Marksmanship Hunter DPS Battle of Dazar'alor Raid Guide — Dragonflight 10.2.5

This page will be a rough outline of the bosses and mechanics in the Battle for Dazar'alor raid. This page will focus primarily on how a Marksmanship Hunter can optimize its performance on the raid bosses in Battle for Dazar'alor, and not on an actual raid strategy for the bosses. Initially, this page will focus on Heroic mode and lower, however, as more bosses are being killed on Mythic, the guide will also include optimizations for Mythic bosses.

Marksmanship Hunters excel in burst damage scenarios, making it useful for a lot of bosses in this tier. It suffers from cleaving a low amount of targets, however, which hurts it on many bosses as well.

On non-Mythic difficulties, this boss can die so quickly that you will only get one Trueshot off. In this case, we recommend going Lock and Load.

When picking a cleave target, try to make it one that you can get an Aimed Shot in on with over 80% health, or under 20% health.

Note: This boss is the second boss for Horde players, and the third boss for Alliance players. For the second Alliance boss (Jadefire Masters), see further below.

A lot of DPS can be gained by swapping very quickly to the Apetagonizer 3000 adds. You should also try to bank almost 2 charges of Aimed Shot for their spawns. The goal is to get 2 Aimed Shots in on an add while it still has more than 80% health.

Using Hunter's Mark on the adds is generally a good idea, but only when it does not come at the expense of 1-2 Aimed Shots during Careful Aim. Let the adds die with Hunter's Mark active to benefit from the Focus generated.

On Mythic difficulty, it may be beneficial to hit the second add, as it is more likely to let you have 2 Aimed Shots above 80% health.

For this boss, we will refer to Grimfang/Mestrah as "Monk", and Firecaller/Flamefist as "Mage".

When the Spirits of Xuen are about to spawn, it is worth holding one charge of Aimed Shot. It can be a major DPS loss to not have a charge ready when using Multi-Shot to cleave down the Spirits of Xuen.

The same goes for the bomb explosives. You should prepare an Aimed Shot charge ahead of time for when they spawn. With good positioning from your tanks, you can cleave with two bosses stacked on the bombs.

On Mythic Difficulty, where everyone has to do the Multi-Sided Strike mechanic, you have a second or two of pure downtime after successfully dodging your combo. Use this time to apply Hunter's Mark to the target you are planning to hit when you get down. If the Monk is currently not active, this could be the Mage.

For the Multi-Sided Strike mechanic, we recommend hiding your UI when you are about to go up. This can help with successfully completing the mechanic.

As an additional tip, we recommend focusing intensely on the Blue spirit when you go up. This will always go first, followed by Green, Red, Green, and Blue again.

The easiest way to fail the mechanic is to get lost at the start. Just focus on where the Blue one is, and you will be fine with a little bit of practice!

This fight is all about staying alive, and the first part of the fight is unimportant from a DPS perspective. All of your DPS will be made in the second phase of the fight, so focus on doing mechanics properly in the first phase, even if it will cost you some DPS.

The most important thing is to have Trueshot ready to go for the first add spawns in Phase Two. This will allow Trueshot to line up with the second add-wave as well, and that is where DPS is made on this fight.

You can use a pet with a dispel ability to purge the Gift of Wind buff from the bosses, although this comes at a moderate DPS loss.

Other than this, there is not much to say about the fight from a DPS perspective. You should be swapping to the Raptors whenever possible, and it is generally not worth reapplying Hunter's Mark to each new raptor.

On Mythic difficulty, this fight offers a lot of ways to optimize your Double Tap usage.

Your first Double Tap after the opener should be worth casting on the final add when it is below 20% health.

Your third Double Tap after the opener will usually line up with the third Zombie Dust Totem. These are a high-priority target and it is worth using this Double Tap for them.

Other than this, there is not a whole lot to the fight. If you are going to the Bwonsamdi area, you want to have Trueshot for the very beginning of the phase. If you are slow to finish the phase, you will get a second Trueshot. If you know that you will finish the phase before your second Trueshot, save it for bursting down the adds after you leave the phase.

The movement speed bonus of Posthaste can be useful when running away from Inevitable End.

On this fight, you should delay your second Trueshot until after the World Enlarger cast, as you do not want to waste your Trueshot in case you get shrunk.

After this, if you play your cards right and do not get too many mechanics, you can use your third Trueshot immediately as it comes off cooldown. Depending on your guild's DPS, you may be able to fit a fourth Trueshot in before the boss enters his intermission phase.

It is particularly important to precast Double Tap on this boss, because it can be a tight fit to make sure that your second Double Tap will affect an Aimed Shot while the boss is over 80% health.

If your boat is faster to reach 50% on the mini-boss than the other boat, then it is beneficial to precast Double Tap when the other boss is casting its teleport to get to your boat.

Depending on how quickly the large adds are dying on this fight, which is very dependent on your raid's composition, it is beneficial from a pure DPS standpoint to cast Aimed Shot once or twice on new large adds as they spawn, to benefit from Careful Aim.

The same goes for the Tempting Siren adds, which are the highest priority at all times. They do not fly in at the same time, meaning that you can cast an Aimed Shot on one when it is above 80% health, and then swap to the other and do the same.

The key to the fight is to be attacking the correct target at all times. Overdamaging the large adds and having them die early is a lot of potentially lost boss damage, which can lead to gruelling, low health wipes on the boss.

If you are starting with 3 adds active on Jaina, we recommend using the AoE opener from the Rotation guide.

You can use Disengage to break the root caused by Ring of Ice and the icicles in Phase 2.

In Phase 1, you should get 3 Trueshots. For the second Trueshot, you should Disengage in after the Ring when the boss enters her Blizzard phase, and immediately Trueshot. The third Trueshot happens after her third Ring, but usually without Blizzard active.

While Trailblazer is useful for the intermission on Mythic difficulty especially, we do not recommend its usage, as Natural Mending can significantly extend your life in the final DPS burn.

We generally do not recommend using Double Tap in the intermission.

The ideal Trueshot timings for Mythic Difficulty is to ensure that you have Trueshot for when the wall spawns, and to use the second one when Jaina is under 20% health in the final phase.

Keep in mind that Aspect of the Turtle does not save you from taking damage from the fire in Phase 1. Turtle should be used to prevent being frozen in Phases 1 and 2 and to cover for mistakes. In Phase 3, it is best used when the raid is moving collectively away from the Glacial Rays, as add damage is high and healing is low at this stage.

In general, ensuring that you have your Healthstone and Coastal Healing Potion active for Phase 3 is very important. Most mistakes in Phases 1 and 2 are recoverable and non-lethal, but there is no substitute for surviving just a bit longer in Phase 3 for more DPS.