How To Improve As Marksmanship Hunter — Shadowlands 9.1.5

Since Marksmanship Hunters are always able to cast something whether we are on the move or not, and because we can generate our own Focus with Steady Shot, Marksmanship Hunters are essentially "GCD-locked", meaning that any given moment in the fight, we are going to be pressing our buttons and casting something. This differs from Beast Mastery Hunters who cannot generate their own Focus, but instead have to sometimes sit and wait passively as they acquire Focus to cast something.

The mistake many make is that they allow downtime to creep into their rotation, meaning time during the fight that is not spent casting anything. It is very important to always be casting something, no matter what happens in a fight. The best Marksmanship Hunters will have way more Steady Shot casts than someone more average, in large part because they do not ever stop casting when moving or dealing with mechanics.

Your goal should be always to be casting something, even during split-second movements or adjustments in your position midfight. Any little "hole" should be filled with Steady Shots, instead of being left empty. Be aggressive in how you press your buttons — if your hand is ever relaxing mid-fight, you are probably falling behind.

Since we are not completely limited by Focus in terms of what we can cast, due to having our own generator, it is a common issue for Marksmanship Hunters to overcap their Focus, effectively wasting it. This is usually due to not Arcane Shot enough, or casting Rapid Fire while already at high Focus.

While not overcapping Focus is important, if you do end up reaching the Focus cap, that does not mean you should stop casting things. Minimizing downtime is more important than minimizing Focus waste.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize an Marksmanship Hunter without using Raidbots to sim your own character, as there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

On top of this, simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.