still pretty pathetic, but it’s better than it was with the damage bonus to stings from RAP.
Actually, I thought that BM is the best soloing spec available.
MM & the high Agi/crit SV builds require a much better understanding of aggro management or you’ll find yourself kiting everything. BM gives you the ‘leeway’ in that it’s just that much tougher to OT your pet.
My suggestion to Chenaya is to give the classic BM spec a try. Train your pet with Growl 8, Claw 9, Dash/Dive 3 & Great Stamina 11 (spend the rest of the points on resistances as needed). Turn on Auto-cast on Growl, Claw and Dash. Throw your pet at the mob, wait for the first Growl to hit, then open fire, spamming Arcane Shots, and Steady Shots. This should be quite workable.
In heroics, you might find it a bit tough with traps being resisted, but remember that your pet is also able to tank most trash (as long as they get heals).
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Id suggest dropping IHM and taking a point out of survival to get barrage talents.
@BRK: You need to slow down a bit! Especially, slow down reading!
I think you completely misunderstood Chenaya’s question!
If I read it correctly, he was asking about the main differences between playing an MM (which he’s used to do), and playing a BM (which everyone knows is the best soloing spec because your tank, read: pet, can last much longer for BM specs than for other specs and usually requires less attention).
So, what’s missing, is a “How to BM for previous MM hunters guide, by BRK”…
I haven’t really played MM for much long, so I don’t know how to solo stuff with an MM build as I never tried. Don’t know if there’s much difference in the play style for those specs…
Hmm… you just might be right, Someone. You just might be right…
/think
BRK,
I agree Silencing Shot has it limits. So, I was wondering if you had some kind of 30/31/0 Hybrid?
Played MM all the way to 70 and LOVED IT!. “Reach out and touch someone, and watch the corpses pile up” is my motto. But, because of Cat losing Aggro often, & I know your thoughts on that, I tryed BM. I am a convert. I agree Beastial Wrath with Beast Within is hard to beat, the DPS plus the cool way it looks is great!
I’m an old MM trying to find a way. Any ideas?
BRK,
Cant help but be disappointed with those builds. Missing Barrage / Improved Barrage in favour of taking both effic and IHM is a gaffe one can only attribute to too many hours spent spamming auto-steady. The only time missing B / IB in a deep MM build is acceptable is when 5/5 arcane has been taken, generally for the purpose of CC-heavy fights and / or tighter 3:2 rotations.
CE is admittedly lacklustre however theorycrafts out acceptably when CA is already maxed, especially when synergy with raid buffs AI and BoK are considered.
finally, 0/31/30 is a build that only a few select hunters ingame could successfully pull off, in that it requires an extreme gear level (generally T6 equivilent) to scale comparably.
Here is an example which should be closer to true cookie cutter (IHM / Effic completely interchangable, with the filler shifting to improved stings) -
7/45/9 - Raid build
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cxbZVtbRVzGestIh
Offers maximum MM raid dmgout. *Can* compete with BM in T5 level gear. Despite its lack of scaling and even at 1000 DPS outputs, TSA still offers a higher than 3% damage increase (FI) for physical damage classes (hunters included), so with intelligent raid setup the FI vs TSA argument is moot.
PS - Nightdrifter - just dont. If you go beyond Intimidation, you go the whole 41 - thats just the top-heavy nature of the BM tree. As soon as your even remotely within reach of Serpents Swiftness, you get it, and when youve got it, TBW > anything else for 1 pt value, so your defaulted to 41 BM.