WoW Hunter Guide
Overview:
Hunters are ranged fighters that have excellent marksmanship skills, as well as the ability to train pets to assist them in their endeavors. Hunters are also skilled trappers and trackers. They have a number of skills that make them valuable for crowd control as well. A hunter does best when he is at a distance from his attackers, though he does have some skills that can be used in melee situations. This is not his forte, so it is best to stay out of these situations when possible.
A hunter can be of a number of different races, including blood elf, draenei , dwarf, night elf, orc, tauren, or troll. They can use almost all of the different weapons, except for maces, two handed maces and wands. Cloth, leather, and mail armor are permitted for this class.
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Special Abilities:
One of the particularly useful special abilities for a hunter is their ability to train and make pets of animals they come across. They can then use these animals to help them during combat situations, either as tanks or as distractions.
Accurately taking down the enemy from afar is one of the other major abilities of a hunter. Ranged fighting using bows, crossbows, and guns, as well as the special shots and stings available to the hunter is one of the more common uses for this class.
Aspects are self buffs that are unique to hunters. They give the hunter 8 different buffs depending on the animal the aspect is named for. For example, Aspect of the Monkey increases the chance to dodge. Only two aspects, Aspect of the Pack and Aspect of the Wild, are party buffs.
Hunters can use five different traps for use in crowd control situations and for some decent damage.
Hunters also have tracking skills that can be used to locate different types of items which is really useful when farming for things like herbs and ore.
Talents: Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, and Survival
Beast Mastery Hunter
The Beast Mastery talent is best for those who want to focus on using their pets to help them to cause damage. You can learn to train exotic pets, and you can increase the amount of damage your pets can do by giving them as many talents as possible. Pets considered exotic include the Chimera, Core Hound, Devilsaur, Rhino, Silithid, Spirit Beast, and Worm. This is the best hunter leveling spec.
Marksmanship Hunter
A marksmanship hunter uses his talent to inflict as much ranged damage as possible through damage enhancing techniques. Some of the additional abilities available include ranged weapon specialization, mortal shots, lethal shots, the aimed shot, and true shot aura. There is a bit of a trade off required, as you won’t be able to do quite as much with your pets with this talent tree. However, if you work with groups or do a lot of PvP this isn’t as much of a problem as it might be if you want to be more solitary.
Survival Hunter
The focus of the survival hunter talent is on improving your traps. This works well for crowd control purposes, but isn’t a high damage dealing talent. This is a defensive talent, which works through controlling the battle through traps and attrition. Many people try to use this tree along with another in order to build a bit of a hybrid hunter that has a better mix of offensive and defensive characteristics.
Leveling Tips:
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Unfortunately hunters can only be truly effective as a damage class. They do some awesome damage so that is a bonus but leveling a hunter can be a bit difficult.
The problem is that if you plan on questing to level your hunter you will also want to do dungeons. Dungeons will give you the most experience while leveling but as a damage class you will be waiting a bit in between dungeons. The Survival spec is best for bringing out the most damage in a dungeon group but it is a bit more difficult to do solo quests with.
It is suggested that you choose a hybrid spec for leveling a hunter. This spec would include some of the pet upgrade talents of the Beast Master spec and some of the dungeon damage talents of the Survival spec.
Your pet will not be able to take enough damage during soloing or pull enough threat during soloing in the Survival spec. This can be helped by some good leather tanking or stamina gear but this will also hurt your damage in dungeons.
Once you do reach level 80 you should switch fully to Survival spec as you will be doing mostly dungeons and raiding. The Survival spec will help you gain the most benefits from the tier 10 gear as well.
There seems to be some hot debates on whether hunters should gem into agility or critical strike at level 80. Many people have found that agility will help you in some of the lower gear score brackets while critical strike will be most beneficial after you are ICC geared.
Getting into a raid guild with a hunter will be easy if you know your class well. Be sure to check your DPS using the Recount add-on frequently. If you can take direction and you are pulling at least 5k DPS you should be ready for some of the higher end ICC bosses.
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