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Alliance 1-60 (Mythrid)

Managing Pets

Important things to remember:  When you abandon or name your pet, its a one time deal.  You cannot get back a pet that has been abandoned, and you can never rename a pet once you've name it.

   Loyalty & Happiness

Happiness determines how much damage your pet does.  There are three levels:  Unhappy, Content, and Happy.  At unhappy he will do only 75% of possible damage, at Content damage will be normal, and happy = 125% damage.  When your pet dies happy, he will come back as content.  If he dies as content, he comes back unhappy. 

Loyalty determines how close the pet will serve you.  At the lowest level, a pet will leave you.  Loyalty grows with happiness.  Keeping your pet happy will ensure that his loyalty to you grows to its highest level.

  Feeding

The hunter needs cooking to be successful with pets.  Cooked food will always generate longer happiness with pets, and getting meat means killing beasts rather than humanoids all the time.  For this reason, I recommend the Hunter build up the cooking skill.

Weapon:

Forget maces.  Forget swords.  For the Hunter, I like the dual-wielding abilities.  Axes are good for this, as are fist weapons (claws).  Claws are lightning fast and dual wielding them is a great weapon choice.  This would be my preference.  However, dual wielding doesn't come until level 20.

Professions:

The 'roleplaying' choice would be skinning/leatherworking but I dont like this at all.  I am a PvP'er and this means Alchemy/Herbalism is the obvious choice as potions can enhance your abilities and life while in combat.  Cooking is an essential secondary profession simply due to the pet management.  First Aid is another recommendation as it again provides more sources of HP, and that is always a good thing.  Longevity means less deaths whether in PvE or PvP

SOLO PVP

Solo PVP requires micromanagement in order to succeed in WoW.  BUT the good news is that yes, a Hunter can succeed.  Let me describe the primary weakness first and then I'll tell you how to strategically overcome it:

PvP Weakness:  The Hunter is crap in melee.  Better than spell casters, yes, but not much else.  In melee range vs. a Rogue, Warrior, Paladin, Shaman, Druid, he is gonna get whacked every time.  When a Hunter is killed in PvP, his pet vanishes, so a hunters pet to other players in PvP is like a gnat.  They will IGNORE the pet completely and simply go for you.  When another player rushes you, and gets inside of your ranged weapon minimum limit, you are very weak and exposed, as you cannot use your gun or bow in close range.  In any solo PvP encounter, prepare to be rushed.   To counter this, you need to do everything you can to keep the gap between you and the other player.  Slow them down, or even better, freeze em.  Drop a freeze trap.  Hit them with scorp sting and arcane shot and when they try to hit you, the freeze trap will kick in.  This will buy you some time to either kite them and send in the pet, or retreat to max distance and start hammering away at their skull.

GROUP PVP

two words:  HUNTERS OWN

In fact, they own so bad, its not even funny and I would not be surprised if Blizzard gimped them in the future.  Let me describe to you what typically happens on a PvP server. 

Hoarde lines up on one side, Alliance on the other.  IN between the 2 masses is 'no mans land', about 35 yards which is the maximum casting range for everyone.  As each side builds up, no one is brave enough to run in the middle since umpteen mages are waiting to nail them.   No player in the game...zip...notta...can cast beyond 35 yards.  So there is this wide open space between each front line.  But the hunter....the hunter can hit from 41 yards out with Hawk Eye talent build.  So the hunters sit on each side and simply snipe off the spellcasters to their hearts content, sniping for 1500+ damage in a single critical shot.  This happens over and over again.  Hunters just plain dominate in PvP.  And it is fun, so much fun to do this, you wouldn't believe it.  I'm honestly thinking about switching my main character to hunter simply because of the group PvP ownage.

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