WoW Hunter Guide

Hunters - Overview

Hunters are the only ranged physical class in the game and focus on obliterating their enemies from a distance. Although hunters have melee abilities, their damage is maximized by using a ranged weapon and their abilities as well as their beast pet allow them to stay far away from their targets. For leveling, they are one of the best equiped classes in the game because of their pet, high damage, and great deal of survival skills such as the ability to feign death, which allows them to escape deadly situations. Hunters also have the ability to track creatures, demons, and various other monsters in the world making questing and PvPing easier throughout the game. Depending on the hunter's talent specification, his or her pet can be a vital tool for dealing and taking damage as well as chasing down opponents. Hunters typically wear leather until level 40 at which point they learn the ability to wear mail. To maximize damage in groups and raids hunters will need to learn how to effectively rotate shots while not pulling agro from the main tank. However one of the best aspects about hunters it their ability to reset agro with the Feign Death ability learned at level 30 allowing them to go all out on their damage output where as other classes are forced to hold back in order to not pull agro from the tank and take damage.

How to Level a Hunter

If you want to level quickly, a hunter is definitely the best class to choose as it is a highly mana efficient class that has a pet to tank (take the damage) for the hunter which means he or she has to rarely spend down time eating food and drinking. In addition, the hunter's Autoshot ability allows the hunter to continue doing damage from afar without using any mana. Hunter's can take two or even three equal level mobs at a time and if a situation gets to hairy they can feign death in order to prevent a long and inefficient run back to their body. The hunter's numerous traps allow him to control the crowd effectively by freezing and slowing or maximize damage by dealing fire based damage over time. Agility, stamina, attack power, and critical strike are key attributes to try and boost while leveling as they ensure high damage output while keeping the hunter alive. Finally, there is no major difference between the three ranged weapons (crossbows, longbows, and guns) but Dwarves do have a improved gun racial and Trolls have a improved bow racial. Finally, a hunter's melee weapon(s) should focus on boosting the statistics listed earlier while maintaining decent close-range damage for the rare uptight moments. For more information please see our Hunter Leveling Guide.

The Talent Tree

The most popular hunter talent build for hunters by far is the Marksmanship tree as it maximizes the damage done by the hunter's ranged abilities while providing a few abilities to augment the damage of the other physical damage dealers in the hunter's group such as Trueshot Aura and Improved Hunter's Mark. However, many hunters who are leveling or farm consistently choose the Beast Mastery talent tree as it buffs the hunter's pet a great deal allowing for a more laid back grinding style minimizing the work and attention the player needs in order to grind individual mobs. However, the Beast Mastery talent build is weak in raids and groups as the hunter's pet dies much more easily in these lethal environments making marksman a much better choice. Finally, the survival tree focuses on keeping the hunter alive while buffing his damage to some extent but not to the level of a fully spec'd marksman hunter. PvP and Arena hunters tend to lean towards marksman for its death preventing abilities and its heavy critical strike based nature, which is important in PvP. For more information on talent builds please see our Hunter Talent Guide.

Raid/Instance Effectiveness (PvE)

Hunters are an extremely useful class to have in a raid or a party situation. Their Freezing Trap ability is the most versatile single target crowd control abilities in the game as there are only a handful of mobs immune to it; however, Freezing Trap is also the most skill-based crowd control in the game requiring utmost diligence and attention during pulls as they hunter needs to lead the mob into the trap without taking substantial damage. In the event a mob is immune to all forms of crowd controls, the hunter's numerous slowing effects in conjunction with the Aspect of the Cheetah speed increasing ability allow the hunter to "kite" or lure mobs away from the battle while not getting hit effectively removing the mob from the main battle. In raids, hunters are the BEST long term damage as their abilities are the most mana efficient, their ability to Feign Death prevents them from having to hold back, and their range prevents them from being hit by mobs allowing healers to focus on the tank. Their Trueshot Aura (Marksman) and Exposed Weakness (Survival) are group buffs that increase the damage of the entire hunters group. Finally, the new ability added in The Burning Crusade called Misdirection allows hunter's to misdirect threat/agro to the target that is supposed to be taking the damage allowing pulls to go smoother and bosses to die faster.

Hunter PvP

Hunters are a great for PvP in Battleground such as Alterac Valley or The Eye of the Storm as they are adapt at long ranged assault and can hide behind the great number of melee classes while laying down high amounts of burst damage in turn racking up killing blows. However on the smaller scale, such as in 2v2 arenas hunters become a tougher PvP class especially against melee as once they are caught up to they are cooked! But they can still be successful on a small scale and need to make the most of their movement impairing abilities to make sure their opponents don't catch up. A Marksmanship hunter's greatest weakness is in their small scale PvP as the talent build has far fewer survival/movement impairing aspects.