WotLK Classic Marksmanship Hunter Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

In Vanilla and TBC, Hunters had to deal with clipping auto shots, resulting in a complex rotation revolving around weaving in abilities optimally between autos. In Wrath, auto-shot clipping is finally gone. You will always auto-shot normally, even while casting Steady Shot. This means our rotation is now far simpler and easier to manage, falling back to a basic priority list.

Always start by ensuring all the required buffs are active, you have Aspect of the Dragonhawk up, and Hunter's Mark is on the target.

1. Kill Shot
2. Kill Command
3. Maintain Serpent Sting
4. Explosive Trap
5. Chimera Shot
6. Aimed Shot
7. Arcane Shot
8. Silencing Shot
9. Steady Shot as your filler.

Chimera Shot will refresh Serpent Sting for you, so you should never need to manually reapply it. Arcane Shot will eventually be dropped from your rotation once you reach around ~430 ArP, as it is not Physical damage and does not scale well with your talents.

Kill Command and Silencing Shot are both off the GCD. You can simply macro these into other spells to ensure you always use them. If Mana is an issue, drop Silencing Shot from your rotation.

With the brand new addition of Trap Launcher in Season 4, Hunters never need to worry about trap weaving ever again. You will now always use Explosive Trap on cooldown regardless of the number of targets or the size of their hit-box. Just throw your trap from a safe distance away and rejoice at being a range DPS once more!

Hunter AoE revolves entirely around two buttons: Explosive Trap and Volley. Volley is significantly more powerful in Wrath than in TBC, and actually makes Hunter AoE some of the strongest in the game. Properly setting up an Explosive Trap into Volley spam on an AoE pack will do absolutely incredible damage that very few other classes can even hope to compete with.

Hunters have several cooldowns that can be lined up for huge burst windows. While the actual timings may vary per fight, in general you should line up all of these on pull and then use them on cooldown afterwards, overlapping them when possible.

• Readiness resets all of your cooldowns on every spell when used. This can be used either offensively for back-to-back burst setups, or defensively.
• Rapid Fire is a Hunter's most important cooldown. It increases your ranged attack speed by 40% for 15 seconds.
• Call of the Wild is a cooldown that Ferocity pets can talent into. It gives both you and your pet 10% more AP for 20 seconds.

Marksmanship cooldowns get a bit complicated because of Readiness. In an optimal use, you will use all your cooldowns, then go through the rotation of Kill Command, Chimera Shot, and Aimed Shot before popping Readiness. This ensures you get to use your most powerful shots twice.