Combat Experience
2 Point Talent
Increases your total Agility and Intellect by 2/4%.
Overview
Combat Experience increases both your agility and intellect by up to 4% depending upon the points invested.
Why take it?
Combat Experience is another bread and butter talent for Marksmanship Hunters. It’s a pretty necessary place to stick two points while making your way down the MM tree.
It may not seem like much, but if you have 1000 agility and 400 Intellect for example, this talent would give you 40 additional agility and 16 intellect. With 3/3 in Careful Aim, this will translate into:
- 56 more RAP
- .48% additional crit chance
- 240 mana
- 80 armor
- and some dodge…
So as you can see, it’s sort of like adding two uber gems to your build without using up any gem slots. 2 points in Combat Experience provides a subtle, yet noticeable difference to overall DPS. Plus, any talents such as these are always nice when scaling raid buffs like Blessing of Kings come into play.
Why not take it?
Apart from being Beast Mastery or Survival specced, I can’t really think of a strong argument against it for most MM builds.
The only case where I could see a MM Hunter passing on this talent would be for PvP. In this case, Concussive Barrage would be the talent of choice over Combat Experience. CE won’t be as much of a factor in short bursty fights, where as Concussive Barrage is a big difference maker in PvP.
All in all, I’d consider Combat Experience to be an expendable talent for PvP. Some Hunters may want it for a little added crit, but its use for PvP is negligible.
Ranged Weapon Specialization
3 Point Talent
Increases the damage you deal with ranged weapons by 1/3/5%.
Overview
Ranged Weapon Specialization increases all ranged damage by up to 5%, plain and simple.
Why take it?
5% additional damage for 3 points is a cheap boost to overall DPS. The caveat is that you need to invest all three points in here in order to get the best value from the talent. However, sticking 3 points in here is a no brainer in my opinion. Keep in mind that Chimera Shot‘s damage is based off of weapon damage and not attack power, so the more weapon damage, the more whallop Chimera will be packing.
3 points in RWS. Do it.
Why not take it?
If you’re Beast Mastery or Survival.
