Marksmanship Hunter DPS Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

Marksmanship Hunter is a relatively mobile ranged DPS spec that is focused on slow-casting, but hard-hitting cooldown-limited abilities like Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. Marksmanship Hunters are damage-focused snipers with excellent burst damage, mobility, and flexibility.

Strengths

• Bursty damage profile.
• High mobility, although not as high as Beast Mastery.
• Does not rely on Pet AI.

Weaknesses

• Weak utility and survivability without a pet.
• Hard-capped AoE.

This section is not specific to Marksmanship Hunter, but serves as a general overview of the strongest Hunter specs in the current meta in The War Within. It should go without saying that if you are not especially interested in the hardcore, competitive side of WoW, you need not worry about this section. The game is meant to be fun, and you should play whatever spec you enjoy the most. It just happens that for a lot of people, "the most fun spec" and "the best-performing spec" are one and the same.

Despite this ranking, there really is no such thing as a singular, best Raiding Spec for Hunters. In other words, if you want to be the best Hunter you can be, you will almost certainly have to be able to play different specs for different encounters. Think of this particular ranking as "If I could only bring one Hunter spec to Raid, which would it be?". Despite this, each Hunter spec is likely the best for at least one encounter, even the "worst" spec, so take this with a grain of salt.

Note that this description is based on Heroic-Mythic gear, and is intended for serious Raiding.

1. Survival Hunter (SV) — The strongest single-target, the second-strongest outright AoE, and the strongest single- target/priority damage in its AoE build by far. Survival's only disadvantage is being melee, and while it may not be able to reach its single-target potential as BM, it makes up for this in other departments and is an excellent all-rounder.
2. Marksmanship Hunter (MM) — MM is competitive for single-target, but a chunk behind Survival still. While it does have the highest peak AoE, its single- and priority-target damage in its AoE build is rather poor.
3. Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — A decent all-rounder, but ultimately falls short of the other specs in all departments when push comes to shove.

1. Survival Hunter (SV) — SV does not have the strongest outright AoE, which belongs to Marksmanship, but it has substantially more single-target and priority-target damage while doing very respectable AoE at the same time. It also has 6% built-in damage reduction, and a shorter cooldown on its interrupt.
2. Marksmanship Hunter (MM)/Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — Both specs are strong in different departments, with MM having the strongest AoE, but relatively weak single-target and priority-target damage, and BM sacrificing some AoE to do better than MM in single-target and priority-target terms.

1. Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — While BM does not have a ton of AoE, it still has the best ability to make large pulls without taking breaks in-between by using its pet to tank things. BM Hunter Pets survive solo-content much better thanks to Ferocity Pets having 4% Leech, and all of that Leech going into healing itself. A disadvantage in most other forms of content, but a distinct advantage for solo content. This is more of a benefit when actually soloing Delves, and for group Delves you will likely prefer Survival.
2. Survival Hunter (SV) — SV has the best damage outright, but lacks the ability to make and live through large pulls that Beast Mastery has. If you are doing group delves, which are pretty similar to Mythic+, then SV is the best.
3. Marksmanship Hunter (MM) — MM has the worst self-sustain and while its AoE damage is good, it frequently has to stand still to cast and has very poor ability to live through large pulls, since everything will probably be attacking you.

The Hunter Specs are broadly similar in this department, but there are a few ways in which the specs stand out from each other.

• Survival Hunter has 3% damage reduction built into its Mastery: Spirit Bond, and while some of its damage is pet-based, most if it is not, and Leech generally does well for Survival Hunter, allowing it to use a Ferocity Pet for the +4% Leech, giving it the most self-sustain of the Hunter specs. With a lot of Hunter Utility being melee-based, like Bursting Shot, or trap-based, like Implosive Trap, Survival tends to have an easier time making good use of this utility in practical situations.
• Beast Mastery Hunter has access to Spirit Beast Pets, which offer Spirit Mend. It is a pretty small, close-to-free heal that can be used on any target, on a 30-second cooldown. As for downsides, Beast Mastery tends to run very low Versatility, resulting in higher damage taken on average than the other two specs. It also barely benefits from Leech, because most of its damage is pet-based, Leech for Beast Mastery Hunters tends to heal the pet more than the Hunter, which is not very useful in most PvE environments. With BM Hunters usually running Tenacity pets, they innately have 5% more max HP than the other two specs, most of the time.
• Marksmanship Hunter gets the short end of the stick in many ways. Due to its near-mandatory Lone Wolf Talent, it usually does not run a pet, which locks it out of some pet-based survivability, because it has no easy access to either Tenacity's 5% Max HP buff, or Ferocity's 4% Leech buff. It has Fortitude of the Bear as baseline, even without a pet.

If you want to play a Marksmanship Hunter, but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Once you reach max level, it can be somewhat overwhelming to completely change the way you play by suddenly implementing a large number of addons in a short space of time, especially if they have a heavy visual impact on your UI. We recommend using some of the more basic addons recommended on our Addons page below while leveling, so that you have more time to get used to them during the easier phases of playing your class.

Marksmanship Hunter is a spec about cooldown management, uptime, and flow.

You want to cast your hard-hitter abilities like Aimed Shot, Rapid Fire, and Kill Shot as often as possible. In-between these abilities, which all have independent cooldowns, you are managing your Focus by using Arcane Shot as a spender and Steady Shot as a filler and builder. When you cast Aimed Shot, your next 2 Arcane Shot/ Multi-Shots do significantly increased damage, so you generally want to make sure to weave two Arcanes or Multis in-between your Aimed Shots.

During Trueshot, your exciting main cooldown, everything dramatically speeds up and you will be spamming a ton of Aimed Shots and Rapid Fires while only weaving in Arcane Shot sparingly when you have no Aimed or Rapid Fire available.

On AoE, you want to activate the Trick Shots buff for all of your Aimed and Rapid Fire casts. This is done by simply weaving at least one Multi-Shot in-between every single cast of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire, even during Trueshot.

The best Marksmanship Hunters are excellent at doing these things on the fly and during hectic movement (which prevents Aimed Shot casting) and mechanics. They always know what to cast next and they have a great awareness of their Focus levels and the status of their cooldowns at all times.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec, but would like to learn the basic fundamentals of the class, recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Beginner page linked below.

If you are already somewhat familiar with Hunters, you can head straight to the Talents and Rotation pages to jump right into the more complex, detailed information.

Despite the fact that gearing has become more challenging, due to the huge number of variables that depend on your character, you can find information on how best to gear as Marksmanship on our dedicated gearing page, which includes the current Best in Slot from this tier.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.

Starting off as Marksmanship can look very different from the absolute end-game raiding and progression as one. Our Mythic+, Raiding, and PvP guides can guide you to performing as well as possible, regardless of your focus in end-game content.

If you are finding your performance lackluster, but are not sure where you are going wrong, you can check out the pages below for potential tips, or answers to questions you may have.