Hunter Hero Talents — The War Within (11.0.7)

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:

Dark Ranger is our strongest Hero Talent for all kinds of content, and also offers the best defensive benefits.

Sentinel is strongest for pure AoE, but since single-target is far more important in Raiding, Dark Ranger is chosen above it.

Sentinel is close to Dark Ranger in AoE scenarios, but falls significantly behind in all other scenarios, and has worse defensives to boot. It is arguably slightly easier to play, but even poorly played Dark Ranger will outperform it.

2.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Marksmanship Hunter

Sentinel Build Dark Ranger 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 is straightforward to build, and always chooses the same choice nodes.

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 Rangers replace Kill Shot with Black Arrow. For the most part, it occupies the same role in the rotation where you use the procs as they come. On AoE, however, it is also crucial that you use Black Arrows only while Trick Shots is active, just like you are doing with Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. During Trueshot, Black Arrows are regularly fired automatically and manual Black Arrows are only used as a filler.