Honestly, unless you take the Hunter Talent that increases your damage against whatever you’re currently tracking, I don’t see it as being a huge problem. I use my Hunter’s tracking on Beasts 99% of the time and almost never look at it; she’s Skinning/LW, but I doubt it would bother me that much if I had to choose between a profession tracking type and a mob tracking type, since I so rarely use the latter.
Still, something to keep in mind.
When did *that *change happen? I don’t ever remember a time when any chanter could DE anything, so either I wasn’t paying attention or it happened more than three years ago.
One of the saddest, and most useless things in all of Azeroth is a hunter that has run out of ammo for his ranged weapon. The saddest and most useless thing in all of Azeroth is a hunter who does that either in a dungeon, a raid or in a PVP battleground. Always top off your ammo supply every time you can. Without fail.
If you are a hunter, ranged attack is your thing. You rock at at it, and that’s what you’ll mostly be expected to do in groups. Advanced students will also learn the art of trapping, pet tanking an extra mob, kiting etc. You suck at melee combat. You might beat a caster or priest wearing cloth armor in melee, if the caster isn’t casting any spells and doesn’t have uberific pvp gear, but pretty much any other class will pwn you in melee. Range is life for you. When you run out of range, you’re about to die.
No idea, but it’s been like that ever since I took an interest in Enchanting. If all you do is disenchant, you’ll only be able to DE up to level 20 items, I think. You top out at 60 Enchanting from DEing, and stuff climbs up into requiring 75 and 125 Enchanting really damn fast.
You are a very flexible class. You can tank, you can heal, and to some extent you can dps, depending on what talents you choose and what you want to specialize in.
It doesn’t matter a whole lot as you first start. You and your partner will be facing easy mobs and mostly just beating them to death. Things get more challenging as you progress.
If I was going to duo a pally with a hunter, I’d probably focus on tanking…ie, holding the mob’s attention, keeping it attacking you, while the hunter and his pet do the bulk of the damage. Your basic healing spells will suffice for most duo situations, even if you don’t put any talent points in the Holy tree. Swap out weapons to keep your skills maxed in each weapon type–you never know when a really nice axe/sword/polearm/mace will drop, and they come in both one handed and two handed versions.
If you want to tank for groups or raids, you’ll be using a shield and a 1-handed weapon. This is sometimes called the “sword and board” technique. Solo or duoing, if the mobs you fight are not doing heavy damage, you might want to break out the two-handed weapon so you can contribute more damage.
Back to the hunter…at level 10 (I think) you learn how to train pets. If they haven’t changed it, you can have up to three different pets at one time, but the two you are not actually using have to be stored at a stable. There are tank-style pets, damage-style pets, hybrid pets, and some that just look really cool.
A boar is a good general purpose pet, used to see a lot of hunters use them in PVP.
Bears make tank style pets–lower damage, but better at holding the mob’s attention while you shoot it.
Cats make damage style pets. They shred things.
Raptors are also popular, or were when I played.
Cool pets can be any tameable animal of the right level, depending on what you like. My first hunter was a Space Goat (Dranei), and in their advanced newbie zone, there’s a named spider that’s tameable. I got tons of comments on him, and people asking where I got him.
Hordies can get a ghost-cat if they’re lucky, but he’s also a quest mob, so is sometimes hard to get.
Fortunately, ammo now stacks to 1,000, and special bags (e.g. quivers) are no longer required to get a speed boost with your ranged weapon.
Is it 60? I thought it was 70 or 75.
Retribution (the Paladin DPS tree) actually does very respectable damage these days. One of the best melee DPS in my hardcore raiding guild is a Ret Pally. (Actually, these days, I’m pretty sure he’s *the *best, but he also has Shadowmourne, and that’s cheating. :D)
Pssssst… I’m pretty sure **jsgoddess **knows what tanking is, as she specified that she likes doing it.
FWIW, these should be all the types of weapons in WoW, off the top of my head:
There is no single class that can use every weapon type (Warriors come the closest, being able to train everything but Wands). I know for sure, for example, that Paladins can’t use any ranged weapons: Wands, Bows, Crossbows, or Guns. Instead, Paladins get a special class-specific item for that slot, called a Libram.
Other classes that use Relics (class-specific items) instead of ranged weapons are: Druids, who use Idols; Shamans, who use Totems; and Death Knights, who use Sigils.
*Not exactly weapons, but they go in your off-hand item slot.
Note, however, that especially as your start getting higher and higher in level, many of your tanking-related abilities–i.e., the ones you need to generate threat and hold aggro off your party member(s)–will require you to have a shield equipped. You will also have passive talents and abilities that require a shield.
Speaking of which… don’t worry that there are a few equipment slots you can’t fill right away. You won’t get rings until you’re in your teens, a shoulder item until about level 20, a head item until about level 25 to 30, and trinkets until some time in your 40s. And for a Paladin, you won’t get a Libram until well into your 50s, at the earliest.
You get the quest that teaches you how to tame pets at level 10, yes. IIRC, you start out with two stable slots and then can buy two more. That means by default you can have two stabled pets and one active one, without spending any extra money.
Currently, at low levels, there is no way to access your stable in the wild. You have to visit a Stable Master to swap your pets out. Stable Masters can be found pretty much anywhere that you see an Innkeeper, as well as by Hunter trainers.
Currently, pets are differentiated by two basic categories: their role and their family. The three roles are Tenacity (tanking), Cunning (hybrid/PvP), and Ferocity (DPS). Each pet “family” is assigned one of these three roles, which determines what miniature talent tree it has. The bear family, for example, is Tenacity, while Spiders are Cunning and Cats are Ferocity. In addition to the abilities a pet shares with all of its broad type, each family has one unique ability–for example, a Spider can spit a web at an enemy to trap it in place.
There are cool-looking and/or unique skins for almost every type of pet.
For when you’re running around on your own, I would recommend a Tenacity pet, at least to start with. They do a very good job of tanking for you. When you’ve got someone else doing the tanking, though, you’ll probably want to use a Ferocity pet. These days, though, my Hunter tends to just run around with her Ferocity pet all the time, because I have abilities like Feign Death that help me manage my aggro. (I’m also Beast Mastery, which makes my pet more robust than usual.)
Something to make a note of: Hunter pets have an ability called Growl, which makes the pet generate extra threat. This should **only **be used when you’re by yourself, in a group without a tank, the tank is dead, or the tank has explicitly asked you to have your pet tank a mob.
If you’re talking about Echeeyakee, he’s not a ghost, per se, he’s just a white-colored lion. He’s spawned from a quest that low-level Horde players do, so it’s not impossible for an Alliance character to have one–it just takes more work.
For a *real *ghost cat, you have to travel to the northern end of Darkshore. There are Naga ruins there with small cat statues scattered around. Each of these has a chance to spawn a ghostly, translucent cat when you click it… which you can then tame. It’s pretty tedious, especially for a Horde character to has to run the whole way there, but IMO the Ghost Saber is so awesome looking, it’s totally worth it.
A resource I love for finding interesting-looking pets to tame is Petopia.
But at the same time we shouldn’t give them any false expectations, prior to level 70 there are very few craftables that are really useful, and most of those can just be bought from the AH, crafting professions are huge money sinks since low level materials are so expensive. I won’t deny that leveling with a crafting skill can be enjoyable, but leveling with two gathering skills and getting a crafting skill(or two) at level 80 is easier. Unless you focus on making sure your crafting skill is keeping pace with your character level it will lag behind while gathering skills pretty much level themselves.
IIRC, patch 2.0, so it was before your time I suppose.
Petopia, pretty much everything you ever need to know about hunter pets.
On preview: Bah, beaten to it.
But there are exceptions, like the Ripped Ogre Loincloth, which drops a whole bunch while doing a certain Horde quest in Feralas. No stats, but this loincloth makes a nice little pair of sexy short shorts on a female toon, and with no level requirement, a level 1 toon can wear it. I’ve sold them for up to 5g a pop. There are some other items like that in the game.
I do keep an eye on the starting bid, mainly because I use Auctioneer and it seems to undercut the starting bid and the buyout price separately. So it might set a buyout price on, say, a stack of Thick Leather at 16g, but thanks to one person posting a single piece of Thick Leather with a starting bid price of 2 copper, I can end up with a buyout of 16g on my stack but a starting bid of 38 copper, and I don’t want to risk somebody seeing that and buying it at that low low price. So I’ll manually bump the starting bid up to 10-12g.
Which is why hunters should go with Skinning, since it doesn’t require tracking. OTOH, my troll hunter has both Skinning and Mining, and most of the time I have the “Find Minerals” tracker turned on. I figure every other class does fine without being able to track mobs on the minimap, so my hunter can manage.
I have two Retribution (DPS) paladins, and take my advice: learn to use a 2-hand axe early, and work on keeping the skill leveled up as you go along, even if you primarily use a different weapon type (this goes for Arms warriors as well). I got my paladins to level 80 and discovered there is suddenly a glaring shortage of 2-hand swords and maces at that level, at least outside of raids. There’s a nice 2h sword you can get at the Argent Tournament in Northrend at level 80, but above that it seems to be axes, axes, axes. And leveling a new weapon skill from 1 to 400 at lvl 80 is boring and tedious.
The lack of a ranged weapon can be really frustrating for pallies, especially when fighting mobs that like to run when low on health in a crowded area. Not much you can do about it, but if you happen to be an engineer, you can throw bombs. Sorta. My engineer was also my mage, and bombs are silly when you can cast fireball.
On the head slot items–you can get a great one for your level as low as the early teens, if you are willing to go to some trouble. Once a week, unless they changed it, there is a fishing contest in Stranglethorn. Special fish will spawn only during the contest–which I think is Sunday afternoon. If you catch a certain kind of special fish, you can turn it in for a floppy hat. It’s leather, but has some stats on it. Lot of rogue twinks have this hat. There’s a different fish you can turn in for some nice boots.
The downside is that getting to Stranglethorn in the low teens is a multiple-death ordeal. Mobs there are about level 30, and will come from far and wide to attack a low level character.
The up side is you only have to make that run one time, as long as you grab the flight path (talk to the guy at the griffon stand). Once you do that, you can fly back anytime.
You’ll die some while fishing in the contest, too. Might want to just take off all your gear and run naked to get the FP, and fish naked too. Once you get the hat and boots, you’re done here for a while.
For shoulders, a pair of leather shoulders drops in…oh hell…I forget the name. It’s the castle dungeon not terribly far from the Undead City, the one with all the werewolves, and the crazy mage boss. I think it drops off the jailer? Very early in that dungeon, before the locked door, anyway.
Sounds like there are a lot of things that will be familiar to me from my LOTRO days.
Someone upthread asked when we were starting. Well, it was going to be soon, but Asi just got sent out of town unexpectedly for a couple of weeks on a business trip, so there will be a delay. I was tempted to get started by myself, but he kinda wants to experience it together so it will likely be a couple of weeks.
Note that there are different levels of ammo, as you go up in level better ammo will become available. When you mouseover the ammo at a vendor, it will tell you what level is required. When you get close to a level that allows better ammo, consider running low on your current ammo so that you can start using the better ammo right away, rather than use up thousand of rounds of lesser ammo. You can’t sell ammo back to a vendor.
What? You mean I’ve been giving up a bag slot for a small shot bag for no reason? I’l fix that right away.
Only true of the three lowest tiers of ammo. The higher-level ammo (starting with the stuff you can use at level 45, I think) can be sold back. The lower-tier ammo, though, is so inexpensive that it’s not a big deal to just toss it when it becomes obsolete.
I disagree. I’ve used many items I’ve crafted myself–from gear to potions to glyphs–across all levels of play. And certainly I’ve missed out on some income I would have had if I’d just run a couple of gathering professions and sold everything, but I wasn’t hurting for money, ever.
So, again, the emphasis is that **YMMV **and you should play how **you **want to play.
It’s easy to farm the mats yourself, assuming you take the appropriate gathering profession. So, you’re missing out on the income you would have had from selling the raw mats, but you’re gaining the benefit of having the profession.
Paladins dont have any ranged attacks (like casted spells), stuns, or snares?
Make that “a **lot **of trouble.” Really, so much that it’s not worth it *at all *unless you’re planning to twink the character. There’s one spot in the whole zone that’s safe for lowbies to be without an escort; that will probably have several people in it. Even if you can find pools to fish in, the fish you need to get for the hat is a rarespawn. I’ve never seen it, not once… and I’ve won the tournament.
The easy way to do this is to swim to Booty Bay from Westfall. It takes longer than running would, in theory, but because you’re not dying every two seconds, you actually make much better time.
Shadowfang Keep, and the shoulders drop off Relithgore, IIRC. He’s a werewolf in front of the jail cells. IIRC, the ones out of Wailing Caverns are just slightly better, but they’re not a guaranteed drop like these are.
Yup, the speed bonus has been baked-in for a while now (to the class, I believe, separate from the DPS increase they gave ranged weapons instead of adding another tier of ammo earlier in Wrath).
A couple. Hand of Reckoning might be the first one you learn. Hammer of Judgement is a ranged stun. That’s about it until high levels, I think.
Even better, buy some Water Walking elixers on the AH. They are cheap, last 10 minutes, and allow you to run (or ride, if you have a mount) which are both faster than swimming.
Thing is, most, if not all, of the stuff you crafted you could just have bought from the AH, Engineering aside you can probably count the number of sub 70 soulbound craftables for any given profession on one hand.
Having your own crafting profession can be fun, but one have to be aware that from a practical point of view there is very little to gain from those while leveling.
There is a considerable difference between not hurting for money(heck, give me a couple of hours and a fishing pole and I’ll have all the money really needed for levels 1-60) and having an epic flyer the moment you ding 70 and 6k gold in your pocket when you ding 80(which is what I had on my warrior when I leveled with herb/skinning).
While I agree with your point, and that’s the way I chose to play with most of my toons back when I could play, there are substantial numbers of other people who like to get in to crafting stuff early and do it as the level. There’s also some overlap with those that enjoy roleplay and other non-exp gaining activities.