Borengora's Hunter Guide: Pets

(This guide was created by Borengora, level 60 orc hunter of the Twisted Nether server. All credit is due to him for this wonderful guide.)

4. Your Pet

Your pet is your best friend in WoW. He will be with you always, and will gladly give his life for yours (even though he’ll get pissed with you afterwards). I’d like to cover a few easy tips to maximize your pet’s role in playing your class.

A. Don’t use your mouse to click your pet’s abilities. Hold Ctrl and hit the numbers. It’s much faster and easier.

B. Keep your pet happy. A well-fed pet does 125% damage as well as gains loyalty, which leads to pet training points. Plus they’ll leave after a while if you don’t feed them.

C. When in an instance, KEEP YOUR PET ON PASSIVE! If he’s on defensive, he’ll chase after everything you tell him to attack, even if you change targets mid fight. Once his current target is dead, he’ll chase after the last one until you call him back. A second note is to DISMISS YOUR PET if you are going to take a shortcut that involves jumping or anything else that could disrupt that pathing of your pet. He’ll go the long way around and bring a lot of friends, which will wipe your raid and further cement your group members belief that hunter=newb.

D. Food gets expensive, so take up fishing if your pet will eat fish. It will save you oodles of money in the long run. Arrows are expensive enough.

E. Finally, pick a cool name for your pet or don’t name it. I don’t want to see the pink flamingo named “Barney.” That’s stupid. If you see me in-game, make sure to check out my bats name…

To level your pet, the mobs your are fighting must be green to you. This means tha tis you just have to have The Rake, and you're level 60, you have to kill mobs that are at least green to you for him to get any XP (and you have a hell of a long grind ahead of you). The best mobs for this are casters, such as the skeletons in WPL.