Method Marksmanship Hunter Guide - Stats Races And Consumables

Stat Priorities

Stat Ranking

Weapon Damage > Agility > Crit > Mastery > Haste > Versatility

Stat Outline

Agility: Increases the magnitude of your attacks and abilities. This is your most important stat, which is why you want to look at the item level of each item rather than the stats on it. A higher item level is usually better because it gives more agility.

Mastery: Your mastery is called Mastery: Sniper Training, increasing the range and damage of all abilities.

Haste: Increases your auto attack speed, increases focus regeneration, reduces the cast time, and the cooldown of Aimed Shot.

Critical Strike: Increasing your chance to critically hit with all spells and abilities. It synergizes really well with Penetrating Shots, Lethality, Critical Precision, Bulletstorm / Incendiary Ammunition and our Apex Talents.

Versatility: Increasing all your damage and healing done and also decreases all damage taken. This can provide a bit of survivability that is sometimes needed for hunters.

As for tertiary stats, Avoidance is the best one, since it reduces your damage taken from a lot of different abilities.

Speed is a neat stat to have on your gear, making movement a bit less punishing.

Leech can provide a good chunk of self healing.

Races

Horde:

Pandaren: Pandaren doubles all stats gained by Food buffs. Those buffs are really strong early on in an expansion.
Tauren: Since your main stat priority is catered around critical striking, Tauren’s 2% critical strike is really strong in every scenario. War Stomp also provides a casted AoE stun, which can be useful in a lot of content.
Haranir later in expansion.

Alliance:

Pandaren: Pandaren doubles all stats gained by Food buffs. Those buffs are really strong early on in an expansion.
Dwarf is the best race for Alliance for the same reasons as Tauren, the difference being the active ability Stoneform providing a 10% physical damage reduction with an added omni-self dispel on a 2 minute cooldown. Dwarf is definitely the best overall option, and I highly recommend it!
Night Elf is another option, granting 1% Haste during night time, and 1% critical strike chance during the day. The active ability is Shadowmeld, which lets you drop threat from all targets instantly. You can use that ability a lot in Mythic+ and even on certain raid mechanics, to completely interrupt or ignore them.
Haranir later in expansion.