Kiting

Hunter Kiting Guide

First off hunter is a class you will absolutely want to have A and D bound to strafe left and right. As much as this might pain you if you never done this before, by the time you hit 60 you will be very use to controlling your character in this way, using mouse to turn and pan the camera and strafing.

So why do this?

In WoW hunter has a 180 degree casting arc, which we can abuse with strafing to almost run in a straight line away from a target but still cast on them even while moving with things like our stings or arcane shot... all while having our camera conveniently placed to help with this. Imagine strafing while facing north, from west to east, with your target east. Of course this person you are strafing from will time to time dip in and out of your 180 degree arc, and how we deal with this is to jump in the direction we are moving to carry our momentum forward, but while in mid air turn our character quickly to face them then land facing in the direction we want our strafe to take us. It will take some time to get those move down just practice it while leveling. Also remember in order to use anything that has a cast time you do have to stop moving for a time.

Next we have all the utility available to use to facilitate kiting. We have aspect of the cheetah, a 30% movespeed increase. This will allow us to run from any mob in the game, and in PvP be passively faster than anyone but druid. Of course you have to watch out for blink, charge, dash, sprint etc... And our bread and butter slow concussive shot. This is our 33% uptime slow, which thankfully has no cast time and can be used while strafing. Both of these should virtually always be up. And if things happen to get into melee range we have wing clip, a 10 sec slow that is spammable.

Moving on we have CC we can talent for. That being mainly scatter shot, a 4 second disorient similar to blind that rogues have. This is your oh shit button you use to prevent something from getting into your deadzone, or to allow you to make space with something already inside. Only use it for that, and please use a macro to set your pet passive when you use this, and make sure you dont have serpent sting on the target or any dots for that matter, you can clear serpent sting with a scorpid sting if you have to. Then if for whatever reason you are BM you will instead have a 3 sec stun from your pet with intimidate, use it in the same fashion as scatter shot, although because it is a stun it has some offensive uses to secure a kill as well. Lastly we got improved wingclip in survival, there may be situations in melee were you can't make space (all your shit is on CD), this is your Hail Mary ability pray it procs and run when it does. We also have improved concussive shot, up to a 20% chance to stun for 3 seconds on use. Use a weak aura or something to confirm when this procs and take advantage of it with a quick aimed into multi etc...

Then we have traps. Freezing trap is really our strongest CC we have access to. Out of combat before a pull we can place and down and kite our target to it, otherwise in combat a feign death into trap macro is needed, as well as a baked in pet passive command. This is used basically as a sheep in PvE and in PvP we use this to get at max range to setup aimed shot multishot combo or bandage up etc... Frost trap is our AoE slow, which is what we will use over freezing trap when we are kiting multiple targets, especially useful in a choke (Think Nefarian fight or tunnels in WSG).

Lastly lets talk aggro in PvE situations. Because Feign Death is also a part of our kit when it comes to kiting it's important to understand aggro and how FD plays into that. If you FD and the only thing that has hit that mob is you it will reset, so if you don't want the mob to reset you can have your pet hit it once, or make sure someone else is on the threat meter. On the flip side hunters have distracting shot, a ranged taunt. This allows us to spike threat on a target if it's attacking something we don't want it to.