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So Ive got this hunter and very little game knowledge I was wondering if anyone had any advice for keeping pets, when to find new ones etc. etc.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Petopia (http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/) is THE hunter resourse. I've gotten caught up from just after TBC with it.

That said, I still use a cat mostly, because I like the look. Though there's a 2headed named demon thingy that's tamable in Shadowland, now that I can tame exotics. And I keep a really scruffy wolf too. And with the skill '20% chance for 5% heal/happiness' thing I haven't fed my pet in ages.

Thanks man. So far I tamed an elder boar, I like him, named him Porky

At some point if you get into 5mans and more, you'll want to start looking at shot rotations and if you want to macro them.  After playing a hunter since the game launched, I've become increasingly distanced from my hunter because of the way shots work.  Timing shots properly can literally be the difference in doing three times the damage from just tooling around shooting stuff. 

They changed it in 3.0. No more doing-this-resets-your-shot-timer juggling.

Im confused, Do i need to learn to get all super macro-ized? I tend to not like putting togather macros

Before this patch you would have, from what I've read currently, you are safe from it.

If that's true, then it's a step in the right direction.

As with any class, you'll still need to develop a rotation to maximize dps to mana conservation ratio.  Maybe.... I could be wrong on that too, though.  Because Viper seems to be working differently now as well.

The only time you have to worry about DPS rotations is if you're raiding.  It sounds like you just want to level and have fun, so don't worry about it.  If you're doing 5 mans just learn how to ice trap stuff for CC and how to control your pet.  That's it.

From what the hunters I play with are saying, the way viper works now means you can basically blow your mana as fast as you want, you just switch to viper a bit to get it all back, then repeat.

That said, because viper debuffs your damage while it is up there is almost certainly an optimal way to do it, but for your average non-EJ-reading hunter I think mana is not a big issue (in PVE) anymore.

If you're a survival hunter, you don't run out of mana either way.  :drillf:

As you level, don't spend a single point in anything but BM. BM is just like...retardedly OP for levelling. Once you get close to 70 you probably can think about throwing a couple of points here and there into the other trees (marks primarily looks to be useful for levelling).

Aspect of the Viper change is a double edged sword atm. On one hand, it sucks royally for what I used it for in the past, which was regenning mana between fights/while farming or doing trash in instances. For raiding, it is pretty hax mana return at 350ish mana a shot landed at 70 (I get about 400, but I have 4pcs of tier6 so I get the bonus). The dmg penalty is pretty harsh, but cest la vie.

If you have a ret pally in your group mana is something you can almost not run out of. Marks is a huge mana hog at this point, but it does asstarded DPS. It went from being pretty meh to being almost double BM which was top dog before. Survival looks like it got a lot better raid utility and better overall DPS.

Volley...OMG....can't...say...enough...good...things...about...it...now. It scales with AP/Spellpower and it can crit now WOO.

Autoshot is not supposed to be clipped or reset now...but I get all kinds of weird auto cancellation errors even when I am not macroing things. Using any non-shot turns off auto, cancelling attack, going out of combat and jumping/running aroudn sometimes does not cancel it so you can accidentally pull mobs when you stop moving, etc etc. I am sure they will fix it, or make steady how it was before.

I really like this class. Pets are almost a minigame with this class. I spent the silver on a stable slot, I have a boar and a raptor. I was checking out the talents i like what i see in the BM page.

I cant beleive i let a stupid opinion about graphics keep me from this game.

By the way, when is the earliest possible time to get a mount. And what does one have to do to get one. I asked on the official forums......i probably wont ever go back there LOL.

Mounts are now at level 30.

Are there run speed buffs? Totems, or potions maybe?

Hunters get Aspect of the Cheetah (30% movement buff) at L20, and Aspect of the Pack (Group runspeed) at L40

cool

Actually, marksmanship is great to put 12 points into. Go for the throat talent is OMGWTFBBQ for your pet. 50 focus everytime I crit? That's a lot of assbeating for your pet. I would probably wait until about level 50 or so to put points that way, just to make sure you get all the beastmaster shit taken care of.

Plus its nice to not feel like a total puss relying on your pet completely :)

Also, any pet that has cower...remember to turn it off hehe

I think my setup at 62 is:

Beast Mastery (41 points)

    5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk
    2/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide
    5/5 Unleashed Fury
    2/2 Improved Mend Pet
    5/5 Ferocity
    2/2 Spirit Bond
    1/1 Intimidation
    2/2 Bestial Discipline
    4/5 Frenzy
    1/1 Bestial Wrath
    3/3 Catlike Reflexes
    5/5 Serpent's Swiftness
    1/1 The Beast Within

Marksmanship (12 points)

    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    2/2 Go for the Throat

Survival (0 points)

    None


I didn't take the extra health for my pet in the first tier cause, I really never need it. I'll probably grab like aimed shot, and finish frenzy....then cobra strikes probably.

And the biggest change, is there's no fucking cooldown. No more 30 sec wait to do the pathetic damage it used to do. I've seen jealous mages calling for it to be nerfed already.


Can a macro even work now with castsequence? I get nothing but cancelled shots as well. I'd like to find a working steady/autoshot macro because having to watch 2 cast bars and time my shots by hand is making me go crosseyed.
(I use bigtrouble for it's autoshot cast bar)

Boars used to be the best pet for PVE tanking, but the nerfs followed by their recent changes has consigned it to mediocre again. It doesn't have the damage to maintain decent taunt which essentially wastes all it's tanking abilities. Gorilla seems to be the new tank of choice as the cooldown on it's ae stomp has been reduced to where it's useful. However, if you are still leveling in greens this may not be as big an issue unless you spec to marksman.

Speaking of gorillas, anyone using one having problems getting it to stomp regularly? With the spam dmg move and stomp both costing 25 focus it seems like the autocast code is favoring the dmg attack and then when the cooldown is up for stomp, there's no focus for it. Yet, even if I turn off the dmg move (swipe? can't remember now) he still wont autocast his stomp and is sitting at full focus for most of the fight. The only time I've ever seen him cast stomp was when he had 2 mobs on him.

My experience is that they wont use it at all on autocast unless they're in combat with at least 2 mobs.

Do you have any professions yet? If you don't I'd recommend two of Mining, Skinning or Herbalism. With the way professions work, there's a very limited amount of craftable stuff that is useful for anyone before max-level, and there is next to no low-level crafted items that anyone will buy regularly. Ore, Leather and Herbs on the other hand always sell well. Take both gathering professions until you're max level, which will most likely be 80 with WoTLK coming, and then drop one and take a complementary crafting profession to access the end-level crafted gear.

Doing this will grant you a steady income as you level, and you won't be burdened with the costs of levelling crafting professions (which are punitive for the item returns at any level except max really). Plus the passive bonuses, such as skinning's +crit are probably the best profession bonuses you can get as you level.

Also, don't neglect cooking. Cooking is probably the easiest and most interesting secondary profession (fishing can fuck off), and it provides useful buff foods from pretty much level 1.

Totally agree about gathering, crafting professions are for max level only, no doubt. Unless you just enjoy the crafting process, but I find that hard to imagine :uhrr:.  However:
Isn't fishing possibly useful for hunters as an easy supply of pet food?

Also, what're people's views on hunters as being good instance-soloers? I know hunters used to rock at being able to solo some pretty tough encounters and were great for boosting lowbie alts through instances and farming for shards etc. Is that still the case or are there other classes better at this?

I ask because I've got a level 64 hunter atm and I can't decide if it's worth my bothering to add him to my "get to 70" list at the moment.

Perhaps, although meat is not hard to farm either. My comment was more aligned with the reflection that levelling cooking is actually rather enjoyable, whereas levelling fishing is about the most unenjoyable thing in the game.

Fishing sucks, but it's better than it was.  Ahh.. memories of when you could fish 20-30 times without a skillup.  I think 10 times per up is ridiculous, but at least you know it's on a schedule not and you're not completly at the mercy of the RNG

Ah yes, good points :)

I hate leveling cooking because I end up with bags full of meat I can't cook with yet... my banks must reek like a broken freezer after a hot bank holiday weekend. And having once worked somewhere where 7 freezers full of dead sheep, cows, dogs, rats and chickens (veterinary research college) did exactly that I can tell you that's not very nice.

I've had issues with older pets (a pre-tbc tiger) having cower and prowl turn on automagicly every time I summon. I think I'll tame a fresh one and see if it works better.

And BM is great for leveling, and just mucking about. Viper drops my damage by 40%, but I can spam all the high damage attacks, heal the pet, do whatever and still be full mana. And continually aoe stuff with the new volley. It's a whole new (fun) class in 3.0

The cower/growl/prowl auto cast thing happens with all pets.

I had it happen on a corehound and a devilsaur.

As long as I crit semi-regularly with steady shot (and I definitely do), I don't even have to think about viper. I <3 survival. <3 <3 <3

I believe almost every pet you tame comes with cower and growl  pretrained now andturned on and yes I've had them both get turned on again too. Pisses me off too because they limit the number of spells on the pet cast bar and I hate wasting one just to get a heads up cower has turned itself back on.

Another annoying thing I've found on my hunter is that old quest markers are still showing up when I track. For example, the game flags aged clefthoof, the birgs, and talbuk stags as gold dot quest mobs on your minimap. But unlike mining or herbalism where the gold dots go away when you finish the quest, I still have them in Nagrand 2 years after I finished the damn quest. This happening to anyone else?

Are you using some addon that tracks quests perhaps?

Are you possibly tracking beasts, you doob ?

Hehe.

Yeah, that was my first thought too.   They changed mini-map tracking a few patches back.  Neuts are Gold dots, Friendlies are green with gold rings, Aggro are Red with gold rings.  There's a different dot for opposite faction PCs and Blue Dots for Friendly faction PCs.

Neutrals are gold now? Wtf happened to gold dots being quest objectives. Sigh. I was away when they made that change. No tracking addons. Afaik there is no way for an addon to do this. I wish there was. I'd love to filter out glowcaps in zangarmarsh on my herbalist for instance.  Looks like I missed a patch note. Sigh.

AFAIK the yellow dots were just for quest handin people, and those you get a nice big F'n ? now.

I dont ever remember having mobs needed for quests being yellow on the minimap while tracking, and I have been playing a hunter for the better part of WoW's retail existence.

I am using my wife's old raptor, I can't say I have any complaints...she tanks elite's a couple level's higher than me and does solid dps. And no cower bug.

Ya, I think it's my mistake. When I came back after a year off I heard they'd changed tracking, noticed the gold dots strewn around nagrand and assumed they'd added quest markers to hunter tracking too. Didn't make the connection from gold to neutral.

Also, on the new defensive mode. Has anyone also noticed a return of an old annoying bug where your character stays in semi-combat, doing the shoot animation, after the mob you were shooting is dead? This can  be a real problem with defensive mode as if you click on another mob your pet makes a beeline for it. So far the bug has happened to me out soloing as well as grouped. THank good for passive with the  lack of a true defensive mode.

I can't say I'm a fan of the new defensive mode. It wasn't a hardship to have to manually command my pet to attack something, and now my pet races off to attack things whether I want it to or not.

I've had trouble with all of my pets on their special attacks.  What I've done is turn off the focus dump pet skill so that all that's automatic is special attack and growl.  It seems to work a bit better.

Just tamed the white gorilla down in Un'goro.  I love volley and AE now.

For hunters, I recommend mining/engineering for ammo later.  At 70, the best ammo in the game is crafted, and people don't sell it much.

Unless Blizzard gets rid of ammo requirements for hunters, that is.

Fishing/cooking/first aid are all good.  Fishing is decent money, too, even while leveling.  Great way to feed pets, if you don't happen to take the talent for your pet to stay happy.

The best way to level these is as you go, by the way, since the zones you are in have the stuff you need.

Selling ore is good money too.  Cooked goods sells well, fish sells well. 

At 70, the best ammo in the game requires some raiding. You can buy "Mysterious" ammo once you're revered with Violet Eye (Kara raiding), and "Timeless" ammo once you're honored with Scale of the Sands (Hyjal raiding).

But if you're not doing any raiding, then yes. Crafted Adamantite is the best.

On the other hand, this may all become moot in a couple weeks. I haven't been peeking at WotLK spoilers in quite this much detail, but I imagine there will be better ammo available by the time we reach 80.

I'd disagree. Unless you have some deep love for engineering I'd steer well clear of it. I levelled mining and engineering on my Shaman alt, but dropped them for herb+inscription because engineering is just so underwhelming. As you level gathering professions make you money, while crafting professions suck money away, and engineering is definitely one of the most expensive to level. The profession-specific benefits don't cut it either compared to other professions. Arrows you can buy are not a good enough reason to pass up other profession benefits.

Double-gatherer is the best way to support a levelling toon, since all end-level toons can typically powerlevel most professions to 350 in a day or two, and before end-level the professions really have no benefit. For WoTLK LW looks like it will be the best profession for hunter, with BoP leg and wrist enchants as well as drums etc. So I'd reccommend skinning + mining/herb and then drop mining or herb for LW at 78 or so.

Yeah, the best right now - according to that spreadsheet linked earlier - is Saronite at 67.5dps.   I wonder if its more expensive than the 2g/stack Timeless crap. Goddamn I hated buying full quivers of that stuff for raids knowing I'd be through at least one full bag of it by the end of the night.  It was the big quiver, too.

Anywho, I also agree on going with 2 gathering professions.  I'm of the opinion that Mining should always be one of these, because smithing, jewelcrafting, enchanting AND engineering use the metals.  The old world stuff like Thorium fetches a hell of a price and will only go up as new DKs level professions.  I think it was selling for 30g/ stack on my server last time I checked, whereas Adamantite is about 20g/ stack.*    Herbing isn't awful but the professions involved (alch/inscrip) don't use anywhere near the amount of materials to produce goods that smithing and JC do.   Add-in the potion debuff and you're looking at a lot lower demand for herbing stuff than mined mats.

*The reason for the difference is there were not a lot of thorium nodes or zones with thorium in the old world.  This means it's not anywhere near as easily farmed as admantite and fel iron which spawn everywhere in BC.

I play on a RP-PVP server, so I went marksman.  Got myself a spider for it's always convenient webs, and that's a nice little combo.  Not as optimal as beast mastery for leveling, but it definitely does the trick.  My critical chances are ridiculously high, with the downside that I tend to pull aggro from my pet a little too easily.

My Hunter is using a hodge podge of shit with a "talent spec" that was me clicking around. I started him a week before the expansion, used 3x speed to get him to 60, and never got any of the level 70 PURPZ so my gear/stats are subpar.

But.

All that considered, I can still round up 6 to 9 (heavily armored being 6, casters that I can LOS being 9) even level monsters and volley them down, using a gorilla to tank.

Armory link (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Altar+of+Storms&n=Layaway)

I have been gathering leather and a buddy is making me the level 78 Swiftarrow (http://www.wowhead.com/?search=swiftarrow) set, so hopefully me having 0 resil (except for the free purple offhand, thanks Blizzard!) will be over soon.

At that point I plan on staying 78/79 and doing the battlegrounds that top out at 79 and spending my spare time staking my claim to the new ring of blood quest in ZD, preventing all the alliance people I can from completing it.

The only macro I use at the moment:

/swapactionbar 1 2

With one bar being my ranged attacks and the other being my melee attacks.  For pets I don't worry so much about their stats.  I have a Deviate Dreadfang, a Death Ravager, and a Ghostsaber.  They all work well enough and my fishing (I actually like fishing) feeds two of them.

I don't know what it is, but I like my ghostsaber.  Humar the Pridelord and Darkshore ghostsaber (sometimes a snow leopard, so it must just be the skin) are what I use.  For fun, sometimes I break out the elite spider from Bloodmyst.  He scales funny, and is super tiny, like a non-combat/mini pet.

1. Spec PvE Marksman
2. Faceroll
3. ???
4. Top DPS Charts

Yes, I'm bitter at a broken DPS class. As a Fury warrior who is actually dealing competitive DPS after years of never being anywhere near the top of DPS charts.

In all seriousness though, I still do a LOT of damage. But Hunters are ridiculous right now.

It doesn't help that a lot of the 2-handers that I want are also super good for Hunters now, too. As if rolling off against the legions of other DPS warriors, Ret paladins, and Death Knights wasn't enough.

Marks is definitely NOT a faceroll spec like BM or a warlock was in TBC.

But it is high DPS, I will not deny that.

Careful Aim and there being intellect on all mail gear also makes a big deal.

I know it's not faceroll - having to carefully time shot rotations to keep Chimera Shot running is important.

Like I said, I'm just bitter.

Barrage.

Volley in its current state reminds me of when I got banned from WoW the first time, using that floating hack.

Screen filled with damage numbers. Except this time they are huge damage numbers.

Speaking of volley, is the damage considered magical? I have a mage friend I have been rolling with, and I might start getting a set of +spell power shit for when we go on AOE killing sprees.

It is considered Arcane, yes. However, hunter ranged attacks were all normalized to scale off RAP rather than spell power long ago. You might want to shop for a glyph of volley instead.

Ah thats right, I remember that happening after people were stacking spell power shit for crazy arcane shots I think.

Thanks

From what I can gather, BM is still the dps king @ 80 in WoTLK, other than the occasional heavy AoE situtation where a MM build might have a slightly stronger volley.  This in large part is due to BM hunter pets easily doing in excess of 1k dps, which when added to the hunter's own dps that is very competitive with most classes all by itself gets you total sustained dps numbers that can push 3.7K+ with just mixed 80 blues/heroics/10 man gear.

Can't vouch for this myself since I've only put about 2-3 hours into my 70 hunter since Wrath hit (busy with other classes), but based on my observations from various WWS reports, forums, blogs, etc. the concensus is 80 hunter dps is sick with BM still being the best/popular choice.  If I was gonna get serious about my hunter again I'd probably dig around in the Elitist Jerks hunter forums to see if they've crunched the numbers and proven one of the talent specs to be the superior choice this go around.  I understand Blizzard did a pretty stand up job though making all 3 trees raid viable and competitive with the new talents and talent changes, so it would be nice to see a thurough breakdown of how they compare at 80. 

Fact: Survival Hunters are the most lovable hunters.

I do 4-500 more DPS as marks vs BM on a single target. Maybe I missed something, but I was never a crazy min-max do exactly as everyone says on EJ kind of person. Esp since a couple of the "respected" posters there I have known were total douchebags who did terrible DPS even with all their elite theorycrafting knowledge and gear far superior to mine.

Just an Update, My hunter is now 52, With a gorilla from Un Goro Crater. My paladin is 48 and Duos with my wifes 48 Priest. Couple of other duos in the 30s. We are slow levelers but its damn fun. So much to do.

We are both hooked.

DAMN YOU WOW!!  Is there no one that you cannot ensnare with your seductive wiles?!?

For some reason, I'm reminded of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, doing his make-up/tuck dance.

Looking at EJ, it seems Survival is lacking at the moment. From the parts I read, no clear cut winner between MM/BS yet, but when more gear comes into play I'll guess MM takes it.

I didn't re-up when my ten day trial was through.  I'm not desperate enough yet, though I do admit I was tempted by my weakness to gypsy space goats.

Survival brings Replenishment though (this expansions Shadow priest mana buff), so it gets away with it  :oh_i_see: