The story of Hunter pets and aggro in Burning Crusade, especially since patch 2.4.2 or so, has been a very stormy one. Even deep Beastmastery Hunters have had to learn to kite, as pet aggro grows worse and worse. Growl in 2.4.2 was supposed to scale, but almost every Hunter that tested it said it didn't, despite Hortus' insistence that it did.

Luckily, it looks like there may finally be some real relief coming in Wrath of the Lich King.

The post about trash and trinkets earlier this week reminded me of this item that we've never covered on PLP before. It's very class specific (hence the "trash and trinkets" argument), but for the right situation, it's pretty useful.

Name: Hypnotist's Watch (Wowhead, Thottbot, Goblin Workshop)
Type: Uncommon Trinket
Damage/Speed: N/A
Abilities:

• Use: Reduces your threat to enemy targets within 30 yards, making them less likely to attack you.
• Cooldown of five minutes, which means you're meant to use it a little less than every other fight -- usually only in situations where you need it. A two-minute trinket is meant to be used more often obviously (and you already know by now that you should be using trinkets as much as possible, right?), but this one is a little more special.
• Most people say it reduces threat by about 720, which isn't much (and there are a few other trinkets floating around that will do more). But this one is super easy to get, and in a few situations, 720 threat is all you need.
• Like which situations? Pets, mostly -- Warlocks or Hunters who accidentally pull aggro off their pets while leveling can pop this one and sent mobs back to their mini-tanks. DPS Warriors and Rogues can also use it as a preventative measure in instances, though in most cases there, you'll want to stick to DPS trinkets and rely on your usual threat management abilities to keep things controlled. This trinket is more for when you want to mess around solo, not when you're in a group and other people are depending on you.
• And one more thing: this trinket drops threat, but doesn't erase it. It won't make you lose aggro completely, like Vanish or Feign Death -- all it does is drop the threat numbers, and someone else (or your pet) has to be there to pick the mob up.

How to Get It: This is husky loot today -- most of the items we've done the past few weeks are hardcore endgame raiding items, so here's one everyone can get. Everyone that can navigate Hellfire Peninsula, that is -- you'll want to talk to "Screaming" Screed Luckhead, who is one of the goblins near the wrecked Zepplin in the southwest part of the peninsula. He'll have you do a quest to pick up zepplin pieces, and then run you far south to the Warp Fields, where you'll have to kill Voidwalkers and steal their essence (of course, this is right near the Ravager nests down there, and near the Human ghosts area, so you'll probably want to chain quests by this point).

Do the Voidwalker thing (the quest is called "Voidwalkers Gone Wild" -- cute), and then bring the essences back to Luckhead to claim your trinket.

Getting Rid of It: By level 68, there are a few other threat trinkets which will serve you better, and by then hopefully you've learned how to control your threat anyway and have a much better DPS or utility trinket to use. This one will disenchant into an Arcane Dust, a Lesser Planar Essence, or a small chance of a Small Prismatic Shard, and will sell to vendors for 74s 64c. You are getting very sleepy...

Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now usually Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus, but this week he has midterms and you're left to suffer with a substitute. Elizabeth recently toyed with the darker side of the priest's profession, but for better or worse, is holy again this week.

I rolled my first Priest for a very simple reason -- I wanted to play with my friends, and I got sick of always having to wait on a healer when we wanted to do something together. With every group stalled for need of healing, picking up a healing class myself seemed a pragmatic solution. (And three healers later, I'm still at it.) So a few weeks ago when we happened to have plenty of healing... but were short DPS... by the same logic I decided I could respec Shadow and lend a hand. And though the plan may seem simple enough, there are quite a few things DPS classes have to worry about that healers may not pay attention to at all.

Ever think about joining the dark side? There are a few things to consider before-hand...

Obstruce brings up a topic that seems obvious to some people but can drive others crazy: healers wearing less sturdy gear than they can just for the stats. I won't lie -- I've got a few pieces of leather on my restoration Shaman for the stats, but in general, I don't think it's a bad thing that healers and casters sometimes wear cloth for the stats, given of course 1) that they're not taking it from someone else who needs it, and 2) that there's not a better piece of normal gear for them to be wearing (it's an upgrade).

Obstruce's aunt disagrees, especially with Shamans and Druids -- if for some reason they pull aggro, wearing leather or cloth will only make things harder on the group. Which is true -- if I'm wearing leather (or even cloth) on my Shaman, I'm not going to have near as much armor as I would wearing the mail I'm supposed to wear. But in a group where all members are doing what they should be, I should never get hit anyway. If a healer's getting hit, it's a good 80% of the time not their fault -- it's the tank's or DPS' fault for not keeping aggro where it belongs.

So no, I don't see any problem with a Druid or Shammy (or even a Paladin, though there's a lot of nice healing plate out there anyway) wearing less than they're meant to. Warriors are definitely not in the same situation -- while yes, some of that Hunter mail may have lots of Agility on it, and that will help out your crit percentage, you get so much more bonus from Strength and Armor that it's just not worth it. Casters can steal Mage and Priest gear (as long as they're not actually stealing it from actual Mages and Priests) if it's an upgrade, but Warriors almost never have a reason to slum it up in mail.

With Patch 2.4 comes a brand new combat log and logging system, with tons of new features and capabilities. As a side effect of this, any mod or addon that uses the combat log to gather information will need to be rewritten, including the raiders' sidekick Omen.

Good news! The author has not been idle since the patch 2.4 test realms have gone up. Luckily for all of you, I have the pleasure of raiding with Antiarc(that little screenshot you've seen so often on WoW Insider is my raid group), so I've been able to get a little bit of a preview. You see that Omen screenshot on the right side there? That's us. In the coming weeks, columnist Sean Forsgren will have something more in-depth and technical for you, but for now, I'm going to walk you through the basics.

The new version of Omen, while remaining light on CPU usage, has gained the ability to track threat on multiple mobs with the same name very accurately, thanks to Blizzard's combat log revamp. In addition to that, Omen 2.0 has a few other new features. Some of them are, as I said, quite technical and won' t mean much to anybody but the modding folk. Sean will handle that quite well, I'm sure. For those of us without extensive mod knowledge, there's still some really great stuff. If you're interested, hop on past the jump and we'll get right into it!

Last week David discussed finding and training your pet. This is a great time to start practicing threat management. When you attack a target in a group, your target will be threatened to varying degrees by everyone in the group. This becomes really important later in your career, when you will more often be facing targets in instances, or larger targets which require a full group to kill. Take advantage of the early levels of Hunter to practice threat management, and bring more to those groups than they might be expecting.

Most classes have to group with someone before they ever have a chance to think about, much less practice, threat management. But we have a built in tank: our pet. We can practice this as clumsily as we need to, dying as often as we have to, all without an audience to mock us. Your pet'll never mock you. He's your best friend! Just don't ask what he tells the other pets when you're not listening.

I'll be discussing "threat," also known as "aggro" or "hate" depending on the group. All of these words refer to one thing: how mad the target is at you and all your allies. Lots of things can cause threat to rise, such as standing within a mob's range, smacking a mob with a gigantic slab of marble, or even healing a party member who is in the process of doing either of those things. Lots of things can also cause threat to drop, such as being feared, being polymorphed, or being killed. Understanding a little about how to manage your own threat will help you prevent that last option from happening to you or your party members.

It's amazing to me exactly how hard instances can be. Not the mobs, but the group. We've all been in ugh-PUGs before. Some players don't understand how to use their class or play nicely in an instance. That's only on regular dungeons; heroics have their own set of potential disasters. Sometimes you just have to give up.

Putting a group together for instance can be extremely difficult, and sometimes you have to take what you can get. While there are many excellent tanks out there, the shortage on my server makes for slim pickings. Folks who think that pulling aggro off the tank is an honor make up another problem. I am occasionally guilty of trying to heal and DPS at the same time. I'll admit to causing a wipe or two because of it.

Healbot Continued uses the embedded Lua scripting language to reconfigure information vital to healers. This retrofitting presents an easily manageable interface that helps you maintain a greater degree of situational awareness. For many of you wondering how this works, it's simply a matter of our program, Healbot Continued in this case, listening to the World of Warcraft client for events. In combat, information is literally flying back and forth between the player (client side) and the game server (server side). Healbot Continued simply listens in and picks out information it wants. This is true of almost all addons, which sift through event information for a variety of purposes. Healbot Continued is easily one of the more powerful addons around, as it goes above and beyond what is normally expected of healing addons.

ces_1 over on WoW Ladies posted bragging about her 9.7k Healing Touch crit, and it reminded me that I do exactly the same thing. For some reason, seeing those big numbers pop up in the middle of battle is an indescribable thrill. Crits are strange entities-- they aren't even always helpful (there are many situations, mostly when aggro is tight, in which big crits are actually bad to get). But big numbers inspire something primal in us. And even if we aren't world-record critting (even in the LJ comments, people are showing off bigger Healing Touch crits), there's something super inspiring about seeing a huge number and then realizing it's your personal best. A 3k Lighting Bolt crit isn't that much, but darned if it wasn't a terrific feeling when I finally hit it on my Shaman.

Loot is fun, but at the highest levels, it's a group thing-- you need to go into somewhere as a group or a raid, and then even if you do down the boss, you have to make sure you win a random roll or however else loot is distributed. But crits are far more personal-- even though they come from that loot, they're a result of all the gear choices you've made and the talents you've chosen for your character. Sure, a big dragon to fly around on is fun, but crits, out of the many rewards we've all earned in Azeroth, are maybe the most personal achievements you can find-- a real, numerical symbol that you've learned how to combine gear, class, and talents to do big things.

Celene has an interesting point: "Who in their right mind thought that the Subtlety tree needed additional threat reduction? Even the rogue class as a whole?" Indeed, she points out multiple ways that rogues already have to get rid of all the threat they can possibly build up: Feint, improved Fein (via the Sleight of Hand talent), Anesthetic Poison -- not to mention Vanish! And now, in patch 2.3, the Shadowstep talent is set to give an extra 50% threat reduction on the next attack the rogue makes after using it. (This is on top of the change to make Shadowstep useable regardless of whether you are in stealth or not.)

But the 5000-gold question is: Why? As you can see, rogues are buffed up with threat-reduction options already. Is Blizzard blind to the actual needs of the rogue class? Bornakk shadowsteps into the thread to point out, basically, that we ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth: "Rogues with Shadowstep will probably be attacking mobs at some point and this will help them use the ability and not pull aggro."

The problem here, as I see it, is that players sometimes assume that devs are handing out some abilities and buffs at the expense of others. A player sees a reduction in threat gained after using Shadowstep, for example, and thinks that the devs are opting to put that in rather than look at the class's real problems and get around to fixing them. In reality, I believe, the devs take their time with the small changes, and wait and wait for the big ones; they do a lot of internal testing to make sure that they don't mess up the class even more by trying to apply a "fix" to whatever problem is presented to them. If there are going to be sweeping changes that revolutionize the class, they'll either come bit-by-bit, or else they'll coincide with the release of an expansion, which is really the only time when huge changes make sense.

Personally, I'm all for more threat reduction, but it's really not that big an issue for me. I'm more excited about being able to teleport about out of stealth as well as in. This and other changes coming up for rogues might actually make me go back to playing my rogue alt again.

There's a lot of content in World of Warcraft that you can do all by yourself -- you can easily get to level 70 without ever joining a party. But there's plenty of content along the way that can only be accomplished in groups, and group play is, well, a bit different from solo play. To succeed solo, all you really have to do is kill your target before it kills you -- but in a group, every player has a specific role to fufill to make the group as a whole function. You've got someone to absorb damage (your tank, decked out in gear to help him or her mitigate damage), several someones to do damage (your DPS, which can come from nearly any class), and someone to prevent everyone from dying in the meantime (your healer). And regardless of whether you're healing or flaying minds, you're cloth-wearer who can't take a lot of hits. What does this mean? Well, my friends, it means you need to know a little something about keeping monsters on your tank and off you. And you're in the right place, because today we're going to talk about threat.

Mania's Arcania, which is the new home of the Petopia blog, has a really interesting look at a frustrating problem for hunters-- leveling a lowbie pet with a high level character. Say you're 70 and you want a Ghost Saber. Because the Ghost Saber spawns at only 19 or 20, the only way to currently level it is to basically let the hunter tank (or kite, more likely), and simply bring the pet along for the ride.

So how could we fix this? One of Mania's commenters has an interesting idea-- whenever a pet is tamed, it is automatically brought within a few levels of the hunter taming it. If you're 70 and taming a level 20, then when the little green ding flare rises up after taming, the pet suddenly becomes level 65, which is good enough to make the pet not so useless. It doesn't quite make sense (why would a pet be so much more powerful just because you tame it?), but it does take out the unnecessary pet grinding. Mania has other ideas that work well, too-- either make the pet experience relative to the pet (not the hunter, as it is now), or reduce the amount of experience needed anyway. Another idea mentioned is to make the latest rank of Growl open to any tamed pet of any level, but I don't see that working-- even if a level 20 could hold aggro against a level 60+ mob, it's not going to last very long.

The only other suggestion I'd have is just to implement a different way to level pets-- maybe a turnin or a special quest at pet trainers that cuts down on the grinding time and method. But no matter how you do it, there's no reason hunters should be forced to go through all this just to get the pet that has the look they want.

Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

Priests always seems to be in demand. Exploring or questing in any area of the game, at any level, whether Horde or Alliance, a Priest player can expect to be pestered with whispers for instance runs. Some polite, some demanding, some who need to be put on our ignore lists, and some who don't make any sense at all, but seem to be asking for something. What's a Priest to do when being asked to go here, there, or elsewhere? And what's a player to do when they need a Priest's help? Well, I'm going to try to explain here, in something of a how-to guide for grouping, for the Priests and non-Priests among us. So whether this is your first time partying with a Priest or your hundredth -- keep reading. There's plenty to know about how to act in a group, and we're only going to scratch the surface.

When Ryan wrote in suggesting we write about the concept of "wife aggro," a collective roar erupted over here at WoW Insider. The resulting conversation was both stimulating and more than a little silly, and in the end I decided if we can discuss this topic so profusely amongst ourselves, our readers certainly would benefit from us writing on the topic.

A couple of weeks ago several people in our guild started using the phrase "wife aggro" or "girlfriend aggro" as explanations why they had to AFK or log out of the game entirely. Now, being of that oh-so-rare female gamer demographic, I really took exception to this phrase, but it wasn't until four days ago when I actually spoke up to my guildies about how I felt.

Soulshatter is another new skill that warlocks receive, this one at level 66. As a variation on the usual "Spells cost mana" theme, this spell costs you 8% of your base health. Base health is your health before any bonuses from items, so it's probably between 3 and 4 percent of your hit points. It also costs one Soul Shard. For the warlocks this spell is great because we didn't have a practical way to dump aggro before, and now we can easily reduce our produced threat to stay below the threat of our tank. The 5 minute cooldown means it's only usable once or maybe twice per fight, but that's usually enough to keep you far enough down the aggro list to not be a threat.

Sorry, no action shot for this one. Trying to capture an instant-cast spell with the screenshot tool would run me out of shards fast.