DHG - How not to Pick up Women in WoW

Here's another installment of Dave's Hunter Guide. How not to pick up women in WoW. I didn't realize how serious Dave might need this until I saw some recent comments in Facebook. So, here you go Dave...

First off, there are actually many females that play world of warcraft. You might not believe it by looking at our guild lately (besides my family members and a few others). But overall you'd be surprised. That being said, most girls that I know that play WoW (actually all of them, but maybe I'm wrong) don't play WoW to be hit on. Seriously, I don't really think they do (at least my wife doesn't). I'm guessing that hitting on someone randomly in the world of azeroth will get you on ignore lists very quickly.

But if you happen to be in Ironforge or Stormwind and you see a Night Elf or a Human female with next to nothing on dancing on top of the mailbox, if you see that then you must definately refrain. You see, those are not females playing, but rather 13 year old boys or 40 year old pervs. They might respond to you in a positive manner, but I don't think that's what you are looking for.

You might want to go hit on the female guards in StormWind though. They can't respond because their on duty, but maybe after they get off work...

Dave's Huntering Guide - Pet Management

Okay Dave, now that you've chosen a pet of sorts (remember you can have up to 5 now), its time to learn how to use him (or her - if your pet is a girl).

With the new expansion several things have changed. All pets now have a growl (which they could have before unless you were being really silly and didn't train it). All pets have a fear, they all have a focus dump (what else would you do with all of that focus coming out your ears), and last but certainly not least, they have their nifty talent based on their pet family.

You'll also get several pet abilities when use up your pets talents in his (or her) given pet tree. Your tenacity pets will have lots of cool stuff that will help them hold aggro better, like taunt. They also have some intervening abilities that can save your tank, or a clothie's butt if needs be. Ferocity pets have some neat things that will help them stay alive longer, like Lick Your Wounds, and a spell that will Rez them with full health (Heart of the Phoenix) which currently seems to be bugged.

Speaking of bugs, sometimes your pet will automatically turn on the abilities. You know when their spell glows, that means its suppose to go off whenever the cool down is up and your pet has enough focus. Well, some abilities were not meant to go together. For example: the pet's fear spell was not meant to be put up the same time as growl. You have an ability that increases your pet's aggro and one that decreases your pet's aggro. What generally happens is that the mob gets so confused as to weather or not he wants to attack your pet that he gets extra angry and he takes it out on you. If you have this problem generally you be thinking your pet is stupid and can't seem to hold the aggro to save your life. Your pet is not stupid, he just doesn't know what to do, he needs you to tell him.

Some people have set up macros to turn off the pet's fear ability, but I find if I just drag the pet spell down to the his ability bar that I can keep an eye on it and make sure that its off when I want it to be off, and on when I want it to be on.

Basic rule of thumb, if you are soloing and you want your pet to take the beating, then turn your pet's fear off, leave your growl on. If you are in an instance/raid, do the opposite. I know most people are thinking, duh. Well, I'm trying to state the obvious... just in case.

Now when do you want to use use passive/defensive/aggressive. Well, when you are in an instance you will almost always want your pet on passive. You get yourself into all sorts of trouble with your pet on defensive and especially on aggressive. If your goal is to wipe your instance/raid then by all means put your pet on aggressive. You're pet will get all excited an pull every mob in a two mile radius. When you realize your mishap your pet will come running all excited lolling his/her tongue all over the place (with about 20 mobs following). If you have your pet on defensive anything that attacks you with range will get your pets attention, usually also a bad idea. Best to be on passive for those situations. Now when I'm leveling I like to keep my pet on defensive so I don't have to tell him everything to do. And my pet reacts quicker than I do. Now there are only a few times that I would actually put my pet on aggressive. The best is if you are fighting rogues. Your pet can find rogues quicker than you can and he can help you sniff them out. Sometimes I leave them on aggressive if I want to clean out an area in a low zone while I'm farming. Oh, and also when I'm mad and want to cause a wipe for my raid (okay, I've never actually done that, but if I were mad I know how I could get everybody killed quickly, then you just feign death - this doesn't win friends or influence people, but if you are pissed at a pug it might be entertaining).

Well, that's all for now. Let me know if I missed anything.

What kind of pet is right for you?

Sorry, I've had to re-post this a couple of times to fix a couple of things, So, if you have this on RSS then you are probably thinking I'm a little crazy, and you wouldn't be far from the truth...


This is my first installment of Dave's Hunter guide. The first thing I'm going to talk about is pets. What is a hunter without a pet? Well, really pathetic, that's what we are. So, you get to make a big decision. What pet do you want to have? This really depends on your play style and what you want to do in the game. There is a great article on how to choose a pet on Petopia. This is a wonderful resource, everything you need or want to know in regards to hunter pets is over there. Technically, you could just go over there are stop reading this post if you would like.

Okay, since Wrath has started the way hunter pets work has dramatically changed. We use to have the lamest system where you would have to tame pets you didn't want just to learn their talent so you could teach it to your own pet. Some of us hated this and never got the latest rank of Bite, or Swipe, or whatever. But now, we have talent trees for pets. Yes Dave, if you haven't already noticed, there is a tab on the right of the talent trees that's marked "Pet". If you click that you'll see one of 3 talent trees for pets.

Now there are 3 talent trees and each pet family is assigned to one of them.

Tenacity: This talent tree is for tanking pets. These pets will be your best pets to level with. They will hold aggro the best and they have the best armor. When you are out and about soloing in the world of Azeroth, you best have one of these. These include Gorillas, Bears, Boars, Turtles, Crocolisks, Crabs, Worms (yes Dave, you can have a worm for a pet), Rhinos, Scorpids, and Warp Stalkers.

Ferocity: These are pets meant to do lots of damage. This is the main dps tree for hunter pets. They are especially good for instances and raids, when you don't need to keep the aggro. You see, hopefully you already have a tank to do that for you. These pets include cats, devilsaurs, core hounds, hyenas, moths, raptors, spirit beasts, tallstriders, wasps, and wolves.

Cunning: At first glance you'll be thinking, what are these pets for? Well, I like to think of this as the utility tree. These pets are still really good at dps in their own way, but they have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Some argue that these are good for PvP. I have one, but haven't used him at all. These pets include bats, birds of prey, chimaeras, dragonhawks, nether rays, ravagers, serpents, silithids, spiders, spore bats, and wind serpents.

Now, you may have noticed that you have 4 spots available at the pet stable. That means that you can have 5 pets!!! You can have a pet for leveling, and another for instances/raids, and if you really like PvP you can have one for that. You can keep an old favorite pet for sentimental value and one that looks really cool.

Bear in mind when you are picking a pet that each pet family has a different talent/ability. For instance, Gorillas have a cool Thunderstomp and is an AoE aggro pull. Wolves do this howl thing (Furious Howl) that is a raid wide Attack Power buff.

So, now you are thinking, what talent points do I use for my pets. That is another discussion, one that I don't want to go over because Pike did such a good job at that at Aspect of the Hare. She gives us several different pet talent builds that work for different circumstances. My suggestion is to get your self a good tenacity pet while you are leveling. I personally like the gorilla, but everybody does that so, do what you would like. When you hit level 80 then you probably would go more for a ferocity pet and focus on kicking butt.

Dave if you have any questions, email me or post something on my facebook page or something. If anybody else has questions, comments, suggestions, corrections, or anything else. Let me know, either by commenting on below or by emailing me at aoirselvar@gmail.com.

Dave's Hunter Guides Coming Soon

I was talking to my friend Dave yesterday. This is my friend who likes to play WoW, but who's a lot more casual than I am. (I admit, I only fit in the casual player category because I lack time to do otherwise). Dave is a truly casual player to the point where he doesn't keep up with the changes of the hunter class. He doesn't follow blogs, doesn't really look at the patch notes, no podcasts, etc. Dave only gets his info through people in the guild like me. Which is fine, but then I think people like me assume that he knows some obvious stuff when he doesn't.

I have let Dave down.

For instance, I would have just assumed that Dave would have known that Aspect of the Viper is only really good when your mana is down. You don't want to keep Aspect of the Viper on all the time. He told me yesterday that 2 weeks ago he realized that Aspect of the Viper was cutting his dps in half. So, for a couple of months Dave thought Viper was great to have on 24/7, he never ran out of mana.

Upon hearing Dave's viper story I thought, I had better do something about this. I had better start writing some posts about how to play a hunter. I had just assumed that if someone came to my blog that they would already have gone to BRK's blog or other's like Aspect of the Hare that have great notes and guides on Huntering. But I know my friend Dave would probably never go to one of these websites.

So…

I'm going to have a new feature entitled, Dave's Huntering Guide. I'm going to touch base on the more obvious hunter issues that are well known or things that all hunters should know about their class. And since I know that Dave doesn't go looking around for hunter blogs, I'll send him an email every time I post about it. Hopefully, someone else will also get something out of it as well.