Hunter Hero Talents — The War Within (11.0.5)

This page is specifically about Hero Talents in The War Within. If you want to learn more about the best regular talents for Marksmanship Hunter, check out our Talents page:

Sentinel is our strongest Hero Talent for Raiding in general, providing by far the highest DPS in all scenarios.

Dark Ranger is significantly behind in terms of DPS output and not worth picking in any scenario.

Sentinel is our strongest Hero Talent for Mythic+ scenarios, providing the most damage and a decent defensive profile.

While Sentinel is strongest for DPS by far, Dark Ranger has a key advantage — Smoke Screen. This defensive node is incredibly strong for high Mythic+, because it lets you effectively use Exhilaration, with its very short cooldown thanks to Natural Mending, as an additional one-shot mitigator. As a Dark Ranger Marksmanship Hunter, you will almost never run out of defensives to press for hard-hitting mechanics. The cost, of course, is a ton of damage, but sometimes surviving is more important than dealing the most damage.

2.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Marksmanship Hunter

Sentinel Build Dark Ranger Build

3.

Best Sentinel Build for Marksmanship Hunter

Sentinel is very straightforward to build. Our only notable choice is Sentinel Watch or Eyes Closed. We default to Sentinel Watch for the shorter cooldown, but if you find yourself simply not pressing Trueshot perfectly off cooldown to take advantage of the cooldown reduction, swap to Eyes Closed for a longer cooldown, but much better burst.

3.

Best Dark Ranger Pure Single-Target Build for Marksmanship Hunter

Dark Ranger is straightforward to build, and always chooses the same choice nodes.

Sentinel has no appreciable impact on your rotational priorities. There is one minmax pertaining to Lunar Storm, which is also laid out in the Rotation section. Essentially, we want to ensure that we refresh Lunar Storm, which has a 15-second trigger cooldown, on cooldown. Sometimes, this means delaying Rapid Fire for up to 5 seconds to catch that refresh immediately, since otherwise we might have to wait 20 seconds for the next Rapid Fire to roll around if we do not get lucky with resets.

But, other than that minmax, Sentinel is completely passive.

Dark Rangers replace Kill Shot with Black Arrow. For the most part, it occupies the same role in the rotation where you use the procs as they come. On AoE, however, it is also crucial that you use Black Arrows only while Trick Shots is active, just like you are doing with Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire.