Marksmanship Hunter DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — 12.1.5

Precise Shots is a buff that you get after casting Aimed Shot, and, via the No Scope talent, Rapid Fire as well.

It makes Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot deal 50% more damage and cost 60% less Focus.

Aside from wanting the damage and resource boosts, spending Precise Shots fuels our Spotter's Mark, which massively buffs Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire depending on talents, and even more so with Sentinel which has an empowered Sentinel's Mark.

Because Precise Shots does not stack (or, more precisely, you cannot generate it twice without wasting some of it), we always want to spend our Precise Shots Spenders (henceforth called PS Spenders) before our next Aimed Shot. The easiest way to do this is simply to follow up every Aimed Shot with a PS Spender.

Rapid Fire grants Precise Shots, so follow every Rapid Fire with a PS Spender as well. As Sentinel, also spend your Precise Shots before you cast Rapid Fire, unless Trueshot is up. As Dark Ranger, simply cast Rapid Fire on cooldown regardless.

On AoE, this has the added convenience of activating Trick Shots right after spending it with those Aimeds and Rapids. By simply following up every single Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire with a Multi-Shot on AoE, we knock off two birds with one stone: Precise Shots is spent, and Trick Shots is activated.

Take Aim makes Rapid Fire shave 5 seconds off Aimed Shot's cooldown over its channel time. With Aspect of the Hydra and a second target in range, that doubles to 10 seconds. Take Aim adds a second effect on top. Your Spotter's Mark now also increases the damage of your next Rapid Fire against the target by 20%, not just your next Aimed Shot. Neither one asks anything new of you. Both are "baked in" to the listed rotation above.

Trueshot is our main cooldown. It has either a 90-second or 2-minute cooldown, depending on whether you choose Calling the Shots or Unerring Vision. It lasts 17 seconds. While active, it increases your critical strike chance by 10% and your critical strike damage by 20%, doubled if you took Unerring Vision, and it speeds up how fast your primary Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire cooldowns recover, while also quickening the cast time of the former.

It also massively increases the chance of generating Spotter's Mark procs when we consume Precise Shots, and even activates Spotter's Mark for free when you press it.

Trueshot simply makes us better at everything, and because the thing we do best is "lots of damage with Aimed Shot/ Rapid Fire", a very good rule of thumb is to always try to cast Trueshot right before a Rapid Fire. This ensures that we are spending as much time as possible in Trueshot casting our most powerful ability.

On 5+ minute fights, you get to use two Potions, and they should not necessarily be the same one. Potion of Recklessness is your go-to/standard Potion. However, once Bullseye is stacking up in the execute phase of a fight, you already have a large amount of Critical Strike, so a second Potion of Recklessness is worth much less, and Liquid Luster is used instead. It ramps its Versatility effect over its duration, so to reach peak Versatility at the right time, pop it around 10 seconds before your execute- Trueshot.

For both Sentinel and Dark Ranger, Trueshot's button will turn into a different button once pressed; Moonlight Chakram or Wailing Arrow for Sentinel and Dark Ranger respectively. In addition, for Dark Ranger, activating Trueshot also gives you a free Black Arrow proc.

Moonlight Chakram is a filler that gives us a Lock and Load proc and does a ton of damage. Notably, its bouncing effect is much slower to do damage on single-target than on AoE. So, on single-target we prefer to cast it with around 5 seconds left on Trueshot. On AoE, we just send it right before Trueshot expires.

Wailing Arrow is a little more complicated. Because both Trueshot and Wailing Arrow give you a Black Arrow proc, and because we do not want to overwrite these procs, we want to cast both when we do not already have a proc coming up. In practice, this means we will usually use Wailing Arrow as soon as we run out of other ways of generating it in a guaranteed way (such as Rapid Fire).

Volley is a talented 45-second cooldown mostly associated with AoE. It is actually a fairly simple button, but there are common misconceptions about its use and value.

Essentially, because of the nature of the Precise Shots mechanic we explained in the previous section, even though Volley gives us Trick Shots, it is actually relatively uncommon for us to make any use of this "free" Trick Shots whatsoever. Because we tend to run talents where Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire both give Precise Shots, we have to use a PS Spender in-between all such casts. Because of this, even if Trick Shots was permanently active, we would actually play more or less the same; the need to spend Precise Shots is so pressing, and all of the Trick Shots that Multi-Shot also gives are sort of a happy accident.