Trueshot Aura

Let's face it up front--playing a hunter well is not easy. Hunters have a fantastically bad reputation in WoW, and I'm sorry to say that it's been well earned in most cases. Yes, I'm saying it: over 50% of the hunter community doesn't play their class well. I'm not saying it's you, but everyone can improve, right? Let's make sure we're on the same page here.

The most important and least common skills among those of us who play hunters are good threat management and solid crowd control. The first thing I'm going to talk about here is (you guessed it!) threat. To be an effective hunter, we have to be able to dish out the damage without pulling aggro off of our tank. Not only does good threat managment make grinding easier and cut down on ghostwalks, it's fantastic prep for instance runs or raiding, and when you are high enough level to get into one of the better guilds, you'll be more likely to get that guild invite if you can run an instance without once making your tank try to chase down a mob.

Please realize, here: hunters aren't tanks! We do NOT melee unless we're up against a wall, as it were. And as a hunter, it's a sad but true fact that you won't be up at the top of the healer's keep-alive list (they're usually concentrating on your tank, and rightfully so), so it's of primary importance that you use your skills to keep aggro off of you and your pet (unless your pet is offtanking), and on your tank. Pulling off of the tank is always a bad idea. Pulling aggro is likely to end in our pet's death at best, and a wipe at worst. Now, this gets easier at 70 with Misdirect, but by then you should already know how to manipulate your aggro like a pro. Get friendly with Disengage (I'll bet you've been ignoring that entry in your spellbook--dust it off!) and learn when and how to use Feign Death (more detail on that to follow). Scatter shot will give you a few seconds to back off and drink a healing potion, which can make the difference between living and dying in a battle. Feign Death is a fantastic tool, but before you feign, always consider who is nearby, and who is likely to take up all that aggro you dump. If you're going to feign in a battle, do it either as soon as you pull the mob off of a tank, or run over to a tank and feign. Keep in mind that your feign death ability is far less effective at melee range, so if you're going to do it close to a mob that's attacking you, you want to do it close to a tank that's pulling aggro. You want to get that aggro back where it belongs, not dump it onto a healer or mage!

The first step toward threat mastery is a threat meter. If you're not using one, run, don't walk, and pick up the threat meter your guild is using. My personal recommendation is KLH ThreatMeter. The threat meter will do several things for you. The first thing you should do once you've installed this new toy is go out and grind. Kill things. Kill lots of things. Use your different abilities, and see how they affect your threat. This thing is instant feedback, and the more you use it, the more you'll get a feel for which shots, stings, and other abilities are high-threat, and which are low-threat. Before long, your pet will be tanking like a pro, and you'll be safely in proper range, taking mob after mob down more easily than just last night. Outside of becoming even more proficient with your talents, a threat meter will give you up-to-the-second information about how much threat you have relative to your tank, pet, and party members.

This is fantastic! But wait...why can't I see X on the threat meter? And how did I just pull aggro/lose threat when it said Y had more/less threat? Sadly, threat meters are not infallible. The biggest problem is that if you are out of meter-range of one or more of your party members, you don't get their threat data. How do we get around this? Make sure that everyone in your guild has the same threat meter! When you're all using one meter, be it KLH ThreatMeter or Omen, your meters will sync, keeping the data on the meter much more accurate. So what are you waiting for? Go grab a threat meter, use it, love it, and kill, kill, kill!