Nostalrius Begins - Quality wow vanilla realm (1.12)

I see a lot of raids when I am reviewing Realm Players, that very very very few if any hunters utilize a pet on bosses.

I have seen one pet actively used and was pushing about 34-45 dps a second depending on the boss. While this doesn't seem like a lot, adding this hunters pet DPS put his raid total from 15th overall to 11th.

So my question is, why is this not utilized more? Set bonuses clearly support the pet in attempt to limit the splash damage taken and increase EHP, and with key binding attack/follow you should be able to move the pet in and out with anticipation of splash damage/boss mechanics for those who try to min max.

Besides, what else are you doing between Aim/Multi and auto attack watching.

Timing is likely the issue for many ... raiders aren't always the greatest at keybinding complexity, that is in the realm if small group and pvp players (I have had some terrible runs with well geared raiders in heroics in TBC ... they didn't know shit outside of their raid rotations).

Other options include using a Lightning Breath pet for ranged option for more safety and of course the pet most raiders use (or should use), a wolf, for the Furious Howl which can buff you and other's physical attacks even if the pet isn't in actual combat (but in range for buff).

Prob with the wolf, most melee are not in range of their assigned hunter's pet, negating the benifit.

As you are max range, and melee at best at 36 yards away if you are max range, even if you are at 30 yards, if melee move to one side of boss, would stll out range buff.

Also on the Serp pet, do they go OOM quickly making them go in for melee anyways?

Would likely be using stay macros although I have not used a serpent yet. A wolf you can macro the ability into your own rotations and tell it stay at points within 20 of melee (or yourself). Again though, this all requires decent attention to pet management through likely macro scripts to optimize it.

Pets are also bugged ib SWStats, sometimes they show as like they did more dmg than any raider, other times like they did no dmg at all, so looking through RealmPlayers raid lists doesn't mean anything. Some guilds and their raid leaders don't even allow pets beside stationary wolfs. In our guild pets are used and accounted for hunters contribution dmg wise, some players do it better, some (like me) not so good, some pets (like cats) show pretty nice dps, others (mostly wolfs) somehow less personal dps but they contribute to melee dps in their groups. Thing is, you need to have healing team that care about your pet in moments they don't need to focus on raid, to actively ask for pet buffs (only one hunter need to bother them all ), macro attack/get back and watch over your pet debuffs and what melee do and follow them. At the end, your pet is still going to die here and there, so having 20/31/0 spec with IRP is a must not only for contribution but efficiency also.

With a little practice keeping a wolf alive in BWL is easy. I try to keep my pet doing damage on bosses and trash whenever it can, which lets it buff the melees in my group and increase my own damage. There's no real reason not to use your pet especially since you can easily prevent any raidstats bugs by disabling pet damage merging.

Imp. Revive Pet is also a useful talent to put points into since it keeps the cost of making a mistake low.