Blizzard made me wipe the raid!

Honest! They did!
I'm a Hunter and unlike some other Hunters out there i aint afraid to use my pet... he's a part of me and can contribute quite a bit, not just in dps ways.
But there is a reason some Hunters dread the use of pets, the micro management might be too much for them in the heat of battle.. these Hunters often have their pets parked at their left foot or not our at all. Kind of a waste of good resources imo.

I can imagen their fear too be honest.. back in the day where i was a happy leveling Hunter doing Maraudon for the very first time i managed to wipe my group because of bad use of the pet. I jumped of a ledge following the rest of the party and i saw my pet run off for some reason, only to see it back 2 mins later with a huge train of mobs behind it. I've seen this happen more often in instances altho it never happened to me again since then and i always warn that other hunter/lock to dismiss their pet before jumping.
But there is more then one way to use your pet for wiping a raid/party. Another very succesfull one is tab-targeting, quite simpel; use Tab to target the next target and send your pet in... only to find out that target is not part of the group you are trying to kill. Ow yes this has happened to me aswell... luckily you get more aware and kind of double-check where your pet is going so you can call it back on time. As long as you have your pet nicely on passive it won't go for the earlier mis-assigned mob after he killed his current target either... another lesson learned. (used to have this great addon which would make my pet assist any partymember when it got attacked when set to "defensive", real helpfull to help a healer who was getting assraped. At least it was in the lower instances where a pet could actually substitute for a tank)

Yesterday something new happened to me in the pet department tho, something i managed to avoid before.
Basicly it is a new problem which Blizzard just recently managed to implent, the idea seems great: get pets attack all mobs from behind (unless they have aggro). Why is this important? Several reasons actually... many mobs have attacks which only cause a problem in front of them, either being a frontal cleave (or cleavage as my GF calls it after a slip up from the raidleader "Keep your cleavage away from the raid Kalli") or a frontal AE. But attacking from the front can cause attacks to be parried, not just lowering your pets damage but also causing more damage on your tank as the next mobs attack will come sooner.
Blizz has been trying out to get problems with pets positioning for awhile now and currently a pet dashes up to a target and then slowly moves to his back if he happens to arrive at his front.. or worse, it goes running around when he can't reach his back from there... this was a real pain at Al'ar where the pets just couldn't get behind the boss as he is tanked high up a platform causing pets to run up and down the platform in a fruitless effort to get to his back. I think my pet didn't manage to do half the damage it does normally that fight.
The second phase aint much better as at the back of the mob is often a ring of fire which just happily turns my cat into a Chinise dish.

And what happened yesterday? I sicked my pet on a trashmob in SSC as we just started on the first pack, i soon found out the mob i made him attack had his back to an unreachable area as 6 more mobs came running our way with just in front of that my cat Barcode. >.>
I've seen other hunters run off and even pull mobs before in SSC since the pathing change but this was the first time i didn't notice on time myself to take action... but still i blame Blizzard. I did kind of managed to save the raid at Hydross by misdirecting the boss on the naturetank who was caught in a bubble so i guess i sorta redeemed myself, i hope.
Ironicaly just later that night i found a post in which Blizzard was asking feedback from people on their class so i think i will be spending some time on a huge post on pathing issues. You might find me at the European Hunter section later.