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 Perhaps the most important aspect of mastering the hunter class is training and using your pets. Strangely enough, the in game tutorials leave out a lot of vital information about training pets. This guide will show some of what I have learned in my adventures as a hunter.

First of all, you must learn to tame pets. Hunters do not start out with the ability to tame beasts. Before you reach level 10, you must rely on your gun and hand to hand combat. At level 10, you can get the quest to learn to tame beasts. As a Night Elf, you must go to the Dolanaar Inn. There are three NPCs there. You will receive a quest from one of the hunter trainers that will tell you to go tame a series of beasts. Once you have completed this series of quests, you will learn the essential beast taming spells. You are not finished here, though. They will send you on another quest to talk to another NPC in Darnassus. Once you have completed this, you will learn the more advanced beast training spells. I have not played a dwarf hunter, but I am willing to bet that you will find the quest chain at the hunter trainer in Kharanos. Be sure to complete the quest chain. These skills are crucial to hunters. Once you have mastered the essential skills, you are ready to start taming your first pet.

First, you must find a pet that you like and wish to make your own. I recommend cats personally as they learn extremely good PVP skills allowing them to stealth and sprint. I used a raptor from level 13 until level 59 due to their good defense and attack power (And they are just plain cool). Bears make excellent tanks (Good hp and def mean they can take a beating while you pick off the enemies.) I recommend trying many different pets and figuring out which you like best. You can only tame a pet that is your level or below. In most places, you can find the same beasts at slightly different levels, so you can select the one that is closest to your level. Once you select a beast to tame, back away to the maximum range of your tame beast spell and use it. The beast will charge you and start attacking you. While you are taming, you cannot move, stop casting, use any item, or have anyone else interfere in any way by either attacking the beast or healing you. You must endure the beast beating on you for 20 seconds before it becomes your pet. Sometimes the taming process will fail and you have to tame again. This is where having an ally to heal you or kill the beast may be necessary to make sure your pet doesn’t kill you. Once you learn the freeze trap spell, taming is a breeze. You simply set a freeze trap in front of you and start taming. The beast will charge and freeze solid for a good portion of the taming process. Another hunter can use their freeze trap before you start taming to freeze the pet and this will not interfere with the taming process. When you have tamed a pet successfully, you can name it by right clicking on its face in its status bar and selecting name pet. Be careful when naming your pet because once you name it, the name can never be changed.
Once you have a pet, you can start training it. The first, and most important thing you must do is to make it happy and loyal. The colored box next to your pet’s status bar shows its happiness level. It ranges from red (the lowest) to yellow to green (the highest). When a pet is unhappy, it loses loyalty. When green, it gains loyalty. If the loyalty level gets too low, the pet will just leave you, or turn on you and try to eat you instead. A pet starts out with the lowest loyalty level, and if it gets much lower, it will leave you soon. This is why you must feed your pet immediately and get his happiness to green.

To feed your pet, click the feed pet spell from your spell book. The cursor will gain a blue outline. Then click on the food in your bags. You can also simply drag food from your bag then click it on your pet. Every pet has different diets. If you check your personal info, there is a tab where you can select your pet, and see his stats. It will show his loyalty level and diet as well. Cats like meat and fish, turtles and monkeys like fruit, wind serpents like fruit and cheese, raptors only eat meat, and bears like almost anything. Always carry a couple stacks of food for your pet. As the pet grows, lower level food will be less effective. My level 60 cat will not even eat anything less than cured ham steak. Once you feed your pet, you will see a status effect with an icon that looks like the feed pet icon. As long as this is on, your pet is still eating. Feeding it again or starting combat will cancel the eating effect, and it will not gain the full amount of happiness from the food. Feed your pet and keep it always green. When a pet is fully happy, it gains loyalty, and its attacks are more powerful. As long as your pet is in green happiness, as you fight battles, over a long period of time, your pet will gain loyalty levels. When a pet gains a loyalty level, it gains TP (training points) that can be used to train skills. There are 6 loyalty levels in all. A loyal pet has no risk of ever abandoning you, so keep that pet loyal.

The next thing you must do is to train your pet to learn skills. If you click the train pet spell, you will see a list of all the pet skills you know. At first, you will not know any skills. Go to the pet trainer once you reach level 10. The ones I use are in Dolanaar, Kharanos, and Ironforge. I am sure there are others as well. The pet trainer has a list of skills you can learn, much like your other class skills. These skills will teach you to teach your pets skills. They are learned by the hunter, not the beast, so once you learn a train beast skill, you will always have it, and can teach it to all your pets that are able to learn it. The most important pet skill is growl. Growl (Rank 1) is available at level 10. Every 10 levels, another higher ranking growl is available. Once you have purchased and learned Train Beast Growl (Rank 1), you can teach it to your pet (If the pet meets the requirements. In this case it must also be level 10 or above.) Select the train beast spell, then select Growl (Rank 1) from the menu. Click train and the pet will learn Growl (Rank 1). Then you will see the growl icon in the pet action bar with a glowing yellow outline. You can right click this to turn the glow on and off. If it is on, the pet will use it automatically, as often as possible. If you turn it off, you must manually click it to get the pet to use the skill. I keep growl always on because my main use for a pet is to tank for me. When a pet uses growl, it increases the aggro on itself. Aggro stands for aggression. Enemies will attack whatever they have the most aggro towards. Doing more damage or healing gains more aggro. Also simply being a lower level gives you a lot of aggro. Growl helps keep aggro on your pet so you can simply sit back and shoot it at your leisure, without taking damage to yourself. As long as the pet is the one getting hurt, you can heal him with your heal pet spell. If you use your pet well enough, you can take on enemies well above your level with ease. Even if your pet dies, you can simply revive him. Aside from being very unhappy with you, you can get your pet back, good as new, in a matter of seconds. Be sure to immediately feed your pet. I carry a lot of extra food in places where I know my pet will die a lot. It pays off.

Skills you learn from the pet trainer are not the only beast training skills you can learn. Wild beasts have very useful skills as well. Only certain beasts have skills, and the level and type of beast effects which skill you can learn from them. Some cats have Cower (Reduces aggro on the pet), Prowl (Stealths the cat and makes the first strike coming out of stealth more powerful), and Dash (Increases run speed for a short time.) Some Bears have Claw or Bite (Adds an extra attack between your normal attacks to do added damage). Owls can get Dive (Increases run speed for a short time) and Screech (Reduces attack power of the targets in range). Wolves get Howl (Increases the attack power of the next move for every team mate in range). Turtles get Shield (Increases the defense power of the pet for a short time). Wind Serpents get Thunder (Shoots a bolt of electricity at enemies). When Patch 1.9 comes out, Monkeys will get Thunder Stomp (Does AOE damage and increases threat to all nearby enemies.) To learn more skills, take your pet to a stable master. These can be found in many major towns. You can put your pet in the stable and go tame another pet. You can purchase more stable slots so you can have a total of 3 pets. Tame another pet and see if it has a skill with a yellow outline around it (Like the growl move you already know.) If it does not, release by right clicking on its face in the status bar and click abandon pet. Then tame another pet that may have a move. I like to try out every new type of beast in an area. Some beasts, such as thunder lizards, zhevras, and devilsaurs cannot be tamed. Once you find a pet with a skill that can be learned, make the pet use that skill. After a few uses, you will see a yellow message saying you have learned that skill. It will now be in your beast training skills. Most skills have more than one rank, often up to rank 8. Keep seeking out more powerful pet skills to make your pet the ultimate fighting machine. Pet trainers also teach skills to increase pet armor, stamina, and magic resistance, so check back with them every few levels. All pet training skills will use up the pet’s TP. You gain more TP as your pet gains loyalty levels and gains experience levels. Be careful how you spend your TP because no pet will ever get nearly enough TP to learn all the skills you can train him. If you make a mistake, you can have the pet trainer cause him to forget his training and give him back all his TP. Be careful doing this because it gets more expensive each time you train, and can end up costing a lot of gold. You can have a maximum of 3 pet skills in the action bar at once. If you go to your spell book, there is a pet tab where you can see your pet’s skills and switch out the active ones.

Now that you have the basic knowledge of training pets, it is time to go out and put your skills into practice. The best way to learn is by actively using your skills. Try out new pets to see which is best for you and train your skills to fit your unique playing style. With time and experience, you can learn to be a master of your Hunter.

These are some general tips for using your hunter’s other diverse and useful skills in combat. The most important thing is, always hold aggro on your pet as much as possible. If an enemy aggroes you, use your disengage skill or feign death to make him aggro back on your pet. You can heal your pet until you run out of mana, but you cannot heal yourself. Always remember to use your hunter stings on your enemies. Reducing enemy attack power, draining their mana, or keeping your poison sting on them can mean the difference between life and death. If things get too bad, feign death. This will make the enemies think you are dead and leave you alone. It can be resisted, and is much more likely to fail against higher level enemies. Use your traps. A well placed fire trap can add a lot of damage once the enemy steps on it. Use your mana wisely. Using arcane shot and improved multi shot can add a lot of damage and kill enemies much more quickly, but if your pet is taking a beating, you will wish you had more mana to heal your pet. If all else fails, run away. Hunters are masters of kiting (Getting a target to attack you and running away so it cannot hit you). If you use wing clip up close, then aspect of the cheetah when you put some distance between you, you can escape most enemies. Be careful using aspect of the cheetah, because if you get hit, it will stun you and slow you down instead. Master the jump shot technique. When running away, jump forward and spin around to face the enemy and fire a shot in mid air. Then quickly turn back around and run forward. Using this technique, you can slow an enemy and place your poison sting on them every time it wears off. It will eventually do enough damage to kill just about anything.

Each time you train a new skill, use it as much as you can to learn how it is used. Every skill has some good practical application, even if it seems useless. Aspect of the wild, for example, is often never used by many hunters. When in high level instances such as Scholomance where the group is often poisoned, using this move increases the entire party’s nature resist by 60 and can often cut their damage to less than half, and sometimes save the whole group. Shaman and druids can also be considerably weakened by using this move. Many hunters do not use disengage because they fail to realize its use. If an enemy gets close to you, use disengage. If it is used while within melee range of a mob, it will stop your melee attacks, lessen the aggro on you, and usually send them back to the pet. This way, you can take on enemies that would normally kill you in a matter of seconds by keeping them engaged on your pet. Feign death is especially useful because it cancels combat. If you get some distance from where the enemy first attacked you then feign, it will usually just run back to where it started and lose interest in you. It can be useful in combat with humans as well. Most people won’t buy it if you play dead, but it does disengage combat. If they do not have a damage over time spell on you and do not have time to attack you after you feign, you can drop a freeze trap and incapacitate them while you eat right in front of them. Stunning the enemy before you feign keeps them from being able to attack you and allows you to drop a freeze trap right on their head. If you are a night elf, you can shadow meld as soon as you start eating to be completely invisible while you recover all your HP and mana.