WotLK Classic Marksmanship Hunter Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

For Hunters, Marksmanship is the best PvE spec once you have raid gear. Marksmanship specifically takes some Armor Penetration and other stats to really scale well, but will eventually outpace Survival for the top spot. At the start of Wrath however, Survival will be a strictly better spec in terms of personal DPS.

This is the standard talent build that you should take for raiding and dungeons as a Marksmanship Hunter. Unlike some other trees, there are no free points as a Marksmanship Hunter. For optimal DPS, this is the tree you take.

The first thing you might notice is only 1/2 points in Go for the Throat, but 1 point is all you need to essentially give you pet limitless focus.

Every single talent taken is a DPS increase. There are almost no DPS talents skipped except for talents like Improved Arcane Shot, which is a poor choice as MM given that you will drop Arcane Shot from your rotation shortly anyway once you have enough ArP.

The only potential choice to make is if you have enough Hit or not. In later raids, you will have so much hit on your gear that Focused Aim is no longer necessary. In the case, you should replace it with the points from Improved Steady Shot.

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Hunters.

Go for the Throat is a 1-point wonder. A single point in this talent gives your pet unlimited focus, which is a huge increase in the number of abilities it can cast. Do not miss this talent.

Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot are both exceptional rotation abilities that you talent into and press on cooldown. They do a majority of your damage.

Readiness is a unique Hunter cooldown that has incredible offensive and defensive potential. This talent gives Marksmanship options in encounters that other Hunter specs do not.

Trueshot Aura is likely already being brought to your raid by another class, but if it is not, you absolutely need to have this. However, if it is being brought elsewhere, this is a free point to spend.

Silencing Shot is a free rotational ability that you can bind to your other button presses for free damage on cooldown since this is shot off the GCD. However, this also gives you an interrupt, which can be invaluable on several encounters.

Improved Tracking is a simple damage increase that gives you 5% more damage against anything you are tracking. Use the macro in our macro guide to automatically track anything you use Hunter's Mark on for the best ease-of-use so you will never forget to have this active.

Trap Mastery is a 30% damage increase to one of your best buttons, Explosive Trap.

Glyph of Steady Shot increases the damage of your Steady Shot by 10% while Serpent Sting is active. Steady Shot is your main filler spell, and this is a solid DPS increase for all Hunter specs over other glyphs.

Glyph of Serpent Sting increases the duration of your Serpent Sting by 6 seconds. Since you need to maintain a 100% uptime, this will save you multiple casts over an encounter.

Glyph of Explosive Trap enables the ticking damage from your Explosive Trap to crit. Now that we have Trap Launcher, you will always take this glyph in all situations.

Glyph of Mend Pet slightly increases your pet's happiness, which means you should not need to feed it anymore. It is a nice quality of life glyph.

Glyph of Feign Death reduces the cooldown of Feign Death by 5 seconds.

Glyph of Revive Pet makes it so you no longer get spell push-back when taking damage while casting Revive Pet.