edit: This post is outdated- all the relevant and recent advice is here.
Here’s the first in a series of guides I’m planning on writing about marksmanship. Today, we go over the rotation. As always, it’s more of a priority list than a rotation, but it certainly feels simpler than survival did.
First thing you need to determine is whether you’re expected to provide silences. If you aren’t, go ahead and macro silencing shot into something like steady shot so it will fire about every 20 seconds (its cooldown). It’s a really weak shot though, doing half an auto-shot, so if you forget, you’re not losing too much performance. If you are expected to silence something, make sure you take it out of your macro and have it on a bar somewhere with a keybind. It’s off the global cooldown, so you can use it right when you need it.
Now for the rotation itself:
- Serpent sting: you always want to open with this, and never fire it again unless you’ve let the damage over time expire. If the sting is expired, this has priority over everything but kill shot. Without it, your largest shot is half useless.
- Chimera shot: this is the largest shot you have. If the serpent sting debuff is up, use this before anything. It hits hard, and when you hit a target with your serpent sting on it, it will instantly do 40% of the total serpent sting damage.
- Kill Shot: all other rotations (SV, and BM) should use this first if it’s available, but for Marks hunters (unless you’re in top end ArP gear), this actually does less damage than chimera shot.
- Aimed shot: less important than chimera shot, instant, has a healing debuff that’s almost never relevant for PvE. This shot triggers piercing shots (our bleed talent), but can’t be used if you use multi-shot as they share a cooldown.
- Arcane shot: this can be used while moving, deals arcane damage, and ignores armor. The fact that this is magic damage is important on some fights. As for whether to fire an aimed before arcane, it all depends on your stats. I would run both rotations through the DPS spreadsheet and see which gives you more DPS.
- Steady shot: Our weakest shot, but one of our only non-auto shots that is affected by armor penetration. You can’t cast this while running. It’s the lowest priority shot.
That’s the priority list. Now we get to the hard part- cooldowns. You have rapid fire on a 3 minute cooldown that will regenerate a bunch of mana (from the rapid recuperation talent), you’ve got readiness on a 3 minute cooldown, and you’ve got kill command on a 1 minute timer. Rapid fire will not trigger a global cooldown, but can’t be cast while you’re recovering from one.
Since you can always count on most bosses taking longer than 3 minutes to fall, you should try to use a rapid fire, readiness, and another rapid fire as soon as you’ve lost enough mana [edit: leaving a couple seconds in there for the kill command to get fully used by the pet]. If you have so much mana floating around in your raid composition that you never go OOM, then just use the first one either early, or during the heroism/bloodlust if it will be early enough for you to get a second readiness off at the end of the fight. Once your first one is gone, save the readiness until the boss is under 20% (unless you have reason to believe that you will have close to a 10 minute fight, allowing 3 readiness uses). You can use the rapid fire whenever you want, but the goal of saving rapid fire until you are under 20% is that you will be able to fire a kill shot and chimera shot, readiness, rapid fire, and then fire another kill shot and chimera shot.
As for kill command, I macro it to all of my shots. Some people like to save it for specific times, but I feel that the lost DPS from waiting until the “opportune moment” to use it is more than the DPS gained by using it when it will have the greatest effect. Also, since my pet is mostly around to give me furious howl, I don’t really worry much about min/maxing his puny attacks :)
Timing your cooldowns is the only challenge here that’s different than SV- other than that, I find the shot priority list to be easier (since there’s no random procs of lock and load)
One caution– if you hit Readiness immediately after triggering Rapid Fire (to get it on CD ASAP), and Kill Command is macroed in to all of your shots, you’ll likely overwrite the first Kill Command with a second before some/all of the charges from the first one are consumed. Just something to keep in mind.
Right- I’ll clarify that on the post. Thanks.
another caution, if you have to use a macro to dish out top dps you fail.
There’s nothing wrong with macroing instant abilities to your normal shots. I macro kill command and silencing shot to every shot in my rotation, however castsequence macros will always cost you DPS.
[…] OutDPS – Marksman Rotation! […]
to be honest with the cost to benifit ratio of mana and the 3 talent points with arcane shot I completly removed it from my rotation for moving fights a jump over to sv my mm spec is based on AmP so arcane just sucks up mana that could be used in better ratio shots. I don’t usualy have to go into viper and I don’t loose dps because of that I would look into a 5 to 10 min pew pew and see what gets u the best overall dps
Serpent sting: you always want to open with this, and never fire it again unless you’ve let the damage over time expire. If the sting is expired, this has priority over everything but kill shot. Without it, your largest shot is half useless.
This is so not true.
You should start off with a serpent sting for sure, BUT it scales with your AP, so iff you get some nice tricket procs, some temp buffs, etc that will increase your RAP itt is good to get in a new one, the damage it does is going to be higher butt also the damage your Chimera Shot does is going to be higher.
Key is to watch your Rap and refresh a sting when it increases a lot.
Important is to do it right after a Chimera shot to minumise the los there.
Every chimera shot sting refresh resets the ticks to your AP at the time of refresh. The only exception to this is the +%damage from certain buffs like tricks of the trade, blue circles on the iron council encounter, and shadow crashed on vezax.
An intelligent point of view, well expreessd! Thanks!
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Chimera shot should be above kill shot in priority for Marksman hunters, since you the damage from chimera and chimera-serpent is higher than kill shot on average. Also, Marksmans don’t have the extra 15% crit that Survival does
That’s contrary to my experience, the advice on elitist jerks, and several DPS calculators. I’d like to see a little evidence before I edit the post. Do you have logs?
I have some logs on WWS, I will post when I get home from work. I will note that it depends slightly on gear. If you go for the Ar Pen maximizing build, kill shot benefits greatly from the 100% penetration, boosting it higher than Chimera. However, in my gear, which is Ulduar hard-mode/25 toc mix, Shandara’s spreadsheet puts my Chimera at about 1000 higher dmg than kill shot (I have about 35% ar pen, I gem for agility).
Well, regem.
Fix’d
I should also note that Kill shot is not affected by piercing shots, while Chimera shot is, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
hey guys,this aint really about this subject tbh,im just looking 4 a dig out here,i m a complete airhead wen it comes 2 stats and working that sort of thing ot,i do know my shot rotation has been good tho without being told and dont really get critisized in general in groups lol,but my dps seems failry low considering my gear,or so ive been tols,if u wanna have a look and let me know what ye think?http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Terokkar&cn=Chedzar
Hey bud rotation may not be your problem. My want to adjust your spec. 7/56/7 is kinda the cookie cutter marksman build. Don’t know your reasoning behind taking hawk eye over improved tracking but I think it is a mistake. And a point in go for the throat is pretty much a must to get max dps out of your pet. Efficiency I think is a wasted talent. And currently I believe wolfs are the best dps pets out there because of the buff they give. Oh and this may sound stupid but make sure you are using the right ammo. One of my guildies didn’t know about mammoth cutters and after I made some for him his dps jumped quite a bit. May want to alter your glyphs too. Other words you have alot of work to do. My sugestion is to go to wow heroes and look at the top hunters and experiment with their specs. here is mine as a jumping off point. http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Staghelm&cn=Feykaald&gn=Illusion
Or you could even use the better bullets? epic ones cause alot more dps and cost around 5-9g a stack on average
Or just use a spreadsheet wich will help you undertsand what to do as a Hunter (gemming, talent tree and rotation).
You wrote: “Kill Shot: all other rotations (SV, and BM) should use this first if it’s available, but for Marks hunters (unless you’re in top end ArP gear), this actually does less damage than chimera shot.”
How much armor penetration is required to make Kill Shot number 1 in priority? I have at the moment 553 armor penetration, and it seems to me that Kill Shot would do more damage than Chimera Shot. However, I haven’t done any exact calculations, so I’d like to hear some opinions from fellow hunters.
I’m also using the Kill Shot glyph.
To be honest, this article is due for a 3.3 update. I’ll be sure to address this when I rewrite it.
How can you use kill shot first? I see a lot of post saying use kill shot first or second how ist that possible?
They’re talking about priority- so when kill shot is available, depending on your gear, kill shot might take priority over chimera shot. Obviously it’s not going to take priority when it’s not available :)
How does readiness affect your shot cooldowns? Or does it affect them @ all? I had another random hunter ask me how I use it, and to be honest I don’t, I open with serpent, blow all my priority shots, hit rapid fire, get 3 steady shots in and repeat, is this right?
Readiness resets your shot cooldowns. As soon as you have a trinket proc, use rapid fire, and then as soon as you cast your next chimera shot normally, use readiness and fire a second chimera shot.
Would this apply to the T10, 2-Set Proc as well? If so, I’m thinking:
Rapid Fire-Serpent Sting-Chimera-Readiness-Serpent Sting-Chimera
Would that be the best rotation on the proc?
Thanks
I was curious if you could tell me what I am doing wrong, on a boss fight my rotation goes as follows , hm, serpent sting, all my priority shots, rapid fire, steady shot until rapid fire is done, readiness, rinse repeat as shots come off of cooldown, I just can’t seem to reflect the numbers of equally geared hunters, any advice?
You should pre-mark the target if you can, and never fire a steady shot if aimed or chimera are on cooldown. If you are running with improved arcane shot, never fire a steady while that is off cooldown either.
Assuming you’ve geared, specced, and glyphed properly, the things that could cost you DPS are not firing enough cooldowns (moving too much or something), not stacking your cooldowns (either wasting them or not optimizing them to match your procs), and not picking your shots properly.
Can you macro Kill Command and Silencing Shot to all your shots?
If so, what macro would you use?
/cast kill command
/cast silencing shot
/cast (insert normal shot)
I would have done this too a few days ago but this would be better IMO
cast!auto shot
/cast aimed shot
/cast Silencing shot
/cast [target=pettarget,combat] Kill command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
The aimed shot or what ever you wanna insert first so that is the cooldown it shows on your bar. Otherwise it will show whatever is first in your macro and it will look like it is on cooldown. The script is so you dont get the spell not ready when kill command or silencing shot are on cooldown. Credit goes to Frostheim over at scattered shots on wow.com
You can use “#showtooltip aimed shot” to display the aimed shot cooldown, no matter what order your macro is in. You no longer need that auto-shot in there, and Kill Command doesn’t have a target. Other than that, it’s a solid macro.
Upcoming patch 3.3.3 and the BM FI buff is making me plan to test out BM in raids again. I like to see if my dps will stay in the top third or not. I’m planning to do this so our raids will have Trushot and FI buffs. My question is since I haven’t rolled BM for PvE in a long time, does the pet benefit more from AP buffs or is Agil benefiting them just as much? I run PvE as MM, stacking Agil and just wonder if replace all the Agil buffs with AP. Thanks for any insight.
Yeah no, not up to raiding at all. Instead if being top 5 in dps as MM, I’m 12-17th in dps barely topping the tanks as BM. The ‘Aura’ is glitchy meaning it comes and goes. Just a bad idea all around.
Lvl 38 MM hunter need to know what is the best pet to use to lvl with, have raptor right now.
I’d say bear to tank. I love it swipe that taps other mobs so it’s the best for aoe aggro. Not as good as a druud or pally tank but the best for hunter pets imho.
Ive tested Bm in ICC 10 today (read 25:th mars) And I lost from around 7k dps down to 6k dps and even lower on Saurfang. Thou my gear aint the optimal for BM. But still its not even close to MM or EVEN Surv.
I welcome you guys who are ready to spend 8 k gold on respeccing and checking gems/different specs but its seems like we are stuck with MM for atleast 1 more patch. :'( Miss my “Blutta”
As for as i know MM is still the best spec! I ahve heard from a different couple hunters that BM is better for single target DPS. Yet they are still kicking it with 6.3k GS so that might me a good reason opposed to me with the 5.8K.
The MM rotation, like all focus-based hunter rotations, is a priority-based rotation. This list of priority is as follows:
1) Put up Hunter’s Mark and Serpent Sting.
2) Fire Chimera Shot whenever available — you will need to make sure you always have enough focus to hit Chimera Shot 3) when it’s off cooldown. This will keep your Serpent Sting refreshed.
3)Fire Aimed Shot when the Master Marksman proc comes up.
4) Fire Arcane Shot as a focus dump.
5)Use Steady Shot to regen focus, and always try to fire your Steady Shots in pairs to maintain your Improved Steady Shot buff.