Marksmanship was once king of hunter DPS, that era is no longer with us however as Beast Mastery has surpassed Marksmanship by leaps and bounds what with the addition of 20% haste talents and a variety of other buffs.
Instead Marksman now takes priority as the premier PvP spec for any
battleground or arena hopeful hunters, leading with CC and burst damage
in arena combined with a silence shot that no other build gains.
This guide is simply intended to provide a general overview
of the Marksman Hunter. For a far more in-depth and highly detailed
resource on this class, check out this
guide (updated for Wrath of the Lich King content.)
2.0 - Talents
Marksman Raid DPS Build
I'd recommend that if you're really bent on DPS'ing in raids you check out the beast
mastery build. At the moment Beast Mastery is the best talent tree for raid DPS.
2.2 - Leveling Marksmanship Build
7/57/7 Marksman
Build. This is actually a PVP build, but it works well for leveling also. It's fun if you want to change things up from the normal "use Beast Mastery from 1-80" stuff you always hear.
10 – 14 Lethal Shots
15 – 19 Mortal Shots
20 – Aimed Shot
21 – 23 Cafeful Aim
24 – 25 Improved Hunters Mark
26 – 27 Rapid Killing
28 – 30 Improved Arcane Shot
31 – Go for the Throat
32 – 34 Improved Stings
35 – Readiness
36 – 38 Barrage
39 – 41 Ranged Weapon Specialization
42 – Trueshot Aura
43 – 44 Combat Experiance
45 – 47 Piercing Shots
48 – 52 Master Marksman
53 – Silencing Shot
54 – 55Rapid Recuperation
56 – Improved Steady Shot
57 – 59 Marked for Death (3/5)
60 – Chimera Shot
61 – 62 Marked for Death (5/5)
63 – 65 Wild Quiver (After this point you can change around the rest of the talents to something you like more if you want.)
66 – 70 Improved Aspect of the Hawk
71 – 72 Focused Fire
73 – 77 Improved Tracking
78 – 79 Survival Instincts
Branch out, possibly put a few points into the beast mastery tree, also a couple of survival and marksmanship talents are still quite useful.
Leveling as marksmanship is undoubtedly about the burst damage, as in repeated usage of both aimed shot and every other special attack. Unlike beast mastery hunters you’ll find that the pet begins to lose its threat holding capabilities somewhere around level 30 – your damage has to make up for this.
In essence you’ll be playing a mixture of kiting and blowing away the target mob, obviously you could skip the kiting part if you don’t mind being beat on, but that’s generally not a good strategy for consistent and efficient killing.
Each fight can be opened with either aimed shot or an arcane should the former be on cooldown, likely your pet will burst out and pull aggro temporarily, however expect the mob to be coming your way within a short period of time.
Generally you’ll get a good feeling for exactly how long you have before a mob detaches from the pets growl and comes to kill the master instead, in time you’ll be instinctively firing off a concussive shot at the same time.
The basics would just be blast away at them until they die, not much more to it than that.
This is a video of a 72 MM Hunter in Northrend. Pretty basic, but
it shows some of the basics and some kiting.
This is simply the best Marksman arena build, giving you the best parts of marksman combined with improved range and snare/roots and traps from survival backed up by the beast mastery health increase.
4.0 - Skills and Stats
(Some of these formulas may be a little out of date at the moment)
Agility – 1 = 2 Armor, 1 Ranged Attack Power/0.025% Critical Rating/0.04 Dodge
Attack Power - 10 = 1.0 DPS
Hit Rating – 15.8 rating = 1% Increase Critical Rating – 22.1 rating = 1% Increase Weapon Expertise – 1 point = .25% lower chance for enemy
to dodge/parry Haste –15.7 = 1%
Resilience – 39.4 = 1%
The Hit cap for PvP is reached at 5% or 79 hit rating, this is all you need for arena, battlegrounds, etc.
PvP priorities change somewhat from that of PvE, resilience and stamina coming into higher rankings than damage in some cases, although often PvP gear will provide some combination of all the viable statistics.
Pet wise the scorpid poison is the most useful in PvP and basically any good hunter requires the scorpion pet to live up to his/her full potential, anything else is simply going to weaken your effectiveness.
4.1 - Consumables
Honestly most of the PvP gems are fairly worthless intiially, and given the fact that you'll need all the honor you can get to pick up any gear in a reasonable period of time I'd recommend skipping them entirely unless you absolutely have to buy one.
This part of the guide is mainly for people who want to do the lvl 70 raids or people who have not yet updated to WotLK (yes, they exist).
This is a primarily pre-karazhan gear guide, allowing you to pick up the optimal gear required to begin the starting raid dungeons with at the very least adequate if not quite good gear. Although not exhaustive, this does include most easily avaliable and high quality pieces.
Here are some figures to aim for once you've geared yourself out fully and gemmed every piece of armor possible, however this is without any outside buffs.
Note: If you're looking for PvP gear you can start
gathering simply from the battlegrounds honor gear or the Arena gear.
The Gladiator's Gear awarded by the vendors is the best PvP gear you'll
find.
Raiding Requirements:
Attack Power: 2000+
Critical: 20%+
Hit Rating: 90+
For years Joana's Horde Guide and Brian's Alliance guide were
the standards for Hunter leveling, simply because Hunters were the
class of choice for both those guides. Other classes had to make due
as best they could.
I argue that Zygor's in-game Guide is better than either because all
the "looking up of stuff" is done away with. No more switching from
game to guide, no more manually setting waypoints, no more browsing
Thottbot for tips. It's all contained within Zygor's guide and it's
all automated.
Check it out and grab
a copy, on Zygor's home page, or read our review, here.
