3.1 Marksmanship Build

Since 3.1 came out I’ve been trying a few builds, tweaking them here and there trying new pets and new talents. thats why my posts have been rare of late. I’ve come up with what I think are good builds for you to try or base your own builds on.

I have tried all 3 builds now from Beast Mastery to Survival and I’m currently Marksmanship at the moment and loving it. All three specs are viable in all raids and I can still top damage and DPS meters with all of them, so there is no excuse and no opportunity to whine about any spec not pulling its weight. True the hunter builds do need to be balanced more and some builds will do better than others numbers wise, But they all do well and above 3k dps in 10 man Ulduar. Seen as I am using Marksmanship now here is the build and macros I am using:

Here is the Marksmanship spec I’m using at the moment.

Just remember I am hit capped. If you are not; you NEED Focused Aim and therefore will have to pull 3 talents out of the build to complensate for this to put in this Hit increasing talent.

Macros

I use quite a few macros with this spec all of which I have adapted for the other specs I use.

1^st macro is my Chimera/ Pet abilities macro

#showtooltip
/cast Chimera Shot
/cast Call of the wild
/cast Rabid

I tried with chimera of this macro and to be honest, its just too many things to keep track of. Chimera works well on the macro as you hit serpent sting just before your first opener of chimera this means your pet is already in combat so you don’t waste any uptime of call of the wild and rabid in the time your pet gets to your mob.

2^nd macro is my main/spammy macro. Not used to extent, it used to be and now Kill Shot is on the GCD (Global Cool Down) it has to be removed from the original macro. However, this has made things somewhat better. The macro I use for all builds as it is generic.

#showtooltip
/console sound_enablesfx0
/cast Steady Shot
/cast Kill Command
/console sound_enablesfx1

Use this when all other shots are on CD and mash it so kill command is used when it’s available. You will still hear the roar when its used.

3^rd macro

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=4 Arcane shot, Aimed shot

I tweaked this about according to how much haste I have to 4 seconds before it reverts to back Arcane Shot so you dont miss the Aimed shot timer. I tried 6 secs and 3 secs (reset=3) etc and found I had very little chance to hit Aimed before it went back to arcane and I tried reset=6 and found that was far too long Arcane shot was coming back faster and I was waiting for it to swap back Arcane for me to hit it. So try reset=4 and see how it goes. I found this to be the optimal time between macro rotation.

Kill Shot

Now kill shot is on the GCD we can no longer add this too macros (tis a pain but simple enough to remedy. Either put it on its own or you can make another macro easy enough to use

/stopcasting
/cast Kill Shot

This simple macro should stop whatever you are doing (usually Steady Shot) to fire Kill Shot meaning you don’t miss any time waiting for the cast time of Steady Shot to end.

Oh another macro I created to look after Readiness and Rapid Fire is:

#showtooltip
/castsequence Rapid Fire, Readiness, Rapid Fire

This cycles through these two abilities to you can Rapid Fire, changes to Readiness, to you can refresh Rapid Fire to use again.

Shot rotation.

With Marksmanship you have a lot of shots to look after, different timers and more abilities than you can shake a stick at. Use the addons to their best extent. OmniCC, Power Auras, MSBT, KHT will all help you look after timers and shots. If you go do the addons page on the blog, you can see how to configure MSBT and Power Auras and how to set up various other timer notifies and aura reminders.
The best rotation I’ve found is this:
Hunters Mark/send pet -> Serpent Sting -> Chimera Shot macro -> Arcane shot -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot macro spam. Now just manages you CD’s as and when they come back. Keep hitting Chimera Shot when its ready and you won’t have to worry about Serpent sting the whole fight on the one mob. Just remember when swapping mobs to fire an opener of Serpent sting-> Chimera shot first.

Pets

I, like every hunter did, went and got and trained a wolf to 80. I took it into heroics and raids and I was very disappointed in its damage, shocked even. My level 79 Moth did more damage on the training dummy than the 80 wolf. So after a lot of research, trying various other pets, lots of recount data and time in IF and heroics levelling pets and trying new builds, I finally decided that for Marksmanship and Survival specs the Raptor and cat where they better pets to go for. After a lot more time and recount data, the raptor won out. Exceptional DPS from that pet over a 10 min time trial on the training dummy with the cat just behind. This is the pet talents I chose and I did try wild hunt too but found with the spec I was using and the 2 points in Unleashed Fury in the Beast Mastery tree the Shark attack worked out much better on DPS.

Marksmanship isn’t for everyone, there is lots to remember, lots of CD and timers to watch and of course Trueshot Aura to remember :D For me though I am loving Marksmanship and will stay this spec. I was Dual specked Beast Mastery/Survival, now I am Beast Mastery/Marksmanship and will stick with this for some time to come. The new workings of Survival where not for me and I will look at Survival in 3.1 in a later post.