Hunter Basics: The Jump Shot

If you’ve played a hunter for any significant amount of time, you’ve probably at least heard of the jump shot.

While running away from an enemy target, the hunter spins around 180 degrees, fires a shot, spins back around, and continues to run in the original direction.

When I first read about this move, it was regarding PVP strategies and involved wing-clipping and frost-trapping in addition to the jump shot. I thought it sounded complicated, difficult to execute, and only useful for hard-core PVP hunters.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

This move is surprisingly easy to get the hang of. It might even come naturally if you’re in a situation where you absolutely need to use it.

The easiest way to pull this move off is to use your right hand on the mouse and your left hand on the keyboard. Use both mouse buttons to move your character forward. Tap the space bar with your keyboard hand and use your mouse, with both mouse buttons pressed, to spin your character around 180 degrees. While your character is airborne, use your left hand to hit the hotkey for one of your instant-cast shots, and then use your mouse to spin your character back to your original direction by the time your character hits the ground. Head to one of the capital cities for your faction and give it a try on the training dummies.

If you’ve done much jousting for Argent Tournament dailies or Trial of the Champion (as any class), you’ve probably done the first half of the move before—jumping and then using the mouse to spin around 180 degrees to charge or shield-break.

I’m not a PVPer; I’m a PVE hunter through and through. Hence, it may not be obvious why this move is so important to master. However, I find myself using this move more and more as I progress through end-game content.

The first time I really found myself using (and needing) this move was on the new Vault of Archavon boss, Toravon the Ice Watcher. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the Toravon fight, he periodically summons frost orbs that need to be burned down quickly. Following normal aggro mechanics, they target the first player that hits them and move in that direction. The catch is that these orbs do pretty serious damage to any players in melee range, meaning ranged dps must be on the ball. As a hunter, I find the jump shot indispensible in kiting and killing the frost orbs and downing Toravon.

Shortly after the Toravon encounter was released, I joined a 10-man Icecrown Citadel group with my guild. It turns out that my guild was repeatedly short on ranged dps, and hunters happen to be incredibly useful in Icecrown, particularly on Deathbringer Saurfang, the fourth boss in the Lower Spire.

Like Toravon, Saurfang periodically summons adds—a pair of Blood Beasts—throughout the fight that ranged dps must quickly pick up. The Blood Beasts must not be allowed to hit a player or Saurfang gets a boost (they also hit pretty hard). As a hunter, I have a couple of slowing abilities that are necessary here, namely Concussive Shot and Frost Trap, but even with these abilities, I usually can’t quite get a Blood Beast down by the time it gets to me. Hence, I have to move away and finish it off with a couple of jump shots. With proper use of my hunter abilities and mastery of the jump shot, I can get one blood beast down while the other ranged dps (2-3 players) are still working on theirs.

There you have it. One simple move saves my butt, and my raid’s butt, time and time again.

It’s good to be a hunter.

- Lisselis

Tagged as: jump shot, kiting, pve, pvp