Someone: Good advice! I started using Fizzwidget’s TrackMenu recently to switch between the tracking options easily, but I like the mousewheel behaviors you mentioned. I’ll have to try those as well!

And, embarrassingly, I *still* haven’t named my crabs. Too many good names!

Also, I’m one of those that don’t believe in “Improved I forgot about my pet and it has died” talents! ;)

If your pet is close to die, you can always recall it and Concussive Shoot the mob while it heals a bit; or if several mobs on it, distract (or arcane shoot) one to you and ignore it a bit while switching to Aspect of the Monkey to allow your pet some less hits on him and heal up a bit…

Very, VERY rarely did my pet die and usually that meant we both going down and because of some HUGE string of screw-ups from me! :)
Don’t forget that your tracking ability *can* be of good use, especially when you zoom it in a bit, so you can always be aware of surrounding wandering mobs or even respawning mobs as they show up in minimap before they fully appear on the terrain giving you a few secs to re-position yourself in order to avoid aggroing them! A simple set of macros like this will help you a lot:

/CastSequence Track Beasts, Find Herbs

(Find herbs is for my hunter, replace with your minerals tracking ability). 1st press you get Track Beasts, 2nd press switches to your gathering tracking ability and so on. I have one macro like this for each of my known tracking abilities…

Also, I’m now using some macros to have either Zoom In/Out *or* Intimidation/Mend Pet on the scroll wheel depending on whether I am in combat or not. Still finetuning them, but it goes something like this:

#ShowTooltip [combat] Mend Pet
#ShowTooltip [nocombat] Teleport: Orgrimmar
/Cast [combat,nomodifier] Mend Pet
/StopMacro [combat,nomodifier]
/Script CameraZoomOut(3)

(for MouseWheel down)

and

#ShowTooltip [combat] Intimidation
#ShowTooltip [nocombat] Portal: Orgrimmar
/Cast [combat,nomodifier] Intimidation
/StopMacro [combat,nomodifier]
/Script CameraZoomIn(3)

(for MouseWheel Up).

So Mend Pet is just a scroll mouse wheel up…

Some hunter timing mods also help and, if you want to cut down on time, check LightHeaded: it’s an addon that shows comments and coords from Wowhead and allows a simple click on NPC name/Coords to set a temporary marker on map, complete with minimap arrow pointing in the right direction!

Also, I made a small change to my Queue Target macro: it now works “On mouseover”, so simply mouse over a new mob while your pet and you are still fighting one, and press the key assigned to the Pet Queue macro and your pet will start that mob as soon as he finishes his current targets! And you can queue more than one (haven’t tested the highest number it can be!)

/focus [target=pettarget,nomodifier]
/petfollow [target=mouseover,modifier]
/petattack [target=mouseover]
/target [nomodifier] focus
/petattack [nomodifier]

If holding a modifier key, it will instantly target that mob instead of queuing it. (Not really tested this last part thoroughly after making some changes so it may not work!)

~Shelgeyr

And currently I have a scorpid named Gall. Which is Akkadian for something, but I can’t remember what it means atm. But it was pretty darn cool…

Shelgeyr,
Thanks for that tip. I just got the hunting quest gun from the long chain in Nagrand. The gun is great but the sound is driving me nuts. I cant wait to give this a try, I wonder if I can find some machine gun fire sounds or pew pew laser sounds online to sub for the default. lol
You just gave me a project for this evening :)

And I am sure you already have your names picked out, but I tend to go with gaelic names for my chars and pets, so I would come up with stuff like: Glassag, Partan, Rudhag, or Dolpaw as a bit of a stretch.

Have fun in the desert!

~Shelgeyr