The Rework No One Asked For - Marksmanship Hunter by the Numbers

Posted 2026/05/02 at 12:59 PM by TheAzortharion

previously highlighted community sentimentMarksmanship's Patch 12.0.5 Rework IssuesThe NumbersAspect of the HydraAspect of the HydraSentinelSpotter's MarkAspect of the HydraTrick ShotsLunar StormBulletstorm

It went from being a middle-of-the-pack Mythic+ spec, to one of the worst in the game. It should go without saying that nerfing a spec while it is merely middle-of-the-pack, while buffing specs that are already at the very top, is confusing and frustrating to behold.

Its single-target stayed about the same, somewhere near the bottom.

Its Belo'ren Egg Damage performance, one of the big burst single-target checks of the season, went from "very good" to somewhere near the bottom. One caveat of this Statistic is that it also counts P1 boss damage, so it is not a perfect analogue. Still, comparing top logs to pre-patch top logs, the loss is around 15% in this department.

Its Lightblinded Vanguard 2-3-target cleave performance went from being the best in the game to pretty decent. This is what I mean by its niche. It is the only scenario where Marksmanship is still a half-decent spec. Meanwhile, Augmentation Evoker, which was about as good as Marksmanship before, remains about as good as Marksmanship was before (taking a small nerf since it no longer has OP Marksmanship Hunters to buff). Meanwhile, Augmentation remains in the Mythic+ meta and is just all-around one of the best specs across the whole raid.

less effort and fewer work hours at BlizzardThe Gameplay

Explosive Shot is virtually never used due to being undertuned. Even with a 3 talent-point investment, it does maybe 1% of our damage. Most of its value is just in the Shrapnel Shot Talent.

On paper, our single-target was buffed slightly. In practice, the Headshot debuff is responsible for so much of Dark Ranger power that its single-target is garbage wherever it matters, because the Headshot debuff attaches to your target, which is forced to change on Belo'ren Egg Phases, Midnight Falls intermissions, Alleria target swaps, and of course constantly in Mythic+.

Aspect of the Hydra is a good talent in this raid for Sentinel. But Sentinel was gutted, and Dark Ranger's core ability, Black Arrow, is conspicuously missing from Hydra's list of affected abilities, destroying its cleave potential.

For the same reason as above, Dark Ranger is forced to run Trick Shots over Aspect of the Hydra in Mythic+ just to do middling AoE damage, losing all of its 2-target DPS and funnel in the process.

The redesigned Windrunner Quiver, in conjunction with the massively nerfed Precise Shots, is so weak as to almost never be used for any content as any Hero Talent. Another example of genuine work being put into something so undertuned and garbage that it never sees any actual play.

Meanwhile, the right-hand capstone Unload is gated behind the Small Game Hunter Talent, which is a completely 0-value Talent point for many builds, since almost no good builds actually run Explosive Shot, and Volley damage is just weak in general. In other words, on single-target, you must take a Talent point that gives you literally 0 value, just to grab a core keystone for the spec.

In the few scenarios where we do run Windrunner Quiver, it is pretty much a universally-maligned, dare I say "clunky" Talent. Precise Shots procs are so nerfed and so slow (with the GCD reduction removed) that the procs do not feel fun or satisfying to get.

Aimed Shot cooldowns are so much longer due to removed CD-reduction mechanics (tied to the Precise Shots nerfs) that being forced to Steady Shot (an ability that does ~auto-shot damage for a 1.75-second cast) during Trueshot (what is supposed to be one of the strongest 2-minute cooldowns in the game) is common.

This is not Patch 12.0.5-specific, but Calling the Shots continues to never be used. It is probably about time to make it turn Trueshot into a 1-minute cooldown, or maybe an ultra-powerful 3-minute cooldown. 90 seconds just does not do it for almost all content.

Summaryworst specs in the game

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Comment by KarthusTeemoThank god hunters have someone like Azor and others trying to fight against this dev team for changes. Unfortunately they are stubborn and will never list.Comment by Khwodang a reason to not touch my hunter anymore lol. what was the point of this? :(Comment by ninjaflower1i could hear the car crash that is clicking on the worst specs in the game link.

edit: do MM hunters and Resto shamans share the same dev?

literally the same behaviors and logic around pruning of talents and the last minute yoinking of Whispering Waves. The dev does not bother to engage with the actual feedback and just take it upon themselves to make changes in spite of the class/spec identity and playstyle.Comment by Kilgharrah96Thank god hunters have someone like Azor and others trying to fight against this dev team for changes. Unfortunately they are stubborn and will never list.Comment by LuxiusAs if the Devs would give a $%^& about that

They do what they think is right and they %^&* on the community on a regular basis..Comment by Kilgharrah96All they had to do was leave it as it was in TWW S2-S3, and replace the talents that was useless, looking at you Obsidian Arrowhead, This whole calamity could've been avoided.Comment by TastelikelemonClass dev team is beyond bad with all their decisions for like a year now , especially bad with the beginig of this expansion. Every class is getting either weekly buffs in to nerfs in the next week forcing guilds to swap classes 24/7 for some bosses all the time.With some recent reworks devs didnt even bothered to tune it properly before release in to nerfing it just week after /resto druids/. I havent seen so clueless dev team with the game in years , its a wild ride that noone wants to play like that - one week you feel powerful , on the next your GM bench you cuz "well this class got buffed and its better now to push X boss hp or kill X adds faster"...we pay to support complete incompetence.Comment by KahlenTime to close the class discord and get a 5% aura buff. (This joke will never get old.) As someone who's played hunter on and off since the end of Vanilla retail, I just honestly can't believe the direction that blizzard is heading into. I told myself I wasn't gonna buy midnight but I caved anyway and boy was it a mistake. I remember getting the battle chest for vanilla with like 7 discs and spending 6 hours downloading them to the family computer. I understand progression and that the game I once knew is gone, it's not rose colored glasses. I'm just kinda sad that the game that was my childhood get shafted like this in so many ways.Comment by Arviuits laughable from blizz. Are they rly thinking that the buffs from next week will magicaly fix the devastating problems from MM and BM, too?Comment by CorpselanceGreat article. Exactly.

I was a huge fan of Marked Shot in the Legion rework, because I figured out that if you didn't take the guide-recommended talent "Sidewinder" which replaced your Arcane Shot AND Multishot with a single skill, Sidewinder, which was like a combination of both skills with a short cooldown, you could actually throw out INSANE burst damage during your Trueshot window by ignoring Aimed Shot altogether and just pressing Arcane Shot, then Marked Shot back and forth. (Or Multishot instead of Arcane Shot in AoE for even more devastation). This was finally realized by Blizzard at some point and they completely scrapped Marked Shot because it was an instant, way more powerful version of Aimed Shot that only had the requirement that you proc a mark on enemies with Arcane or Multishot. But During Trueshot, it was 100% chance.

After Blizzard killed that, I didn't think I'd ever love Marks again. For a long time, it struggled with the new "Rapid Fire" which was just a single-target Barrage that didn't fit into the rotation well. At one point, players in BfA made something called the "Machine Gun" build, where stacking a certain Azerite power made 5 casts of Steady Shot back-to-back empower your next Aimed Shot with massive damage, and it ignored the other skills almost entirely. Very fun version of Marks, and also funny. And hey, it got us to press our most useless skill, Steady Shot.

But the devs hated that the players came up with their own build, in both cases, rather than being pigeonholed into whatever the Devs were thinking we *should* do. So, they buffed Rapid Fire to the point of it being a longer CD, channeled version of Aimed Shot, essentially. Then they made it so we could use Disengage while Rapid Firing (very nice, at least).

Then the spec was just "okay" in my terms, for a long time. But in The War Within, the devs did something incredible. Not only did they finally give us Black Arrow, truly, but they made it deal absolutely astronomical damage through stacking Crit and ignoring all other secondaries in Season 2 of TWW. Paired with a Crit = Crit Damage passive (Chef's Kiss), I quickly fell in love with Marksman again and played it for the rest of TWW. Incredible design. It finally understood the rough edges of Bloodlust without a pet, while dealing damage like a true sniper. The Risk vs Reward of Crit vs Non-crit.

And then, of course, came Midnight's initial changes. A few nerfs, but overall negated by tuning and tier set, etc. Gone were the days of using that clunky Explosive Shot in single target, oh-ho! ... And now for Patch 12.0.5, they suddenly decide, "No no, wait, let's quickly make it worse again. Overnerf and give them a dead-on-arrival skill they didn't want back." So what is the solution? Buff Explosive Shot, of course. Simply incredible. We saw it with Rapid FIre, and now we're seeing it with Explosive Shot. Blizzard really can't just let the players jump in their pile of leaves, can they?

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I wonder, and hope, that Blizzard will too.Comment by RachakAzortharion my GoatComment by cdavi52Nice article. Honestly sort of cathartic to read. It's been really annoying having to reroll specs midseason. Especially moving to survival from MM to be viable for raid progression has just been a lot of work and wasted vault / voidcores. The change was incomprehensible to me. It seems like the kind of overhaul that happens in between seasons, not mid progression, and I've felt really frustrated with the dev team ever since. And as you pointed out, it's not even a well calculated overhaul.Comment by DrDoomguyMM was amazing with their rework in TWW with a good smooth reward mechanic. The Midnight class designer got the call to remove abilities so they gutted the class tools alongside with all the benefits and rewards with the rework while keeping all the negatives.

Now it’s a really bad identity where one hero talent turns you into a 3 second caster and a snorefest outside trueshot while and the other turns you into a necromancer summoning the same pets the hunter rework in TWW was all about removing

Bring back explosive trap!Comment by VarusEUBlizzard devs and completely overengineered solutions, name a more iconic duoComment by Renzo197Marksmanship was in the best state it had been in a long time in terms of gameplay. Yeah, that's true, but after blizzard's rework gameplay became awful, it's so slow, i play like 1000 ms, DR MM is a dog *!@#, nobody want to play with this hero talents, players enjoy Sent MM. Yesterday class tune won't change this situation, as tuned things dont' affect on gameplay, so the best decision REWERT 12.05 hunter's %^&*ty changes, as blizzard don't know what to do with classes in this game, as they can't afford class designers and don't listen their community and players.Comment by BlueearthHonestly not only a number issue, Marksmanship would've been fine with slight dps nerfs because it was in fact overtuned. However, that whole rework just made MM gameplay really worse. It's now super clunky, super SLOW, so slow that it feels like i'm playing a tank on FF14 with 3s GCDS.

Hopefully for us, survival is banger in numbers and gameplay, gotta wait for blizzard dev team to do something with MM.Comment by r1dd3lBM is the worst spec for raiding should be highlighted more often and have its own topic not just small letters under summary

i think he azor could do much more for HUNTER in general than this we have many examples reddit posts with statistics and data, youtube videos, forum posts and HE SHOULD ASK COMMUNITY FOR BACK UP

all i remember azor for is that terrible video with max and selling his UI, he COULD DO MUCH MORE we would FOLLOW

ps: AND BEFORE HIS FANBOYS EAT ME ALIVE THE RESULT IS WHAT MATTERS THE MOST AND WE HAVE NONE ESPECIALLY FOR THE WORST SPEC FOR RAIDING, WHAT COULD BE LOWER THAN THAT, TERRIBLE REWORK, TERRIBLE PACK LEADER, TERRIBLE TALENT CHOICES NO ST DAMAGE IN AOE BUILD HELLO THERE AZORComment by MarkElfMM players just spent that past week crying cause their numbers are low and they got their buff. God forbid Survival is the better hunter spec for a whole week. Explosive shot was a fun proc for both specs at the end of TWW but readding it does go entirely against the whole pruning goal they had in 12.0... Make up your mind Blizzard. Other specs are slowly going to regain things to keep their spec interesting. What MM really needs is a minor nerf and reduce time for the Aim Shot cast. The additional duration adding for the 12.0 rework was such a miss.

BM is the worst spec for raiding should be highlighted more often and have its own topic not just small letters under summary

i think he azor could do much more for HUNTER in general than this we have many examples reddit posts with statistics and data, youtube videos, forum posts and HE SHOULD ASK COMMUNITY FOR BACK UP

all i remember azor for is that terrible video with max and selling his UI, he COULD DO MUCH MORE we would FOLLOWComment by r1dd3lMM players just spent that past week crying cause their numbers are low and they got their buff. God forbid Survival is the better hunter spec for a whole week. Explosive shot was a fun proc for both specs at the end of TWW but readding it does go entirely against the whole pruning goal they had in 12.0... Make up your mind Blizzard. Other specs are slowly going to regain things to keep their spec interesting. What MM really needs is a minor nerf and reduce time for the Aim Shot cast. The additional duration adding for the 12.0 rework was such a miss.Comment by LunarizsaYep... Pre-season I was so excited to go back to MM, go back to my roots. Then this all happened and I haven't touched my hunter in like 2 weeks, barely even logged on to it. It used to remind me a lot of shadowlands MM and I loved the spec then but now.. So now I swapped to disc priest main... I currently find 0 joy in my hunter sadly.

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