Lesson #5: Combat (as a Hunter).

Another lesson for Mom.
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Hi Mom! This is going to be a pretty important email, as it deals with how to fight, how to deal with combat, and what happens when you die.

As you've likely noticed, combat is an integral part of the game. Many quests send you out to kill stuff, and frequently you are sent to kill more than one monster, pest or enemy (collectively known as mobs). So learning to do this efficiently means you level faster and become more proficient overall.

As a hunter, you're considered a ranged class. This means your most effective method of fighting is to keep your target at range, that is, at a comfortable distance so that you can shoot its face off before it can even reach you. I won't lie, this is a bit tricky to do at first without a pet to help you. Once you get a pet at level 10 though, it becomes much easier. Blizzard designed it that way, I think, so that you can get the hang of ranged combat before you have to deal with the upkeep of a pet. That said, your pet will become your very best friend.

First though, you should learn how to fight at range. Before we even start fighting though, there are things you need to check, such as:

1) Do I have enough ammunition? (Check your ammo bag for that. You can run through an awful lot of ammo pretty fast, and it doesn't come back.)
2) Do I have my gun/bow/crossbow equipped, so I can automatically start shooting? (Check your character sheet, weapons are at the bottom.)
3) Do I have a melee weapon equipped, in case the monster runs up and hits me before I'm done shooting it? (This would be your axe, or dagger, or whatever.)
4) Do I have some healing potions, in case I get into trouble? (You probably don't yet, but you might loot them so keep them handy in your bags. Healing potions look like little vials or flasks of a bright RED liquid. Mana potions are BLUE. Right-click a potion to drink it and watch your health and mana go up instantly.)

The first thing to learn is how to pull. Pulling a mob means you choose your target carefully, and then get its attention, usually by shooting it. This makes it run toward you as if you're pulling it on a string. Pulling is especially important when there is more than one mob in an area, because as a hunter you want to deal with only one mob at a time. Some classes are excellent at fighting multiple mobs at once, such as warriors or mages, but as a hunter you're not one of them. That doesn't mean you can't fight and dispatch multiple mobs, but it's not your specialty and it's easy to lose control of the situation. Your specialty is picking off your targets one by one, and making them dead before they even reach you.

To deal with only one mob at a time when there are a bunch, you want to look for outliers. Check out the perimeter of the area and pick off the stragglers, slowly working your way in to the middle of the group. Be careful because if a mob is too close to another mob, sometimes you end up pulling both. This creates a less-than-ideal situation where your attention is divided and you're trying to fight more than one. When that happens, you can get flustered, and that means you end up dead yourself. So keep your eye on one mob at a time.

Once a mob is engaged, keep shooting it. This seems to be a "duh, no kidding" thing to say, but a surprising number of hunters either stop shooting deliberately to run up and hit it with their weapon, or forget to turn on Autoshot. Both of these are very inefficient for a hunter. You want Autoshot to be up and blinking all the time when you're in combat. If Autoshot stops, click it with your mouse to turn it back on (I think it's a right-click). Autoshot should NOT be turned off unless you click it off by accident. Clicking toggles it on and off. Unless you want it off for very specific reasons, such as pulling a mob into a trap, Autoshot should be ON all the time. It will stop blinking once you're out of combat, but it WILL resume automatically once you engage your next mob, so you don't have to keep clicking it on and off.

Try to keep the mob at range as much as possible. Your best chance of causing a lot of damage is to keep shooting. My advice is to figure out the farthest range at which you can engage a mob, and start shooting from there. That means you can get off two or three shots before it even gets close to you, which means it's significantly weaker when it finally does hit you. Then it's an easy matter to finish it off with your hand-to-hand weapon. Once you get more proficient, you can jump backward to keep it in range, or learn to strafe to one side and keep it at a distance that way. Unfortunately, you can't run and shoot at the same time. You have to stand still to shoot. Be careful when you're running and jumping NOT to engage other mobs. That's usually, y'know, bad.

Once the mob is at low health, it may run away in fear. You might notice that the mob suddenly stops and runs away from you, and a message will come up, something like, "The troll runs in fear!" When this happens, especially in a situation where there's multiple mobs around, pursue and kill it. Or keep shooting till it's dead. If you've stopped shooting you can right-click the mob to resume shooting it. What happens when a mob runs in fear is that it will run away briefly, and then gets its second wind, comes back and tries to kill you again. It will always come back. Sometimes it brings along a friend or six, and then they gang up on you. So your best bet is to make sure it doesn't get very far in the first place.

As you level up and train, you'll get some special attacks and different types of shots. Some shots will stun the mob for a few seconds, which means it just stands there in a daze as you fill it full of holes. Other shots will drain extra health from the mob so that it dies faster, or make the mob move very slowly so that it takes longer to react. You want to do the most damage in the least amount of time, and you want to keep the mob at range for as long as possible. So when you're deciding which shots to use, keep those two points firmly in mind. The order in which you decide to use your special abilities is called your rotation. Everyone's rotation is customizable, but some rotations are better than others. You don't really have to worry about it, though, for a few more levels.

Some mobs also fight at range, especially casters (i.e. mobs that throw magic spells at you). These are extremely annoying for a hunter, because it means that unless you're doing a lot more damage to them with your gun than they are to you, you're pretty much forced to close the distance and hit them with your hand-to-hand weapon. The good news is that caster mobs are typically quite weak, and once you start smacking them directly, they die pretty fast. Once you get a pet at level 10, you can send your pet in and make your pet chew them up while you keep shooting.

If you're losing the fight, you can always run away. This is another reason why it's important to learn how to move effectively. Turning and running is a perfectly viable alternative to, say, dying. Once you turn away from the mob and start running, the interface will start sending you messages like: "The enemy must be in front for you to attack" or "Turn around to start attack." Just ignore all that if you're determined to run like a rabbit. Being a coward beats being dead! Once you're outside of a certain range, the mob will quit chasing you and go back to where it came from. Then you can eat and drink, heal up and try again.

Running doesn't always work though, as sometimes the mob will catch up and kill you anyway. I don't know why, they get insulted when you shoot them or something. Touchy. ;-)

When you die (it'll happen, and probably quite a lot, so get used to the idea):

1) You turn into a ghost and wake up in the graveyard. This means that everything goes grey, the sky is swirling with weird loopy spirals (which looks pretty cool actually), and you're, well, transparent. The good news is that you can travel much faster and you can walk straight through some barriers. Not all though.
2) You'll see two new arrows on your mini-map in the corner. One is labeled "Your Corpse" when you hover over it. The other is labeled "Spirit Healer".
3) You want to travel to your corpse. The Spirit Healer is a last resort. I know, the Spirit Healer is right there in the graveyard, has big poofy wings and looks all spiritual and angelic. However, if you use her to revive, she will cause 25% more damage to your gear, and/or she will give you a nasty debuff called Resurrection Sickness. That means all your stats go down by a lot, and you're weaker after you revive. (You can see this for yourself if you click your Character button -- all your main stats will be reduced and in red.) The Sickness takes 10 minutes to wear off, so usually it will take you far less time to track down your corpse. Sometimes your corpse is unreachable though, so in that case, use the Spirit Healer and take the penalty.
4) When you get close to your corpse, the arrow will turn into a little tombstone on your mini-map. You will also start to see mobs gradually reappear around you, so you want to wait for the mobs to move away before you revive so they don't kill you again. Cuz that's just really annoying.
5) After you revive, you'll be at low health. Dying takes a lot out of a person. You'll have to head somewhere reasonably safe to eat, drink, and regain your strength. Dying's hard on equipment too, so if you've been fighting for a long time and/or you've died more than once, chances are you'll want to find a repair NPC back in town and repair your gear.
6) You can log out when you're a ghost, but that means you'll log back in as one too so you'll have to revive anyway. However, you're pretty darn safe as a ghost since you can't be killed again!

Here's a webpage on Spirit Healers with a little more information:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Spirit_healer

I think that's about it. Hope that helps, and if you have questions please ask!