There are many different beasts throughout Azeroth, some are friendly and some are ferocious. They have one thing in common though; they all share a special bond with the Hunters. The Hunters rely on firearms and different pets to be their only true friends.

The Hunters can tame, track, soothe and slay all kinds of beasts and animals found in the World of Warcraft. The Hunter is a ranged warrior that can wear any armor except Plate armor and has a huge variety of choice when it comes to weapons. The Hunter is a great pulling class because of its ranged capabilities and the use of different traps.

The best weapon of the Hunter is the pet; the Hunter can tame different pets and teach its existent pets new abilities. Pets have to be fed and if you want to be able to use more than one type of pet you have to house the unused pets in Stables that are located near Inns and Mailboxes.

The Hunter can also use different aspects, special animal related buffs. You can only have one aspect active at a time and some aspects can affect your whole party. An example of a group aspect is the Aspect of the Pack where the movement speed is increased of all party members.

The Hunter’s Guide to Being Useful

I. What can I do?

A simple question. If a group leader asked you what you’d bring to his group, how would you answer? These are some of the key features of your class and some of the clever tricks you can use to benefit your group.

* You deal excellent, easily-sustained ranged DPS. All of your ranged attack abilities have 36 yards of range (Or 41 yards of range with at least 13 points in the Marksmanship tree) which often enables you to avoid nasty AOE attacks and gives you a great view of the battle, allowing you to see what’s going on. What’s more, your attacks are never dodged, blocked, parried, or resisted, and they infrequently miss. This gives you very consistent and reliable DPS.
* You have the best de-aggro abilities in the game, which can guarantee that you will not steal aggro from a tank. Feign Death, with a 30 second cooldown, allows you to drop 100% of your aggro as if you’d died. If feign death is resisted and you take aggro, you can use Disengage, a melee range skill similar to the Rogue’s Feint, which reduces your aggro with a targeted enemy. If all else fails, you can use your pet (With Beastmastery talents like Intimidation) to take the mob’s attention off you until a tank can deal with it.
* Your primary CC skill, Freezing Trap, can have a great effect on battles. It affects any type of mob that is not immune to CC, and lasts 20 seconds (Or 26 seconds with 2 points in the Clever Traps Survival talent). This trap should be placed while you are out of combat, but during a fight to drop another Freezing Trap, and then use a skill such as Distracting Shot to pull a mob into it. Since patch 1.6, Hunter traps can be resisted, so always have a backup plan in case your trap fails (You can reduce the failure rate of your traps by 10% with 2 points in the Trap Mastery Survival talent).
* Hunters can give themselves excellent awareness of their surroundings. Using your Tracking abilities, you can monitor the pathing of patrols, determine the size of groups of enemies, or look for rare spawns and other named NPCs. Using Eagle Eyes (which only works in the outdoors) you can send your view ahead to find a good path to your objective or spy on things that can’t be seen with tracking abilities. Using Eyes of the Beast, you can send your pet ahead to scout for you. Even if your pet aggros mobs, those mobs will not attack you as long as your pet is killed or desummoned without bringing the mobs back to you. This gives you a zero-risk scouting unit that can go places you dare not. Lastly, using Flare and Track Hidden, you can detect stealthed or invisible enemies before they ambush your group. If stealthed enemies are nearby, flare ahead of you before moving on!
* Your Debuff, Scorpid Sting, reduces a mob’s damage output, critical strike rate, armor, and dodge rate. Use it! Tanks will take less damage and enemies will take more damage. Since multiple Scorpid Stings on one mob will not stack, if there are multiple Hunters in a group, designate one to use Scorpid Sting and the rest are free to use other stings.
* Compared to a caster, you and your pet are very durable. Often a healer in your group will accidentally pull aggro by casting heals or when the tank is stunned. In these situations, their cloth-wearing selves will not survive long. You can save them, however! Using your abilities cleverly, you can take aggro away from the casters or otherwise stop the mobs from killing them. It’s almost always better for you to die than your group’s healers. You can use distracting shot to take a mob’s attention and then try to tank it or kite it around until a real tank is able to deal with it. You can feign death and place a freezing trap to incapacitate the mob. You can use your pet to take aggro from the mob and tank it while you use Mend Pet to heal it. Be creative! If the Healers survive, the chances that your group will survive are greatly increased.
* Wing Clip and Concussive Shot provide you a great means of slowing down fleeing mobs. If you know a mob will run at low health, run up and Wing Clip it before it does. If a mob starts fleeing before you can do this, use Concussive shot. It only lasts a few seconds, but that buys others time to catch up to it, and the Marksmanship talent Improved Concussive Shot gives you a chance to stun enemies when you fire it. Beastmasters can use Intimidation to stun the mob for a few seconds, and Marksmen can also use Scatter Shot to do the same.
* When your group must fight numerous enemies, you can use Explosive Trap and Volley to damage them all at once. Normally a Mage or Warlock will do the majority of the area of effect damage in a group, but that doesn’t mean your help won’t be appreciated. Stay out of combat until the caster starts to AoE, then drop an explosive trap right in the middle of the group of mobs you’re fighting. Afterward, back off and use Volley on them. Sometimes your Mage might prefer that you drop a Frost Trap to slow the mobs down so he can AoE kite them. If you have the Survival talent Entrapment, this can be a very effective tactic.
* Organization and communication turn a bad group into a good one. Hunter’s Mark can greatly assist with communication. Before a pull, use Hunter’s Mark to designate the first enemy you want your group to kill, while everyone uses crowd control abilities on the remaining enemies. As your group kills enemies, use Hunter’s Mark to designate each mob you want killed in turn. This will greatly reduce the number of CCs broken early and help keep everyone on the same mob, ensuring that the battle is won quickly.
* If you are the main puller for your group, you have the ability to completely abort a bad pull with no casualties. Create a macro which yells out “BAD PULL! ABORT!” and then triggers your Feign Death ability. If you accidentally pull more mobs than your group can handle, you can use this macro to let your group know to stay away from you. That way, even if your Feign Death fails, you’ll be the only person that dies. In order for such an abort to succeed, you must make sure your group leaves space between themselves, you, and the mobs you’re about to pull. If you don’t mind sacrificing your pet sometimes, you can use your pet to pull by sending him to attack enemies and feigning death while he is moving toward the mobs. If you mess up, just let him die, and the mobs will simply wonder where he came from.
* Feign Death offers you more than a chance to lay traps and shed aggro. You can use it to leave combat during a fight and eat, drink, or resurrect people using Goblin Jumper Cables. A potential wipe can be averted through use of this tactic, and as such, Hunter Engineers are highly valuable in both instance and raid groups. On the subject of eating and drinking: Some people will consider it selfish of you to eat or drink while they are still fighting, and in some cases, it’s not worth cancelling Auto-Shot to drink. Use this technique wisely and try to understand other players’ jealousy.
* Scare Beast is a very powerful and resilient crowd control ability. It allows you to fear a Beast class mob for up to 20 seconds, and usually takes a considerable amount of damage to break. Mobs feared by this ability tend to run very far away from you, so make sure if you choose to use it that there are no other enemies nearby which might be alerted by the fleeing beast. Try hitting the mob with Wing Clip just before or just after you use Scare Beast to reduce the distance it will flee while feared.
* With the ultimate Survival talent, Wyvern Sting, you can cement your role as the main puller in a group. It puts a mob to sleep for 12 seconds, and when the mob wakes up, it suffers a strong DOT. Like traps, you must be out of combat to use Wyvern Sting. A great way to use this ability is to sting the first mob that you intend your group to kill, have the group CC the remaining mobs, and kill the Wyvern Stinged mob when it wakes up. With Wyvern Sting and a Freezing Trap, you can crowd control two mobs in one pull, making it much easier to sort out CC in large pulls.
* If you are properly Beastmastery specced with a resilient pet such as a Crab, Bear, or Turtle, your pet can very much survive tanking even powerful mobs. It will never tank raid bosses, but it makes a very capable offtank. Learn talents such as Thick Hide, Endurance Training, and Improved Mend Pet. Train your pet with abilities like Natural Armor, Great Stamina, and various resistance boosts. A Hunter Pet can easily end up with 5000 Health and 6000 Armor, and he has his own dedicated healer… You!

Learn to be a real beastmaster
Beastmaster