Marksmanship Hunter Talents Guide

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The only “mandatory” talents in the Hunter tree are your defensive and offensive nodes. The entirety of your utility toolkit is interchangeable depending on the situation you are in.

Notable offensive nodes are:

• Deathblow: a talent that gives your Aimed Shot a chance to instantly ready Kill Shot and make it usable on any target regardless of Health percentage.age.
• Specialized Arsenal: a flat 10% damage increase to Aimed Shot.
• Explosive Shot with Blackrock Munitions: AoE burst ability that is also a decent single target option.
• Trigger Finger, Keen Eyesight and Serrated Tips which are passive stats.
• Unnatural Causes: Increases your damage over time effects.

Mandatory defensive nodes are:

• Hunter's Avoidance for a passive 5% avoidance.
• Natural Mending, Rejuvenating Wind and Wilderness Medicine to buff your Exhilaration.
• Survival of the Fittest with Padded Armor and Lone Survivor to get the maximum value out of your main defense.
• Born to Be Wild to reduce the cooldown of your Aspects, most notably Aspect of the Turtle.

Apart from those mandatory nodes and the nodes you have to pick along the way, you have about 5-6 free talent points to put into whatever utility you might want to pick up. Intimidation, Binding Shot, Implosive Trap or Bursting Shot are strong options for crowd control. There is also some niche utility in the form of Scout’s Instincts to get rid of slows, or Emergency Salve if you are in need of poison/disease dispels.

There are a lot of passive damage increases in our talent tree, so I will just give a brief overview of gameplay altering choices.

Trick Shots received another choice node called Aspect of the Hydra. It makes most of your spells passively cleave onto a second target, without the need of using Multi-Shot.

Tenacious and Cunning grant us access to “pet bound” utilities like Freedom, without an active pet.

Precision Detonation, Shrapnel Shot and Magnetic Gunpower vastly increase the potency and availability of Explosive Shot.

Last but not least we have several talents that increase the potency of Trueshot:

• Feathered Frenzy increases the chance to proc Spotter’s Mark.
• Calling the Shots reduces Trueshots cooldown by spending Spotter’s Mark.
• Tensile Bowstring extends Trueshots duration and makes us cast faster.
• Double Tap lets us cast a double version of Rapid Fire or Aimed Shot when using Trueshot or Volley.
• Unerring Vision is stacking up Crit chance and Crit damage each second of Trueshot, as well as granting Calling the Shots more cooldown reduction.

Dark Ranger

Dark Ranger replaces Kill Shot with a stronger version called Black Arrow, that we can use above 80% and below 20% HP.

We also receive a different variety of ways to reset Black Arrow, with Auto-Shots and Black Arrow itself. Withering Fire is our capstone node for Dark Ranger, that makes Trueshot grant a Deathblow proc, as well as letting your Black Arrows cleave for the duration.

The defensive trait in this Hero Tree is Smoke Screen which allows Exhilaration to be used as a third charge of Survival of the Fittest and vice versa. This is incredibly strong!

Sentinel

Sentinel essentially applies stacks on targets you hit. After accumulating some stacks, they implode, dealing damage over time.

The notable nodes on the Sentinel tree are Symphonic Arsenal which makes Multi-Shot deal additional damage to targets afflicted by Sentinel. Sentinel Watch which further decreases the cooldown of Trueshot, and Lunar Storm that summons a damaging area when pressing Rapid Fire.

The defensive trait in this Hero Tree is Don’t Look Back granting you an absorb shield when Sentinel does damage.