Hunters are known to be one of the easiest, if not easiest class to level. Send in your pet, put autofire on, go for a coffee, come back and see that your pet didn’t only kill the mob you wanted him to attack but also 3 other mobs that attacked you while you were AFK. No but seriously, a Hunter is easy to level.
How do your maximize your efficiency though and reach the level cap as soon as possible? The answer is quite easy for this one; The Beast Mastery Tree.
The Beast Mastery talent build will make your pet a lot stronger and this will make it easier for your pet to keep the enemy NPC’s attacking him while you do steady damage with your ranged weapon.
Here you can see a nice leveling build for a Hunter:
Hunter Leveling Build
Choose Hawk Eye and Lethal Shots to boost your damage and range a bit.
From the Beast Mastery talent tree you can skip Imp Aspect of the Monkey because you will not be the one taking the hits. Imp Revive Pet isn’t necessary for leveling. I would choose to put only one point into Imp Mend Pet because of the Dispelling purpose.
Thick Hide isn’t bad at all but I would rather go with some damage abilities instead of some bonus armor.
When you choose this build your pet will receive:
+10% Health
+10% Crit
+100% Focus Regeneration
+9% Dodge
+10% Attack speed
+15% Damage
+10% Movement speed
+4 Additional Skill points
This all together with a lot of nice abilities that will be gained in this talent tree like Intimidation, which make the pet stun a target and creates a high amount of threat, Bestial Wrath, which causes the pet to do 50% (!) bonus damage for 18 seconds.
The Hunter himself will also receive quite a few nice boosts through this talent tree like 20% Attack Speed, 5% Health, Improved Aspects and other nice boosts given through the pets abilities.
Besides these abilities the Hunter and his pet will also move around the areas quicker because the Aspect of the Cheetah and Aspect of the Pack abilities will become more effective, a 10% mounted speed increase is given as well as a 10% bonus to their normal running speed.
Another nice thing of this talent tree is that the Hunter can Tame some creatures that otherwise could not be Tamed.
All together, the Beast Mastery talent tree is the way to go. The Marksmanship talent tree looks nice and it definitely gives a great boost to the Hunters damage. However, you will notice that your pet can’t keep the mobs on him and that they will come for you, which makes it all a bit less nice. The Survival talent tree is nice at later levels, especially for PvP.
