Hunters in vanilla are incredible levelers, capable of soloing a wide variety of content, and have by far some of the most intricate vanilla systems in pet taming and management; the class is fairly easy to pick up with a few stumbling blocks but has a very high capacity for skill expression in the open world, instances, and PvP.
In a raid setting, Hunter is a great perspective to lead with a relatively simple ranged rotation and the ability to control the pace of trash via pulling. Without large balance changes, it remains a sort of ranged support class; you contest warriors and rogues on some loot and do not contest an equally skilled one in damage. If you want to top meters, hunter isn’t a particularly good class to play, but, every raid will want 1-3 for pulling and tranqing -and- good pulling hunters will dramatically increase your raids speed and quality of life.
As always, if you have any questions please ask in the Classic WoW Hunter Discord.
On horde, troll hunters dominate with their Berserking racial while orcs are slightly behind in PvE. In PvP, orc stun resist can make or break fights. For the Alliance, night elfs and dwarves racials are equally weak in PvE, though provide different situational advantages in PvP; dwarves can Stoneform off rogue’s Blinds and night elfs can use Shadowmeld to eat/drink/lurk in the open world. For PvE, pick either, for organized PvP/duels, pick dwarf, for open world shenanigans, pick nelf.
All hunters classes are advised to go Engineering as one of their professions in vanilla. Its simply too good to turn down. If you plan on farming Dire Maul Tribute runs, your other profession should be enchanting but there is no need to level it in vanilla to be able to disenchant. No other profession dramatically impacts hunter performance in vanilla.
If you have read other classic addon guides you may have heard of a required Aimed Shot macro for avoiding the retry timer; this was fixed late in classic and remains fixed in Season of Mastery. You can use Aimed Shot in macros if you’d like, but you do not need a macro to just cast Aimed Shot, you can use the spell from your spell book with no issues.
Spammable, target finding auto shot macro:
#showtooltip
/cleartarget [dead]
/targetenemy [noharm]
/stopattack
/cast !Auto Shot
Spammable, target finding auto shot with petattack and dash/dive:
#showtooltip
/cleartarget [dead]
/targetenemy [noharm]
/cast !Auto Shot
/stopattack
/petattack
/cast [pet:Cat,harm]Dash; [pet:Owl,harm]Dive
I’d bind both and use them situationally. Not having a keybind to attack without pet will hurt you down the line.
Not a macro, but bind petpassive to an easily accessible key. Its the seal icon on your pet bar and hitting it even while the pet is already in that setting calls it back to you or its petstay spot. You will regret not having this the first, second, and third time you pet is sprinting towards a raid boss before anyone is ready.
Reasonable pet care macro which will Call/Revive/Mend pet without any modifiers.
#showtooltip
/use [@pet,nodead,exists] Mend Pet
/stopmacro [@pet,nodead,exists]
/use [@pet,dead,exists] Revive Pet
/castsequence reset=2 Call Pet, Revive Pet
Binding your Aspect of the Cheetah like this allows you to hit it again to cancel. Using spellbook Cheetah doesn’t let you cancel during your GCD. You should do the same with Aspect of the Pack.
#showtooltip
/cancelaura Aspect of the Cheetah
/cancelaura Aspect of the Pack
/cast Aspect of the Cheetah
I bind all my other aspects like /cast !Aspect of the Hawk so that mashing them doesn’t disable them.
Eagle Eye chaining macro lets you recast Eagle Eye from your current spot:
#showtooltip
/cleartarget
/cast !Eagle Eye
Eat/Drink/Prowl/Shadowmeld:
#showtooltip
/use Alterac Manna Biscuit
/use Conjured Crystal Water
/use Morning Glory Dew
/use [mod:shift] Conjured Cinnamon Roll
/use [mod:shift] Roasted Quail
/cast [mod:alt] !Shadowmeld
/cast [mod:alt] !Prowl
Adding flag dropping into your mount macro is good if you do any PvP
#showtooltip Swift Green Gryphon
/cancelaura Horde Flag
/cast Reins of the Swift Mistsaber
Use top trinket and RF (add Berseking if Troll):
#showtooltip Rapid Fire
/use Rapid Fire
/use 13
Using items (rocket boots, parachute cloak, etc) Replace X with 1 for helm, 8 for boots, 13 for trinket 1, 14 for trinket 2, 15 for cloak, 16 for main hand weapon:
#showtooltip
/use X
Sorta a mouseover, this fires Flare at your cursor: /cast [@cursor] Flare
What people bind as mouseover macros is pretty subjective. I’m going to list all of mine in order of most popular to sorta niche things to mouseover. I always use the syntax [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] which will use the mouseover target if it is hostile and not dead, otherwise cast at your target; remove [] if you don’t want that fallback condition.
Highly recommend mouseover Scatter Shot
#showtooltip Scatter Shot
/stopattack
/petpassive
/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Scatter Shot
I put Naxx totem stopping into my mouseover HM but I’m not sure whether this will work in SoM
#showtooltip Hunter's Mark
/cleartarget
/targetexact Lightning Totem
/targetlasttarget [noexists]
/cast [@mouseover,harm][] Hunter's Mark
Mouseover Raptor Strike/Melee is very useful for lots of free DPS. This is also weave friendly if you do not queue the attack while out of melee:
#showtooltip Raptor Strike
/cleartarget
/targetlasttarget
/targetenemy [noharm]
/tar [@mouseover,harm]
/use Raptor Strike
/use Mongoose Bite
/startattack
/stopmacro [@mouseover,noharm]
/targetlasttarget
/use !Auto Shot
/targetlasttarget [noexists][dead]
Mouseover stings are useful for mana drain, DoTing rogues, and blanketting a DoT if you need to trap
/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Viper Sting/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Serpent Sting/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Scorpid StingPetattack mouseover is good to send pet to a target while you ranged another: /petattack [@mouseover,harm,nodead]
I include Raptor in a mouseover Wing Clip macro because I almost always want more damage on a WC target.
#showtooltip Wing Clip
/stopcasting
/cleartarget [dead][help]
/cast Raptor Strike
/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Wing Clip
/startattack
#showtooltip Feign Death
/stopattack
/petpassive
/cast Feign Death [combat]
Some people will add /cast Freezing Trap afterwards so they can mash a single key to FD and trap. I don’t like this, but you do you. More advanced FD macros are included in the PvE section for trinket swapping.
This is an unorganized list of Weakauras I like or use:
You should use addons to compliment how you want to play the game. Copying another person’s UI that doesn’t play like you isn’t going to make you a better player; fixing little issues with your UI can remove friction that you would experience for hours and hours. Below I’m going to list a healthy mix of addons but if you’re just getting into things, then install Leatrix, Weakauras, Questie, DBM, and start your adventure.
This section is about addons which help you optimize your gameplay a bit more. Because vanilla WoW doesn’t really have hard PvE content, most of these are far more useful in PvP so you can skip them if you’re not planning to engage with that side of things at all.