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For years my answer was simply: "heart-lung shot, just behind the shoulder."
After a couple of tracking incidents in which my margin of error was tested (even though the shot was pretty good), and the deer made it a distance into the brush before completely expiring, I've moved my optimal shot a tad.
The first thing I did was to move that bullet placement about 2" further forward. It's very difficult to hit the deer too far forward, and if there is likely to be a lateral drift, it is going to be toward the rear of the animal, given that they tend to move forward. [profound, I know.]
I'm on record in saying that I just don't think it's much of a loss to bust a shoulder of a deer-- there's not much meet there, and what is there is hard to get at. I try, every year, but it just goes into the sausage grinder. Big loss of maybe 2 lbs on a TX whitetail, and you positively ANCHOR him.
My next move in shot placement came after some serendipitous high shots. I set my sights to shoot about 2.5" high at 100 so that I'm dead on at 225 and 8" low at 300. One year, the scope was a tad high, say 3.5" at 100 with the given load I was using. 3 deer walked in front of the rifle before I lowered the setting, and all three had spectacular kills. What happened? The bullet, in all three cases, just barely kissed the ridge of bone that runs beneath the spine, imparting HUGE shock to spine on the way through. Deer's total travel? 2 feet. Straight down. This aim point is just about 2" higher than I used to aim at 100, and I must stress that I don't try for this shot at longer (250+) ranges, due to the fact that the margin of error is somewhat (but not greatly) diminished. I'm a big believer in margin of error. For this reason I can NEVER reccomend a head shot or high neck shot, unless as a coup de gras or to try to bring down a wounded animal that only presents that shot. Very slight movements change a killer head shot into a terrible crippling jaw shot off, and the resultant starving over the next 2 weeks.
Remember that the neck of a deer is strong and muscular, and moves incredibly quickly and unpredictably. Oh, you say, it can't move the head before my laser-fast bullet gets thered! Really? If you have a rifle that fires the bullet at an honest 3000 fps, at 100 yds it will take that bullet over 1/10 of a second to reach the deer, and that doesn't even count reaction time, should the deer begin moving before the shot actually goes off. At 200 yards, it's more like a quarter of a second. A good sprinter can move 7 feet in that time. Think maybe a spooked deer can move his spinal collumn 4" in that time?
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