Marksmanship Hunter DPS Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

Marksmanship Hunter is a relatively mobile ranged DPS spec that is focused on slow-casting, but hard-hitting cooldown-limited abilities like Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. Marksmanship Hunters are damage-focused snipers with excellent burst damage, mobility, and flexibility.

Strengths

• Bursty damage profile.
• High mobility, although not as high as Beast Mastery.
• Does not rely on Pet AI.

Weaknesses

• Weak utility and survivability without a pet.
• Hard-capped AoE.

This section is not specific to Marksmanship Hunter, but serves as a general overview of the strongest Hunter specs in the current meta in The War Within. It should go without saying that if you are not especially interested in the hardcore, competitive side of WoW, you need not worry about this section. The game is meant to be fun, and you should play whatever spec you enjoy the most. It just happens that for a lot of people, "the most fun spec" and "the best-performing spec" are one and the same.

Despite this ranking, there really is no such thing as a singular, best Raiding Spec for Hunters. In other words, if you want to be the best Hunter you can be, you will almost certainly have to be able to play different specs for different encounters. Think of this particular ranking as "If I could only bring one Hunter spec to Raid, which would it be?". Despite this, each Hunter spec is likely the best for at least one encounter, even the "worst" spec, so take this with a grain of salt.

Note that this description is based on Heroic-Mythic gear, and is intended for serious Raiding.

1. Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — Simple to play, and ranged. Often used for important duties in the Raid due to this freedom of movement.
2. Survival Hunter (SV) — The strongest single-target by around a 4-5% margin, but does come with the "tax" of being melee, and relatively weak AoE. If you already have another BM Hunter doing the mechanical duties throughout the Raid, an SV Hunter is arguably better.
3. Marksmanship Hunter (MM) — Slightly inferior single-target to Beast Mastery, and less flexible AoE. Not far off, but not strictly better for anything useful.

1. Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — A Swiss Army Knife with solid damage in all situations and target counts.
2. Marksmanship Hunter (MM) — Extremely powerful AoE or single-target, depending on build choice, but is somewhat inflexible and struggles with 2-target situations, and uncapped AoE.
3. Survival Hunter (SV) — Extremely good single-target, but at a significant AoE cost. This Mythic+ Season is also widely considered Melee unfriendly, though Survival handles this better than most.

1. Beast Mastery Hunter (BM) — Solid all-around damage, the tankiest pets, and the easiest mobility. One of the best Delve DPS specs in the game!
2. Survival Hunter (SV) — Fairly tanky pets, and quite mobile as well. Especially good for bosses.
3. Marksmanship Hunter (MM) — Excellent AoE, but requires things tightly stacked and has poor ability to make that happen. Single-target is very poor as well.

The Hunter Specs are broadly similar in this department, but there are a few ways in which the specs stand out from each other.

• Survival Hunter has 6% damage reduction built into its Mastery: Spirit Bond, and while some of its damage is pet-based, most if it is not, which means the spec gets pretty good benefit from the Leech stat on gear, unlike Beast Mastery giving it the most self-sustain of the Hunter specs. With a lot of Hunter Utility being melee-based, like Bursting Shot, or trap-based, like Implosive Trap, Survival tends to have an easier time making good use of this utility in practical situations.
• Beast Mastery Hunter has access to Spirit Beast Pets, which offer Spirit Mend. It is a pretty small, close-to-free heal that can be used on any target, on a 30-second cooldown. As for downsides, Beast Mastery tends to run very low Versatility, resulting in higher damage taken on average than the other two specs. It also barely benefits from Leech, because most of its damage is pet-based, Leech for Beast Mastery Hunters tends to heal the pet more than the Hunter, which is not very useful in most PvE environments.
• Marksmanship Hunter gets 3% innate damage reduction if it picks the Tenacious Talent (as it usually will), but does not have much else going for it. Marksmanship almost never uses a pet, so the benefits of 4% Leech from Ferocity pets are not relevant.

If you want to play a Marksmanship Hunter, but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Marksmanship Hunter is a spec about cooldown management, uptime, and flow.

You want to cast your hard-hitter abilities like Aimed Shot, Rapid Fire, and Kill Shot as often as possible. In-between these abilities, which all have independent cooldowns, you are managing your Focus by using Arcane Shot as a spender and Steady Shot as a filler and builder. When you cast Aimed Shot, your next 2 Arcane Shot/ Multi-Shots do significantly increased damage, so you generally want to make sure to weave two Arcanes or Multis in-between your Aimed Shots.

During Trueshot, your exciting main cooldown, everything dramatically speeds up and you will be spamming a ton of Aimed Shots and Rapid Fires with their reduced cooldown. The main benefit conferred by this cooldown is significantly increased Crit Chance (more Crits) and Crit Damage (stronger Crits). Crit is a huge stat for Marksmanship due to these and other mechanics.

On AoE, you want to activate the Trick Shots buff for all of your Aimed and Rapid Fire casts. This is done by simply weaving at least one Multi-Shot in-between every single cast of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire, even during Trueshot.

The best Marksmanship Hunters are excellent at doing these things on the fly and during hectic movement (which prevents Aimed Shot casting) and mechanics. They always know what to cast next and they have a great awareness of their Focus levels and the status of their cooldowns at all times.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec, but would like to learn the basic fundamentals of the class, recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Beginner page linked below.

If you are already somewhat familiar with Hunters, you can head straight to the Talents and Rotation pages to jump right into the more complex, detailed information.

Despite the fact that gearing has become more challenging, due to the huge number of variables that depend on your character, you can find information on how best to gear as Marksmanship on our dedicated gearing page, which includes the current Best in Slot from this tier.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.