PvE Marksmanship Hunter Talents & Builds

Marksmanship Hunter

Stat Priority

Talents & Builds

Gear & Best In Slot (BiS)

Gems, Enchants, & Consumables

Rotation, Cooldowns, & Abilities

Below you will find the traditional PvE build for Marksmanship Hunters. Under the Survival Tree, you can switch Monster Slaying with Humanoid Slaying, depending on what type of mob you’re going to be attacking. If need be, you can also choose Hawk Eye, increasing your ranged attack range by 6 yards. Under the Marksmanship Tree, you can switch four points from Improved Hunter’s Mark (if you are not the Hunter designated to use Hunter’s Mark) and place them in Efficiency, leaving you one point extra. If you find yourself wanting to pick up Silencing Shot, you can spend that 1 extra point on it, or take a point from Unleashed Fury for it.

While this build does revolve around the Marksmanship talent tree, most players won’t find many opportunities to use Silencing Shot, which allows us to conserve that talent point and use it elsewhere. Most talents chosen are based on damage, and not necessarily crowd-control, so Silencing Shot isn’t a top priority.

Beast Mastery Talent Tree

• Improved Aspect of the Hawk: Since Aspect of the Hawk will be our Aspect of choice, it’s only natural to improve it so that there’s a chance our ranged attacks can increase our attack speed by 15%
• Focused Fire: While we don’t rely on our pet as much as Beast Mastery Hunters do, we’ll still have it summoned, and with Focused Fire, our damage will be increased by 2%
• Improved Revive Pet: It’s always beneficial to be able to revive your pet faster and at a lower mana cost since we get a damage boost with its presence through Focused Fire
• Thick Hide: This one point is spent so that we can reach the third tier of talents
• Unleashed Fury: While we don’t rely on our pet as much as Beast Mastery Hunters do, increasing our pet’s damage is still always beneficial

Survival Talent Tree

• Monster Slaying: This increases your damage caused against Beast, Giant, and Dragonkin targets by 3%. As mentioned above, these points are interchangeable with Humanoid Slaying or Hawk Eye

Marksmanship Talent Tree

• Lethal Shots: This is a mandatory talent, increasing our critical strike chance with ranged weapons by 5%
• Improved Hunter’s Mark: This talent should be picked if you are the only Hunter in your group, or the other Hunters already do not have this talent
• Efficiency: If Improved Hunter’s Mark is unnecessary for you, it’s recommended that you place the extra points in here to reduce the mana cost of your shots and stings
• Go for the Throat: With every critical strike of ours, our pet will gain 50 focus, which will increase their damage output
• Aimed Shot: This is a hefty ability – for the great damage and the reduced healing effect it has on your target
• Rapid Killing: This is mainly taken for the cooldown reduction of Rapid Fire since with the exception of trash pulls in raids, you generally won’t be killing a boss, and attacking another within 20 seconds
• Mortal Shots: This is an undisputable talent to pick up since it increases the critical strike damage bonus by 30%
• Scatter Shot: This is great for Crowd Control, but we mainly grab it so that we can access Trueshot Aura
• Barrage: We use Multi-Shot regularly enough that increasing its damage is beneficial
• Combat Experience: Increasing our Agility and Intellect will increase both our DPS and our longevity in fights
• Ranged Weapon Specialization: Increasing our ranged damage by 5% is vital
• Careful Aim: Increasing our Attack Power based on our Intellect is incredible, especially since Combat Expertise increases our total Intellect
• Trueshot Aura: Increasing all party member’s attack power in your group is always beneficial
• Improved Barrage: Similar to Barrage, it’s always beneficial to increase damage from Multi-Shot
• Master Marksman: Increased total Attack Power is great, especially when it’s by 10% and continues to scale when improving your gear

If you notice that your pet really isn’t causing that much damage, even with Unleashed Fury, you can take those 4 points, and the 1 point in Thick Hide, and place them in Efficiency and either Monster Slaying or Humanoid Slaying.