Marksmanship is the hunter who stays at range and lets Auto Shot carry the damage. Auto Shot fires on its own and is about 40.5 % of your total. Your global cooldowns go to Arcane Shot, Aimed Shot, Serpent Sting and Forever's new Sniper Shot, every one of them paid in mana, so on a long fight mana is what limits you. A cat fights beside you the whole time. On a one-minute single-boss fight this guide's build reaches 897.1 DPS, which places it 6th of 25 damage specs.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Packs of bosses. Multi-Shot hits three targets and you can keep a Serpent Sting on each of them. On a three-minute fight against three bosses Marksmanship ranks 4th of 25, its best result.
• Intellect counts twice. Careful Aim turns every point of Intellect into a point of ranged attack power, and the same Intellect pays for your shots. That is why Black Dragonscale Helm, with more Intellect than Agility, is the pick for your head.
• Crit never caps. Ranged attacks roll crit on their own, after the hit roll, so every point of crit adds damage. With Mortal Shots each crit deals 2.3 times its damage.
• A raid buff for other hunters. Hunter's Mark gives every ranged attacker 98 ranged attack power against your target, and Trueshot Aura adds 75 to the hunters in your group.

Weaknesses

• Mana on long fights. On a three-minute single-boss fight a Major Mana Potion is worth 7.0 % of your damage, against 0.0 % on a one-minute single-boss fight. Run dry and you are left with Auto Shot alone.
• Middling on one boss. You rank 5th on a three-minute single-boss fight, lower than on three bosses: a single target leaves Multi-Shot nothing to add, and it shares Aimed Shot's cooldown.
• Auto Shot has to keep firing. It can't fire while you move, and nothing within 8 yards can be shot. Any repositioning costs you the biggest part of your damage.

On every fight

Marksmanship climbs with the number of targets, because Multi-Shot and three Serpent Stings outpace anything a single target allows. Fight length matters less. The one-minute fights score highest, since mana never runs short there and Rapid Fire's 15 seconds cover a quarter of the fight. Pick a fight in the table to reread the guide for it.

Races

Night Elf is the Alliance's best race on every fight. Elune's Light gives 10 % crit with every attack for 15 seconds on a three-minute cooldown, and you press it at the pull.

On the Horde side, Orc comes out on top on a one-minute single-boss fight. Orcs win the one-minute fights through Blood Fury, which adds 10 % ranged attack power for 15 seconds and lines up with Rapid Fire at the pull. On the longer fights the top Horde races sit within a few DPS of each other. The Skyborne Windshaper's Wind Blessed, 1 % haste all fight, comes out about even with Blood Fury there.

Dwarves and Trolls have no ranged weapon racial in Forever: Gun Specialization and Bow Specialization are gone.

What a Hunter brings to the raid

Trueshot Aura is the buff Marksmanship adds to its group, and in Forever it raises ranged attack power only. It helps the other hunters in your party and nobody else, which is why the table lists so few specs. Hunter's Mark shows no value there because every hunter in the benchmark casts its own.

Changes

Each point is this build re-run on this fight after an update to the simulator or to Forever's data. The Updates page says what each update changed.