Marksmanship Hunter PvP Guide for Mists of Pandaria Classic

While a bit weak in PvE, Marksmanship Hunters are absolutely dominant in PvP throughout the expansion. Marksmanship has access to brutal burst windows thanks to several powerful shots on very short cooldowns, allowing you to deal devastating damage in just a few globals. The true strength of Hunters however comes from the combination of their burst damage with their long crowd control chains, all of which can be setup without casting. Hunters have some of the strongest crowd control potential in the game, with very little counter play.

Strengths

• Incredible burst damage potential.
• Top tier crowd control.
• Excellent mobility.

Weaknesses

• Pet management can be challenging.
• Few defensive cooldowns.
• High skill floor.

This is going to be your default build in PvP as a Marksmanship Hunter. The majority of the points in Marksmanship are set in stone, where you're taking all of best single target damage options along with the strong single target utility that the tree offers. The only real options exist between choosing either Post Haste for the speed boost and root break, or taking Narrow Escape to root aggressive melee.

Major glyphs typically offer utility-based options and can be highly situational, but there are several required glyphs that will make your life far easier in PvP.

• Glyph of Solace — this removes all DoTs from the targets that you trap, ensuring your crowd control will not be broken. This is a must-have for any PvP.
• Glyph of Animal Bond — increases your healing taken for you and your pet by 10%.
• Glyph of Explosive Trap — turns your Explosive Trap into a strong knock-back instead of dealing damage, which can be incredibly useful against melee.

Minor glyphs typically provide very minor benefits. There are only two required minor glyphs that you must use. The third gylph is strictly personal preference with no real benefits.

• Glyph of Aspect of the Cheetah — an absolutely required glyph that makes Aspect of the Cheetah usable in PvP. When you get hit, instead of being dazed the Aspect will just be removed from you.
• Glyph of Revive Pet — removes any pushback from damage while casting Revive Pet, which can be important if you ever need to revive a pet during a fight.

Stats are an important part of PvP to balance out your durability with your damage output. Here is the stat priority that you should be going for as a Marksmanship Hunter.

Agility is your primary source of Attack Power which all of your damaging abilities scale off of. This is your Primary stat and should be on every piece of gear. There are other sources of scaling for Agility as well, but ultimately, more Agility is the best and most important way to scale your damage.

Hit and Expertise Rating are great ways to deal damage and more importantly land our abilities. Missed abilities such as Scatter Shot could result in the target not being controlled, which could easily cost a match. In short, hit cap is extremely important both numerically and for easier game play. As a Marksmanship Hunter we are aiming to achieve 3% Hit rating and 3% Expertise rating to be capped against other players at level 90. Hit and Expertise are functionally the same thing, so both caps are equally important, but these should also be trivially easy to reach.

Marksmanship Hunters have several additional bonuses when attacks crit such as with Piercing Shots. Piercing Shots specifically is a massive damage increase and is what makes Crit your best secondary stat by a large margin. Crit provides you with a better rotation in terms of focus generation and just more damage. Overall, Crit is going to be your best secondary stat for damage output.

Haste rating is our next best DPS secondary stat after Crit, but is still quite weak. It will increase both you and your pet's attack speeds as well as reducing the cast time of shots such as Steady Shot, and Marksmanship Hunters have the added benefit of a higher than normal auto shot damage thanks to Wild Quiver.

Mastery is the new stat added in during Mists of Pandaria and provides a different, unique benefit for every single specialization in the game. For Marksmanship Hunters, Mastery gives all of your ranged attacks a chance to fire an additional ranged shot. This additional ranged shot is basically just another auto shot and is quite weak. Unfortunately, Marksmanship Hunters have one of the weakest Masteries out of any class. Mastery should be avoided on gear wherever possible, and it is highly recommended to Reforge this stat into a higher priority stat like Critical Strike Rating or Haste.

1. Engineering — Engineering is still by far the best profession in the game, made even stronger in Mists of Pandaria with the new on-use glove tinker Synapse Springs. This new tinker is far stronger than the Wrath version, giving Agility instead of Haste. This will be far and away the best option as a DPS player, even in PvP. The added utility is also just fun to have in the open world and battle grounds.
2. Blacksmithing — Lets you add an extra socket to both your Gloves and Bracers thanks to Socket Gloves and Socket Bracer. To be frank, as long as you have any non-gathering profession as your second profession, you are fine. The differences in combat bonuses between all other non-engineering professions are mostly negligible, so take your pick as to which you would prefer. Blacksmithing is generally a very strong choice as it gives you the most control over what stats to add due to the extra sockets, but that will always be Agility as a Hunter anyways.

Marksmanship's rotation is about maintaining a priority system, with the big difference being managing your focus. Keep in mind that winning in PvP is not about doing the most damage, but doing the right damage at the right time. This means coordinating crowd control chains and setting up burst windows. In general though, here is how you want to prioritize damage.

1. Cast and maintain Serpent Sting;
2. 2x Steady Shot to maintain Improved Steady Shot;
3. A Murder of Crows;
4. Kill Shot below 20%;
5. Aimed Shot while instant from Master Marksman;
6. Chimera Shot;
7. Throw Glaive;
8. Aimed Shot when available and you can combine it with Chimera Shot for a large opening burst of damage;
9. Arcane Shot if you have enough focus remaining to not delay other abilities;
10. Steady Shot as your filler to generate focus;

The list linked below includes the best possible gear setup for an Marksmanship Hunter in PvP.

When it comes to evaluating Marksmanship Hunter's place within the Arena, we have created a number of guides devoted to listing a variety of popular team compositions which you can find below.