#0 - Jan. 14, 2008, 8:10 p.m.
Introduction
Welcome to Ayms Comprehensive All-In-One Hunter Guide. The purpose of this guide is to give you the basic knowledge to succeed as a hunter, teaching you how to best decide on the course of your life, aswell as providing you with tips and tricks to stand out amungst other players.
For too long, hunters have been shunned by the community, shouted at with vile names, and looked down on for our wierd, often too close relationships, with our pets. Many hunters lack the basic knowledge of the class, simply because leveling up as a hunter is insanely easy, and doesn't provide the challenging learning courve that other classes get.
If you're here, then that means that you're one of the few, that wants to make a difference!
Table of contents:
* * * Basics * * *
Pets
-Taming a pet
-Training a pet
-Pet control
* * * Talents * * *
Picking your spec
Beast mastery
-Talents
-Shot rotation
-Gear
Marksmanship
-Talents
-Shot rotation
-Gear
Survival
-Talents
-Shot rotation
-Gear
* * * Advanced huntering * * *
Player Versus Environment
Player Versus Player
Shot rotations
Pulling and kiting
Trapping
-Advanced pulling and trapping technique
Macros
Links and refrences
Changelog
Todo
About me, feedback and requests
^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^ P R E T T Y L I N E S ^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
* * * Basics * * *
PETS
Pets are an invaluable resource to hunters. They keep you company on long, boring grinds, they offer love and warmth at night, and adds a nice bit of damage to yours. Learn to control your pet, and you never have to be without it.
-Taming a pet
Once you reach level 10, you will get your hunter quest. This is a pretty straight forward quest, sending you out to tame a few animals. You don't get to keep these animals though, and once you're done with your quest, it's time to go find our companion. To tame a pet, simply select it, and press "Tame beast". You'll notice that for the next 20 seconds, the animal isn't really that loving, and you're suddenly squishy with your lack of armor. Eventually, the taming will finish, and you will have your very own pet.
If you're having problems taming a pet, try dropping a Freezing Trap between you and it. You can still tame a mob while it's trapped, and it can save you quite a lot of damage.
Keep in mind that the animal must focus on you constantly. Tame Beast doesn't add any threat, so if a friendly healer comes by, thinking to keep you topped off while you're apparently making love to an animal, the beast will run for the healer instead, thus stopping your taming.
For leveling up, i suggest you get a nice little cat, raptor or ravager for damage, or a boar for the extra threat from charge. High armor/low DPS pets aren't really that usefull - your pet will have no problems keeping aggro anyways.
If you're having problems deciding which pet to choose, be sure to check out Petopia - the best hunter pet site in the world: http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/
-Training a pet
Your pet has been living a peacefull life in a forrest somewhere, and has never had to kill anything except rabbits and deer. Thus, you need to teach it a bit. As your pet levels and gains loyalty, you'll notice you get training points. These can be used to train your pet various skills.
Your Pet Trainer will hang around your hunter trainer, and offers you a few hunter skills. Growl is your basic threat building pet skill, which costs no training points to teach. You get a new rank of that every 10 levels. The trainer also offers a variaty of stamina, armor, and magical resistance attributes for your pet. Of these, you should only really go for stamina, as armor only mitigates physical damage done. Pet resistances are rarely needed. You will also find two skills as you level up: Cobra Reflexes (which makes your pet attack faster) and Avoidence (which reduces your pets damage from AoE effects) - both of them are very nice skills, and every pet should have them.
Every other skill comes from beasts in the wild, and in order to teach your pet new ranks of skills, you have to learn it yourself first. You can't actually use the skills yourself, but imagine that you have to show Mr. Cat how to bite something... better. Check Petopia to see which pets can learn what, and at which levels.
Once you have decided on a skill to learn, you need to stable your current pet. Go out into the wild, and find the animal that has the skill you need, and double check with Beast Lore if you wish. Tame the beast, feed it a bit of meat, and start grinding mobs in the vicinity. When you see the message "You have learned <skill> rank x", you can dismiss the pet, go back to get your own out, and then teach it to your pet.
Since the dawn of time, there's been a bug with the amount of training points required to teach a pet new ranks of a skill.
Lets say your pet knows Claw rank 3, which cost 15 training points.
Lets assume claw rank 4 costs 20 training points. If you only have 19, it will show as red, and you would think that you cant teach it to your pet, but you actually only need 5 points to "upgrade" from rank 3 to 4.
In the end, at level 70 with max loyalty, your pet will have 350 training points, and you will have to decide what to use them on. Don't worry if you mess up - a pet trainer can reset your pets skills for a mere 10 silver. You should prioritise your pet skills as such:
Avoidence
Cobra Reflexes
Pet skills (claw, bite, gore, charge, dash, whateveryouhave)
Stamina
-Pet control
Controlling your pet is important above all. For simplicity, my "Pet Attack" (Default is Shift+T, and ctrl+1 also works) is bound to Q. This allows me to quicky send in my pet. I haven't bound anything to make my pet stop attacking. I simply use ctrl+2 to call it back, but you can also click your pet to passive, to have it return to your side.
It's important that you always know where your pet is, and where it shouldn't be. If your pet is attacking a target that gets crowd controlled, it will stop attacking the target, but it has no worries about breaking a crowd control if you order it to attack the target after it has been incapasitated. If you're running with scorpids, which leaves a dot on the target, you should be very carefull to not put it on anything someone might want to crowd control soon.
For information about raiding with your pet, please consult my guide made just for this: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=612614593 - yes, i know, it's under a different name. I switched server since i posted that guide, and I am no longer Zoa.
