Hunter Hero Talents — The War Within (Season 1)

This page is specifically about Hero Talents in The War Within. If you want to learn more about the best regular talents for Marksmanship Hunter, check out our Talents page:

Sentinel is our strongest Hero Talent for single-target and Raiding scenarios. It is pretty simple, really — It is the best at everything, and it puts little to no extra demands on your rotation for the most part.

Dark Ranger is not far behind for pure single-target scenarios, but it is overall just less versatile, and has less burst overall. Its only real advantage is that the Smoke Screen defensive node can sometimes be a better defensive than Don't Look Back, but even that is more of a Mythic+ concern, with the constantly generating Absorb shield providing a respectable amount of self-sustain over an encounter. You will notice that I ended the Dark Ranger section here by talking about how good Sentinel is, which tells you a lot.

While Sentinel's single-target advantage is pretty modest (but consistent, at around 3-4%), its AoE advantage is massive. Most of Dark Ranger's Black Arrow effects are exclusively single-target. Meanwhile, almost every Sentinel-related mechanic scales well on AoE, and should be the default choice for pretty much everybody.

While Sentinel is strongest for most people, Dark Ranger has a key advantage — Smoke Screen. This defensive node is incredibly strong for high Mythic+, because it lets you effectively use Exhilaration, with its very short cooldown thanks to Natural Mending, as an additional one-shot mitigator. As a Dark Ranger Marksmanship Hunter, you will almost never run out of defensives to press for hard-hitting mechanics. The cost, of course, is a ton of AoE damage, but sometimes surviving is more important than dealing the most damage.

2.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Marksmanship Hunter

Sentinel Universal Build Dark Ranger Pure Single-Target Build Dark Ranger "Everything Else" Build

3.

Best Sentinel Build for Marksmanship Hunter

Sentinel is very straightforward to build. Our only notable choice is Sentinel Watch or Eyes Closed. We default to Sentinel Watch for the shorter cooldown, but if you find yourself simply not pressing Trueshot perfectly off cooldown to take advantage of the cooldown reduction, swap to Eyes Closed for a longer cooldown, but much better burst.

3.

Best Dark Ranger Pure Single-Target Build for Marksmanship Hunter

Dark Ranger offers us one important decision between Dark Empowerment or Grave Reaper. For PURE single-target, we pick Dark Empowerment since Grave Reaper is worthless. But, if you can get just a single Black Arrow reset off on an encounter, you should run Grave Reaper instead.

3.

Best Dark Ranger Mythic+ Build for Marksmanship Hunter

Dark Ranger offers us one important decision between Dark Empowerment or Grave Reaper. For AoE and Mythic+ scenarios, we pick Grave Reaper. While we will not always be able to make use of this, the cooldown reduction will happen with some regularity, and it is essential to have a Black Arrow prepared for every new pack.

Sentinel has no appreciable impact on your rotational priorities. There is one minmax pertaining to Lunar Storm, which is also laid out in the Rotation section. Essentially, we want to ensure that we refresh Lunar Storm, which has a 15-second trigger cooldown, on cooldown. Sometimes, this means delaying Rapid Fire for up to 5 seconds to catch that refresh immediately, since otherwise we might have to wait 20 seconds for the next Rapid Fire to roll around if we do not get lucky with resets.

But, other than that minmax, Sentinel is completely passive.

Dark Ranger has to apply Black Arrow on cooldown, and this will regularly grant Aimed Shot resets that also reduce their cast time, almost like mini- Lock and Load procs. When you press Black Arrow, you will also get a Kill Shot proc, thanks to Death Shade proccing Deathblow.