I’m going to break down everything you need to know as a Marksman Hunter. This will be your ultimate Marksman Hunter guide for WoW Classic Season of Discovery. The first question everyone usually has is when they can go Marksman, when they can swap over from BM to Marksman, and if they need something special. There are a few little caveats to that.

If you do have the epic crossbow, then you absolutely can go Marksman and you will absolutely blast. But even if you have a decently powerful weapon or some decently good gear, you absolutely can swap over to Marksman already and be ready to top the meters. I would say the biggest caveat, the biggest time to go Marksman, is when you know you will have quick kill times.

That’s because Marksman is ridiculously Mana-intensive, and you can do insane amounts of damage in short bursts, but you will eventually run out of Mana if you are doing your full DPS rotation, which we’ll get into later. So If you’re in a guild group, I would highly suggest going Marksman. It is so much more fun, and you can do insane amounts of damage. If you own enough SOD Gold, just follow this complete guide.

Talents

The specialization you’re going to want to go is always 5 points into Efficiency. This will reduce the cost of all your shots and stings, helping you out with all those Mana issues I just mentioned. Then, 5 points into Lethal Shots, giving you an extra 5% crit, and one point into Aim Shot. This will affect your rotation. The Aim Shot is here in your rotation. Then we can go 5 points into the Improved Aspect of the Hawk. This is very useful because of the changes that happened to the Aspect of the Lion.

Runes

As for runes, if you are the only hunter in your raid, you need to grab the Aspect of the Lion. If you are not the only hunter in your raid, then you will absolutely want to go with Master Marksman. If you have another Hunter doing Aspect of the Lion, it’ll be so nice to have 5% more crit. But on top of that, 25% Mana reduction to all your major abilities will help you do so much more damage. So if you can ideally, you’re running Master Marksman.

In your Glove Slot, we are going to use Chimera Shot. Explosive shot is really nice to have on an extra pair of gloves. If you switch over to the other pair of gloves, you can use Explosive Shot on trash. Then just go back to your main gloves and then you will have Chimera Shot again. On trash, you can use Explosive Shot for AOE. But for all boss encounters, we will be using Chimera Shot.

As for your Leg Slot, this is where we kind of don’t have anything that’s too insane. The best one to go with is going to be Sniper Training. This requires you to place your character in a solid spot before you actually start the boss encounter and then try to stand still for as long as possible because the longer you stand still, it will give you 10% increased Critical Strike chances. Sniper Training is really strong, especially in cleave encounters. But if you position poorly, you’ll have to move, and you’ll literally get no use out of this. So, just try to always be positioned well to get the most uptime out of Sniper Training.

Pets

You might be curious about what pet you should use in the actual Marksman spec. You are either running a cat or a raptor. If you go up to Ashenvale and do the little figurine farm, this is the ghost cat. But you can also get a raptor because you can teach both of them to use both claw and bite. Bite has a 10-second cooldown. But you are going to use both pets, or either of these pets, instead of using something like a scorpion right now or instead of using a Wind Serpent if you’re playing Marksman.

As an extra note, you might not know this, you can actually use Scrolls on your pet to increase their damage. So, if you have better Scrolls, Scrolls of strength and Agility, make sure you use them on your pet always. It will increase your pet’s damage. Every Hunter should do this, whether you’re a BM Hunter or even a Marksman Hunter.

Rotation

For the rotation, your opener is always to try to get in a suitable position so you have sniper training buff up. Then, you are going to open with Aim Shot. Opening with Aim Shot as the tank pulls, the boss allows you to hit with a Serpent Sting, followed directly by a chimera shot, and then follow again by a multi-shot.

There are a few things that are a bit confusing here. You’re always going to want to do Aim Shot, Chimera Shot, and multi-shot off cooldown. But one of the big mistakes you might make is called clipping. Clipping is when your character starts to do a cast or a shot. If right before I started casting that Auto Shot, I actually instead cast an Aim Shot, it would cancel the entire cast of that Auto Shot. An Aim Shot is a 3-second cast. So, no matter what, when you’re using Aim Shot, unless you have over a 3-second weapon swing bow or crossbow, you will end up clipping a little. But the best way to use Aim Shot is always right after an Auto Shot goes out.

Whenever you’re actually fighting, you will use an Auto Shot and then start casting the Aim Shot. If you’re using an ability like Chimera Shot, you don’t need to worry about that. But the good thing about Chimera Shot is that it will refresh the Serpent Sting that you have up forever.

It’s nice to get a Serpent thing up on bosses if they’re going to live long enough and just keep them up pretty much forever by using Chimera Shot repeatedly. Because we are using our entire toolkit, this will be extremely Mana-intensive, meaning that if there’s only a single-target boss and you are low on Mana, you will actually stop using things like multi-shot because multi-shot costs 90 Mana.

Instead, Chimera Shot costs 66, and Aim Shot costs 68, and both hit really hard. So, you would prefer to only use Aim shot and Chimera Shot if you are low on Mana. If you’re very low on Mana, you’re literally only using Chimera Shot when you can to keep up that Serpent Sting. This is where you are going to be using a Mana potion as well as a Minor Recombobulator, to try to have enough Mana to kill the bosses.

Melee Weave

You might be wondering when to melee weave. What you would do is switch your rune from Sniper Training to Flanking Strike. Whenever you move in, you can have a macro that will hit with raptor strike, then Flanking Strike. If you have it like this, it can hit them both right after each other, and it can reset that Raptor Strike for your next melee weave. It’ll just be off the CD perfectly. But what you’ll do is just use an Auto Shot, then run in and do that and run back out.

Use another Auto Shot first before you start casting anything else because you want to start casting that Auto Shot. Instead of instantly casting Aim Shot, you can cast another auto shot first and then the Aim Shot. If not, you are fully missing out on that auto shot and you’re missing out on the next 3 seconds of Auto Shot because of that Aim Shot. Always make sure you cast Auto Shot next.

If you follow this guide, you absolutely will be ultimate. You will destroy the meters, and it gets even stronger if you have a stronger group.