Playstyle & Rotation
Single Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Aimed Shot before combat
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Volley if talented
- Cast Trueshot alongside your combat potion and active trinkets.
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Rapid Fire
Single Target Priority:
- Cast Steady Shot to keep Steady Focus active. Reapply it when you are using Steady Shot during downtime.
- Cast Rapid Fire when Lunar Storm is ready
- Cast Kill Shot
- Cast Volley if talented
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Trueshot
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Arcane Shot to spend Precise Shots if you have more than 55 Focus.
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Steady Shot to generate Focus and fill downtime.
Without Razor Fragments talented, only use Kill Shot outside of Trueshot.
Multi Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Aimed Shot before combat
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Volley
- Cast Trueshot alongside your combat potion and active trinkets.
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Aimed Shot
Multi Target Priority:
- Cast Volley
- Cast Rapid Fire with Trick Shots active and Lunar Storm ready
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Trueshot
- Cast Rapid Fire with Trick Shots active
- Cast Aimed Shot with Trick Shots active.
- Cast Multi-Shot to spend Precise Shots if you have more than 55 Focus.
- Cast Kill Shot
- Cast Steady Shot to generate Focus and fill downtime.
With Razor Fragments talented, prioritize Kill Shot over Multi-Shot.
Single Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Aimed Shot before combat
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Kill Shot
- Cast Volley if talented
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Trueshot alongside your combat potion and active trinkets.
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Rapid Fire
Single Target Priority:
- Cast Steady Shot to keep Steady Focus active. Reapply it when you are using Steady Shot during downtime.
- Cast Kill Shot
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Volley if talented
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Trueshot
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Arcane Shot to spend Precise Shots if you have more than 55 Focus.
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Steady Shot to generate Focus and fill downtime.
Without Razor Fragments talented, only use Kill Shot outside of Trueshot.
Multi Target Opener:
- Cast Hunter’s Mark on your main target before combat.
- Cast Aimed Shot before combat
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Volley
- Cast Trueshot alongside your combat potion and active trinkets.
- Cast Rapid Fire
- Cast Aimed Shot
- Cast Aimed Shot
Multi Target Priority:
- Cast Volley
- Cast Explosive Shot
- Cast Black Arrow
- Cast Trueshot
- Cast Rapid Fire with Trick Shots active.
- Cast Aimed Shot with Trick Shots active.
- Cast Multi-Shot to spend Precise Shots if you have more than 55 Focus.
- Cast Kill Shot
- Cast Steady Shot to generate Focus and fill downtime.
With Razor Fragments talented, prioritize Kill Shot over Multi-Shot.
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 Shots. Every Aimed Shot will provide you with 2 stacks of Precise Shots, which in return buffs your filler skills Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot.
Precise Shots 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
Marksmans is essentially capped by the cooldown of your abilities.
Trueshot gets rid of a huge portion of this cooldown, allowing for very high burst damage for the duration.
Eagletalon’s True Focus passively fires a second Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot during Trueshot. This allows us to quickly get rid of our Precise Shots stacks, so we can continue to spam Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot.
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.
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 Shots 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!