Now that I’ve more time to elaborate.
The reason I use my build is simply as follows:
Snatching at 1, The enemies that fly are so rare that I won’t bother increasing the damage of this skill, before when it increased its duration, it was amazing. But now, I only use it as a way to double my strike damage agaisnt flying bosses (rush dog, sonic strike and hovering)
Retrieve & coursing are the second damage option I’ve got, I use them while rush dog is on CD. If you want, you can use either skill while the pet is afar from the target, followed by a rush dog. This way rush dog propels the pet towards the target, executes rush dog and whatever skill you executed before. If you do this while an enemy is under the effect of either skill, rush dog will cancel said skill.
Hounding I’ve got it for PvP purposes, as for fixing the pet I’ve this video explaining how to : https://youtu.be/mNIzgrvo2xA basically, feed your pet and wait for it to finish eating.
Growling at lv 3 means that enemies must resist 2 growling checks, growling effects are triggered once every 3 seconds. So this means that at lv 3, it last 6 seconds and thus it last 2 checks and enemies must resist those 2. It also means that with a savage bow and growling gem / or divine might, it last for 3 checks.
Hunter I’ve found that my particular play style makes me move alot, so I never took archer’s kneeling shot, I’m always getting near and away from enemies in order to move the pet the way I want.
On the falconer side, I just recommend that, you can choose whatever skill level for either pheasant and hovering, but please, never put one level beyond hanging shot. Hanging shot is the single worst most unreliable skill in the game, it is even worse since it began giving that silly “companion not near” message.
Anyway, for the best experience as a hunter
- get a rocksodon (this is the best available pet right now for us, it eats… non tp food, meaning you can heal it on battle without breaking your bank account)
- keep /comeon in a macro, spam it.
- be aware that your pet can execute skills while it is close to your enemy, this means that you can have your pet be far from you and your target near your pet and execute a skill. This also means, that it will fail triggering skills if it is 1 small tile too far.
- turn off pet auto attacks, many times it decides to auto attack a dead enemy and stays put, until you feed it.
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edit If your pet is not executing either retrieve or coursing, use /comeon, it will refresh its pathfinding forcing it to go after the target, you can achieve something similar with heavy shot, by forcing it to recalculate the new position of the enemy. It also helps that heavy shot roots the enemy for a split second.