Hunter in Forever

The three specs:

• Beast Mastery invests heavily in a strengthened pet, so a large share of total damage comes from the animal rather than the Hunter’s own shots.
• Marksmanship centers on Aimed Shot, stacking ranged crit damage and Intellect-scaled Attack Power behind that one slow, hard-hitting cast.
• Survival mixes ranged shots with melee weaving, leaning on traps and melee talents to stay effective at close range.

Human Hunter is one of Blizzard’s six confirmed new race and class pairs, giving the Alliance a Hunter option it never had in 1.12. Hunter is also open to the Skyborne on both factions — unlike Mage or Shaman, this class carries no faction restriction for that race.

Talent trees keep their familiar structure — seven rows, 51 points — but Forever adds a fourth one-point “gold medal” milestone at 16 points alongside the existing ones at 11, 21, and 31. Several talents that used to do nothing but unlock a group buff are baseline abilities instead, opening tree space for talents that change how the spec plays. Reading the demo trees, one outlet’s tally puts Hunter at 15 brand-new talents, 16 that changed, and 19 left untouched — the largest untouched count of any class in that count, so the tree’s overall shape should feel closer to 1.12 than most other classes will. On the baseline kit: Aimed Shot is now trainable rather than gated behind a Marksmanship talent, with a faster 2-second cast (down from 3 seconds in Classic) on a cooldown it shares with Multi-Shot; Aspect of the Beast now also grants melee attack power on top of making the Hunter untrackable; and Call Pet is renamed after whatever animal has been tamed. Hunter also picks up the itemization change Blizzard called out specifically for the class: melee, ranged, and spell hit chance collapse into one combined stat instead of three, which Blizzard says makes traps land more reliably.

None of this has been tested at the level and raid content Hunters will actually play at launch — see each spec guide’s Overview for what’s confirmed versus projected. The Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, and Survival guides below cover talent priorities, rotation, stats, and gear for each tree.