A Look Back at Marksmanship Hunter in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Marksmanship Hunter Writer, Azortharion, offers a retrospective highlighting Marksmanship’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Marksmanship in Dragonflight

Marksmanship has had a pretty rough time throughout Dragonflight. For Raiding, it was decent in Season 1 and 2, and one of the worst specs in Season 3. For Mythic+, it has been poor in all 3 seasons. In this article, I’ll go over the pros and cons of Marksmanship as a spec, and a wishlist for how it might improve in The War Within.

Gameplay

Marksmanship’s gameplay is simple, but fun. Of course, opinions differ, and some do not like the long cast-times of Aimed Shot, but most people would agree that the gameplay loop and excellent burst numbers are great. The gameplay, outside of cooldowns, is slow-paced and simplistic, however. It is a matter of taste whether the burst moments make up for this. I do not think that the overall gameplay of Marksmanship is a major weakness, as much as its mechanics and output are. That is not to say there is not room for improvement, as we’ll discuss.

DPS Strengths and Weaknesses

Marksmanship’s primary strength is AoE burst, particularly on 3-8 targets. Within a 20-second window, almost nothing can beat Marksmanship’s damage on these target counts. The problem arises on 2 targets, and anything above 8; Marksmanship is “hard” target-capped, meaning that most of its AoE kit will simply not hit more than 8 targets. Even bringing it to 8 targets requires you to invest a Talent Point, because the baseline target cap is 6.

This leads to an obvious conflict. Marksmanship’s only real strength is AoE. The best use-case for good AoE is in Mythic+. But in high Mythic+, pulls tend to get larger and larger, far exceeding its target cap. Suddenly, Marksmanship’s biggest and only strength becomes a major weakness.

Marksmanship enjoyed high single-target in Season 2, thanks to a talent that has since been nerfed. A major complaint in Season 2 was that this strong single-target relied heavily on RNG. Marksmanship in Season 2 was arguably the most RNG-heavy DPS spec in the game’s history. Yes, even moreso than the so-called “Gamba” builds of Enhancement Shaman, if you look at the numbers. They fixed that by nerfing the talent that caused it, and flattening out its RNG. Unfortunately, they “flattened it out” so that instead of sometimes having insane RNG, you would now always have below-average RNG relative to before. Marksmanship never recovered its single-target numbers, and is the worst single-target spec in the game as of this writing, since the few specs below it at the start of Season 3, like Windwalker Monk, have been buffed.

Currently, Marksmanship suffers from 4 major hindrances to its viability:

1. Lowest single-target damage in the game.
2. While its AoE is good, it sacrifices a lot of single-target to do so (10-15%), and it doesn’t have much to begin with. Other specs do more single-target, and lose only a few % to do similar AoE.
3. While its AoE is good, it is hard-capped, putting it out of contention in competitive Mythic+.
4. The spec has very poor survivability and non-existent group utility.

Marksmanship is also the only spec in the game to have no viable answer to 2-target cleave. It has a talent that is supposed to enable this, Bombardment, but it is undertuned. Its current Tier Set also helps this somewhat, but is a band-aid solution to a fundamental problem of the spec since the inception of its current state in Battle for Azeroth. Why, exactly, must Marksmanship not do 2-target AoE well? Until at least 2 of these hindrances are remedied, it is hard to imagine Marksmanship being a strong overall spec for PvE anytime soon.

Utility and Defensive Woes

Marksmanship is, by virtue of not having a pet, the worst utility spec for Hunters, which is already a class with broadly poor group utility. Hunters are also notably squishy, particularly for sustained damage. It has a few good buttons to press, albeit it with far too long cooldowns, to mitigate one-shots, but Hunters require more external healing than any other class by a massive margin. In Mythic+, this translates to Hunters in the group actually costing the Healer valuable DPS. This is because other specs can be expected to sustain themselves when incoming damage is low to moderate, but Hunter has no self-sustain besides pressing Exhilaration every minute or so.

These things affect all Hunter specs. Marksmanship is worse off because it does not have pet utility to lean on. Survival Hunters can run a Ferocity pet and have 10% Leech, giving them passable self-sustain. Beast Mastery Hunters have 7.5% more max health if they run a Tenacity Pet. Marksmanship gets none of these.

Currently, the only saving grace that Marksmanship has for survivability over Beast Mastery, is that it does not hate to stack Versatility like Beast Mastery does, so it ends up having a reasonable amount in BiS gear. This amounts to a few % more passive DR from Versatility than Beast Mastery. But that’s it. And Beast Mastery gets Spirit Mend, too.

Since Hunter’s single-target stun with an outrageously long 1-minute cooldown, Intimidation, is caused by pets, Marksmanship also loses access to that. Its consolation prize is Scatter Shot, a single-target incapacitate on a 30-second cooldown and 20-yard range. Marksmanship’s class fantasy, if we consult its Mastery, Mastery: Sniper Training, partly involves attacking enemies from afar; it is even mentioned first in the tooltip! Very far. Farther away than any other class. But its only manner of single-target CC has a 20-yard max range. Of course, there is Freezing Trap, but Traps have an incredibly long travel time, particularly at the range that Blizzard wants you to play Marksmanship. Binding Shot exists, too, but is useless in the vast majority of situations since it became a short Stun instead of a long Root in Dragonflight. It used to be good for helping tanks kite. Now it is not good at that, and it is still useless as an AoE stop, since mobs have to move to trigger it.

The War Within Wishlist for Marksmanship Hunter

DPS and Utility for Viability

• For all Hunter Specs: make Hunter’s Mark work across the entire HP range and tune accordingly. A very simple boost to Hunter’s very poor Mythic+ viability would be to buff it to 2% and make it apply on AoE, too.
• Remove the minimum cap on AoE. It is simply unnecessary.
• Remove or raise the AoE cap and nerf its AoE accordingly, to avoid encounters and situations where Marksmanship is completely unviable.
• Improve Marksmanship’s single target DPS. This is easy to do without touching AoE, as Trick Shots, its primary AoE mechanic, can be retuned accordingly.
• Reduce the talent cost of going for AoE talents. It currently takes 5 points (Multi-Shot, Trick Shots, Bulletstorm, Salvo, Volley) to fully enable Marksmanship’s AoE kit. Volley is currently run on single-target, but that is a feature of our current Set Bonus and not the norm. There are also some Talents which could be baseline, like Rapid Fire, Crack Shot, and Improved Steady Shot. My point is, there are many ways to make Marksmanship’s talents more flexible.
• Allow Marksmanship to, via Lone Wolf, choose to get certain pet utility without needing a pet. For example, being able to opt in to 10% Leech + Lust vs Max Health + Fortitude of the Bear, exactly like Beast Mastery and Survival.
• Alternatively to the above, make Lone Wolf not mandatory by not locking Hunter’s Knowledge behind it.
• This goes for all Hunter specs, really: put Wailing Arrow in the Class Tree where it will not cost a ton of DPS to take, and remove its Cast Time, Travel Time, or both to make it a viable AoE stop/kick/silence.
• Marksmanship currently has a decent Execute niche in Bullseye, but nothing active to pair it with. Consider having Deathblow not make Kill Shot available without restriction, and compensate with wishes #1 and #2 in the Gameplay section below, but make Kill Shot much stronger. In other words, shift more damage into execute and deepen this niche for single-target. Take lost AoE power into account, though, as Kill Shot fares poorly for AoE despite some attempts at making it not. Deadeye being baseline would also help a lot with both this and the Gameplay wishes below. There is room for Marksmanship to have a single-target execute niche and a burst AoE niche at the same time.

Gameplay and Quality of Life Wishes

1. Marksmanship spends a lot of time casting Steady Shot, which is only slightly better than casting nothing at all due to its extremely low damage and Focus generation. It would be nicer for Steady Shot to feel more impactful and relevant, or to phase it out and have the rotation be focused on more fun hard-hitters.
2. More big picture: Marksmanship is most fun when it is pressing its hard-hitters, but it currently spends a lot of time casting very weak spells. interspersed with hard-hitters. The spec would feel better if it had more substance and less filler. Half of Marksmanship’s time spent is basically waiting for a cool spell to become available.
3. Remove the RNG stack generation of Precise Shots and buff it accordingly. Alternatively, rework the talent to be more interesting, like buffing the next non-Aimed Shot spell, encouraging combos of Aimed Shot+Rapid Fire.
4. Doing extra damage to high-HP targets (Careful Aim) is a far less useful and fun niche than execute. It also necessarily weakens Marksmanship massively at other, more relevant health decades (70-0) to prevent it being overtuned. Simply removing this talent and spreading its power would make Marksmanship both more viable and feel more effective more of the time. Alternatively, it could be made execute instead, although there is such a thing as too much execute if you also implement Kill Shot changes.

About the Author

I’m Azortharion, hailing from the cold north of Denmark. I have been theorycrafting, writing guides, and streaming for Hunters since 2014, as well as playing the game on a high level, with hundreds of rank 1 parses and dozens of World #1 Mythic+ runs on all 3 Hunter specs over the game’s history. I also founded and run Trueshot Lodge, the official Discord for the Hunter Community, where I always solicit and address feedback, suggestions, and comments for this guide. Most importantly, I wrote the Wowhead Marksmanship Hunter Guide that you are reading now! You can also find me on my Personal Hunter Discord Server, where I offer more direct coaching and advice to thousands of Hunters. You may also find me on Twitter and YouTube.