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Marksmanship Tier 17 Set Bonuses

Marksmanship Hunters

The following is all information I covered before here, back in the Warlords of Draenor Beta, when tier 17 set bonuses were finalized. I've seen the subject come up again on the battle.net forums, and the MMO-Champion hunter forums, so I thought it might be worth going over again, as many of us are getting our 2 or 4 piece set bonuses in the live game. 



For Marksmanship Hunters, Blizzard did a great job of finding set bonuses that worked really well with how the spec is played. To be clear, in case you forgot about the perk, that's a total of 28 focus returned for each AiS crit. That means when TotH is proc'ed and Aimed Shot crits, you'll end up with more focus than you had when you started casting (cost -30, returns +28, passive regen about +7). Assuming we're crit capped during Careful Aim (it's worth noting the AiS crit cap during Careful Aim will be going up to 53% when 6.1 drops, which will also increase the overall value of crit during the rest of the fight), this gives MM even better opening and on-demand, single-target burst.

Unfortunately, the  MM 2-piece set bonus (much like SV's) will have absolutely no benefit to MM's abysmal AoE (BM's is the only 2-piece bonus that will affect AoE). The 4-piece, however, will at least have some effect on AoE:


This isn't going to be a game changer for MM, but it does mean that we'll be seeing a little bit more damage out of our Multi-Shots and Barrage.  In Heavy AoE situatioins, with TotH and Bombardment, we should be able to get some considerable Multi-Shot spam, and start to get a bit more damage out of it. This has the downside of still being very RNG intensive, and you will lack a lot of control, since you won't be able to make the damage go to a specific target, but will instead get randomly more damage to random targets.

Unfortunately, the nature of both the set bonuses means you'll need to be hitting an even greater number of targets before Multi-Shot starts to do more damage than Aimed Shot.

In single-target situations, the MM 4-piece set bonus is much more clear cut, of course, and it really doesn't have any effect on our rotation.  There may be a slight addendum that it will be even more important to make sure you can spam Aimed Shots the entire way through Rapid Fire (you do not want to be using Steady Shots/Focusing Shots), but you should be doing that anyway, so it's hardly a change, just more important to do it right.  

Overall, the MM tier bonuses are pretty fun. There's something really satisfying about seeing those ridiculously large crits, especially with Lone Wolf.  Since the devs have decided that MM will be a slow, casting type spec, getting to see unreasonably large crits is the only solace we get.

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