Post by H3Knuckles
You never, ever, want to have your pet using taunt or growl unless specifically asked to do so. Tanking is designed around maintaining consistent aggro (such as many of their survival, resource, and damage abilities being fed by being attacked) barring special mechanics used by specific bosses. Furthermore, when an enemy switches targets it may move, or at least change facing, which throws off any melee damage dealers attack patterns (they need to stay in range, and as much as possible, behind the enemy). It makes things moderately more difficult for healers who have to keep switching back and forth between whoever is receiving the damage. In short everyone in the group (except ranged damage dealers) is inconvenienced by ping-ponging the enemy in typical situations.
The only time you want to try to pull anything mid-fight is when an enemy's going for a healer or less survivable dps'er and the tank can't immediately stop it. Then you might want to use a single target ability like Distracting Shot (
not an AoE threat ability like Growl) to pull it to you or your pet and eat the damage until the tank can reestablish control. While not an advanced tactic, it isn't necessarily for beginners as it requires rapid judgement calls and familiarity with your tank and an understanding of the encounter to know when it's appropriate.
Pet aggro abilities are really only intended for questing by yourself or without a tank, 'extreme soloing' (doing old dungeons or even some lower-level raids by yourself), and the rare special fight mechanic (much like Mage or Warlock tanking during the Burning Crusade expansion).
The other big aggro trick for a hunter though, is to use misdirect to throw the threat you're about to accumulate (not that it does
not include your pet's accumulated threat) onto your target. By yourself, you use this to help keep enemies on your pet, in a group you target your tank right before you use a big threat-generating move to help keep him ahead. Note that Misdirect fades off the tank (and possibly reverts to you, I forget this part) after a little while though.
TLDR; Always turn growl, taunt, etc off autocast when participating in a group.Also, always check the "Helpful Threads" stickied thread at the top of this here Hunter forum for detailed information on how to play your class. The best resources for endgame PVE in particular though, would be Elitist Jerks' Hunter threads (see
this subforum), and our very own Cialbi's thread on
pet use. The EJ site is raid-focused, but very useful for developing a deeper understanding of what your working towards.