Hunter Pet Management

Pets can be situationally kept in passive or aggressive. Aggressive is useful when we are trying to react to stealthed opponents because our pet will see them and immediately start attacking them often even before we notice the opponent is there. The downside of aggressive of course is that the pet will break crowd control or put us into combat prematurely.

Passive is the safest mode. Hook in PetAttack macros into your various attacks so that your pet automatically attacks whenever you use these abilities (e.g. you can set a macro such that whenever you raptor strike something, your pet attacks that same target).

Note that even with our pet on passive, warriors can use taunt to draw the pet to attack them, such as if the warrior knows he's about to hit a trap and wants to trick the pet into breaking the CC.

As a general rule, most opponents will not target your pet. This is because when you die, your pet dies; and equally as important, when you res, your pet will also res with full happiness even if it was dead. For this reason, I would also not using a tank pet such as a bear, since you are trading off DPS for survivability but your pet does not need survivability in PvP.

Thus, it is not as vital for your pet to have as much health and defense as possible. I generally find that putting training points into resistances is a good idea because whereas people won't try to kill your pet, they will usually try to CC it whether through fear, frost nova, entangling roots, etc. In arenas, the most important resistance for my pet is shadow, since he is feared more than any other CC. Beyond that, I also get frost resistance since frost nova is another common form of CC. Most opponents will not bother rooting my pet (nature) or polymorphing it (arcane).