BM Hunter Pet Abuse

[Niley]

the only thing about this idea, is that not only You're gimping Your hunters damage(turtle part), but in a 5 box team this would over complicate every thing, and based on my experience is not really needed.
Its always easier to spam heal one target then make Your healer keep switching to pets, back to the tank, to Your team w/e. Thats why priest or shaman healers work best for boxing, one button heals Your tank, one button heals Your whole team.
Anyways just my point of view :P I'm actually going to change my team quite a bit in next few weeks, kicking out 2 shamans, and replacing them with different classes, boxing is kinda easy with just 2 classes.

[homerjunior]

If your boxing a 5-man team purely for hunter tanking would not 2 healers be wise? 3 hunters,Priest,Druid for example

[Boylston]

Niley: Its always easier to spam heal one target then make Your healer keep switching to pets, back to the tank, to Your team w/e. Thats why priest or shaman healers work best for boxing, one button heals Your tank, one button heals Your whole team.

Here are a couple of interesting things to consider about running a Healer+4xHunter team as opposed to a more common Tank+4xShaman (or any Tank+Healer+DPS) setup:

1.) Most of the time, PvE instance boxers play the tank as the main character and controller the healer with buttons, since it's an alt. I play my HEALER as the main, and all the DPS and tanks are "alts". In my setup, I use mouse-click-casting through healbot to heal and mash buttons to control my "tank" and DPS. I can very effectively chase damage around this way.

2.) Unlike other boxing setups, ALL the characters are in a pile together at range while the "tanks" are farther away. Using an AoE heal (WG, CoH, CH), I can hit all the characters at once easily or all the pet tanks at once easily. There's nothing earth shattering about this observation, just that it is a little different than your normal boxing setup where you have characters split into two groups. I like the way this works since I can easily see everything that's going on with the pulls.

For trash pulls, I really don't mind having aggro bouncing all over the place. I have macros set up to mark and assign tanks to up to 4 targets, but in most scenarios I just let the 4-pack of Gorillas charge in and let natural variations in their Thunderstomp damage split aggro up between 2-3 of them. I set them all to Growl and compete for aggro. This means that the aggro is bouncing around a lot, which is OK since I am using a strong AoE heal in Wild Growth. I can very simply Wild Growth the pack, toss rejuv on pets that get aggro, and then use Regrowth or Lifeblooms on any target that starts taking heavy damage. (In heroics, I will probably revert back to manually assigning tank targets for 4+ elite pulls, however). The nice part about doing this from a DPS perspective is that I can have all my damage on the same target and quickly burn stuff down. Anyhow, the normal frustrations of having aggro bouncing around aren't there for me since I play the healer as main, utilize great AoE heals, and I have basically disposable tanks. If a pet DOES die, I can battle rez it in 4 seconds and keep on trucking.

For bosses, I just need much more healing on the pets, so I try to restrict the tanking to one Gorilla that I can pre-hot and keep WG, Rejuv, Regrowth, Lifebloom all going for the full duration. The Heal-over-Time efficiency doesn't concern me, since pets get such insane healing bonuses, but it's just spike damage I worry about.

homerjunior: If your boxing a 5-man team purely for hunter tanking would not 2 healers be wise? 3 hunters,Priest,Druid for example

Nah, the real magic of this setup is that I can go with a full 4xDPS classes and kill stuff faster than a traditional instance team. The only good compromise would be to run a character like an elemental shaman that would DPS on trash but then also toss a few heals during boss encounters. I don't really want to run a mixed group, though. My focus is NOT always PvE-- the core of my team is 4xHunters for BGs and raiding, and I play the healer only as a way to level and (hopefully) farm heroics.