You might want to pick up a mod called Talented (I don’t think it was mentioned in this thread yet…I believe I was tipped on it from the WoW Livejournal community). It keeps track of your build so you don’t have to remember what it was from scratch whenever they retool the talent trees and refund your points.
I don’t know any Hunter-specific sites since that’s not my main, but Elitist Jerks is good for strategy of all types. I think this should be the Hunter forum, per a link in my guild’s forum.
1.) Presumably because they’re bright blue and fairly bulbous.
2.) There were several talent resets, yes, so if you haven’t respecced since then, go have fun! 
ETA: jayjay, Talented also got a mention over at WoW Insider not that long ago.
I suggest petopia for a pet-by-pet review, and perusing threads at EJ, but for a quick run down:
Tanking: I feel like the change to thunderstomp has actually dimished the use of a gorilla as a tank-pet somewhat, since it no longer scales with the gorilla’s level and is limited to one rank. Although I’ve tried neither, it seems to me now that a bear (extra AOE with swipe) or a turtle (shell shield damage mitigation) are the better tanks.
DPS: The devilsaur is the runaway winner in DPS, but is not very popular in raids because it’s too damn big. This means that it’s always taking up the view of your tanks and melee DPS, and it has trouble staying out of the bad stuff. The consensus among the spreadsheet crunchers is that wolves are the best DPS pet (at least for your raid buffed geared level 80 hunter), regardless of spec, because of the attack power buffs from their special ability that now stack with Blessing of Might and Battle Shout. Core Hounds, Spirit Beasts, Raptors, and Cats (in roughly but not necissarily that order) are also high DPS pets. There’s some debate about just how high the DPS is on Raptors because the spreadsheets don’t seem to accurately model the crits on Savage Rend, or something.
Some data indicates if you get over 10,000 attack power (you can’t yet), Moths are number 1 dps pet.
I’m not a big fan of cunning pets, because they lack talents that automatically regain health and happiness (there’s carrion feeder, but you have to remember to click it and sometimes it seems buggy), and their special skills are usually stuns, snares, and interrupts more suited for PVP, and I’ve found in PVP I’d rather just use my own traps and shots and have the higher dps for killing.
I’ve heard that Crocolisks are also good, with their reactive damage ability.
But yes, the change to Thunderstomp was intended to lessen the importance of gorilladins and allow other pets a chance to be cool. The gorilla is still quite effective, I’ve found, although Pummel kind of sucks. It’s nice to have an anti-caster ability, but every time I’ve gone to use it the gorilla either has too little Focus or is in the middle of GCD. When the skill is so timing-dependent as spell interruption is, that gets aggravating real quickly.
Thanks, aktep. Interesting points.
I’ve been playing a hunter off and on for several years, now, but I always got my pet based on: a) Looks, and b) ease of feeding.
I realise that is kinda sloppy, but I was always happy going off and doing my own thing. (I never bothered to learn how to kite, either. The jump>spin-in-air->concussion shot>run-some-more is tough for me to master.
1.) I’ve never seen a Hunter use a Devilsaur in a raid, either, but I guess I just assumed it was because they weren’t BM. Speaking as a tank, I can see how a pet that big would get really annoying really fast, especially on trash mobs or anything involving adds spawning in the same place as the boss.
2.) As for top DPS, the same WoW Insider article I linked about the Devilsaur lists Cats as top DPS for non-BM Hunters. Caveat being that I don’t do any reading on this subject since my highest hunter is in her 30s, and the article is two weeks old.
It depends on what you want to do with the character, really. It’s only “sloppy” if you want to, say, join a hardcore raiding guild.
That being said, if you run even Heroics, please make sure you understand the basic utilities your class offers. The first time my guild brought one of our Hunters into OS, we had to explain to him how Misdirect worked. And he *still *managed to pull Sarth onto himself instead of me the first time. :rolleyes:
I thought about mentioning that. If you read the comments on the article, you’ll see that it made poor assumptions that didn’t treat the hunter-pet combo as a unit and instead focused only on pure pet DPS. You’ll also see that the minmaxing number crunching wow is srs business hunters really really dislike WI’s new hunter blogger.
Don’t mess with theorycrafters, man–they will fuck you up. 
Part of the problem is how frickin’ easy even Heroics are. I only started playing in November and my hunter is my only 80. I can’t think of a single Heroic encounter where I use traps for CC (or Wyvern sting for that matter).
Because of this I am still learning many new things about my class even though I’ve cleared all of the NR Heroics (except Oculus and CoS) and have cleared Naxx. Just a few days ago I used Aspect of the Wild (+130 nature resist for the group) for the first time to make Loken a lot easier. And just last night I used Tranq Shot for (almost) the first time to remove a boss enrage (final Nexus boss).
Oh, and I almost never use Misdirect except on bosses that drop aggro spontaneously or if we have a really bad tank (it’s just so damn easy for tanks to generate threat and Feign Death is a free reset - I guess it’s really just laziness…). Could I use it to to pull things to the tank? Sure. But I have yet to find a scenario where that’s really necessary…
Just out of curiosity, why do you use a hunter misdirect to start the Sarth encounter?
This has been the standard since BC. There’s very little use of CC in instances–tanks grab and hold everything, and DPS burns it down. This is one of the reasons that I’m very, very happy they’ve done a decent job of buffing Warrior AOE threat.
Yay! A useful Hunter! I hope you’re using that Tranq Shot on Gluth, too, during your Naxx runs.
Yeah, you shouldn’t have to use it in most cases unless you’re trying to boost the TPS of a tank that is seriously outgeared by their DPSers. There are a couple of cases where it’s useful for setting up positioning, though. In the Sarth case, it was 'cause we were doing him with drakes up–if you think of where Sarth starts as the north side, I was going to be tanking him in the southwest corner. It’s not essential, but it’s slightly easier than having me run up, Heroic Throw, and then run back.
Misdirect can also be a good way to start a Patchwerk fight. There’s a good chance that the person who’s normally your MT will be the one taking Hatefuls to the face, which means they can’t be topping the threat meter. While your MT doesn’t always outgear your OT(s), starting the fight with an extra boost of threat for the person main tanking the encounter can be helpful. (Last night, for example, a new Warrior tank with a lot of blues, unchanted gear, etc. was my OT, whereas I’m almost all 213 purples with Last Laugh, so I actually spent a lot of the fight not doing anything to avoid pulling aggro. And that was WITH his Vigilance on me, too.)
Heh, trying to be useful at least! 
And no, I wasn’t using it on Gluth. I was in the back kiting the skeletons around and burning them down when he Decimated and didn’t even realize that Enrage was dispellable. Guess I’m a huntard after all 
Well, now I know!
Ah, that makes sense. I’ve never done it with drakes up so I didn’t realize the tanking position was different than with zero drakes.
That’s a great point - we had major issues with this on one of our runs because the OT was new and didn’t have great tanking gear (dual-specced DK). The MT kept passing her and the healers had a hell of a time keeping her up. I’ll try to remember to use MD on that fight in the future.
Ooooh, AotW for Loken! Thanks! Do hunters automatically learn tranq shot now? I never thought about it. I got mine from Lucifron but I can’t imagine that all new hunters have to go to Molten Core to get this shot, heh.
Yeah, Tranq was just from the hunter trainer - no special quests or drops anything. Apparently it also works on the Skirmishers in AN and the adds in OS (after they get hit by the flame wall).
And yeah, after two wipes on Loken I’m reading through the damage log and see “xxxx hits for xxxx Nature damage” over and over and finally think “wait! I have something that buffs nature resistance!”. Made the fight like 75% easier. I would assume that Shamans have a totem that does something similar.
So I logged onto my priest tonight, waited for the boat back to Menethil, and got to Stormwind, Vaulted and sold some stuff, and then went and picked up my talents
I read the talents specs on Wowwiki, and found one for shadow spec soloing, but for some reason, the way the wowhead site’s talent calculators work, they don’t print right.
So I decided to just play it by ear, as far as what talents to pick. I picked all of the ones I remember being important, but the less obvious choices, I just guessed.
And I decided to try the other Alliance side Northrend Entry-Level Zone. Valiance seems pretty cool so far, and these level 68 mobs are getting owned by my spells. I had a 3k crit on Mind Blast, which seemed nice.
And an old guildie contacted me, happy or surprised or whatever to see I was back. I used to do Kara runs with her and her guild pre-Lich King.
So Shadow Priest seems fun so far, not a ton of variety or strategy in my spell casting so far, is the only complaint I have right now. Mage was my first character in Wow, and I liked the tactics to playing them, but I’m sure it’ll get more interesting once I get into tougher fights.
I just killed Leviroth. The quest chain with all the mist creatures and the Tuskarr guy and the Naga, pretty mysterious (the naga part) and interesting.
And I hit 71 finally, so that’s cool.
Yesterday my pally suffered exactly the opposite. I discovered I (at lvl 75) could solo those lvl 73 elite named magnataurs near Wyrmrest Temple and after taking down the second one I completely failed to notice that he’d hit me with some DoT thing. So I was standing there looting the corpse and checking my map to see where the third one is, and then I keeled over dead. Oh well, it was a short corpse run from Wyrmrest 
I take screenshots, trim them down to just the talent calculator, and stick the resulting JPEGs in a folder named “WoW Builds”.
Hooray, I dinged 76 last night - one more level and I can finally learn Cold Weather Flying! Still gonna be a bit before I can afford an epic mount, though. My pally has about 3200g on hand, and her bank alt is holding another 300g or so. I also discovered the Pet Supplies vendor in Dalaran. My White Kitten was so very very happy with her bath and treats
Northrend has made me glad I’m Exalted with IF - my Swift Ram just seemed like a very appropriate mount for trotting around Dragonblight.
Hey, is Naxxramas that necropolis floating just outside of Wintergarde Keep? The map makes it look like Naxx is a big ground-based fortress, but if there’s one there I don’t see it.
Yes.
Another puzzle (for me at least). I seem to be completely failing to grasp what “Elite” means when it comes to mobs. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of consistency as to “Elite” being an indicator of difficulty.
To wit: as I mentioned earlier, at lvl 75 I was able to successfully solo the lvl 73 Elite magnataurs near Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight. This led me to believe that, at lvl 76, I should now have no trouble going back to Borean Tundra to complete the quest Last Rites, where the objective is to kill Prince Valaran, a lvl 72 Elite. In reality, I lasted barely longer against him than I did when I attempted the quest at lvl 74. I couldn’t seem to to even dent the guy, and the attempt was utter fail, despite the fact that the NPC Thassarian, himself a lvl 72 Elite, helps in the attack.
Just what the heck is going on here?