Hunter Kiting Strategy

Kiting is one of the most essential hunter skills in PvP. Kiting is where you maintain distance from a melee target while shooting at it. This is akin to "running and shooting over your shoulder". It works very well against classes that have poor or no ranged ability, since you can effectively kill them without them getting close.

The motivation behind kiting is that hunters do their best work at range, and are relatively poor at melee. A hunter does not want to go toe-to-toe melee against a rogue or warrior because in most cases he will get slaughtered. Kiting allows us to keep our opponents at range.

Kiting can be accomplished in a number of ways. The most standard method is to jump in the air, spin at least 90 degrees towards the target (most people spin a full 180), shoot off an instant, and then spin back, all before hitting the ground. Thus, you are basically running in one direction while occasionally jump-spinning to face your target so that you can hit him.

Another method of kiting involves using the strafe key to essentially run sideways away from the target. Done properly, you will still be slightly facing the target (imperceptably in most cases), so you can shoot your instants without having to jump and turn around.

Learning how to kite may at first may seem rather daunting. To jump and then spin, shoot, spin back, all before landing takes some work. Fortunately, this can be practiced against any landmark or inanimate target. You can for example choose a hallway in your town, then practice running up and down while jump spinning. Or, choose any stationary NPC in town and jump-spin with him as a dummy target.

I recommend learning how to jump-spin using the first method I mentioned (i.e. jump, spin at least 90 degrees, shoot, spin back). When you first practice this, you may want to spin a complete 180 degrees. If you're having trouble spinning back to your original position, you may want to adjust your mouse. Another key thing to note is that as long as your mouse returns to its original position, you will also be back to facing in your original direction. Practice flicking the mouse and then flicking it back to the same horizontal position it started. You can even do this outside of WoW just by playing with your mouse on the screen. Once you can consistently flick it back to where it started, you're set for kiting.

Another helpful hint for learning how to kite is to watch your minimap. Since your minimap gives you an indication of what direction you are facing via a pointer, you can practice spinning back to the same direction by just watching your pointer.

In terms of what to actually shoot while kiting, typically you'll want to concussive shot, arcane shot, and sting in whatever order. Watch your cooldowns and hit your shot whenever it's available. The exception is stings -- they have a much shorter cooldown their duration, so you don't want to waste mana repeatedly stinging a target once it's already affected. You will probably want to map your instant shots to keys that you can still reach while holding down the "w" to move forward. For example, mapping concussive shot to 4 and arcane shot to 5 allows you to hit those buttons while holding down the "W" to keep moving forward. Note that you do not need to actually hold down "W" while jumping, since the whole idea is that while you're in the air, you'll be continuing forward in the direction that you were facing when you first started jumping. However, for convenience, some prefer to keep "W" held down. Personally, I have concussive shot mapped to 2 so that I just release the "W" key briefly to hit "2". What you choose to do is totally up to you -- any number of methods are equally effective. Other options are to hold down both mouse buttons, or put yourself on auto-run using the numlock key.

In steps, the mechanics for kiting are:

1) Run forward holding down either 'w' or both mouse buttons.
2) Jump with space bar, release 'w' or your mouse buttons.
3) Spin 90-180 degrees in either direction using your mouse.
4) Hit your concussive shot, arcane shot, or sting button to shoot.
5) Spin back in the other direction using your mouse.
6) Hold down 'w' or both mouse buttons to resume running.

Also be aware that you can start your kite from when you are facing your target. Suppose you are happily shooting away at a distant target and he starts coming towards you. Jump backward, shoot an instant, and turn 180 degrees so that you are now facing away from him and running in that direction.

Kiting is also an important skill in PvE. You can kill much higher level melee mobs if you kite effectively.

During kiting, also watch for improved concussive shot. If that procs, your opponent is stunned -- you'll want to get to maximum range, perhaps hit rapid fire, and start unloading multishot and auto shot in addition to your instants.

6.1.1 Jousting

Jousting is a method of going in and out of melee range to confuse opponents and get off intermittent melee strikes to damage and slow them. A typical example is to run through an opponent, hit him with raptor strike and wing clip, continue running through until you are behind him, and then kite once you're in range. This can be confusing for melee classes to deal with because after you run through them, they have to turn around to chase after you. Or if a player has any sort of lag, his character may continue running through you before he has a chance to turn around.

6.2 Melee

Melee is inevitable in PvP. Theoretically you can kite all day or opponents will be distracted by your pet, but in truth people will generally make a beeline for hunters to get into their dead zone or melee range. Fortunately, our melee abilities are not bad, and we have many ways of getting out of melee range.

Much of a hunter's survival relies on getting out of melee range effectively. Against pretty much any class, if we are stuck in melee range and have exhausted all our tools to get out, and we are not beast master specced, we will die. Tpyically we will want to use a macro to both raptor strike and wing clip/counterstrike/mongoose. Such a macro may look like this:
/cast Raptor Strike
/castrandom Wing Clip, Counterattack, Mongoose Bite
/petattack

An important consideration with melee is to turn off the auto range switch. By default, once you enter melee, you will switch out of auto shot mode and start swinging your weapon. This has a number of downsides. First, if your opponent is trapped, you may accidentally swing and break his trap. Second, since your first melee attack is more or less instant, you will miss your chance to raptor strike and will have to wait for the full weapon cooldown cycle before you get your raptor strike off.