Season of Discovery Marksmanship Hunter DPS Talents and Runes

These are going to be the optimal talent points to take at level 50 in Season of Discovery, with little variation. If your goal is to do the most damage possible at level 50, 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 2 points in Improved Hunter's Mark, where you could choose to put those in Improved Serpent Sting instead for better Chimera Shot damage.

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.

• Pants — Flanking Strike
• Gloves — Beast Mastery
• Chest — Aspect of the Lion
• Belt — Expose Weakness
• Boots — Trap Launcher
• Helm — Lock and Load
• Wrists — Focus Fire

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 reasonably competitive, but is still outclassed because of how strong pets are in the current meta.

For the gloves rune, while Beast Mastery is the only real choice since it will be the largest buff to your pet. In the current state of Season of Discovery, pets are more powerful than they've ever been in Classic WoW. Making your pet as strong as possible is the best choice, even as Marksmanship. Chimera Shot is mildly close, to the point where it may be useful later on with more gear, but it is not the correct choice right now.

If you melee-weave in your rotation, Flanking Strike is the best option when used optimally. If you do not plan on melee-weaving, then you are free to pick any of the other rune options.

For chest rune, Aspect of the Lion is the strongest option by far now that it is an aura. The additional stats scale the damage of both you and your pet, as well as providing an exceptionally powerful raid buff.

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 Focus Fire. 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. However, even then, it's still rather mediocre when you cannot proc its secondary effect at max level. Rapid Fire will be decent for leveling from 50-60 though or for PvP.

More Engravings are likely to come out as we reach higher level caps, so make sure to checkout our general Runes guide to get a better understanding of what all tools you have available to your Hunter.