WotLK Classic Hunter Pre-Patch Guide (2022) - Class Changes, Survival Rotation Tips, Talent Build, Things To Do During Pre-Patch

Hunter is absolutely the strongest class in Wrath of the Lich King. It is probably the most underrated class, it's gonna be extremely powerful and everyone in any sort of guild that's at the highest quote-unquote level has already been looking at potentially bringing more than one hunter, because they're actually crazy strong in this next expansion. But how to play hunter in Wrath of the Lich King? With the new expansion, the class changes quite a bit, today we look at how to play hunter in the WotLK pre-patch and for leveling. We at both different specs looking at the glyphs, your rotation, everything about how to play hunter well moving on all the way up to 80. 

WotLK Classic Hunter Pre-Patch Guide (2022)

Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch gives players a chance to level up and equip their characters, before the expansion's release, all while trying out some of the new class features. Here you will find recommended talents & specs, class changes, professions, glyphs and some rotation tips for a Survival Hunter in WotLK Classic .

WotLK Class Changes To Hunter

1. One of the first and most immediate changes you'll notice is you can no longer clip your auto shots. Auto shots are on their own timer although they are also on the same timer as your melee swings. So you no longer can melee weave, these are the two biggest changes realistically to the play style of the class, you're no longer worried completely about rhythm, you are now worried more on your actual normal rotation.

2. The next thing is that beast training changes, so your pets completely change, in the fact that they have different types of pets and the best pet is just without a doubt a wolf. 

3. Next thing to know is that aspects are off of the global cooldown, so you can aspect weave if you want, which you didn't really do often in the burning crusade. But now we will have some mana issues, so switching over to aspect of the viper is going to be crucial to overall damage in a raid. But aspect of the viper does cut your dps by 50%, so you do 50% less damage but you gain a crazy amount of mana.

4. Next is that hunter traps have now changed to their own specific categories. Explosive trap now does a crazy amount of damage, it is no longer extremely weak and this is the first thing that lets us go into hunters being really strong on aoe damage. That and the change to volley, volley is now a channeled spell that you have no cooldown on, it hits for a ton of damage and it can also crit. So every time you are doing any sort of chain pulling or a big pull, you're gonna use mass erect into an explosive trap into volley and just chain volley and watch yourself do so much damage and shoot up the meters.

5. Next you're going to want to know that kill command is a one minute cd, so you're no longer spamming kill command if you have it on any of your macros.

6. Lastly, hunters now cannot dispel things with arcane shot, you can dispel magic abilities with your tranq shot. Other than that, those are the major key class changes other than talking about the specific specs themselves. 

First Things To Do In WotLK Pre-Patch

When you log into the pre-patch, you're going to be a little bit confused because you have new talent points, you have so much to learn, you don't know the new abilities, what do you want to do to set things up first? 

To set up your character, the first thing you want to do is head over to your major city and buy dual spec, this will allow you to have now two major talent specs. Then go to your stable master right by the trainer and make sure you buy two new pet slots. Then you can pick your spec.

Talent & Specs - Talent Build

It is so much different in wrath of lich king as you're picking your spec, make sure to go into your interface and go into features and click preview talent changes. This is crazy that it's not automatically set on checked, but basically what this does is makes it so that whenever you're changing your talent, instead of it automatically choosing the talents for you, you can reset that or you can learn that.

This is the basic PvE talent tree that we recommend while playing Survival in the pre-patch. At Level 70, you do not have many extra points to work with. The biggest questions comes down to how geared you are: if you are more geared and have enough crit, then just 1 point in Expose Weakness IconExpose Weakness should be enough to maintain a near 100% uptime. However, with a lower crit chance, you might want to put an extra point into it by taking a point out of Mortal Shots IconMortal Shots.

Where To Get A Wolf In WotLK Prepatch

We're gonna train our wolf and the highest level wolf in the entire game that you can currently train is a level 67 wolf, the bloodmaul battle worg. You can go find these up in Blade's Edge. Now you don't need to train as many wolves as you want for level 80, because you can train yourself level 80 wolves instantly and you won't have to level them up, you're not really worried about loyalty or anything anymore. You can just go up here towards the terrace of the makers in storm peaks and you can tame those wolves yourselves at level 80.

Markmanship Rotation

So if you choose to play marksman, the way to play it as any hunter is to make sure you keep up hunter's mark, then you're gonna make sure you're keeping up serpent sting and as marksman, your serpent sting actually stays up basically forever, so you want to snapshot it as powerful as you can and then you won't have to refresh anything because then your next highest prior ability is going to be chimera shot. And chimera shots your new ability, your new main ability which makes you do a ton of damage. So chimera shot next this will refresh your serpent stings, then your next prio is aim shot into arcane shot, only specific people are using arcane shot, it's not actually fully figured out if this is higher dps. And then your filler is going to be steady shot, so you're just kind of chaining steady shot until you have chimera shot back up again and rinse and repeat.

Survival Rotation

One of the most fun builds in the game, this is actually where you're getting a much more unique rotation and that's because you have some procs. First up, always keep up hunter's mark, then the next thing is explosive shot. This is like the best feeling ability a hunter ever gets, it is so insanely powerful what explosive shot does is hit the target and then it ticks them for damage that can also crit, but also you want to make sure that you're not clipping the actual dot from it. So there's a two second dot that you add after you shoot this ability, but also if you get a proc from your lock and load talent, from either a trap or a black arrow, then you will have your next three explosive shots be instant cast and no cd. The way to deal with this is to always use either an instant cast ability, but what you don't want to be doing is steady shotting, it's actually a dps loss because it will stop you from doing your next explosive shot on time. Steady shot is just a filler.

So let’s go down in prio of these abilities:

- Explosive shot is your highest damage dealing ability, always use this exactly off of cooldown other than when you're clipping, there is a projectile so it takes a time to get there, so you could shoot early.

- Black arrow or trap are your next highest prio, make sure you're keeping up serpent sting and steady shots as your filler. 

Professions

The professions you're going to be looking out to level are going to be always engineering, no matter what engineering is just absolutely vital in this next expansion and past that you can choose, but we would choose jewelcrafting if that was focused on min maxing pve. 

Glyphs

As for glyphs, you only really have one good glyph right now on pre-patch which is your Glyph of Serpent Sting, you can use this for both specs.

That's everything you need to know for pre-patch hunter in Wrath of the Lich King. Hunters may not be the 'strongest' class, but its the most consistent throughout Wrath.  Its good in every tier, has solid single target damage and pretty great AoE damage, and also some mechanical utility. And having a Hunter is never a bad thing for a comp - unlike melee heavy builds, that run into issues on some bosses. Enjoy playing this class during the pre-patch you will have so much fun in this entire next expansion!