After spending a good few levels and over a week as a Beast Mastery hunter, I’ve returned to Marks. What do I miss the most from the BM tree? Believe it or not, probably Improved Mend Pet. I hate it when poor Tux contracts a disease or something and I can’t do anything to help him out. I also miss Intimidation, and of course, Serpents’ Swiftness and “The Big Red Button”. But I’ve found myself wishing for IMP back more than anything else.
Thoughts on returning to Marks: I thought for sure “Oh, my poor pet won’t be able to hold aggro anymore”, but actually he’s still an aggro-holding machine, possibly even more than he was as BM. I believe that this is thanks to two things: Improved Hunter’s Mark, which gives him a melee boost, and Go For the Throat, which gives him more focus and more chances to use Growl. These are two things that a normal 41/20/0 build would probably have, but mine didn’t because of lack of talent points, and it made a big difference. I also think my Trueshot Aura helps out a little, but obviously it’s not going to make up for the lack of a Beast Mastery build in the pet-power department.
Tux is back to doing about 35% of my total DPS instead of 45-50%. That’s still a considerable amount of damage. I really feel that a marksman hunter cannot and should not underestimate the power of his or her pet.
Overall going back to Marks sort of feels like “going home” to me, but that’s just because I was “raised Marks”, so I’m comfortable with it. I really enjoyed the time I spent as BM and I definitely plan on returning to it and playing with it even more once I get some more talent points. Next up, though, is Survival! I’ve been wanting to try that one out for a long time.
Anyways, one last thing: thanks to one of my jobs, I am going to be WoW-less for the next eight days starting tomorrow. I will have my laptop with me, (because I’m a geek with three computers), but my poor laptop isn’t capable of running WoW. Fortunately I will still have internet access, and thus I will still be able to read all my favorite blogs and also try and make a few posts for my two or three readers to enjoy. I have a couple ideas for things I would like to write about. =D
I believe that playing all the specs is a good idea. You learn things in each tree that you can apply to the others. I started out playing as BM until I got to about 53, went to marks for quite some time and went to survival later on at 60 and started feeding my tanking delusion. Agi got nerfed so I went back to Marks and was marks until about 2 months ago when I went back to BM after a long absence. I miss scatter shot and trueshot aura, but I like dps’ing and rather enjoy the BM play style.
But yeah, playing all the trees is good for your development as a hunter. When you go SV, make sure you’ve stacked your agi as much as humanly possible.