Marksmanship Hunter Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

• Dark Ranger
• Sentinel

General Playstyle

The 3 most important things of MM rotation are:

• Keep your cooldowns rolling. Aimed Shot, Rapid Fire and sometimes Kill Shot / Black Arrow should be used as soon as they come off cooldown. Aimed Shot should never hit 2 charges.
• Manage your Precise Shot stacks. It is very important to not overcap on them.
• Always keep casting! If you need to cancel Aimed Shot due to movement, cast an Arcane Shot or Steady Shot while moving, if your other abilities are on cooldown.

Marksmanship Hunter revolved around 2 different Stack mechanics. Precise Shots and Spotter's Mark. Precise Shots is buffing our filler spells Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot, whereas Spotter's Mark is buffing the damage of Aimed Shot. Aimed Shot generates Precise Shots, and consuming Precise Shots has a chance to grant Spotter's Mark. This dictates the basic gameplay loop of Marksmanship.

Multi Target

Your main mechanic in AoE is Trick Shots. It gets applied by hitting 3 or more targets with Multi-Shot / Black Arrow (as Dark Ranger), or by pressing Volley.

Both Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot consume your Trick Shots buff to hit additional targets around your main target.

It is vital to reapply Trick Shots before every single Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot!

Volley grants you Trick Shots for 6 seconds. This iteration of Trick Shots does not get consumed, hence there is no need to reapply Trick Shots while Volley is still going.

This allows you to cast as many Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot as you can fit in quick succession for huge burst damage.

For SENTINEL ONLY: As of right now, you can play Aspect Of The Hydra in Cleave/AoE situations. When choosing this build, Trick Shots is not relevant at all, and Multi-Shot is no longer part of the rotation at all. Extra Arcane Shots from Aspect Of The Hydra have a chance to proc additional Lunar Storms, which then can be consumed by Aimed Shot. This build has a lower AoE ceiling, while providing higher Single Target/Priority damage.

Cooldowns

Marksman is essentially capped by the cooldown of your abilities as well as Focus cost.

Trueshot gets rid of a huge portion of this cooldown and Focus cost and some of our talents and Hero Talents play into this burst fantasy, increasing either our damage, or granting access to more powerful abilities during Trueshot, allowing for a very high burst damage, for the duration of our cooldown.

When playing Double Tap and Volley, you need to make sure to not use Trueshot and Volley at the same time. Consume the Double Tap from Trueshot before casting Volley, otherwise Volley will simply reapply Double Tap, since it does not stack! In single target, it is best to consume Double Tap from Volley with Rapid Fire, before you enter Trueshot. In AoE you always want to consume Double Tap with Aimed Shot!

Dark Ranger and Black Arrow

While playing the Dark Ranger Hero Talents, Black Arrow turns into a very high priority spell for both Single Target and AoE.

Withering Fire is now active for the entire duration of Trueshot. During this time, Trueshot turns into Wailing Arrow and allows you to cast it once during that time.

Since Black Arrow does around triple damage during Trueshot, it is best to maximise the amount of Black Arrow you cast by consuming Deathblow during Withering Fire. By default you will get one Deathblow proc when you press Trueshot, and a second guaranteed proc after casting Wailing Arrow. On top of that every Rapid Fire guarantees an extra Deathblow and Aimed Shot has a chance of proccing Deathblow.

Deathblow generated from Aimed Shot, triggers once the Aimed Shot HITS its target. Since we do not want to wait to consume a possible proc as fast as possible, it is best to always cast the fitting Precise Shots spender, right at the end of the current Aimed Shot cast. In case you proc a Deathblow, you would consume it on the following Aimed Shot cast. When Black Arrow is ready to be used, queue it at the end of the Aimed Shot cast. This allows you to proc another Deathblow from the same Aimed Shot that is used to consume the already available Black Arrow.

Sentinel and Lunar Storm

When playing Sentinel, there is more emphasis on generating and consuming Precise Shots, in order to maximise the amount of Sentinel's Mark procs. This just means that consuming Precise Shots is one of our biggest priorities as long as Sentinel's Mark is not already on the target.

Lunar Storm itself is now simply a damage proc when Sentinel's Mark is consumed, so there is no reason for delaying any spells, or trying to place it in the correct position.

On top of doing a hefty chunk of damage, Moonlight Chakram is essentially a free Lock And Load proc, which can be very handy during AoE burst scenarios when combined with Volley, or simply for some mobility during Trueshot.

Defensives

Hunters have a really solid kit of healing and defensive options:

• We have 2 charges of Survival Of The Fittest as our main defensive wall.
• Aspect Of The Turtle functions as an immunity, with an inbuilt damage reduction against damage types you can not deflect.
• Exhilaration is our self healing skill. When playing Dark Ranger it even grants us Survival Of The Fittest for a short duration, essentially functioning as a third independent stack of our main defensive.
• Hunter's Avoidance granting us 5% passive avoidance against AoE damage.
• Roar Of Sacrifice as a damage redirection ability that is also usable to allied targets / Guardian's Hide for a passive 3% damage reduction.
• Touch Of Grass to increase our HP pool by 10%
• Endurance Training from Tenacious is granting us 5% more HP
• Air Superiority, also gained from Tenacious is granting us an additional 3% damage reduction