Orthodox medicine has not found an answer to your complaint. However, luckily for you, I happen to be a quack.

Having mentioned this idea earlier, I thought I'd explore more fully the idea of a non-healing character acting in a healing capacity.

To begin, take First Aid and max out your abilities in that profession at the earliest opportunities. When healing others with bandages you should always use the highest rank bandage it's possible for a character of your level to produce. There are two reasons for this. First is the "Recently Bandaged" debuff. If the bandaging should be interrupted, you want to have accomplished as much healing as possible in the time you were able to bandage. Second, healing others quicker means you're able to heal your next target sooner.

As a rule, never, ever apply a bandage to a target that has aggro. As soon as that target takes his next hit, the bandaging will be interrupted and he'll have received the "Recently Bandaged" debuff for naught. Instead, work with your group to establish aggro sharing so you can work a bandage rotation on your tanks, or look for items with a "Heals your Target" effect. Draenei can also use their Gift of the Naaru as a heal spell in this case.

Also, do not neglect Anti-Venoms as a component of first aid. The most effective healers decurse as well as heal. If you want to do your best as a healer, Anti-Venoms are essential.

The type of items you'll be looking to carry are those that give you healing abilities or otherwise impact group stats in a positive way. I found these to be of interest. There are almost certainly other items I've missed. Among these are the sort of items you'll be using to heal a target that has aggro.

Head

• [43] Admiral's Hat

Neck

• [26] Pendant of the Agate Shield
• [34] Citrine Pendant of Golden Healing
• [39] Aquamarine Pendant of the Warrior
• [70] Embrace of the Dawn
• [70] Living Ruby Pendant
• [70] Thick Felsteel Necklace

Hands

• [41] Gauntlets of the Sea

Waist

• [32] Gem-studded Leather Belt

Trinket

• [40] Ankh of Life
  
• [10] Minor Recombobulator (140 eng.)
• [20] Goblin Jumper Cables (165 eng.)
• [35] Major Recombobulator (275 eng.)
• [35] Goblin Jumper Cables XL (265 eng.)
  

Two-hand

• [15] Staff of the Purifier (3 charges)
• [57] Headmaster's Charge

Shield

• [19] Black Husk Shield

Off-hand

• [22] Everglow Lantern

Some character choices complement the un-healer concept better than others. Only Engineers, for example, can use Jumper Cables and Recombobulators. Mages can naturally decurse, as well as provide food during fights. Warlocks can provide healthstones. But both mages and warlocks are limited to cloth armor, meaning there are a couple items on the above list that are inaccessible to them. A hunter who feigns death may be able to recover a party using his jumper cables on the rezzer. And as mentioned before, any Draenei receives the delicious Gift of the Naaru.

There are some good tools available to help manage your healing. I prefer Clique and Grid. With Grid, I can see who has aggro to avoid bandaging them, who has a debuff on them that I can cleanse, and who has an incoming heal (meaning they don't need to get bandaged). The Grid squares that provide all this data support click-casting, and Clique is the tool I use to do that. I configure Clique to use the healing items and bandages I have on me when I click a player's Grid square, and from there healing is as simple as paying attention and clicking the squares to use the right item on the right person. A comprehensive discussion of Clique and Grid is certainly beyond the scope of this missive, but suffice to say they're extremely powerful tools when wielded competently.

Remember also to maintain your cooking! Having stacks of buff foods to hand out to the party helps to lessen damage taken and improve damage done.

Can all this make you into an effective main healer? No. Not a chance. As an off-healer, though, I think it's feasible. Back to the idea of the melee hunter -- which seems more useful to a group: an off-healer with party buffs, or a really poor melee fighter? It's something to think about.

Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear.

Keeping in mind that I infrequently use Wing Clip, and that sometimes an Immolation Trap misses and wastes time in combat, I tried to evaluate Counterattack's usefulness by running some tests on Young Stranglethorn Tigers, one at a time in batches of ten, using various combinations of only Raptor Strike, Counterattack, and Mongoose Bite. For the tests I kept my pet dismissed and used no other attacks at any time or buffs other than Aspect of the Monkey in an effort to normalize the results as much as possible.

While Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite were doing the lion's share of damage, Counterattack generally represented 5% of the overall damage when it was brought into the mix. As I said for Immolation Trap, five percent is not insignificant. My average dps across tests was 47.2.

And yet it's clear that Counterattack is not really designed for melee. It does fair damage, but the attack immobilizes the target for 5 seconds and cannot be blocked, dodged, or parried. Like Wing Clip, the real purpose of Counterattack is plainly to allow the hunter to escape to a point where he can resume ranged attacks.

The trick, then, to maximizing melee damage is to make every attack hit as hard as possible. This means more than just using a hard hitting two-handed weapon. It means maximizing your crit chance and adding in more damage whenever and however possible. Using a good weapon is a start, but I found that using a weapon that has a chance on hit proc is even better.

After looking at my average dps, I applied a bottle of Shadow Oil to my polearm. Shadow Oil gives your melee weapon a 15% chance on hit of casting Shadow Bolt (Rank 3) at your opponent when it hits, causing 48 to 56 shadow damage. My dps jumped from 47.2 up to 53.0, a full 12% increase. I also observed that the chance on hit effect did apply to my "special" attacks, proccing after Raptor Strikes and Counterattack as well as regular melee attacks. I also saw that the Shadow Bolts would occasionally crit. This is great news. Those pitiful Wing Clips, for example, now have a 15% chance of hitting for 61 damage instead of 5.

Granted, Shadow Oil isn't a panacea, because it doesn't scale. But looking at this effect in a generalized context, it points out that a weapon that naturally carries a chance on hit, like the Diabolic Skiver or the Grim Reaper, has the potential to greatly improve your melee results. I've not yet had the chance to test out a DoT effect from a weapon versus a simple bonus attack such as the Shadow Oil provided, but I've procured a Poison-tipped Bone Spear that I intend to begin using.

With my next major melee attack, Kill Command, not coming until level 66, I'll continue to look for ways to improve the immediate efficacy of my physical attacks.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!

Last night I saw a group forming for Gnomeregan. Ordinarily my hatred for that instance is so severe that I wouldn't consider grouping for it, but for the melee hunter Gnomeregan is an interesting opportunity. So few people actually care to go that when I saw a group forming I took a chance and whispered the group leader, explaining that I was an experimental character who would not use ranged weapons. This was met with curiosity, and lo, I was actually accepted into the group! I spent a few moments gathering quests and set out.

As it turned out, the group was being run through the instance by a 62 warrior who was generous to a fault. (Thank you, Naubudis!) For the sake of the project I was hoping to evaluate my performance against a peer group, but I wasn't going to decline the run. And as it turned out, it was still a learning experience for me.

Pets in an instance can be perilous. Even with my pet set to defensive and on follow, he would sometimes take off in a direction I didn't want when I gained aggro from a group down the hall -- very dangerous. Ultimately I decided that if the pet was to be out at all, he needed to be on passive and follow, with me controlling exactly what targets (if any) he was to attack.

Even though none of us "lowbies" were a big source of dps relative to our tank, I was still able to contribute significantly by acting as the navigator -- I was the only person in the group with a solid knowledge of the dungeon's layout. This, to me, represents the essence of good play. Don't focus on expectations. Discover what you can do, and maximize those contributions.

Had this been a pure peer group, I was still prepared to make contributions. As my main is a healing class, I have a number of healing add-ons that let me monitor health, incoming heals, who has aggro, etc. With my bandages and some good decision making about when and on whom to apply them, I can make an effective off-healer while my pet does dps on my behalf. (I off-heal with bandages in moonkin form on my main, so I assure you this works, even though I've not been called on to do it with my hunter yet.) Using items like the Gem-studded Leather Belt, Gauntlets of the Sea, Recombobulators and other items and trinkets, a creative person can actually make a pretty effective off-healer, so I may try to make off-healing and crowd control via traps and Wing Clips my dwarf's focus in any future instances, while my pet does the dps. I was also able to keep the group buffed with +10 stamina with my Pendant of the Agate Shield.

My pet wolf, I have decided, is a poor choice for running instances. I chose him as my primary companion because he complements my melee play. But in an instance, I need a higher dps pet to compensate for the fact that I will (hopefully) never have aggro, so for the whole of a run I won't be able to execute a Mongoose Bite or a Counterattack. I considered a ravager, but there's a big gap from level 24 to 48 where the Gore skill can't be upgraded. Its ranks skip from Gore 4 off Bellygrub to Gore 7 from Ashmane Boars in the Blasted Lands. This encouraged me to consider cats, and I'm glad I did.

Reports indicate that the mob King Bangalash, a 43 elite cat in Stranglethorn Vale, is unique in having a passive skill called Cobra Reflexes that lowers his attack power slightly but increases his attack speed by 30%, making him the best possible choice for a dps pet. I'm not at a point where I can tame the King just yet, but now that I'm aware of him, I'll be working on capturing a cat soon, with the goal of replacing him with King B later on.

When I do go to tame King B, I'll be using a trick I found. If you lay down a Freezing Trap before initiating a Tame Beast, the mob will run across it and be frozen in the trap while the taming continues, making it a lot more likely you'll succeed in the taming.

Freezing Trap's AoE counterpart Frost Trap confounds me. I just can't find a very good use for it outside of PvP. Defending the flag room with it, especially with talent points put into Entrapment, seems like a big win. But in PvE... what good is it? I could possibly drop one if I get aggro from multiple mobs, run away from them and the trap until the trap procs, then run them all back across it and hit Aspect of the Cheetah to get away, but I already escape group aggro by using my wolf to distract them. I'm not ready to delete it from my hotbar just yet, but I'm sure not in love with it, either.

After tearing apart Gnomeregan and taking some serious gear upgrades from the Triprunner Dungarees and the Gnomebot Operating Boots (which, embarrassingly, replaced my level 13 Blackened Defias Boots) I had dinged not just 30, but 31. With Counterattack finally added to my repertoire, I'm ready to re-examine my damage distribution. Look for a post concerning that soon.