Pull And Pass - Advanced Hunter Moves
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Gavin under General Tips, Instances
Nanny nanny boo boo -
I don’t know if kids still use the same annoying little chants to taunt each other that we used when I was a nooblet in real life. But the one that sticks out for this lesson is: “I’m rubber; you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!” Boy I hated that one. But it’s very appropriate for the technique we’re going to talk about today. The pull and pass.
Last time we talked about using all of your skills all of the time. But there are certain cases where some skills are just not that useful outside of instances. Even worse, there is not a reason to use them in most instances until you get to the really hard ones. Beginning with Steamvaults, Shattered Halls and Shadow Labyrinth, the mob pulls are beginning to come in groups of 4-6. And those teams are well-balanced just like your group. If one of those elites, or even worse - two or three, get locked on your healer, you can pretty much just start hustling toward the entrance so your corpse run will be shorter.
Most of the time, a healer can do something like bubble (for priests), and run around for a bit and heal himself while the rest of the team goes full DPS on one or two mobs. He can kite guys around and survive for a while. But the elites in the end game instances hit so hard and you simply cannot get them off your back once they lock on, especially as a healer. So the best you can hope for is that you can keep the party healed long enough in spirit form so that they finish off a couple of them and make the next pull easier. But talk about a long night. One or two wipes in an instance is a good run, One or two wipes every one or two pulls blows.
Hunters have gotten a bad rap in groups because many other players think: they don’t (most of the time) do the serious DPS of a mage or Warlock (and locks have off-tank pets too), they can’t tank a murloc, are useless unless they are in range (except those 7 players who went survival spec) so they spend a great deal of time just running around like an idiot, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you’ve heard these and more. If you have decent skills as a hunter you know that these statements may be true about many hunters, but not AL hunters. But the thing is: 25-30% of the toons on just about every server are hunters. Why? Because they solo so well. For the casual gamer, getting a holy priest to level 70 is about as fun as having your wisdom teeth removed. But hunters can do just about anything without having to have much help.
You can be the exception to the rule for those people who don’t really like hunters on instance runs. You paid attention to me in the last article when I told you to use all of your skills so you have all your hot buttons ready to go. Let’s cover how every priest in the game will be your new best friend when you do this a few times for them. Paladins and Shaman aren’t nearly as squishy as their cloth compatriot, but they will appreciate it just as much.
I call it a pull and pass. It can be a little tricky, but not if you know where all your buttons are and pay attention to what’s going on. We are in a big fight and you see a mob going to take a big chunk out of your healer. Here’s what you do:
1. Fire Distracting Shot - As soon as you see your healer has drawn aggro (btw, this IS hunter duty, to pull agro off of healers and to take down trash add mobs) Nail it with distracting shot to get them locked on you.
2. Use Scatter Shot/Concussive Shot - If you have specialized in Marksmanship and can use scatter shot to slow them down or even stop them altogether - if they disorient, they will drop agro on you and your pet can pick it up. If you are Beast Mastery, concussive shot.
3. By this time one of two things will have happened: the mob is now ready to pick on someone else, or someone else is picking on him.
4. If he has already been drawn to another party member, you can go back to nuking down the mark you were on in the first place - OR - use misdirection.
5. Misdirect - Hit your misdirection hotkey and then click your tank. Blast away at your target with the three biggest damage shots you have and he will go back where he needs to be.
So you pull the agro off of your healer and pass it back to your tank. A different kind of crowd control, with a hunter, you gotta love it. And that’s just one of our hunter crowd control tips. Misdirection may be the most underused skill hunters have, and I have never seen many hunters use distracting shot well because they don’t want the agro either. Most marksman hunters will use scatter shot because it saves their own bacon, but don’t know how to pass agro once they pull it. If all else fails, Feign Death and let the mob naturally wander off to someone else. You and your healer are still standing. Hunters have another great way to manage agro we’ll talk about another time.
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Thx for the heads up man, my main on firetree is a hunter and i’v noticed a decline of ppl needing or wanting a hunter except for the later instances and or raids, we dont get a lot in the way of jobs these days.
Hi I am a Hunter (Tur) I love to use my Misdirection for all, a good start to a mob pull say in Kara, I MD to tank and use Volly, now ALL the mob under the cone of it is now on the tank and the one maybe two out side it are mine
to kill off and play with.
Tristan, that’s SUCH a good tip!
Misdirection then Volley.. should be on EVERY Hunter guide out there.
Ok as a Survivalist I have to object to your comment. A survivalist, (A VERY GOOD ONE) can turn a bad pull around if they know what they are doing. Also, the healers know, if the tank goes down to heal me, because I have on a few occasions ran with a whiny tank (we all have), or they just DO NOT GET OUT OF THE LIGHTENING, effectively dying, and I have on my hunter tanked, Thorngrin the Tender from 50k health down, and the first boss in SV twice on two different groups, and saved the entire group from wiping. I have also used Wyvern sting, and am able to use it twice in a row on pulls that just seem to go sour, I can double-triple trap if need be. And I can with my gear keep up five hundred dps or better, so I’m viable in my raid group (still in Kara gear). So don’t diss Survivalist, because we can be excellent at what we do… and not everyone can effectively pull off being a Survivalist either.
My personal use for MD was to Immediately use it if tank lost aggro then place on tank. Distracting Shot Aimed Shot/Arcane Shot. I was Marks spec at the time and my cat was for pure DPS. (Go for the throat RULES) The distracting shot in this case, instead of on you was put on the tank again. If you were worried about the healer getting aggro in the first place, concussive shot the runner or disoreint with scatter shot then start the cycle i said before. just my piece of the pie for the hunters out there.
Another good tip, assuming there ISNT a mark for a freeze trap up already, is to set a trap right up on the healer. BTW< not all healers have spirit form, or bubbles :D. (Just a little prejudiced, eh?)
a decent option, if you ARE BM, you dont get scatter shot- you get intimidation. Distract, concussive, intimidate. it requires a couple extra button presses, but should also buy you a smidge more time
Also, MD doesnt work with volley, but it WILL work with multishot–if you ever need more than one mob directed to another target
Ive seen hunters top DPS in 25man raids, and to say they cant put out the DPS of a mage or a lock is a fallacy. MOst of them just dont itemize properly or cycle their shots as they should
OK, we have some very advanced comments here, and I think I may have given a couple of you the wrong impression at times - we’ll try to take them one by one.
First of all - I wasn’t talking bad about hunters, merely repeating what other “non-hunters” say about us. I mean us because my first and best geared toon is a hunter. And I certainly didn’t mean to imply that SV is a bad way to go - just very rare. You might consider a good SV hunter “the few, the proud.” So I am going to update the original article to do a better job of expressing the joke.
Another thought on the SV tree, it can really be divided into two completely distinct flavors we call the pugilist and the trapper. There are so many good skills in that tree that you simply never have enough points to grab them all.
Having played a hunter through about 6 different specs at the Kara raid level and beyond, you have to admit that only a SV hunter such as Kaliska has a serious shot at doing any off-tank work. The SV hunter can behave a little bit like a rogue in a pinch hitting situation.
I didn’t omit the traps and other skills such as intimidation out of ignorance. There was a time when every single one of us had to get used to the basic move set I outlined above. It is not something that comes naturally either, since you would never use this “push” set of moves solo. You have to learn it in instance runs under pressure.
With so many new hunters out there, we just wanted to give a small tip on a way to make a few friends and keep them if you catch my drift. Getting REALLY good is admittedly going to take a lot more practice and will include a lot of what you guys are mentioning.
Hunters and DPS boils down to spec and gear. Given reasonably equal gear (a hard thing to quantify) a mage or lock will do slightly more DPS than a hunter of any spec. Given the same gear, a BM hunter will do more damage than any other spec from the hunter trees. It’s just a fact supported by the numbers.
With that being said, players rarely have equal gear and equal skill. If you don’t mind drinking a lot, you can (and should) go all out on every single pull in an instance and stay ahead of that mage on the team. I always took it as a matter of pride that my hunter could out-DPS anyone in my guild. Then I joined another guild and there were several mages and locks that would hammer me in the damage meters. Better gear, and great skill.
You really shouldn’t frown on the fact that SV hunters really don’t do as much damage as a BM hunter. That wold be like a holy priest getting upset because someone says shadow priests do more damage than healing specs - well DUH! SV hunters DO have a role to play in groups, and their DPS is only going to be about 25 lower than MM and 45 lower than BM. But their traps are better and they can mele quite well, something a pure BM or MM hunter can never say.
Thom is correct that MD does NOT work with Volley. After MD is cast, only the next three shots add agro to the MD target. Thom is also correct that your first shot after MD should be Multi. The next two are up to you, but they should both be cast shots with big damage and not auto shots. I prefer MD>MS>Arcane>(Steady/Aimed). Intimidation is another thing you really should use in this situation - probably first, or right after the distracting shot. This buys you time to get a MD in before your next couple of shot and almost guarantees the mob will regain agro on the MD target - something David advocates, and a very slick advanced move on this set.
David makes another great point in that if you get good enough, you can use MD in this series FIRST and then let Distracting Shot help put the wayward mob back into the tank. But for you new hunters out there, you gotta know that David has mad skills if he can do this consistently. That one takes some real practice and quick thinking.
Relax hunters, it was a tongue-in-cheek satire of ourselves. People talk bad about us all the time, I thought maybe your skin would be a little thicker
Plus I didn’t want to overwhelm a newer hunter with too many subtleties in one article, just a few basics.
For everything about hunters, you can all check out our soon to be released Hunter Toolkit. It covers everything from the very basics to all of the trickiest advanced moves that have been touched on here already.
Good tips there.
Personally I have a misdirect macro that auto casts it on my focus, or my pet (if no focus).
So i simply focus the tank in any party, and i use it virtually everytime it’s ready. It’s great if you get 6 mobs and a pala tank, the pala can throw his holy shield on 3, and you can MD the other 3 to him… if any get lost in the pull and attack someone else, Scatter Shot / Trap are always there to lend a hand.
This macro also helps massively when solo’ing, especially for the elites in Netherwing Ledge. MD + Scatter Shot + Steady Shot = agro on pet… then you can run and FD when you’re far enough away that it doesn’t matter if it resists.
Survialist is the best hunter spec there is Enuff said
I think the best way to use this would be to switch up the order a bit.
1) Use scater shot first to disorent the target
2) use Misdirect on the tank
3) blow a Distracting shot, Aimed Shot, then Steady shot
4) Continue FF w/ auto shot/Steady Shot
As a hunter at level 70, the first thing you MUST do is make two macros, the first should go like this:
/focus
Click on your tank before any fighting begins and click on this macro. A whitish sheen should appear around the tanks portrait. This indicate you have set them as your focus.
The second macro you need is:
/target focus
/cast misdirection
/targetlasttarget
This will target whoever you set as your focus with the first macro, normally the tank, put misdirection on them, then go back to whatever mob you were targeting in the first place with just one click!! It is the most useful macro i have ever made, as you can click it mid combat, and then do your threat cycle, without a break to select your misdirection target and then carry on DPS as normal! Seriously guys, use it, can save up to 5 seconds in combat, and it saves lives =P. I know it does I have a lvl 70 raiding hunter, Blahblablah of Alonsus EU realms.
im a BM hunt with a cat pet. what i like about cats in PvE is that they aren’t as squishy as say a windserpent but can out dps a boar(which in my opinion are the best pet tanks) so what i do is pop dist shot to pull off our healer then use intimidation and throw down mend pet so i dont have to worry about him dying then use bestial wrath/beast within and nuke it. i have saved many wipes in karazhan and on this guy i have even saved a couple ramparts runs that way
hers my armory i cant get the link to work so youll have to copy and paste it into your adress bar
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Traker
i guess the above link did work…hmm oh well