by Brian Wood

For almost every hunter who raids — and the vast majority of those who don’t — addons are an essential tool for optimizing gameplay. While it could be argued that the only addon the hunter class needs is a pet (and possibly a frothing mug of awesomesauce), addons can contribute a lot to your performance. Properly used addons can help you avoid void zones, keep you alive and improve your DPS.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at some of the key addons that every hunter should consider using. We aren’t going to cover every possible addon, of course, but instead look at what I consider the most important hunter addons.

Where to download them

Every boss mod mentioned here is linked to its download page on Curse.com. Curse also has thousands of other mods that you can filter through at your leisure.

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by Brian Wood

As hunters, we spend a lot of our down time engaged in awesomeness. On long weekends, we strip down and roll around in awesomesauce; we drink it and bathe in it it and steep ourselves in the awesome until we reek of it, until we radiate awesome so strongly that it even starts to rub off on those around us. Pet tanking is yet another example of this principle in action.

Grandpappy Frostheim always used to say, “If you want a job done right, do it yourself. But if you’re getting a good drunk on and good enough is good enough, send your pet to do it.”

With the right pet, the right talents, a bit of gear and a pinch of forethought, our pets can make surprisingly formidable tanks. Our pets can easily tank, for example, any dungeon and any heroic in the game. We can even tank raid bosses. And I’m not talking about just the easy stuff in Naxx, either. We can tank a goodly number of ICC bosses including, as you can see in the video above, Sindragosa (and we don’t even need another tank to help out in Sindragosa phase 3, either). So join me after the cut and learn how!

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by Brian Wood

Now, the loot lists we have access to may not be complete. I want to stress this. I really, really hope they’re not, because, all joking aside, the hunter loot selection is grim as all heck. I’m seeing three hunter drops from 25-man, which is fine. But in 10-man I’m only seeing one hunter drop, and it’s probably not going to be used by any hunter — basically no hunter loot in the 10-man version. On the bright side, awesome new trinket!

Twilight Scale Shoulders (10-man, shoulders)

We do not yet have a convenient Wowhead tooltip for these, so here are the stats:

98 Agility
90 Stamina
52 Intellect
Red Socket
Yellow Socket
+12 attack power socket bonus
153 attack power
66 armor penetration rating
48 haste rating

About the only thing these shoulders have going for them is the ArP and even with that they are worse overall than our ilvl 264 tier 10 shoulders — and that’s without the set bonus. The fact is that every hunter out there is absolutely going to be using the shoulder slot for the set pieces. Our set bonuses are totally awesome these days and are not worth sacrificing even for a gear upgrade, let alone a downgrade or sidegrade.

Sadly, this is the only piece of hunter loot currently known to be on the 10-man loot table. QQ.

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by Brian Wood

As hunters, our main job in a raid or a dungeon run is to do as much eyebrow-searing DPS as we can, and do it without pulling aggro or standing in void zones. This is the primary difference between hunters and healers — healers don’t worry about any of these things. One of the secrets of end-game hunter DPS is to stack our cooldowns together, and to time those cooldowns with trinket procs. Over the course of a boss fight, this stacking can yield very real DPS gains. While every hunter spec benefits from this stacking, marksman benefits the most, being able to use our big cooldown, Rapid Fire, four times in a typical four- to five-minute fight. The key here is to stack abilities that combine multiplicatively, rather than additively.

One of the interesting benefits of the DPS gain of stacking cooldowns is that you could actually do more DPS than spreadsheets would indicate. Spreadsheets use averaging of all abilities over the course of a fight, rather than assuming that you’re combining them intelligently. Join me after the cut as we take a look at how it works, when you should stack and when you should not.

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by Basil Berntsen

Hunter PvP is fun. It’s a lot of fun. It’s also something you can jump into any time, compared to raiding where you have to be in a guild that is managing to continue running content. A lot of people are getting into it for the first time but are having trouble getting started.

Start with the gear

The average hunter with a bit of PvE experience and gear will queue up for a random battleground and get mulched. Hunters are almost as squishy as mages, and until you get some resilience, you’re going to die a lot. The best thing you can do while you’re in this state is to use your cooldowns to extend your death, stick with healers and do as much damage as you can before you croak. Hunter damage is insanely high — the phrase “it goes to 11″ doesn’t begin to cover it. The problem is that if you can die to a single warlock DoT, you won’t be able to apply this pressure for long.

The process of getting the required resilience is fairly painless, if a little long. All the ilvl 264 non-set pieces are available for honor points. Assuming you want to start in battlegrounds, you want to aim for a balance between survivability (resilience and stamina) and offensive pressure (agility, AP, crit, int, and to a lesser extent, ArP and haste).

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by Brian Wood

The Lich King is the most complex and demanding fight in ICC. It requires a moderately high DPS throughput, with lots of target switching and burst DPS, situational awareness and unforgiving positioning requirements. With a 15-minute enrage timer, this fight has it all.

As always, we are assuming you have an understanding of the encounter mechanics, and we are focusing on tricks and tips for hunters.

Dear person who named the phases: I hate you

I have no idea who it was that first named the Lich King phases, but whoever it is, I want to kick them in their delicate bits. Seriously, what the heck is wrong with just numbering them in, you know, numerical order? Alas, this silly system is often used in guides, while other guides use a more logical numerical progression. In an attempt at clarity (and pointing out how frickin’ dumb it is), I’ll be using both systems. But I want it known that it’s not my fault that they work like this.

Okay, let’s get started.

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by Brian Wood

I love damage meters and raid parses and any other source of data that can help you evaluate and analyze your performance. I strongly believe that any hunter who is interested in doing the best he can should absolutely run a damage meter. Whether you prefer Recount or Skada or something I’ve never heard of is up to you, but you want to use damage meters just like you want to use any tool that can help you improve your performance.

Alas, damage meters have gotten a bad name, and it is now very in vogue to hate the damage meters and the people who run them. For today, we’re going to set fashion aside and ignore what’s popular to talk a bit about why damage meters are so awesome and why you should absolutely use them. We’ll also look into exactly why it’s important to do as much DPS as we can.

Using a tool vs. being a tool

Damage meters are a valuable tool, and the reason they get a bad rap is they are sometimes used by people who are themselves tools. There’s an important difference here.

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by Brian Wood

Today’s topic is a perennial favorite that I really should have covered long, long ago: What spec should I use? This question is usually accompanied by a description of the hunter’s gear, and often an explanation of where the hunter’s DPS currently is and where he or she thinks it should be.

So join me after the cut as we tackle the question of what spec you should be, and what factors go into the decision. With any luck, putting this one to bed will make room in my inbox for more pressing emails so I can start scheduling my Blizzcon downtime.

Respeccing is not a miracle cure

Right off the bat, I want to stress that respeccing is not a cure for all your DPS woes (unless you’re doing something silly with your talents, like a hybrid spec). Every single hunter spec is capable of putting out high DPS. They aren’t equal — far from it — but if you’re struggling to do over 2k DPS in heroics, your problem is not which tree you chose. Every tree can be played well and every tree can be played poorly.

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by Brian Wood

Today we’re going to cover five basic rules of how not to be a terrible hunter in groups. Following these rules won’t make you great, but they’ll keep you from being called a huntard. I’m going to be a bit more stern than usual here, because this is the hunter good name we’re talking about, but be assured that it comes from a place of love. Tough love, to be sure, but love nonetheless.

Feign Death: the huntard’s tool of death and destruction right here on this very planet.

As the song says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. Feign Death is a tool that the terrible hunter grips with both hands and uses as a bludgeoning weapon to shatter the tank’s kneecap. Not yet satisfied, he then spits in the tank’s face and goes to work on the other kneecap.

No tool in the hunter arsenal is more misused than FD, nor contributes as much to hunters becoming bad players. FD allows bad hunters to violate the laws of natural selection, removes the negative reinforcement and thus keeps them from learning those hard lessons. Where another class might do something stupid and die from it (and hopefully learn better), the hunter does something stupid, FDs out of the death and somehow seems to think, “That was awesome — look at everyone else struggle and die! I’m going to do that again and again!”

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