Roxanne Flowers

Level 10 or under. 2 hours played or under. Last logged into 4+ months ago. Sounds like a fair enough way to "cull" unused creations.

Pretty much the same story for a leveling PvEer too. The only times I don't have my Pet with me is when I'm out Taming to learn a new Pet Skill. I therefore have only ONE Best Friend and everything else is just a "temporary relationship" before I return to my Owl that I've had since Level 10.

It's not too much of a hassle, but it is a complication that needs to be "tended to" rather than just doing a copy/paste and then forgetting about it. So it's a nuisance, not a crisis. ^_~

So, did a little more noodling and testing this week and found out, as mentioned above, that i can't get the commands to toggle Pet skills on and off to work inside a macro (grrr...). Also, the Pet Stay macro that Raziya provided exceeds 255 characters in length if you try to double up on the Dash and Dive /script lines. That means that at present I'm back to using the following macro set: Just as an experiment, I tried changing up my usual opening tactics to do a ranged pull to Immolation Trap ... and quickly discovered that adding a lot of Sting and Shot skills at the beginning of an engagement is a great way to spam away almost all of your mana in a hurry (I know, go figure). I was finding myself OoM after just doing a pair of takedowns in Stonetalon Peaks, in part because I wasn't paying attention to it (because melee doesn't put that much of a strain on mana consumption/recovery) and found myself needing to take long pauses before proceeding to the next target. Simply as a rule of thumb, as opposed to direct measurement, it felt like my overall progression speed as slowed by using ranged attacks at the start of an engagement, simply because of the added downtime after only a couple of fights, while sticking to a melee only posture allowed me to "cruise" from combat to combat to combat with very nearly no downtime at all for mana recovery and pretty much full health for every fight. So overall, it felt like I was racking up kills faster by dispensing with the ranged combat openers and just sticking to melee. As an amusing side note, I spent about 2.5x more arrows on that one series of fights in Stonetalon testing the viability of the strategy than I had in the preceeding 2+ Levels of melee fighting since reaching Level 25. So oddly enough, I'm getting some pretty strong feedback signals telling me that if I want to use ranged attacks as part of my battle strategy, I'm going to need to take time outs to drink (or just wait) in order to manage the mana costs ... while in contrast, going straight melee only (plus a Trap) has next to no such downtime issue when taking on single targets sequentially. The "need to drink" almost constantly when adding ranged attacks to the mix made me think that I was playing my Balance Druid, due to the rate of mana consumption, rather than playing my Survival Hunter.

The copper veins in Dun Morogh are either widely scattered or underground past piles of mobs. It's not like Elwynn Forest where you can run along the ridge line that goes for 3/4 of the map and just see copper nodes every couple minutes while you run. So the nodes ARE there, but they aren't conveniently located near each other, and typically you'll only find them in places that people don't go to very often (if at all).

So ... ~1.5% proc rate, which I believe is similar to a Crusader enchant (roughly speaking)?

Are you planning to play at melee distance or at range? What do you want to use for your ranged weapon? A bow or a gun? If the answer to these two questions is Range and Gun, then you're going to be better off going Dwarf, simply because of the +5 Gun Skill racial. If the answer to these two questions is Melee and Bow, then you're going to be better off going Night Elf, because of the higher base Agility and +1% Dodge racial. Those are pretty much the only game mechanical reasons for picking one over the other. Beyond that it comes down to choice of starter areas and the Beasts available for taming within those areas (if you want an Owl, that's MUCH easier for Elves to do than Dwarves, since at low levels Owls exist exclusively atop Teldrassil). If you're still undecided after that ... pick based on appearance/aesthetics and just enjoy the game.

I just had the server shutdown on me with only 10 seconds of warning.

That's looking a lot like a misplaced decimal point, where you're getting into the range of a 10:1 differential in performance.

Not saying it CAN'T be done, just that being a Main Tank on a Hunter will be a bigger challenge than you'd have if using a different class for the role, that's all. We just lack some of the skills that other aggro magnet classes get built into them. Sure, our Pets can tank, with Growl, but that's the Pet tanking and drawing aggro, not the Hunter. One side effect of asking this question though is that I'm trying to figure out if there's a way for a Hunter to set up a sort of Threat Rotation where they "trade" aggro back and forth with their Pet in a predictable way. That way your Pet tanks the adds while your Hunter sequentially DPS engages targets one by one in melee rather than at range. Obviously, this is a more complex problem than the standard "plink from a distance" strategy, where your Pet holds ALL of the aggro, but in the melee range scenario you want your Pet to hold the aggro of ALL BUT ONE, which is a bit more of a challenge to manage adequately. Now obviously, since the beginning of this thread, I've been advocating for NOT using Growl on a Screech Pet, and instead using Cower (which, apparently, no one takes seriously) and not even bothering to train Growl onto your Pet at all. My current build strategy for Pet Skills doesn't include Growl ... but I've still got room for it, since my plan was to only use 3 trained skills (Screech, Cower and Dive) so I've got the 4th Pet Skill slot empty, and I've budgeted all of my Training Points (except 1) on maxing out those 3 active skills plus All Resistances (rank 3) and the Stamina (rank 1) and Armor (rank 1) skills to make my Pet an all around "hardy" type. So I've got 1 skill slot open upon which I can spend all of 1 training point on if I wanted to ... and Growl could fit into that slot and would cost zero training points, meaning it could be done. Which then begs the question ... okay, genius ... how could you possibly use Cower AND Growl on the same Pet in a way that isn't inherently self-defeating? Well ... this is where things start to get interesting, theoretically speaking. The first thing that comes to mind is that in order to use Cower AND Growl ... together ... on the same Pet (wait, what?) you need to have your Pet use these skills in an intelligent and DELIBERATE fashion to support a strategy of engagement (in this case, melee rather than ranged), instead of just putting them both on Auto Attack and letting them cancel each other out. Now, according to the vanilla database, here's the threat values for Cower ranks 1-6, and the lowest level Beast you need to Tame in order to learn these ranks. Rank 1: -30 Threat (5-6 Nightsaber or Juvenile Snow Leopard) Rank 2: -55 Threat (15-16 Savannah Patriarch) Rank 3: -85 Threat (25-26 Crag Stalker) Rank 4: -125 Threat (36-37 Ridge Stalker) Rank 5: -175 Threat (50 Jaguero Stalker) Rank 6: -225 Threat (55-56 Frostsaber Cub) And here's the threat values for Growl ranks 1-7, learned from the Pet Trainer every 10 Levels. Rank 1: 50 Threat (Level 1) Rank 2: 65 Threat (Level 10) Rank 3: 110 Threat (Level 20) Rank 4: 170 Threat (Level 30) Rank 5: 240 Threat (Level 40) Rank 6: 320 Threat (Level 50) Rank 7: 415 Threat (Level 60) So obviously, at any given Pet Level, you're looking at needing to Cower TWICE in order to shed the Threat generated by 1 Growl (roughly speaking). Now, just for shizzle, let's throw in the Hunter (melee) skill Disengage. Rank 1: -140 Threat (Level 20) Rank 2: -280 Threat (Level 34) Rank 3: -405 Threat (Level 48) And just for the sake of completeness, here's the (ranged) skill Distracting Shot. Rank 1: 110 Threat (Level 12) Rank 2: 160 Threat (Level 20) Rank 3: 250 Threat (Level 30) Rank 4: 350 Threat (Level 40) Rank 5: 465 Threat (Level 50) Rank 6: 600 Threat (Level 60) These are the Threat talents that Hunters have to work with, NONE of which do any damage at all, so for people wanting to top DPS meters, these control skills do not directly aid you in your quest to secure the #1 DPS slot. It's also plenty obvious from these listings that there is a Design Intent for it to be easier for Hunters (and their Pets) to build up Threat than it is to shed it. So now, here's my thought ... Using macros, shouldn't it be perfectly possible to structure a Melee Hunter's attacks such that when your Hunter uses any of your three bread'n'butter melee attack skills (Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite or Counterattack) your Pet is commanded to also use Cower on your target ... AND ... at the same time create a different macro such that whenever your Hunter uses Disengage (which only works in melee), your Pet will use Growl on your target? In both cases, both Cower and Growl are NOT on Auto Attack ... nor is Dive ... but Screech is kept on Auto Attack so that it gets used as often as possible on the target your Hunter is fighting, to do damage to that target and debuff the Attack Power of all other hostiles in melee range of your Screech Pet. This would then create a sort of Push/Pull dynamic in both adding to and subtracting from Threat. It creates conditions under which your Pet is minimizing its Threat on the target your Hunter is melee attacking, while continuing to Screech at it (and any adds nearby), so as to encourage that specific target to engage your Hunter so as to proc Mongoose Bite and Counterattack. At the same time, it creates a "tag team switch" option in which your Hunter can successfully Disengage simultaneously with your Pet using Growl to draw aggro away from your Hunter and onto your Pet, so as to free up your Hunter to do anything from Bandaging to Mend Pet to repositioning to begin attacking from range and "move" the battle to a new location, including use of Distracting Shot to pick apart the dogpile on your Pet. It would mean that the use of Cower would decline from the Auto Attack scenario, due to "inefficiencies" of timing in the use of Hunter melee skills relative to the cooldown of Cower on the Pet. Now, one of the factors that isn't clearly understood in all of this, mainly because both Petopia and the vanilla database are "silent" on the matter, is ... are Growl, Cower and Disengage effectively single target skills, or do they have a melee range PBAoE (like Screech does). I'm reasonably certain that Growl is a PBAoE skill that adds Threat to every target in melee range of your Pet, but I have no information confirming that either Cower or Disengage have a PBAoE associated with their Threat reduction. An alternative to this formulation would be to keep Growl off Auto Attack and key it such that it is only to be used as part of a Disengage+Growl macro, while keeping Cower on Auto Attack. This would then produce a situation in which "on demand" your Hunter can try and shed the aggro of adds onto your Pet, while continuing to DPS your main target which should remain (mostly) focused on your Hunter. In this case, use of Growl is meant to moderate incoming damage from multiple hostiles by splitting it between your Hunter and your Pet. That way, your Pet is tanking everything that you're NOT targeting, while your Hunter "solo tanks" every target in melee in a sequential rather than parallel fashion, such that your Pet holds onto the attention of everything BUT what you're trying to DPS down. The key here is that Cower is on Auto Attack to shed Threat against whatever your Hunter is fighting in melee, while "on demand" (rather than "on auto") Growl keeps everything else focused elsewhere (on your Pet). With proper positioning of yourself and your Pet, you ought to be able to debuff most (if not all) of the hostiles in parallel so as to suppress their damage production and extend the survivability of both yourself and your Pet, giving you both time and opportunities to win the engagement. Yet a third possibility would involve turning the Auto Attack for Cower ON/OFF depending on whether the last melee skill used was an offensive (Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite or Counterattack) or defensive in nature (Disengage), while making Growl still only used in conjunction with Disengage, for possibly the best/simplest melee Threat management that doesn't require extra skill slots on your hotbars. Using this third possibility as a theoretical basis, here's how the various attack macros used by the build would need to be edited. Well ... just tried it in game and ... apparently the /petautocaston spellname formulation isn't supported in the vanilla version of Darrowshire, even though I'm using Supermacro and CastModifier add-ons. I even tried... /petautocaston Cower ... from the command line while I had the skill off auto to test it, and all I get is a chat window message implying that I've used an unregistered command and would you like to see a list of commands? I even found This Post from January 2007 strongly implying that the command ought to be supported, but I can't get it to work. Would anyone more knowledgeable about creating macros (that work) be able to tell me how I should edit to be able to make use of /petautocast on/off scripting in macros? Or is this something that only came out with TBC and thus we'll need someone to come up with some sort of LUA scripting extension or something in order to be able to support the functionality of turning Pet Skill Auto features on/off using macros? Raziya? Help?

Sankaku Complex Link (NSFW) Obviously this is in reference to the current retail game (since we don't exactly use game tokens for playtime over here), but this sort of thing may help explain why Gold Spamming is so rampant and resistant to being stamped out on our realms. The profit motives of exploiting idiots with more Dollars than Sense are just too strong.

Agreed, but I honestly wouldn't consider myself "qualified" to write something like that (yet) simply because I haven't progressed through enough of the game yet to be able to write definitively about strategies that will remain viable for all situations, particularly the ones where you want want to be "soaking" aggro away from others. Hunters have a remarkably poor toolkit for being able to manage aggro themselves. To be fair, in most situations, you're better of letting your Pet tank for you (which is why so many Hunters do precisely that), since they (usually) have Growl and your Hunter has no equivalent. Indeed, pretty much the only aggro magnet skill you've got as a Hunter is Distracting Shot ... which isn't all that useful in melee range (go figure, eh?). So in team play, Hunters make for poor aggro magnet tanks, simply because we lack the tools to gain and maintain aggro from multiple targets upon ourselves simultaneously. One of the few ways we can do so in melee range is use of Explosive Trap, which is hardly a multi-target Taunt type of ability, and even then we're relying on straight damage output to draw attention to ourselves. With all of that in mind, I honestly can't recommend that a melee spec Hunter bill themselves as a Tank for group play, particularly dungeons, unless you're really well geared and have at least the 10/0/30 core talents selected to give yourself the necessary edge to make a go of it ... and even then you're going to need your party to be understanding of your limitations when it comes to generating Threat and holding aggro. In that respect, I definitely feel that in group play, Hunters, even if Survival spec, will make remarkably poor aggro magnets for a group of Players. It's different when it's just you and your Pet, since you ought to be in control of all of the participants on your side of the encounter, so it's a lot easier for you to play aggro magnet when it's just you and your Pet since there are fewer variables involved (Player patience being a big one). I know that Warriors aren't the ONLY tanks in the game, since Paladins, Bear Druids and even Shamans can tank 5 to 10 man dungeons successfully. At this time, I sincerely doubt if a Hunter could fill the same role adequately, given the demands of expectations. What we CAN do is DPS ... even when we're holding aggro for our Pets so we can proc our retaliation skills.

Just letting people know the option exists, even though it's not a BiS choice necessarily. Depending on how people like to play, they might want to pursue the option (like you did, obviously).

Don't feel bad, the same thing happens to me too ... both when writing and reading those walls of text. Fortunately, there's useful info in them, so I don't consider it to be time wasted. It's definitely a Horse Of A Different Colour (hat tip to our British friends) way to play as a Hunter, that's for sure. Since I'm concurrently playing a Rogue through the exact same content as my Hunter (just not at the same time) I can definitely say that playing a Melee Hunter is actually easier and less nerve wracking than playing a Rogue. The reason for that is simple. Hunter+Pet+Trap brings more offense than Rogue alone when it comes to a straight up fight. The only times when it's easier to be a Rogue is when you can One Shot Kill a target with an Ambush crit from Stealth. Just think of your Pet as a "third hand weapon" that does damage middling between your Main Hand and Offhand weapons and it'll start making more sense to you, since you want to be fighting beside your Pet rather than far away from them. I can't say I've had NO mana issues, because continuous adds, pulls and combat will drain you down, so getting overrun can still be a problem. That said, I can take down 2-3 at a time without running out of mana, and on Trog Island in Loch Modan I think I went through like about 7 respawns in a row chain aggroing onto me and my Pet by the broken down wagon, at the end of which both my Pet and I were in really bad shape, but we were both still alive. I didn't even have all of my macros set up yet at that point, so I was "directing traffic" manually while swinging so as to Split Tank with half on my Pet and half on me to divide up the damage between us. It was a scary fight, but at the end of it I certainly had a feeling of accomplishment. The "classic" rotation for a Melee Hunter is ... catch as catch can. Ideally you want to lay a Trap down before you even start. Since you aren't going to be kiting (much), Frost Trap has very limited value to you when you're soloing if you're going to melee your target(s). Immolation Trap is your go to 1v1 damage Trap. Even if stuff dies in under 12 seconds you're still getting damage ticks out of Immolation for that time to hasten the defeat so you take less incoming damage. Once (or if) you've laid your Trap, it's a good idea to use the Stay macro on your Pet to keep them "parked" beside the Trap. YOU then advance forward (carefully) until you Attract Attention™ and get your target so start moving in your direction. You then simply back up until you're beside your Pet where the Trap is. This then "lures" your target to blunder into the Trap to engage you. Using Immolation Trap for this is helpful because it establishes Threat on your Hunter, rather than on your Pet. Once your target has "eaten" your Immolation Trap, proceed to unload Raptor Strike into them. I have Raptor Strike macroed to automatically order my Owl to attack whatever target I've got selected, so then my Pet gets in on the action because I'm attacking that target. After that, it's simply just use of Raptor Strike every time it's off cooldown ... and using Mongoose Bite whenever it procs and is not on cooldown, or Counterattack whenever it procs and is not on cooldown. Don't forget that Counterattack will immobilize targets in place for 5 seconds EVERY TIME and that Counterattack cannot be Dodged, Blocked or Parried (meaning it roots if you don't MISS). This is why I have no real use for Wing Clip (or even the Improved Wing Clip talent) in a melee oriented Survival build, except maybe as a way to proc something like a Ravager by spamming Wing Clip Rank 1 for "next to nothing" in mana cost (aside from the 5 second rule of mana recovery). See Raziya's Ravager Video for more information about that particular Melee PBAoE possibility. Note that the same mentality would seem to hold true for almost any Proc On Hit weapons you might be using, where you spam Wing Clip Rank 1 just to increase the number of attacks you can make with slow weapons (Nightfall anyone?). Speaking just for myself, of course, I have to now wonder about the possibility of melee tanking as a Hunter with a pair of Julie's Daggers with Lifestealling enchantment on both of them for some respectable life drain/leeching to extend survivability/endurance. Won't generate the largest damage numbers per hit ... but would definitely fall into the Chuck LOTS Of Dice™ category of strategies. Trust me, dual wielding 1.30 speed Daggers generates a LOT of hits in a hurry. As an added bonus, whenever the hit you make crits, any healing/drain through your weapon(s) will ALSO crit for even more healing/drain ... and what does a Survival spec Melee Hunter want to have in a huge abundance? Agility ... for Dodge ... and ... Crits ... and Armor. And you did take Savage Strikes to get +20% crit chance on Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, didn't you? Anyway, once combat is engaged, there's basically only 4 skills to really worry about ... Auto Attack (duh), Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite and Counterattack ... the latter two of which proc when you Dodge (Mongoose Bite) or Parry (Counterattack). You're looking at cooldown times of 6, 5 and 5 seconds for those last 3 skills, and you want to be using them every single time you can when fighting in melee combat, particularly Counterattack, which prevents Runners from fleeing you. Pretty much everything else is incidental or ancillary to those 3 skills, including having your Pet attack the target that you yourself are attacking, use of Mend Pet, Scare Beast, and so on. That said, you can't just switch off and zone out while fighting, because you still want to remain aware of your surroundings and be mindful of any escape routes you might need to use. If things start getting too hot for you, go ahead and dump Threat yourself to shed it onto your Pet to give yourself some time to Bandage or Flee. Speaking of which, I wonder if there's a way to toggle auto-attack on Pet Skills like Cower so as to detoggle Cower whenever your Hunter uses Disengage so as to help transfer Threat more neatly from Hunter to Pet. Hmmm ... it appears that there is ... This bears further investigation. Looks like I need to make a macro that will do something like this (will probably require tweaking): That would then cover situations where I want to shift aggro from myself to my Pet while in melee. Anyway ... moving on ... Since I'm playing as a strictly PvE Hunter, I went with Leatherworking and Skinning, with the intent to specialize in Dragonscale post-40 (which allows you to craft Mail, unlike Tribal and Elemental Leatherworking). Basic idea is that there are certain BoP crafted items and I wanted to have access to them for my Hunter, and I wanted the "selfish sufficiency" offered by being able to skin what leather I needed without resorting to use of the mailbox or the auction house for mats. Since I have a Druid, a Hunter and a Rogue, and I put Leatherworking onto each of them (Tribal, Elemental, Dragonscale, respectively is the plan) I basically needed 2 Skinners, and since my Druid is an Herbalist (go figure, eh?) that meant that my Rogue and Hunter wound up being those 2 Skinners feeding mats to 3 Leatherworkers. Certainly beats having 3 Leatherworkers and only *1* Skinner like I tried to do over a decade ago. Engineering is by no means "required" for a Melee Hunter, although it would offer certain additional advantages, depending on whether you went with Gnomish or Goblin Engineering. It really depends on personal preference. I understand that Engineering is the PvP Profession, so feel free to spec into it if you feel like you need to. No, I haven't, although next time I get around to crafting myself some new Leather Armor I'll ship them off to my Enchanter first for an Absorption enchantment before soulbinding them onto my Hunter and Rogue. That does seem like it will offer a really good synergy, so thanks for mentioning it!

I'm sitting here laughing, not because of the request, but because I've never made a video of gameplay before and have honestly never had an inclination to make one. Also, at the moment, because of my insistence on playing all 3 campaigns on each of my characters (for rep and cash/item rewards) I've gotten somewhat overleveled for the content that I'm playing, so a lot of stuff is green/grey to me right now in Stonetalon Peaks and out in The Wetlands. That of course changes when fighting against Elites. The gear I'm using on all my characters is (relatively speaking) weak crap that either drops, is a quest reward, or is something I've crafted. So it's all totally leveling gear/experience/play for me right now. I've still got BFD and the Stockades to do once I finish up with Stonetalon and The Wetlands. But yeah, I can definitely understand the desire for visual/gameplay evidence of the differences that bringing all of these disparate elements to bear can bring. It is one of those things where you need to SEE it in action to really begin to understand and grasp the potentials. It's also easy to argue that playing as a Melee Hunter is a good bit more ... complex ... than playing a Ranged Hunter who simply goes through a rotation of Shots. There's a slightly different emphasis on choosing where to fight and how to fight what you're up against, and how much prep work you want to invest before starting an engagement. Until you SEE it in action, it's all theoretical. The true CORE talents of a proper Melee Hunter build are, I would argue, are composed of a 10/0/30 talent mix with a Screech Pet, with the remaining 11 points being free to fill out the build with whatever floats your boat. In this context, 11 talent points "leftover" makes for a pretty decent mix of opportunities for personalization. You could spend those points in Beast Mastery to really buff up your Pet with Unleashed Fury and Ferocity (putting 5/5 into each) and still have 1 point left over for either Bestial Swiftness (outdoor pursuit speed) or Intimidation (3 second stun plus Pet Threat) or Wyvern Sting. If you absolutely must have Aimed Shot (in a melee oriented build?), you've got the 11 talent points you'd need available to you to get that deep into the Marksman tree. Or you can do what I did/will do and spend 5 points on Survival, 2 on Feign Death, 1 on Wyvern Sting and 3 on Thick Hide. Point being, there's a goodly bit of Nice To Have™ rather than Absolutely Necessary™ "leftover" talent points at the end of things, so arguably the build ought to be "filled" by Level 50, with the last 10 Levels simply being augmenting/refining the core of it.

Wow, I can hardly believe I started this thread over 6 months ago. Guess it's time for an update. Still leveling 8 Alliance characters in parallel and playing all 3 Alliance campaigns (Human, Dwarf/Gnome, Night Elf) and I've gotten all of my characters up to Level 28-29 by now. It's been a heck of a lot of fun to replay the game this way. As a side effect of having every single Profession in my stable (army?) of characters, I've been able to level up all of my Professions rather nicely to keep them all current with the content that I'm playing through. Fishing tends to be my second lowest skill on everyone, simply because I only do it while waiting dockside for boats to arrive. My absolute lowest skill on everyone is First Aid, in the 100-115 range (I need so much Wool Cloth!). My highest skills at the moment are things like Mining, Blacksmithing (x2), Engineering (x2), Herbalism and Enchanting, mainly since I've got the resource gathering flow needed to advance all of those skills. Surprisingly enough, the big moneymakers for me (on Darrowshire) have turned out to be Enchanting (of all things) from taking a pile of low level green junk weapons, disenchanting them and making Wands to sell to vendors, Herbalism creating a surplus to sell (my Druid can never go anywhere in a straight line!), Mining + Blacksmithing from either selling off raw ore I don't intend to use or crafting Mail pieces that are cheap in resources to make and then vendor, and of course ... Pickpocketing every Humanoid/Undead in sight (my Rogue "finances" anyone who falls short on cash). At this point, at Level 28-29 on 8 characters, I figure I've got about 100+ gold spread across my 8 characters. Some of them are always in poverty, since their only income is quest rewards and vendor trash, while others are (by comparison) "rolling in it" and are already on their way to saving up enough cash to buy mounts at Level 40. I figure I should have no problem financing 5-6 mounts at Level 40 (Paladin and Warlock won't be "buying" mounts in the usual sense). Anyway, that's neither here nor there for the topic of playing a Beast o' Melee Hunter ... which I have been doing on my Night Elf Hunter. It's been ... interesting. At Level 25, I of course switched over to Razor Arrows and bought 5 stacks of them (for 1000 arrows). Prior to this I'd been using a SINGLE stack of 200 Sharp Arrows since Level 10 and was running low when I finally dinged Level 25 and switched over to Razor Arrows. That's right, I used less than 200 Arrows during 15 Levels from 10-25, including running through Deadmines. Instead, I just spend a handful of copper on repairing my gear whenever I get back to town. Between Levels 25 and now 28, I've used about maybe some 40 or so Arrows. My Hunting Quiver is only half full of ammo, and it STAYS that way ... because I'm playing through the game as a Melee Hunter. I just don't spend a whole lot of time shooting things. There are have been some close calls on occasion, but it's kind of fascinating to see just how capable a Survival Hunter build can be. When taking on multiple opponents or a single elite, I've always got the option of sending in my Pet first to soak up aggro while I stand back and plink away with my Bow until drawing aggro myself and then proceeding to melee. I try not to need to Split Tank between my Hunter and my Pet all that much, but when I have needed to, it's worked pretty well (especially in Loch Modan on Trogg Island when caught by respawns). Most of the time the standard tactic is to "get close but not too close" to the mob I want to take down. I plunk down an Immolation Trap for them (still don't have Explosive Trap yet) before entering combat. I then "nudge" forward to draw aggro and then fall back to stand at my trap. I let my target charge at me, get burned, and then open up with Raptor Strike and start watching for Mongoose Bite procs on my hotbar. Meanwhile, my Owl is Screeching and attacking right alongside me and is doing almost as much damage as I am and the trap is. The whole thing feels like something of a buzzsaw because of how fast it piles on the damage from 3 different sources, instead of just 1 (Trap, Pet, Hunter). The Screech debuff makes a pretty big difference in tanking effectiveness, since it reduces the amount of damage the mobs can generate, yielding a Damage Avoided/Reduced scenario that synergizes really well with tanking yourself as a Melee Hunter. I well and truly believe that THIS is the essential Design Intended behavior pattern for a Melee Hunter build strategy ... the Three-on-One combination of damage sources. I hardly ever have to feed my Owl by this point, after getting my Pet to Loyalty 6 Best Friend, in part because my Pet is hardly ever taking any damage in combat (which can lower their Happiness). Thanks to this, I just feed my Owl any Meat that drops which otherwise would have simply been vendor bait to keep my Pet happy and well fed. As far as weapons go, I'm using a Bow that dropped for me back in the teens (and probably ought to be replaced by now), but since I use it so rarely it hasn't been a big issue for me. It's there, but it's not my go to weapon. I tried using a 2H Axe for a while, to get those satisfying melee crits from Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, but it was really unhappy camper time if my attack(s) Missed and I then had to wait for the next swing to arrive. I then switched to dual wielding a pair of Axes for a while, which was kinda cool, but I didn't have any good stat modifiers available to me on the weapons themselves, so they were just straight damage weapons. Then my Blacksmith(s) reached a Level where they could craft Pearl-handled Daggers and later Deadly Bronze Poniards which I could of course equip 2 of, for stat bumps. It may seem strange to equip a Hunter like you would a Rogue, with dual Daggers, but they turn out to be surprisingly effective. Since Daggers are so fast, if you Miss an attack there isn't a long lag time before you make another swing at your target and in the overall scheme of things you didn't lose a whole lot of damage throughput. Also, because they're fast, you don't have to wait all that long for Raptor Strike to be used after hitting it on your hotbar. The entire build feels very quick and responsive when using dual Daggers, and in combination with Immolation Trap and a 2.00 attack speed Pet can produce a melee range caster pushback performance broadly similar to using Broken Tooth, simply because of how FAST the damage is landing from four(!) different sources (Trap, Pet, Dagger+Dagger). I have to say, that although the 2H Weapon strategy looks really good from a BIG Numbers perspective when getting crits from Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, that's more of an RNG "spike damage" strategy and is something which has an "intermittent" performance profile. Sometimes you will, sometimes you won't (crit) ... and when you don't, it's a long wait until the next chance to land a big crit, and that's not even counting what happens when you Miss with your big 2H Weapon (or get your attack Dodged or Parried). Very much an All Eggs In One Basket sort of deal, which is fine ... so long as the basket works. When it doesn't ... it hurts. So sometimes you'll kill faster and sometimes you won't, and it's really all up to the RNG to decide your fate (hit/miss/dodge/parry and crit chance). That sort of lottery chance may be fine for some people, but in my personal opinion it's really not worth it at the Levels I'm playing at. By contrast, using dual Daggers feels more like a "DoT pressure" strategy, where any one Miss doesn't hurt you all that badly (although getting 3-4 in a row do!). This is more of a "chuck LOTS of dice as fast as you can" strategy, which smooths out the edge cases better to yield a more consistent performance over time, even though the RNG is still a factor. Getting to 3/3 Surefooted in tier 4 Survival really makes a big difference here, since it's adding +3% chance to hit both to your Main Hand and Offhand weapons, which effectively lets you "double dip" on making your dual weapons that much more effective at damage generation. Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite are Main Hand Only spells, so the Dual Wield to hit penalty doesn't affect those attacks, so once again 3/3 Surefooted is really working for you to improve your melee throughput. As I mentioned before in previous posts, Raptor Strike merely ADDS Damage to an attack, much like Heroic Strike for a Warrior or Maul for a Bear Druid, rather than being a damage MULTIPLIER on the spell itself. The damage multiplication for Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite is a function of scoring critical hits with those attacks, and in order to do that you have to be in melee range, and to use Mongoose Bite your Hunter needs to have and be holding aggro (so you can Dodge and respond with a Mongoose Bite). Having tried it both ways, 2H versus Dual Daggers, I have to say that at the levels I'm playing in I definitely prefer the Fast DoT over the Slow Spike performance, mainly because the Fast DoT doesn't rely on the necessity of big hits to finish stuff off quickly. I'd have to say that on balance, the Daggers would routinely kill targets faster than using a 2H would, simply because they'd be "whittling away" quickly at targets rather than waiting for the "big swing" to take stuff down by bunches all at once. The Daggers were therefore also less prone to wasting potential on Overkill, yielding a quicker Time To Kill performance profile on average when soloing, which then meant less time needed to recover back to full after defeating a mob and a quicker overall "cruising speed" through the mobs I needed to defeat. Oh, one other thing to mention about playing a Melee Hunter ... mana management. When blasting away with your Marksman spells on a continuous rotation, mana consumption, and its recovery, can potentially become something of an issue. With the Melee Hunter build I've been playing, mana consumption and recovery just isn't that much of an issue at all. Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite are VERY forgiving on the mana costs, which then leaves most of my mana available for doing things like Mend Pet (on the rare occasions that I Split Tank and need to do so). This also improves "cruising speed" of working through content when doing the Trap, Pull, Strike routine. In many cases I'm more concerned about recovering Health after a fight than I am about recovering Mana ... and oh, hey, look, I just so happen to have some Food here in my bags that my Owl hasn't eaten yet (if it comes down to needing to recover Health fast after a fight). So having played my Beast o' Melee spec from 10-28, I have to say that I'm extremely pleased with how it has turned out in actual gameplay thus far. The 13/0/38 build strategy seems to be working out quite well, even if at this point I've only gotten 0/0/19 deep into the build thus far. Between use of Immolation Trap, Owl for Screech and the buzzsaw of dual Daggers for Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, the performance is definitely in the Melt Faces™ category. I'm already looking forward to reaching Levels 31 (Dive 1) and 32 (Screech 2) and 36 (Cower 4) as well as Level 30 (bump up all Resistances) to start really supercharging my Owl's performance profile for even better melee tanking by my Hunter. Oh ... and one last thing ... special hat tip to Raziya for a couple of macros I've been using. The purpose of these macros is to keep my Owl in combat beside me, rather than letting it range freely. Action 2 is Follow and Action 10 is Passive modes. These actions keep my Pet beside me. I'm using separate macros for Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite so that I can see the cooldowns and readiness status on the icons on my hotbar. I don't have Dive yet for my Pet, but once I do, it'll automatically just Dive to attack. The key here is that Dive isn't kept on Auto but is instead only used under the correct conditionals (to swoop in and attack). The way this works is that since as a Melee Hunter I want the aggro to be on ME and not on my Pet, I keep my Pet in Passive mode at all times, meaning it is only going to attack because I tell it to attack, and using either Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite are the conditions under which I want my Owl to engage and start Screeching while it's beside me. Once I pick up Counterattack at Level 30, I'll be making yet another macro for that skill. This kind of automated Pet control works VERY NICELY on a Melee Hunter build, since it keeps your Pet from doing a lot of otherwise silly things on its own (just be mindful of your clicks!). The whole idea behind the Melee Hunter + Screech Pet combo is that the two of you fight your opponent(s) side-by-side, rather than far apart from each other. Since I don't advocate the inclusion of the Focus dump skill Claw for Melee Hunter builds, there shouldn't be any problem with being able to pay the focus cost of Dive. These also work quite nicely for commanding my Pet to attack if I'm still at range from my target. I'll get the "It's too far away" announcement when doing so, but my Owl will fly off to attack anyway. Pairing these actions together like this just streamlines and simplifies a whole lot of stuff for playing a Melee Hunter. I'm keeping the /cast Dash in these macros just in case I ever decide to play with a Pet other than a Bat/Carrion Bird/Owl so I don't have to rewrite the macro depending on which Pet I'm using. Raziya, if you're still around, I saw your most recent (April) Pet Tutorial video about Dash/Dive only working when moving to attack but not when returning. So here's another place for people to see these macros. As Raziya explained (around 28 minutes into the video), this is a Dash/Dive to Follow Hunter macro, which will command your Pet to follow your Hunter while also going to Passive mode (and thus not get distracted) and if your Pet is in Combat to activate the Dash/Dive skill to return to your Hunter at best possible speed. This is, of course, useful for getting your Pet out of trouble that you can see coming, or to pull a target mob into a Trap (such as the Ice Trap that he demonstrated). Since my engagement pattern as a Melee Hunter doesn't (often) involve being at a distance from my Owl Pet, I haven't really needed to make use of such a macro yet, but there will probably come a time when this becomes important for tactical positioning reasons later on. And then there's Raziya's Stay macro here, which I'm not entirely sure I can manage to get my head around the tactical permutations of (since there are many when it comes to Pull/Fallback/Ambush tactics), since as you say you can use it to make a Pet retreat from an engagement back to a pre-set (Stay) location, presumably one with a Trap placed at it as you demonstrated in your video. This sounds like something that would be very nearly ideal for use with Eyes of the Beast and Corner Pulling, but I just tested it on Darrowshire and after you stop channeling Eyes of the Beast, your Pet will return to Follow your Hunter, even if the Stay mode is still on ... so that's out (boo...). Still, being able to get your Pet to retreat to a Stay point could be useful when working in tandem at a distance. This could then be an additional enhancement for picking apart mob groups of 3+ to safely handle them sequentially via Wyvern Sting and Ice Trap in combination with strategic placement before starting the engagement (so proper time for a proper setup is required). Still, being able to Split Tank like that from the beginning to take things on sequentially rather than in parallel would seem to offer a wealth of possibilities in PvE, and in the hands of a properly skilled Hunter, a large bag of tricks for use in PvP too (if you have the luxury of setup time to attack from different directions). Putting all of this together does, of course, require a lot of practice and (learned) skill in how to use all of these disparate parts and pieces most effectively. Suffice it to say that I've enjoyed the process of learning just how DIFFERENTLY a Melee Hunter plays from the stock'n'standard Tank & Spank (from a distance) playstyle employed by Marksmen and Beast Masters. Remember, the different talent trees call for different strategies for how to succeed ... Beast Master: Pet tanks (at range), buff the Pet. Marksman: Pet tanks (at range), buff the Hunter. Survival: Hunter tanks (in melee!), Pet offers close support(!). Suffice it to say, that playing as a Beast o' Melee Hunter has been quite the ride all the way up to Level 28 so far ... and there's still more fun to come! *^_^*

The spawn rate is low. Most of the time you'll just get vendor trash. Since Ghost Sabers are Level 19-20, it is recommended that your Hunter be at least Level 20 so that you can Tame a Level 20 Ghost Saber if they spawn as Level 20 rather than 19.

3/3 Improved Sap at Tier 4 in Subtlety is what gives you a 90% chance to remain in Stealth after use of Sap. Without those talent points, Sap will break Stealth every time it is used.

Vanish puts you into Super Stealth, but that boosted "I'm not here" has a duration on it, after which you're just in Standard Stealth. As I recall, almost everything in Strat has the "We See Through Stealth" buff on them (you see the eye above their heads while you're in Stealth) that renders Stealth practically useless in their presence. Based on your description, it's entirely possible that the Super Stealth of Vanish expired as normal and you were detected (and thus attacked). Sometimes you just have to put LoS blocking terrain between yourself and the hostiles, just to make sure they can't "see" you when they shouldn't.

Servers have been up for, what ... 8-9 months now?

King Bangalash has a "hidden skill" of Cobra Reflexes. If you ever untrain his talents, this "hidden skill" of his will be lost and cannot be recovered (short of Abandoning him and re-Taming him).

There is no "Alliance Only" barrier to getting Ghost Kitties for Horde Hunters. The figurines ARE THERE, but you're going to have to look around to find them. And even when you do find one, it won't necessarily spawn a Ghost Saber. You may get a vendor bait trash item instead. The Cat Figurines do not require being on a Quest in order to spawn or interact with the items. Just remember that the Ghost Saber you tame will "expire" on a timer after you've Tamed it, so once it has been Tamed, go ahead and start feeding it meat or fish to raise its happiness (as normal) and understand that it will just spontaneously "die" on you of its own accord after like 3-5 minutes of existence and despawn. Simply do your Summon Pet whistle and then Raise Pet to bring it back and start feeding it again. And if you're going to the trouble of getting a Ghost Kitty as your Pet, you are practically obliged to get Prowl for it once you're in the low 30s, so as to make it "doubly transparent" when it goes into Stealth Mode, making it almost impossible to see. Makes it the ultimate Pet for Eyes of the Beast ambushes.

Southshore versus Tarren Mill battles were a thing of legend ... until Blizzard "gave" Southshore to the Forsaken in Cataclysm when they broke and remade the world for 3D flight anywhere.

I only finally got around to watching the movie this past month also and it was really just little more than a love letter to the "noble savages" of the Horde and the Burning Legion. The orcs were really well done (even the language barrier!), but everything else was really ... meh. Worst of all, the only way you could possibly even HOPE to know what the hell was going on (let alone WHY) was to already be a fan who was steeped in the game's lore, and thus already knew all the locations from playing WoW.

So ... do that again when you know you're never going to stable your Pet ever again EVER?