Marksmanship Hunter Playstyle and Rotation Guide

• Sentinel
• Dark Ranger

Playstyle

The 3 most important things of MM rotation are:

• Keep your cooldowns rolling. Rapid Fire, Explosive Shot and sometimes Kill Shot should be used as soon as they come off cooldown. Aimed Shot should never hit 2 charges.
• Manage your Focus. Don’t overspend Focus on Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot, while trying to not waste Focus by casting to many Steady Shots
• Always keep casting! If you need to cancel Aimed Shot due to movement, cast an Arcane Shot or Steady Shot while moving, if your other abilities are on cooldown.

Your general gameplay loop on Marksman consists of hard casting Aimed Shot and therefore the generation of Precise Shot. Every Aimed Shot will provide you with a stack of Precise Shot, which in return buffs your filler skills Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot.

Precise Shot can and should be ignored in order to not overcap on Aimed Shot charges.

This loop is mixed with your other hard hitting abilities such as Rapid Fire, Explosive Shot and Kill Shot. All of those spells can be used while moving!

Cooldown Usage

Marksman is essentially capped by the cooldown of your abilities as well as Focus cost.

Trueshot gets rid of a huge portion of this cooldown, allowing for very high burst damage for the duration. It also reduced the Focus cost of Aimed Shot by 50%.

Wailing Arrow

Wailing Arrow is essentially a stronger Aimed Shot that also interrupts and silences targets hit. It replaces Aimed Shot after generating 20 Wind Arrows from the Legacy of the Windrunners talent.

Use it as you would use a normal Aimed Shot. Wailing Arrow does NOT profit from Trick Shots, so there is no need to set it up.

When talented into Readiness, Wailing Arrow resets the cooldown of Rapid Fire and generates 2 charges of Aimed Shot.

Outside of the Wailing Arrow granted by Trueshot, try to get rid of your Aimed Shot charges and Rapid Fire before it becomes available.

You can track how many Wind Arrows you have already generated, to deal with this easier. One of those WeakAuras can be found in my package.

Dark Ranger and Black Arrow

While playing the Dark Ranger Hero Talents, Black Arrow turns into your Bread and Butter spell for both Single Target and AoE.

Thanks to Withering Fire we don’t have to worry about reacting to Deathblow procs during Trueshot.

Bleak Powder lets Black Arrow deal a significant amount of our AoE damage, as long as Trick Shots is active (without consuming Trick Shots itself). In every AoE scenario, make sure you have Trick Shots running before pressing Black Arrow.

Sentinel and Lunar Storm

A big part of the Sentinel Hero Talents is Lunar Storm. It summons a damaging zone below your target for 8 seconds.

Lunar Storm is triggered every 15 seconds, when Rapid Fire is cast.

Casting Rapid Fire when Lunar Storm is ready is a very high priority, so make sure you track Lunar Storms cooldown, and save your Rapid Fire for a bit, to trigger it as soon as Lunar Storm is ready.

Multi Target

Your main mechanic in AoE is Trick Shots. It gets applied by hitting 3 or more targets with Multi-Shot, or by pressing Volley.

Both Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot consume your Trick Shots buff to hit additional targets around your main target.

It is vital to reapply Trick Shots before every single Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot! This is primarily done by spending Precise Shot stacks on Multi-Shot.

Volley grants you Trick Shots for 6 seconds. This iteration of Trick Shots does not get consumed, hence there is no need to reapply Trick Shots while Volley is still going.

This allows you to cast as many Rapid Fire and Aimed Shots as you can fit in quick succession for huge burst damage.

You can easily put Volley and Salvo together in a macro (as seen in the macro section of the guide) if it’s more comfortable for you. It can be better not to do it in some situations, but for the sake of comfort, I suggest keeping them macroed together.

Careful Aim:

Careful Aim gives 50% bonus damage to your Aimed Shot on targets above 70% health. This means you want to hit targets above 70% hp as much as possible, so switching targets to keep this bonus can be the play unless you need to keep hitting that low target for strategy reasons.

Defensives

Hunters have a really solid kit of healing effects and defensive cooldowns.

We have Survival of the Fittest on 2 charges as our main defensive and Fortitude of the Bear when using a Tenacity pet. When playing Marksmanship you also gain access to Fortitude of the Bear when playing without a pet as well. On top of that we can use Aspect of the Turtle as an immunity.

Exhilaration is our self healing skill, it comes with a neat Heal over time effect.

Hunter’s Avoidance gives us 5% passive Avoidance to reduce the damage taken from a variety of AoE effects.

In general Hunter defensives are strong with a shorter duration. Most of the time you are looking to use your defensives for single hard hitting abilities in Raid and Mythic+.

Pet choices

Without a pet active, you gain access to Fortitude of the Bear, a powerful defensive tool. This is what you want to have for almost every scenario.

Be sure to have at least one pet from the other 2 families. You might need to use Primal Rage in Mythic + if no one else can Blood lust or in raid if the others are dead. Master's Call is a niche ability and can be used to remove or prevent the application of movement impairing debuffs (works like a paladin's freedom). There are other niche secondary abilities that your pet can have, like Mortal Wounds to reduce enemies' healing done.

Good choices for pets with Mortal Wounds are:

• Carrion Birds with Primal Rage
• Raptors with Master's Call

I highly recommend the WoW Petopia site to find your new pet!