When it comes to specing your Hunter you have several options to choose from to establish a solid build. The real trick to figuring out what will work best for you is to determine first what you want to accomplish. Do you want to be able to solo better, do you want a solid PvP build, are you looking to spec for groups or raids, or do you just want to become a beast at damage? All these are viable options through various builds using the three talent schools for the Hunter. Each school has a specific focus and will appeal to various play styles.

• Beast Mastery - This tree focuses on building up your pet abilities and increases your pet's damage output. The advanced section of this tree also allows you to tame exotic pets. Beast Mastery Hunters can provide a raid with strong dps and their buff Ferocious Inspiration is a beneficial proc buff for raids. The drawback is that the hunter's own DPS can suffer as a great deal of damage enhancing talents go to making the pet DPS its primary focus.
• Marksman - This is a high damage dealing school. It focuses on enhancing the Hunter's ranged damage attacks with damage enhancing talents. Marksmen can dish out a great deal of damage and in some cases enhance their groups damage output through talents like Trueshot Aura.
• Survival - This tree's big perk is the ability to enhance your traps and use some of them to augment your DPS. Damage with this build is among one of the best. With the 3.1 updates, the Survival hunter has gained some useful new skills that can make it very deadly.
   

Beast Mastery PvE/PvP Build:
 

Building an efficient Beast Master hunter can be done by making sure you take advantage of all pet enhancing talents that work well together. For example, the Beast Master is given the option to train a tier 7 talent known as Ferocious Inspiration after they have invested 30 points into the Beast Mastery talent school. This talent provides the Beastmaster's pet with the chance ability to buff a party or raid after a successful critical hit by enhancing their damage by up to 3% for ten seconds. This alone can make the Beastmaster an indispensable tool of destruction and a well desired element for any group or raid. There are many talents in this tree that can help by enhancing your pet's damage and increasing their chance to land a critical strike such as Focused Fire. By building these talents you can maximize your pet's potential for dealing a critical strike and thus increase the possibility that he can aid a group or raid with the Ferocious Inspiration buff.

For this guide I have established a pretty solid build for the Beast Mastery line (link above). The excess points have been invested in the Marksman and Survival trees to add an increase to damage. The most important thing about being a Beastmaster is focusing on powering up your pet any way possible. If you follow the Beast Mastery build I have provided, you will have a few points left over that you can use to try different things with. In the build I have included, I make use of Marksman and Survivability talents, but you can change those out for other talents that might better suit your play style. The beauty of the Hunter is that there are no shortage of talent build variations and you can always find something different to try.

Talents to avoid as a Beast Master Hunter:
The Beast Mastery tree provides one of the best lines of talents for this class, but there are a few things talents you should avoid like the plague. You will want to avoid wasting points in Catlike Reflexes. I know an added dodge chance sounds tempting, but if you're doing your job as a Hunter you shouldn't be close enough to be getting hit anyway. Spend those three points somewhere more important. Pathfinding may sound nice for increased speed, but in the grand scheme of things it's pretty useless. Your mount speed will be more than sufficient for transportation once you have one and that will render this a pointless skill and it's more of a burden in dungeons and on raids since you get stunned when hit. The enhancements are minor and really not worth giving up points in other more important things.