Forever Marksmanship Hunter Stat Priority

This is the priority list for what stats you will want as a Marksmanship Hunter in WoW Forever at level 60. While the stat priority is relatively straightforward, please always remember that your personal stat weights can change depending on what gear you currently have equipped. For the best possible results, you should always sim your own character to check possible upgrades. Everything on this page is based on the information we currently have available from the WoW Forever Beta, and it is possible that new gear, tier sets, or changes may be updated as new information becomes available.

Stat	Bonus
Weapon Damage	This is the base damage on the weapon you wield; the majority of damage you deal from hits with your weapon will use your weapon damage as a starting point for how the total damage is calculated. This is what makes weapon upgrades feel so powerful.
Hit Chance	When you attack enemies, you have a chance to miss your attacks. Missed attacks deal no damage and do not proc special effects, which feels really bad if you ever miss a bigger attack like an Aimed Shot. Hit chance reduces the chance that you miss attacks, down to 0% meaning you will never miss. As a Hunter, you need 8% hit chance to ensure you never miss with your abilities against end-game bosses.
Critical Strike Chance	Attacks have a chance to critically strike, which means they deal 200% of their normal damage. Critical hits can also interact with talents or abilities to trigger spells, such as your Mortal Shots talent which gives an additional 30% crit damage. Hunter pets also can critically hit with their attacks, and most importantly, your pets inherit your critical strike chance. Any increases to your crit chance also increases your pet's crit chance.
Agility	Agility is your primary stat that you will want to have on every piece of gear. As a Hunter, Agility gives you ranged attack power, melee attack power, crit chance, armor, and dodge chance. Throughout the entire game, this will be the stat you generally look for.
Intellect	Intellect by default will increase your maximum mana. However, with the Careful Aim talent, Intellect also increases your attack power. This makes it slightly more valuable than raw attack power 1:1.
Attack Power	Attack power does what its name implies, it increases the power of your attacks. While Agility is your primary stat, it does not directly increase your damage; Agility gives you attack power, which increases your damage in turn. All of your damage is calculated using multipliers that start with your attack power.

Below we will break down each stat a bit more beyond the basic descriptions. Additionally, you can find some of the numbers and math behind each stat.

Weapon damage is a straightforward stat in the sense that more weapon damage means you deal more damage while using that weapon. There are no breakpoints or things to worry about here, you just want a weapon that deals the most damage possible. This usually means a slower weapon, since you should get a weapon that does the most damage on each swing, not necessarily the weapon the has the highest DPS.

One common mistake that players make is looking at their weapon DPS instead of their weapon damage.

Weapon Damage Explained

Let's start by reviewing where your damage comes from. In general, your damage will be broken down into 3 buckets: your auto-shot damage, your ranged attack damage from spells, and your pet damage. Pets do not benefit from your weapon damage, so we can ignore that for now. This means we will focus on your auto-shot damage and your ranged ability damage.

Your auto-shots will happen throughout the fight without you needing to control anything. If you have a fast weapon here, you will attack more frequently, but each individual hit will be smaller. If you have a slow weapon, you attack less frequently but each hit will be larger. So how do you know which type of weapon does more DPS? Well, this is actually already calculated for you and is exactly what the weapon DPS stat on your weapon refers to. So if we were only interested in your auto-shot damage, we would strictly look at weapon DPS. However, this is only part of your damage. Let's take a look at how the damage for something like Aimed Shot is calculated.

(Range Attack Power / 14) * 2.8 + Average Weapon Damage + Aimed Shot Bonus

The above math is a slight oversimplification since there are other factors like ammo and talents that can affect the damage, but this is the core component. Aimed Shot's ability reads that it deals your weapon damage plus an added amount. The added amount is flat, but then your "weapon damage" is calculated in the first part of that equation. It actually calculates your weapon damage assuming a fixed speed of 2.8 seconds, it takes into account your ranged attack power, and then adds your average weapon damage on top of that.

So, why is this important? Your weapon speed does not affect Aimed Shot's damage. Aimed Shot and most other attacks only care about the actual damage your weapon does per hit, or the average weapon damage. This is also what makes weapon damage an incredibly valuable stat.

Hit chance increases the chance that you hit an enemy whenever you attack. Every attack has a default chance to miss against enemies, which increases as the level difference between you and your target increases. Against a Level 60 enemy, like another max level player, you need 5% hit chance to never miss. Your maximum chance to miss will be 8%, which is against level 63+ enemies, including all end-game bosses.

Hit chance for Hunters is a simple stat. Missing attacks is bad because you miss out on the damage and effect unpredictably, and it still uses up the attack. Spending time casting an Aimed Shot only for nothing to happen is both a huge damage loss and incredibly frustrating. Hit chance is unfortunately difficult to find early on, but you eventually will have access to enough of it that you can reach 8% to ensure you never miss attacks.

One final note, while capping your hit will ensure that your ranged abilities cannot miss, your melee attacks can still be dodged or parried. Ranged attacks cannot be dodged or parried, they can only miss. Your pet also does not directly benefit from your hit chance at all.

Critical hits in WoW are attacks that will deal 200% of their normal damage by default, although this can be increased with some talents. For Marksmanship Hunters this becomes 230% thanks to Mortal Shots. For the most part, critical hits just deal more damage. However, as a Hunter your pet inherits 100% of your critical strike chance.

There is not a ton more to add; critical strikes deal more damage. Crit is also an important stat because it gives you a way to scale damage beyond just scaling attack power or Agility, and most importantly your crit and attack power are synergistic with each other. If you already have lots of attack power, then your crits hit harder. If you have high crit chance, increasing your base damage means more. Functionally this will not change your gearing path ever, but is more meant to explain why Crit and Attack Power are both important stats.

Agility is your primary stat of choice as a Hunter and gives you several important bonuses. It increases your ranged attack power, melee attack power, dodge chance, crit chance, and armor. Of these, the most important two stats are the ranged attack power and the crit chance. Overall Agility just makes you do more damage the more you have of it, the math is not too important.

Agility Scaling

Each point of Agility will increase your stats by the following.

• Ranged Attack Power
  • 1 Point of Agility grants you 2 Ranged Attack Power.
• Melee Attack Power
  • 1 Point of Agility grants you 1 Melee Attack Power.
• Critical Strike Chance
  • 53 points of Agility will give you roughly 1% critical strike chance.
• Dodge Chance
  • 53 points of Agility will give you roughly 2% dodge chance.
• Armor
  • 1 point of Agility grants you 2 armor.

For Hunters, 1 Intellect will grant you 15 additional maximum mana. Having a large mana pool will be important later on for ensuring you can freely cast spells in longer encounters, but it will not directly affect your overall DPS. However, thanks to the Careful Aim, each point of Intellect also gives you 1 attack power, both melee and ranged. So while Intellect is still strictly worse than Agility as a stat, it is better than attack power in a 1:1 comparison.

Attack power can be thought of as the numerical ranking for how powerful your attacks will be. More attack power means all of your attacks deal more damage. Attack power can also be useful as a baseline for comparing other stats, since you can express how valuable stats are in terms of ranged attack power. For instance, 1 point of Agility is roughly equivalent to 2.4 ranged attack power. However, these values are highly likely to fluctuate and change as we get new information about the gear available at level 60.

Finally, your pet will inherit 10% of your total attack power from either your ranged or melee attack power, whichever value is higher. As a Marksmanship Hunter, your ranged attack power will be significantly higher.

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