How To Improve As Marksmanship Hunter — The War Within (Season 1)
On this page, you will find out how you can improve at playing Marksmanship Hunter in World of Warcraft — The War Within (Season 1). We list the common mistakes that you should try to avoid and the small details that can greatly improve your performance.
Mistake #1: Having High Downtime
Since Marksmanship Hunters are always able to cast something whether we are on the move or not, 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.
Mistake #2: Overcapping Focus
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. Keep your Focus in the 35-80 range to ensure you can always cast Aimed Shot of cooldown, while also being reasonably far away from the cap of 100.
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.
Mistake #3: Not Knowing How To Sim Yourself
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.
Simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. We have a dedicated guide on using Raidbots here on Icy-Veins:
If you are not familiar with Raidbots, you can use our Raidbots Guide to get started.
Analyzing Your Mistakes as a Marksmanship Hunter
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.
Changelog
- 09 Sep. 2024: Preliminary updates for The War Within Season 1.
- 22 Aug. 2024: Updated for The War Within.
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Reviewed for Season 4.
- 19 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Updated for Patch 10.2.5
- 06 Nov. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.2
- 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Hunter Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Azortharion, a Hunter Guidewriter, Theorycrafter, and top player since 2014, who is widely considered one of the best PvE Hunters in the world. He is an accomplished player with hundreds of top parses across all Hunter specs. He is the Head Admin of Trueshot Lodge, the official Hunter Class Discord. You can find him on his stream on Twitch and his channel on YouTube. He also has his own, personal Discord server where you can freely ask him any Hunter questions you may have!
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