Hunter Abilities and Talents

Beast Mastery
Most of these abilities are, oddly enough, related to the mastery of beasts, in that they’ll contain spells that will heal your pet, scare away mob beasts, and so on. The most commonly-used abilities in Beast Mastery, though, will be your Aspects, of which Aspect of the Hawk (increased ranged damage) and Aspect of the Cheetah (increased movement speed) are the most useful.

Of the talents in Beast Mastery, there are a few that will come in handy, especially Improved Aspect of the Hawk, which, luckily is available at tier one. Since every Hunter will usually have Aspect of the Hawk up during combat, this is a great talent to invest in. The rest of them mostly focus on pet buffs (increasing their damage, armor, health, etc.), which you’ll probably want to hold off on until you get an idea of how useful your pets are in general. Although having a superpet might sound like a good idea, any talents invested here will prevent you from increasing your own combat skills in the Marksmanship talent tree, so you’ll want to examine both trees carefully before deciding how to invest your talent points.

Marksmanship
Markmanship is the ability tree that deals with enhancing the Hunter’s natural prowess with ranged weapons. You have a lot of spells and skills in this tree, but the standbys are going to be: Hunter’s Mark, which helps you increase your attack power on a target (and lets you see enemy rogues after they stealth); Arcane Shot, which is an instant-cast extra attack that can be seamlessly inserted into your normal sequence of attacks; and Serpent Sting, which adds a DoT effect that will sap even more health from your target during combat.

Unless they get drastically nerfed, Marksmanship talents are where you want to be spending almost all of your talent points. Almost all of these are simple buffs, which might not have a drastic effect on the way you play, but which will let you deal much more damage with your ranged weapons and your Marksmanship skills. The obvious ones here are Improved Hunter’s Mark, Serpent Sting, and Arcane Shot, as well as Ranged Weapon Specialization, all of which taken together should let you be an absolute DPS machine, and which will let you get along without a pet much more effectively in groups.

Survival
Survival can be roughly split into three groups: tracking abilities, melee abilities, and traps.

The tracking abilities are just baldly useful, especially the first two variants that you get, Track Beasts and Track Humanoids. These are free, unlimited-time skills that will pop up their targets onto your minimap; e.g. when you have Track Beasts active, all beast-class enemies will appear as dots on your minimap. Track Humanoids is great when you’re in areas that are densely populated by mobs, as it will help prevent you from accidentally backing into another mob, and can give you an idea when another player on a PVP server is moving towards your position (human players tend to move more quickly than mobs). You can mouse over the dots on your minimap to get a name for each target. These can’t be active at the same time as Find Herbs or Find Minerals, though.

Traps can be quite useful for soloing or crowd control in group combat. You can only place these out of combat, though, so you’ll need to plan ahead when using them. The two notable traps here are Immolation Trap, which will give you a good amount of extra damage should an enemy approach you (especially useful when you’re unsure of your pet’s ability to hold aggro), and Freezing Trap, which will freeze an enemy for a while, letting your party deal with other threats. Explosive Trap is going to be rarely used, as you won’t be facing off against multiple mobs in solo play very often, and it has a tendancy to draw in a lot of aggro onto you in group PVE. Frost Trap can be useful to prevent enemies from running away, but in group PVE that shouldn’t be your beat anyway.

Your melee abilities are going to be rarely used; simply put, you should rarely be using your melee weapon after you gain your pet at level 10. Wing Clip is going to be the most useful of these, as it’ll afford you time to get out of harm’s way when a melee opponent closes in on you; this should be your standard opener when dealing with a PVP melee attacker.

Although you may find your Survival skills useful, you’re unlikely to want to spend even a single talent point here, as most of them deal with melee weapon buffs. If you’re using a melee weapon often enough to consider buffing your abilities with talents, then you’re ignoring the whole raison d’etre of the hunter class, which involves dealing massive amounts of damage at range. Even if you soak all of your talents into the melee buffs of the survival tree, you’re still going to be a poor imitation of a warrior, at the very best, in which case you might as well just play as a warrior!