#marksmanship hunter

i am trying to choose a covenant to join on my marksman hunter when shadowlands releases. or really, i am trying to convince myself that kyrian is the best choice because it lets me shoot thru walls and has that blue angel trans dude as a soulbind in it and he’s my friend.

the first thing u need to know about marksman hunter dps is that it revolves around two abilities: Aimed Shot, which deals something like a third of your damage on any given fight, and Trueshot, which is its primary dps cooldown, and which reduces the cooldown and cast time on your aimed shot by 60%. so aimed shot is the most important thing, and trueshot is important because it lets you cast more aimed shots. you do nearly half of your damage while in trueshot, even though its active for just a quarter of the time.

if you look at any given talent row where one of the talents impacts your aimed shot either directly or through Trueshot, and the other ones dont, there is no row where the strongest choice is not the one that impacts aimed shot.

and so the question of which covenant ability will be the biggest upgrade is largely a question of how well they synergise with Aimed Shot.

the Night Fae ability, Wild Spirits, is  probably not a strong choice for marksman. it causes you to deal extra damage on every attack for its duration, so it scales with attack speed, which doesn’t pair well with marksman’s slower aimed shot-centric rotation.

the necrolord ability, Death Chakram, has a little interaction? it’s a stand alone attack and generates a little focus, MM’s resource, but focus isn’t usually the limiting factor on how many aimed shots you can cast, the cooldown on aimed shot is. the exception to this is during Trueshot, where you have plenty of aimed shot charges and focus is the limit on how many you can cast. the thing is, on a 45 second cooldown and paired with Call of the Wild and Calling the Shots this ability should actually end up lining up with every Trueshot... and if th extra focus gen resulted in 1 extra aimed shot per Trueshot cycle, combined with the truly massive damage the chakram itself deals... idunno! i’m not ruling it out? i think the real weakness of the necrolord covenant is the lack of good dps soulbinds.

which leaves the two covenants i think are probably the front runners.

the Venthyr covenant ability, Flayed Shot, also deals a good chunk of damage (almost exactly as much as an Aimed Shot) as bleed damage over 20 seconds, and is on a thirty second cooldown. every time it deals damage it also has a 15% chance of allowing you to use Kill Shot on any target, (normally only usable on targets below 20% health.) Kill Shot also does a ton of damage, about 4/5ths of the damage aimed shot does. it probably ticks 10 times per application so, maybe an average of 3 extra kill shots per minute, outside of execute phase? it might scale with haste?

compounding on this, the talent Dead Eye causes Kill Shot to reduce the cooldown on Aimed Shot... so, more aimed shots. it’s a really compelling case. if this ends up being the most powerful choice, I ain’t gonna be mad. this seems like it’ll be pretty fun to play with. of course, the other really compelling thing about the venthyr covenant is the medium range teleport it gives you access to on a 60 second cooldown. that’s pretty huge.

finally this leads us to the Kyrian and its beautiful blue angel man who teaches you how to shoot through walls. Resonating Arrow is on a 1 minute cooldown, affects an area for 10 seconds and increases your critical strike chance against all targets within it by 30%... in addition to causing all your abilities to ignore line of sight on those targets. its cool as fuck! even if its not that useful... there will probably be at least one raid fight where the ability to shoot through walls will be a big deal.

it’ll line up with every Trueshot while you’re running Calling the Shots (which is pretty much mandatory) and it scales directly with number of targets so it might end up being the best AoE option by a good margin. also, Pelagos, the aforementioned beautiful blue angel man might be the best throughput soulbind in the game? he provides 3 throughput conduit sockets and two strong passive effects.

alternating every ability for Let Go of the Past is a totally viable way to play MM, so this should translate to a flat 5% damage increase, and Mastery effects all of Marksman’s abilities so a 5% buff here is also effectively another 5% damage increase which will at least partially line up with Trueshot. the alternating attacks playstyle might end up being fun but it might not contribute anything all that meaningful to the rotation.

my biggest worry about Kyrian is that it might end up having negative synergy with the Call of the Wild legendary effect, which could end up desyncing Trueshot and Resonating Arrow. Since this might end up being one of the strongest legendaries, having it be essentially non viable for kyrian would be a huge blow.

This is the conversation Markmanship hunters get with Alleria about Thas’dorah!