Scattered Shots: How to play a MM hunter
by Brian Wood 
Mar 21st 2013 at 9:00AM
With the awesome buffs to MM in Patch 5.2, MM hunter DPS is better than ever, just a theoretical wee bit behind SV DPS. Despite this, however, MM continues to be vastly under-represented in raid parses, often having so few it's impossible to make a statistical evaluation of their performance (and that's before even considering the selection bias).
Theories abound for the lack of MM representation: MM is harder to play; MM is technically a bit behind the others so everyone leans on the ones ahead; MM has no clear role in which they are superior (unlike BM burst and SV AoE); MM is associated with elves, and no one wants to have anything to do with dirty elven things.
It's been a long time since MM has been a popular spec, and most of the hunter optimization sites focus on maximizing your performance in BM or SV. So now seems like a good time to review how to optimize your MM hunter to take full advantage of all those juicy 5.2 buffs.
MM talents
Talents for the MM hunter look very similar to the talent selection you'll see for other hunters:
- Level 15 : Any
- Level 30 : Any, though Binding Shot is useful on some boss fights.
- Level 45 : Any, though Aspect of the Iron Hawk is typicall best for most raid encounters.
- Level 60 : Dire Beast
- Level 75 : A Murder of Crows
- Level 90 : Glaive Toss
Shot priority
As always you want to be sure that you have Hunter's Mark on your target, and that you put Serpent Sting up and keep it up throughout the fight. Thereafter your shot priority looks like this:
- Chimera Shot
- Steady Shot in pairs to maintain Steady Focus
- Stampede
- Kill Shot if available
- Aimed Shot if an instant version is procced
- Glaive Toss
- A Murder of Crows
- Dire Beast
- Arcane Shot
- Steady Shot as needed to regen focus
Careful Aim priority:
- Chimera Shot
- Aimed Shot even if you have to hardcast the long cast time version
- Steady Shot in pairs to regen focus as needed
Another complication of the MM rotation is whether or not to hardcast the full casttime version of Aimed Shot. In general, we don't want to do this in our rotation; however, during big haste effects like Rapid Fire or Ancient Hysteria you can also hardcast Aimed Shot.
MM hunters will also want to take the Glyph of Aimed Shot, so they can hardcast while moving.
AoE talents & rotation
The MM AoE rotation is fairly simple, just spamming Multi-Shot as often as possible, while also maintaining the Steady Focus buff with pairs of Steady Shots.
MM hunters benefit from Bombardment, which lowers the cost of their subsequent Multi-Shots by 20 focus and increases the damage. The Bombardment buff lasts for five seconds, so the key to MM AoE DPS is to keep that buff up always -- this means you will not always want to Steady Shot your focus all the way to full. Instead just fire the steadies in pairs and always get at least one Multi-Shot in between steady pairs.
As always, MM hunters will also want to launch an Explosive Trap into AoE packs that are going to be around for a while.
AoE talents: If you're in a fight where AoE is important, or you're just clearing lots of trash (such as in 5-mans) you will want to take Barrage instead of Glaive Toss, and take Thrill of the Hunt (which makes your Bombardment Multi-Shots free!) instead of Dire Beast.
Your AoE rotation then becomes:
- Launch Explosive Trap
- Barrage
- Multi-Shot
- Steady Shot pairs
Scattered Shots is dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. From leveling your hunter to learning the DPS value of skill, we've got you covered. If you're stuck in one of the nine support classes, why not move up to the big league and play a hunter?
Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots
