Marksman 1-80: Level 10

I suppose you're all well past level 9 now. >.> Here's level 10!

Level 10

Level 10 changes the flavor of hunter-hood: Your hunter quests at level 10 will net you a pet.

Skills, Level 10

• 10: Aspect of the Hawk (Rank 1), Serpent Sting (Rank 2), Track Humanoids, Tame Beast, Call Pet, Dismiss Pet, Feed Pet, Revive Pet

When you talk to your trainer for your skills at level 10, you'll get Aspect of the Hawk, a new rank of Serpent Sting, and Track Humanoids. You'll be using Aspect of the Hawk a lot. You'll also get your first talent point - start with Lethal Shots in Marksman so you can get to Aimed Shot by level 20.

Your trainer will also give you quests for taming pets. If for some reason you've left your native newbie zone, the local hunter trainer may not have the quest for you. Taurens need to go to Bloodhoof Village, Night Elves to Dolanaar, etc. Your trainer will give you three successive quests to tame some kind of local fauna, and then you'll get the skills to tame your own pet. Make sure you talk to both the hunter trainer and the pet trainer so that you pick up the full gamut of skills - Tame Beast, Call Pet, Dismiss Pet, Feed Pet, and Revive Pet. A lot of hunters wander around confused about the feeding process initially; it's usually because they missed the quest for the skill.

A couple pet-related macros:

#showtooltip
/cast Feed Pet
/use 3 1

This will cast Feed Pet and select whatever food is in the specified bag slot. The location format is . Bags, from left to right, are numbered 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 for the backpack. The slots inside the bag are labeled from the upper left-most to the bottom right-most; in a bag whose slots aren't divisible by 4 (say, a 10-slot bag), the left slot in the top row of two is slot 1. Just keep whatever food your pet likes in that slot, and when you click the button, you'll be feeding that food. If you prefer, instead of using a bag slot, you can use the name of a food, but if you have a pet like a boar or bear that eats anything and are just using randomly dropped food, the bag slot macro will be less of a hastle.

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Mend Pet; [button:2] Revive Pet

This is a left-click, right click macro. I use a lot of these. This one casts Mend Pet (which you haven't learned yet) when you left click and Revive Pet (which you do have) when you right click. Even if you don't have one skill or the other, you can still use it for the other skill with the appropriate button.

Your pet is going to come with Growl, Cower, and some family-specific abilities. Petopia is an awesome source for browsing pets. Regardless of what you pick, you'll want to open your Spellbook, go to your pet's spell page, and drag Growl, Cower, and maybe some of his other abilities down onto your pet's action bar. Right clicking on an ability will toggle autocast; if there's a moving gold border around the spell, it's on autocast. You want autocast ON for Growl and OFF for Cower. (Note that in groups with a tank, the opposite is true.) Also keep your pet's basic special attack (Claw, Bite, etc.) on autocast. You can always left-click an ability to cast it, as well. Note that pet spells tend to be buggy and turn themselves back on to autocast if you don't leave them on the toolbar. This is why it's important to keep skills you don't want to use on the toolbar.