Addressing Hunter Marksmanship PvP Concerns - Enhancing Sustained Damage and Critical Hits

Hello, fellow hunters

I wanted to share my experiences in various PvP activities over the past week, including world PvP, arenas, and battlegrounds, as a Marksmanship Hunter with a PvP item level of 440. While I have witnessed impressive crits, such as Aimed Shots hitting for over 200k, and found the 2-piece tier set bonus enhancing the feel of Arcane Shot, I can’t help but feel our sustained damage is lacking.

Casting Aimed Shot below 70% feels underwhelming, as it is only as effective as an empowered Arcane Shot. Additionally, Kill Shot doesn’t provide meaningful damage unless it procs, and even with two charges, it often feels like a waste of global cooldowns. The bleeds and poisons we apply seem negligible due to the prevalence of absorbs in PvP encounters.

I had hoped that the trinket set bonus would compensate for the PvP nerf on critical strikes for MM, but it appears our abilities are lackluster without modifiers and critical hits. This raises the question of why our class hasn’t received any significant pvp buffs.

While I understand that the upcoming 4-piece set bonus may alleviate some of these issues, we will still face the same underlying problem. I propose a solution that involves buffing our normal abilities to be more impactful when unmodified, while also granting our critical hits the ability to truly devastate opponents outside of Careful Aim. An increase in crit damage somewhere in the talent tree could help achieve this.

By making these adjustments, Marksmanship Hunters would enjoy improved sustained damage output and the satisfaction of landing powerful critical hits. This would contribute to a more enjoyable and competitive PvP experience for Marksmanship Hunters, aligning us better with other classes in terms of sustained damage potential.

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts. I hope that we can engage in constructive discussions on this topic and work towards making Marksmanship Hunters a more viable choice in PvP.

buffing sharpshooter to be 5/10% might be good

i feel like i pump as MM even though top end aimed shots are similar to last season. outside of that, stuff like death chakrams, rapid fire, and arcane shot are all doing great damage imo. 23% mastery and hitting up to 90k chakram crits and 90k arcane shot crits.

aimed shot outside of careful aim could be better i agree. does not feel good having reroll enh/destros doing more damage than that purely from instants all game

Sharpshooter is a good choice to buff. I would further buff it by causing more bleed damage on crit.

They feel good for sure but death chakrams it’s on a 45s cd, Arc Shot only feels good when empowered and rapid fire is on a cd that depends on Aimed shot resets or trueshot windows. The downtime is real as MM lol

Solely because of how much we rely on getting aimed shots off and getting procs from it and being that it has a cast time and having rapid fire on a relatively long CD which also only has a 20% chance of proccing KS its just too much reliance on procs vs simply doing damage.

I wouldn’t even mind if they do the ignite route they did for fire mages. Buffing the EFF out of MM’s serpent sting, Master Marksman