Hunter

With moving to Northrend, hunters have seen tons of improvement, enabling them to use any of the three specs for leveling to a decent level. Widely believed to be the strongest, Beast Mastery will be our choice. Making our pet tankier and dish out more damage is a recipe for a very enjoyable leveling.

The gameplay loop will consist of marking your target, sending your pet in and attacking at range. But you don’t have to leave it to just that. While shooting, we will start moving to your next target, send our pet over after your primary target gets to low life and finish it off with a few more abilities.

We recommend getting a weapon swing timer addon, allowing you to know when to move and when to stop and shoot.

Hunter rotation can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.

For early game leveling Hunter’s Mark, Serpent Sting and Arcane Shot will make up for most of your ranged damage combined with your Auto Shots. Until you get your pet or when you manage to take aggro from it, you can use Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite in melee range and Wing Clip to slow down enemies until you get back to shooting.

For multiple targets use Multi-Shot, Explosive Trap and Volley provide some great damage, just be careful of not pulling aggro if you don’t intend to do so and relieve pressure from your pet. This is mainly it until you get to Steady shot or Aimed Shot from your talents.

For your aspects use Aspect of the Hawk/Aspect of the Dragonhawk for increase in damage, Aspect of the Viper when low on mana, and Aspect of the Cheetah for increase in movement speed to kite or move to next target faster where mounts aren’t available

For your crowd control, there are Concussive Shot and Wing Clip for both ranged and melee options. Scare Beast can be used in rare situations to fear beasts. When it comes to your traps, there are your Freezing Trap and Frost Trap for single and AoE situations.

For your Utility and movement, you have Feign Death to drop aggro from all enemies. It can be used to redirect aggro to your pet and give you some breathing room to drop traps. If you still need more space, you can use Disengage to leap backwards and use your Concussive Shot to slow enemies down. And last but not least Misdirection to transfer threat to another target that will in most cases be your pet, or in group content, your tank.

For your stats, it’s really strait-forward. Agility and Stamina give you Damage and Health, plus it partly transfers over to your pet.

Agility > Stamina > Crit > Hit > Intellect > Strength

Cooldowns:
#showtooltip Rapid Fire
/cast Rapid Fire
/use 13
/use 14
/use 10
/cast Call of the Wild

Auto-shot macro that you can’t cancel by spamming:
#showtooltip Auto Shot
/targetenemy [noexists][dead][help]
/cast !Auto Shot

Hunter’s mark + send pet macro:
#showtooltip Hunter's Mark
/petattack
/cast Hunter's Mark

Feign Death safety macro:
#showtooltip Feign Death
/stopattack
/petpassive
/cast Feign Death

Return pet macro:
#showtooltip
/petfollow
/petpassive
/cast Dash

For your Major Glyphs:

Glyph of Hunter’s Mark – for increase in damage
Glyph of Serpent Sting – for easier uptime
Glyph of Bestial Wrath – for more readily available dps cooldown

And Minor Glyphs:

Glyph of Feign Death – makes sure your aggro drop ability is readily available
Glyph of Mend Pet – is your QoL glyph, allowing you to save gold on buying food for your pet.
Glyph of Revive Pet – to easily revive pet in combat

As for your pet, it starts getting talent points at level 20 and every 4 levels after that. And in leveling and PvE situations, you should use Ferocity pets. 

Those include Cats and Wolves as most favorites, as well as Carrion Birds, Hyenas, Moths, Raptors, Tallstriders, Wasps. Later on you can tame Core Hounds, Devilsaurs and Spirit Beasts after reaching level 60 and getting Beast Mastery talent.

Here are how its Talents should look like:

As Beast mastery Hunter, you get 4 additional points, put those into 2/2 Shark Attack and 2/2 Bloodthirsty.