Lesson #4: Movement.

Mom's been having a little trouble moving around effectively, so I dedicated the next lesson to explaining a bit more about movement.

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Hi Mom! You've mentioned a couple times that you're having trouble getting Jolynne to move smoothly, so I'm going to explain a bit about general movement and about moving as it relates to playing a hunter.

First, to review: whenever you log into the game, it automatically resets Jolynne to running forward. So if you want to slow her down, hit your NumLock key, which is on the top of your number pad on the far right side of your keyboard. NumLock makes your character walk. Hit NumLock again to make her resume running.

The keys WASD are your basic movement keys.
W makes her go forward (if she isn't already -- see F4 below).
S makes her go backward. She always goes backward more slowly than forward, so don't rely on it as an escape tactic.
A makes her turn left.
D makes her turn right.

If she's standing in one spot and you press and hold either A or D, she'll simply turn in circles on the spot.

If you want to keep Jolynne moving forward, then hit F4 -- remember, "F4 for Forward." (I think we keybound it for you.) The F4 key can be found at the top of your keyboard, just over the line of number keys, typically over the numbers 4 and 5. Then you can just steer her using the WASD keys. Hit F4 again to get her to stop, or hit the W key a couple of times. Pressing both mouse keys at the same time will also stop her.

Space bar makes your character jump (you already know that one). Practice keeping her going at a steady clip and learn to turn and jump without stopping her forward movement. You can even make her jump backward (I personally do this all the time when fighting.) You want to be able to produce smooth turns, which is very useful in combat. Once you get proficient at that, you can practice strafing.

There are two keys to make Jolynne strafe. (Pronounced "STRAYF".) Strafing means you make your character run off to the side at an angle. This is really handy if you have to get out of the way of a monster quickly! Hunters in particular find this move handy, especially when they are learning how to kite.

The strafe keys are Q and E. Q strafes to the left, E to the right. Practice these a few times because they're pretty cool moves, and they could just save your character's life someday!

To kite something means that you first irritate a monster by shooting it once, and then run like crazy to get the monster to follow you in a certain pre-planned direction, like into a trap. (You will learn the ability to set traps later on.) It's called kiting because you're deliberately pulling it along as if it's on a kite string, staying ahead of it just enough to keep it interested and not die in the process. It's an advanced technique though, and requires a lot of practice. I'm only moderately good at it myself, but some players are master kiters and can drag a monster through an entire zone.

One rather famous example occurred a few years ago, when a relay team of kiters dragged a giant level 60 monster through several zones and let it loose in the human city of Stormwind (which is similar in size to Ironforge). The monster then ran amok and killed dozens of characters and NPCs over and over and over, causing massive chaos. Eventually the entire server had to be shut down and restarted. It was a pretty mean trick, but everyone had to hand it to the players who pulled it off because that's a really expert maneuver. They even recorded it for Youtube! After that, Blizzard made it impossible for any monster to be kited out of its original zone, although you can still kite it anywhere within the zone if you're good enough.

So if you see players talking about strafing and kiting, that's what they're talking about.

These movement techniques are especially important for you as hunter. Hunters want to keep all enemies at range, that is, at a comfortable distance away so that you can keep shooting at them. Hunters are fantastic at ranged combat, but significantly weaker in close combat. So the more you can keep your distance from a monster while shooting it full of holes, the better. The best possible situation is to keep the monster at range while you shoot it dead before it even gets close enough to hit you.

This will become much easier when you're level 10 and learn to tame your first pet. A hunter's pet is their closest companion and friend. Typically, you will send in your pet FIRST to engage an enemy at close combat. Then, while the monster is busy attacking your pet (and your pet is busy ripping the monster's face off), you stand back and shoot till the monster is dead. Then your pet comes back to you and you give it a pat on the head for being such a good guard dog. (Or guard lion, or guard bear, or guard wolf, or whatever pet you've decided to tame.) Hunters have a wide, wonderful variety of pets to choose from, and each type of pet has its own special abilities to assist the hunter.

This brings me to combat, which I'll explain next. Love you Mom!