View all WoW Cataclysm hunter information Here.
Mastery is the big new stat that all classes have in Cataclysm. Mastery is a bonus ability or buff specific to your spec and the strength of that buff increases with your gear. Mastery has changed from its initial implementation (which had 3 tiers of mastery) and instead you get a unique ability for choosing your spec, a specialization bonus, and one mastery bonus.
In Cataclysm your hunter gains mastery by training the Mastery skill at level 78. You gain specializations when you first choose your talent tree.
It’s important to note your hunter only gets the specialization and mastery bonus for one talent tree — it is not possible to get mastery bonuses from multiple trees. You will get the mastery bonus from whatever tree you chose as your main tree.
As soon as you choose a talent tree at level 10, you immediately get the bonus ability and the specialization of that tree. You will not get the mastery bonus until you train the mastery skill at level 78 (available from your hunter trainer).
Hunter Mastery & Specialization Bonuses by Spec
- Beast Mastery (BM hunter)
- Bonus Ability: Intimidation
- Specialization: Animal Handler – attack power increased 15%
- Mastery: Master of Beasts: pet damage increased by 13.6%. Each point of Mastery increases pet damage by an additional 1.7%
- Marksman (MM hunter)
- Bonus Ability: Aimed Shot
- Specialization: Artisan Quiver – auto-attack damage increased by 15%
- Mastery: Wild Quiver: 16% chance on all ranged attacks to proc a normal damage shot. Each point of Mastery increases the chance by an additional 1.8%. Note that this procs off both auto-shots and special shots.
- Survival (SV hunter)
- Bonus Ability: Explosive Shot
- Specialization: Into the Wilderness – agility increased by 10%
- Mastery: Essence of the Viper: elemental damage increased by 8%. Each point of Mastery increases elemental damage by an additional 1% (Note: if you have .35 mastery, that will indeed increase your elemental damage by .35 — the game recognizes the fractions even if they aren’t displayed on the tooltip).
There are a couple of important things to note about the specialization/mastery system. The system was explicitly not designed to have cool and interesting abilities — in fact the opposite is true. The specialization/mastery system was supposed to take some of the dull flat damage increasing abilities out of the talent trees. It’s also — and this is the big thing — supposed to give the designer a knob to turn to tweak the damage of each spec to help balance them, and we saw this tweaking in action when SV’s mastery was turned down.
Furthermore, the mastery (or specialization) bonuses for each spec are not supposed to provide the same dps advantage! One spec can get less dps from it’s specialization, but get more dps from other abilities in its talent tree. All that matter is that the overall dps of each spec is close to the same.
The Mastery Stat
Mastery Rating is now a stat available on Cataclysm gear of level 78 and higher. Just like with crit rating or hit rating, we need a certain amount of mastery rating to convert into 1 Mastery, and that amount will get larger the higher our level is.
At level 85 it takes 179.28 mastery rating to get 1 point of mastery.
I like the mm 30% armour pen before mastery talent and gear that is sounding so OP , but i thought they were removing armour pen from Cat ? so thats weird. Looks like theres going to be alot of theory crafting once cat comes out to find out the best spec again since so many things are changing.
Will Teir gear be the standard equipment we see with “Mastery” as a stat? I thought I’d read something about current Teir gear stacking mastery levels and am curious to see the weighting.
(In the meantime, I’d suggest putting off vendoring/DEing old epics till we see the ArP conversion, but I guess Mastery is another reason.)
@Fradin
They are removing Armor Penetration from gear stats, but they aren’t removing it entirelly from the game. Thank Elune we don’t need to bother with that evil stat anymore.
Also the whole point of the mastery stat is to better fine tune and balance all the specs from all the classes.
I think we’ll see mastery spread pretty evenly across our gear. Some will have it, some won’t, but I don’t think it’ll be specific to tier gear.
Blue drops from the starting few dungeons on regular mode have mastery on them. (see totalbiscuits runs on http://www.cynicalbrit.com and on mmo-champion.com
by starting I of course mean 78+ zones not like the new westfall drops
Still too bad they limit mastery to 51. Why not do all the way up to all points (and of course reduce gain per point). That way, we’ll actually start wondering whether to spend our 52 point on a usefull point in the other tree or on a fun talent in our own tree …
Nevetheless, I like these masteries. The double shot seems nice. Its pretty much a double Zodd
They capped mastery at 51 points to give you more flexibility. After 51 you can keep spending points in the same tree, or spend them in another tree, because *only* the 51 points in *one* tree help your mastery. If you spend your 52nd points in the same tree, or another tree, it will not help your mastery bonuses at all. Thus you can spend it wherever you want.
Dorianchicka, you won’t need to worry about old (or even current) hunter gear. Crafted lvl 81 blues are better than Shadowmourne. From what I saw of drops, green 81s are ilvl 277. When they talk about a gear reset, they really mean it this time! It’s unlikely anyone will have lvl 80 IC epics that stand up to lvl 80/81 Cata greens.
Thanks for the breakdown of the mastery %s, Frostheim! As you said, it’s always nice to put a number to a concept.
Well if its icc25 man gear and u were ArP then u wont have to worry about replacing some of your gear right away, greens dont really stand a chance to icc25man gear, but the blues on the other give it a run for the money, but only some, on my hunter i kept the greens in my bags so I could do more dungeons, some of the gear that dropped didnt give me a dps increase like i would’ve wished for
@Frost, I get all that, I just would have liked it better if they had the full scaling. Now they just punish hybrid specs but not that many used it anyway. So mastery is like a fixed bonus all hunters get regardless of talent choices and varies only based on spec.
You pick MM and get 8,01% double shot for free. Etc.
Great for balancing, don’t get me wrong, but other than that just a fixed bonus that we don’t really have to think about. It’s just there and – outside perhaps during leveling – has no real affect on our talent choices compared to as if we just got as a fixed bonus e.g. depending on level.
As it is now, they could have e.g. tied it also to level instead of talents.
“Looks like there’s going to be a lot of theory crafting once cat comes out to find out the best spec again”
The purpose behind Mastery is to prevent that. Any theory-crafting you do, Blizzard can either do better (should they so desire), or just use collected data; and use to change the mastery numbers to even things out.
You gave great points here. I did some research on this subject and have found nearly all people agree with your website.
Sent from my iPad 4G
I was excited and couldn’t wait for Cataclysm to come out. Now I’m not sure I’m even going to play World of Warcraft after Cataclysm comes out. Complete waste of money in my opinion.
I understand the need for a tool to tweak DPS – Blizzard is always playing with class and spec balance, and rightly so in a game of this complexity – but I’m disappointed with the homogeneity of the specializations across specs. Why not abandon the Focused Aim specialization and give us something unique to each spec? As you say, by the time it’s useful, we’re focused on disengaging and repositioning. Here’s to hoping Blizzard gets a little more creative here… /raises tankard
we need dots that last longer and stack other wise our shot rotation is a no go and they need to even out the cool down timers to work in simple blocks
as far as armor penetration it should be built into the weapon or even have a class only enchant system for our guns and bows since they are pride and joy just like the the balded weapons of a dk
there is nothing they can not over come but at what cost to playability and freedom they have allot of knobs to turn this is the first time such a knob was attached to our chest like the mastery skill meaning they can in effect turn the effectiveness of a char down or up
but this also makes it so new gear is critical right from the start and remains that way as you level up past 80 and even after you hit 85 more so than the last expansion
they had to replace the lack of 5 lvls with something
i suspect the next expansion is right around the corner as 5 lvls will go quickly and gear should not be that hard to get customizing it may take some time
we will see what happens
I have a question about this, and I’m not sure the answer is out there yet.
I’m in beta, level 82, running around with 2 tier 10.5, and 2 t 5 to keep my pet up. I’m seeing greens drop that look close to the same, with Mastery as a stat. Is this worth looking into? As a SV hunter, the Essence of the Viper looks great, but I cant decide if its worth building on.
Hi.. thanks for all the good work you do for us Hunters.
I am lvl 85 Blood Elf on Jaedenor server with iLevel357 Gear, Survival spec. I have all the Hunter traiining available.. but do not see anywhere the Essence of the Viper and the Explosive Shot does not appear in my list of trained items. In my telent tree my “Survival” tree pane has Explosive Shot with “A powerful ranged attack the deals fire dmg over 2secs”, 6sec cooldown.
Little confused as to what is going on with me. I am hoping you can help me. My dps is not where it should be either. I am at bout 13k at dummy and believe i should be topping 17k or higher.
Plz help me find where this info is located.
Thanks
My mastery is at 871,
So here’s my question. I am a level 85 survival hunter on Moonrunner and have just started running raids. I was looking at my mastery (Essence of the Viper) and it states that it increases the MAGIC damage a player does. I’m not sure if this was changed in 4.1 or 4.2 from elemental damage. My first thought is that covers Arcane Shot but does it also include Explosive Shot and Black Arrow?
Is there any kind of a mastery cap an MM hunter should be looking at?
just curious how much mastery is too much?
Should an MM hunter be doing Hit>crit>mastery>haste?
or should we get the haste to a certain plateau and then go with mastery?
From what I have come to understand about Cata is this. Mastery still is not a viable hunter stat and should not be stacked. I made this mistake first hand. I re-gemmed my gear, reforged and jumped on the mastery train. What I found is my dps in pvp tanked. Agil and crit will always be hunter stats for any tree. I have found most pvp hunters to be gemming for a certain amount of extra resil as well. If I am completely out to lunch and there is a hunter out there who has found that mastery has made them a beast in pvp, pls let me know…