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 Kill Command a chance to instantly ready Kill Shot and make it usable on any target regardless of Health percentage.
• 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 and Rejuvenating Wind 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.

The Marksmanship tree has mostly received positional changes to already existing nodes, allowing for different builds.

The first major change is to the way our Wind Arrows from Legacy of the Windrunners work.

We now spawn a lot less Wind Arrows, but after accumulating 20 of them we change our next Aimed Shot into a Wailing Arrow. With Readiness talented you reset both your Aimed Shot charges as well as your Rapid Fire. During Trueshot we additionally summon double the Wind Arrows.

The second major change is to the talents for Trueshot itself. Calling the Shots and Unerring Vision are no longer the same choice node. This enables you to pick Calling the Shots and Unerring Vision at the same time, massively increasing the potential of Trueshot while simultaneously decreasing its cooldown.

Another noteworthy new talent is Penetrating Shots. This turns critical strike chance into critical strike damage. One of the reasons we want to stack a lot of crit rating.

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 auto-cast a cleaving version of Black Arrow, whenever we gain a Deathblow proc.

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.