Season of Discovery Marksmanship Hunter DPS Talents and Runes

These are going to be the optimal talent points to take at level 60 in Season of Discovery, with little variation. If your goal is to do the most damage possible at level 60, this is your only real choice. This is assuming that your goal is to maximize raid DPS, which means taking all 31 points in Marksmanship to grab Trueshot Aura at level 40. All of the other talents along the way are the best DPS options, locked in for each row. The only variant will be the 3 points in Hawk Eye, which you could choose to put into Improved Hunter's Mark for better marking.

Past the initial 31 points, you're going to want points in Monster Slaying and Improved Aspect of the Hawk. These are the highest DPS talents available outside of the MM tree. None of the other options provide any meaningful DPS benefit. After this, we mainly dump the remaining points into the Survival tree. Since we are playing with Lone Wolf after the massive buffs, pet talents are useless to us.

• Pants — Sniper Training
• Gloves — Chimera Shot
• Chest — Lone Wolf
• Belt — Expose Weakness
• Boots — Trap Launcher
• Helm — Lock and Load
• Wrists — T.N.T.
• Cloak — Resourcefulness
• Ring 1 — Ranged Weapon Specialization
• Ring 2 — Pole Weapon Specialization

For the gloves rune, while Explosive Shot was incredibly strong in the first few days during leveling, it was subsequently reworked and is now very weak for single target damage. It is an AOE spell that is only useful on extremely high target situations, which is not common even in the raid. Chimera Shot is the strongest choice overall and will be incredibly important for single target damage.

For pants, after the recent buffs Sniper Training is too powerful to pass up for the massive increase to your crit. The other options don't compare when you account for your own damage.

For chest rune, Lone Wolf is the only choice after some absolutely massive buffs. Losing your pet is well worth the damage increase.

For belt, Expose Weakness is going to be the obvious choice for the huge passive damage bonus it will provide.

Finally, for boots, you'll either use Trap Launcher for shorter or AoE based encounters where traps are going to have an impact or Invigoration for the Mana sustain that will be invaluable on longer encounters.

At level 50, your two new runes will be Lock and Load and T.N.T.. There are not many options to choose from, and while these aren't particularly stellar, the other options are designed specifically for melee. These will be your go-to runes in all situations, although Rapid Killing could prove to be useful on a fight that is under 3 minutes, allowing a second Rapid Fire.

At level 60, you have access to the back and ring rune slots. These will be relatively static due to the nature of the runes. For back, Resourcefulness is the best option by far due to the huge trap benefit this offers, as well as some mediocre secondary options. For rings, you have the leeway to pick what you want here, but you will always want to just take whatever weapon types you are currently using.