Demonology has of course been a big topic of discussion between
Power Infusion,
Demonic Consumption scaling and just overall strength in Sepulcher. Not too long ago we received a change that reduced our damage and has brought Demonology back in line with other classes, however there is still some blame being thrown over to
Power Infusion when really this scaling was bound to happen in the long run regardless.
Demonology
- Demonic Consumption’s (Talent) now causes your Demon Commander to drain 12% of the life from your other demons (was 15%).
- The haste generated from Implosive Potential (Runecarving Power) can now only benefit from a maximum of 15 imps from Implosion. The tooltip will reflect this change in a future patch.
As top guilds have started to finish Sepulcher of the First Ones, Marksmanship Hunter has come to the forefront as one of the best DPS specs for this raid. The primary reason for our strength lies in our AoE prowess. That being said, there are some large caveats. Marksmanship's strength is largely fight dependent and relies on heavy AoE for it to be strong. From fight to fight, there are large swings in Marksmanship's viability depending on whether AoE phases are present in that particular encounter. Fights such as
Vigilant Guardian,
Artificer Xy'mox and
Anduin Wrynn that involve heavy add killing phases, Marksmanship tends to shine. But then we look at more single target, high-movement type fights such as
Dausegne,
Halondrus or
Rygelon and we see Marksmanship towards the bottom.
These trends can easily be explained simply by looking at our tier set bonuses.
Focused Trickery gives Marksmanship a ton of passive AoE, adding to its already strong baseline abilities such as
Volley and Night Fae's
Wild Spirits. The nice thing about our tier set here is the
passive AoE it gives, we no longer have to sacrifice single target damage to perform AoE. Additionally,
Fragments of the Elder Antlers gives Marksmanship incredible burst damage every 2 minutes, which lines up quite nicely for most fights in Sepulcher of the First Ones. We can see just how strong Marksmanship's AoE currently is by observing Mythic+ settings. We are currently one of the strongest Mythic+ specs, mostly due to our high consistent AoE output.
On the flip side, Marksmanship still has a ton of weaknesses. While our tier set provides a hefty amount of AoE damage, it does not provide very much single target gain relative to most other classes. Thus, on the fights mentioned above that do not have add phases in the encounter, Marksmanship's damage is mediocre at best. We also see another major disadvantage of the Marksmanship tier set on a fight like Halondrus.
Focused Trickery, quite literally, turns us into an
Aimed Shot bot. Almost 75% of our time is spent casting Aimed Shot once we obtain 4 set bonus. This of course means to perform an optimal rotation, we must remain planted. High movement fights such as Halondrus shed light on this weakness of ours as we can clearly see with Marksmanship's poor performance on that fight in particular. We can even see the few Marksmanship Hunters that have killed Mythic Halondrus have opted to go Venthyr for a more "on-the-move" damage profile.
Year of the Spear
No, you're not dreaming. This is an article on WoWhead about Survival Hunter's impressive performance in a raid tier.
What started as (some might say a meme) a rallying cry in the beginning of Shadowlands, "Year of the Spear" was seen in many online communities about what spec to play each tier of the current expansion pack. While the specialization was never
bad, it's previous performance was a hard sell—bringing a melee DPS when the Hunter class has such appealing ranged DPS such as the ever-powerful Marksmanship or the mechanical and mobility deity known as Beast Mastery was often seen as questionable.
That isn't to say the spec has been weak, either. For the last few years the spec has had a very powerful AoE kit composed of two very powerful (and until recently) always uncapped abilities:
Wildfire Bomb and the once-Azerite trait, now Legendary
Wildfire Cluster. The quick and dirty? Using a combination of talents, Legendaries, and proper play the seemingly long cooldown of
Wildfire Bomb is much shorter than you'd think and you find yourself in a fast-paced, high-damaging gameplay loop of
Carve and
Wildfire Bomb pushing out impressive numbers in AoE encounters.
Sepulcher of the First Ones
As many of you know, Patch 9.2 brought back a fan-favorite in tier-set bonus abilities. A quick refresher on Survival's fancy new toy is down below.
Mad Bombardier