Give a hunter a fish...

...and he can feed his cat once. Teach him to fish, and he can feed his cat for a lifetime!

...okay, so that's not really how the saying goes, but I'm sure you've all heard it and know what it means.

I am here to talk about why I blog about hunters, and why I make "hunter kindergarten" posts, and things like that.

I try my best to write readable and easily-understandable Hunter How-To Posts because I think that there is a very big category of hunters out there that fall between the category of "good hunter" and "huntard." These are the people that are spec'd something cookie-cutter like 41/20/0, have gear that is at least mostly correct (no spell hit gems or shammy gear *shudder* ... but maybe going too overboard with one stat or something), and yet do not know why they are doing these things.

I have been in heroics with hunters who show up with a solid spec and a solid set of gear and then they start tossing random Aimed Shots into their non-existent rotation and Serpent Sting stuff they should be trapping. I've seen hunters that use the Auto/Steady macro and have no idea WHY it does so much DPS, they just know that it DOES, so they spam it, maybe with a bow that is several speeds too slow.

Now do I have anything against these hunters? Of course not, I was there once too, and I'm sure I'm still there in some aspects. That is why I write what I write, and that is why I advocate hunters learning to weave their shots manually before switching to the macro (if they choose to do so)... because it's all about the foundation.

I'll never forget how surprised I was one day when this story happened: I popped into game and four of my guildies were in a Heroic. I asked who the fifth member was, and they said a PuG'd hunter. I asked how the hunter was doing (I tend to ask that... I'm curious), but instead of the typical answers, which are always either "He sucks" or more often "He's okay, but...[something]", they told me "She's actually really good."

I got into Ventrilo and popped into their channel just to listen in, and chat a little. I had just got my Choco-Bow and mentioned how fluid it made my shot rotations, and the PuG'd hunter said "Hey, what shot rotation do you use, if you don't mind me asking?"

... /blinkblink

Another hunter was actually asking me about shot rotations. And we actually had an intelligent hunter conversation about them.

MADNESS, I tell you!

That's never happened to me before outside of blogs. I've had a lot of people come up to me in game and ask me for shot rotation advice, which I have always very happily given those who ask... but actually having a little discussion about it was new.

Since then, that incident has stuck in my mind, and it reminds me about why I write. Because incidents like that should not be as rare as they are. I shouldn't have to be surprised when my guildies say they PuG'd not just an okay hunter, but a very good one. I shouldn't have to be taken aback when somebody wants to discuss shot rotations with me.

I'm part of the "WoW Noobs" community over at Livejournal, where I can give advice to newer players (Heck, if you look back far enough, you can find a level 20 me asking what the meeting stone outside Deadmines is for), and I've noticed that new players are attracted to the hunter class like a magnet. This means that we, as hunters, have a big responsibility. Learn why you are spec'd what you are spec'd. Why you've picked one talent over another. Learn why your shot rotation is your shot rotation. Then, pass it on.

"But Pike, if everyone is a good hunter, won't that put you out of a job?" Maybe, but teaching-for-make-benefit-glorious-class-of-hunters is more important. Besides, I seem to have lucked out and I currently hold a monopoly on the hunter class in my guild. It's true, almost all of the other 70 hunters in my guild either /gquit, permanently started playing non-hunter alts, or disappeared entirely. It's really kind of odd and I'm not sure whether that's says good or bad things about me, but... hey. >.>