No hunter teams?

[Mercbeast]

I'm almost up to level 35 with a sham+4warrior team where my 5-hunter team stopped in beta. So far, they are far more resilient than the hunter team to "oops" situations, though the repair costs are 100% more expensive in spite of hunter ammo costs. In terms of DPS, they are also better (for me, I was 5x BM spec) post-30 at AoE damage.

As for general playability, after the 2.1.0 Avoidance ability and instant Mend Pet HoT, it got better, and 2.3.0 effectively removed the deadzone but IMO hunters (BM in particular) really didn't come into their own until the pre-Cataclysm ~4.0.1 patch with Glyph of Misdirect (no cooldown if targeted at your pet). That really, REALLY helped control aggro, especially with adds.

What pets were you using? The guy 5 boxing the hunters said the team was terrible initially, and asked for pet suggestions, bunch of us suggested bats/carrion birds for the demo shout, and he's said that his threat management has been a joke ever since.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

What pets were you using? The guy 5 boxing the hunters said the team was terrible initially, and asked for pet suggestions, bunch of us suggested bats/carrion birds for the demo shout, and he's said that his threat management has been a joke ever since.

I went to Westfall and got Fleshrippers at ~18 or so but I didn't notice all that much of a difference. Eventually, I just ran with auto-taunt and manually targeted pets pre-pull. It worked, but when you get adds in the middle of a fight or a boss/hard mob that kills the pets pretty fast, it becomes a problem screech or no screech. Granted, I was doing pretty much all OJ/red stuff because I could, so there's that.

There are ways to mitigate deadzone aggro, and I am not saying they are bad by any stretch. I just like being able to trip on three groups in a row in SM Library at level 35 and not die because my stupid DPS ran out of mana.