Hunter
Marksmanship
Playstyle
Slow-casting but hard-hitting ranged DPS built around Aimed Shot, Rapid Fire, and Kill Shot on cooldown, with Arcane Shot as spender and Steady Shot as filler. High skill floor: roughly 40% of uptime can be locked into Aimed Shot's cast, so movement and charge management matter a lot. Trueshot compresses everything into a short, intense burst window.
Same near-mandatory Hunter's Mark buff as its sibling specs
Season 2 Tier Set
Skulking Viper's Ambush
Explosive Shot lasts 1 second longer and deals 20% increased damage.
Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire damage increased by 5%. Each time Explosive Shot causes a burst of damage, the cooldown of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire is reduced by 0.5 seconds.
+ The Good
Same near-mandatory Hunter's Mark buff as its sibling specs
Among the highest peak burst AoE numbers in the game, up to its 8-target cap
More mobile than most other ranged casters, if not as mobile as Beast Mastery
− The Bad
Damage falls off a cliff past 8 targets
One of the weaker M+ picks since dungeon pulls usually exceed its ideal target count
Long non-cooldown cast times make it slow to react to sudden target swaps
Pick My Main ratings
Raid buffs
Utility
Hero talents
Replaces Kill Shot with a much more frequent Black Arrow and adds extra Deathblow procs; heavily proc-driven and reactive rather than a fixed rotation.
A quieter, mostly-passive tree layered on top of the standard Marksmanship rotation rather than changing it. Currently the stronger option in every scenario given Dark Ranger's reliance on mechanics that got pruned this expansion.