*dusts off desk*

*slowly walks up to chalkboard, baton in hand*

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  Pretty sure my last Hunter Kindergarten post was written back during WotLK.  Well, ladies, gentlemen and robots and all others… class is back in session.

So you’re a brand-spanking new hunter in this World of Warcraft and you’ve decided it’s time to do some instances.  Awesome!  That’s the bread and butter of WoW and hopefully you have fun.

Before heading in, however, you do have a couple of things to keep in mind.

(Yes, long time readers: most of these are rehashes of posts I wrote five or six years ago.  But trust me, this is stuff I still see.  IN RAIDS.)

REPAIR: Personally I have this weird quirk where I try to be 100% repaired at all times.  I just default to repairing every time I’m in my garrison or, well, basically next to anyone who can repair.  If you’re not in this habit, you should at least repair before queuing up.  I understand that if you’re in LFG you may be out in the world or whatever whilst waiting for the queue to pop.  But you don’t want to be that guy whose gear is mysteriously red after one single wipe.  Right?

PET SPEC’D FEROCITY: Ferocity is the DPS spec.  It gets you and your pet both all the DPS bonuses.  I’ve just started keeping pets spec’d for different things with me at all time and I swap them in or out as needed.  It’s easy enough to just switch pet specs on the fly, so you don’t have to do that, but this does lead in nicely to my next point, which is…

TURN GROWL OFF:  Ten years later and I’m still seeing hunters with their pet’s growl on in raids.  This messes with the tank and leads to your pet dying, which leads to a severe drop in DPS.  Please, please make sure growl is off before going into the instance!  If you have trouble remembering then pick one of your pets to be an instance/raid pet and keep growl off on him at all times.

BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR AOEs: Barrage is awesome and a stupid amount of fun.  Like, I always wanted to be a human gatling gun.  (Er… elf gatling gun.)  But it’s not for places where you have to be careful with pulls, because it can and will accidentally pull the next pack of mobs – or the boss.  Same goes for Multishot!

BUFF UP: Maybe not a huge deal in low level instances.  Maybe not a huge deal if you’re a Mythic raider dicking around in LFR.  But otherwise you should probably use an agility flask and eat some food.  Oh, and I know Exotic Munitions isn’t the most popular talent in the world right now, but if you do use it, be sure to make sure you’ve just applied it.  (With Poisoned Ammo in most cases).

Okay, that’s about it.  No, really.  That’s it for Dungeons 101, at least.  Oh, there are other things you’ll need to know – things about shot priorities, character stats, and so on.  But those are all subjects for another day!  For now, these five tips should be enough to get you started.

Class dismissed!  Your homework: Play video games!  Hooray!