This would be niceFollow

I've often thought about how nice it would be if you could have your pet "defend" another group member. For example...have a priest in your group? Click on priest, hit "defend" button and the pet will guard the priest and attack anything that hits him/her.

I don't think this would be OP'd and seems reasonable.

Opinions?

Yeah I use Ctrl-F1 as well. You are right that a "defend" setup isn't necessary. In fact it would probably be completely useless if you were specced BM. But I know my MM hunter would use it all the time since my pet doesn't contrinute tons of additional dps. He could definitely be spared to take up a defensive position.

I'm just wishing here.

I've rebound almost all the keys around wasd to do something. My pet attack is q. I don't think more automation is the answer, as it takes less skill. I think part of being a hunter is to learn how to use your pet.

Something like that would be nice for raids and instances, but we already get enough flack from the rest of the community about being over powered. Hunters are already pretty easy in raids, they can't make it even easier for us. Plus, if we had a defend focus option for our pet, that could EASILY be called overpowered in PvP- especially arenas.

It's not a horrible idea, but the situation you describe with the PUG is one which can be solved by people learning to play their class and work better together with their group mates. Your suggestion, if implemented, would further dumb down the skill required to play the game, which would only serve to perpetuate players advancing who have no skill. Which would lead to your finding more clueless PUGs. Which would require more features to overcome. See the vicious cycle?

I'd rather see the skill level required increase, rather than decrease.

Here are things you can do to accomplish the same goal as your suggested feature request:

/w the healer. Tell him that you'll be laying a Freezing Trap in front of him in case a mob heads his way. Tell him to stand and heal, rather than moving around, if that's how he is playing. You'll both protect him and improve his healing, since most healers need to stand and cast and time spent moving is time not spent healing.

Learn your F keys. Note the F key associated with your healer. Lets say it's F4 for this example. If a mob heads for the healer, Hit F4, f, <shift>1. Your Pet is not attacking the mob on the Healer, and it's taken you almost no time to accomplish.
As an alternative to the example above, you can make a macro to do all of this, using the /focus feature. Set your /focus to the Healer and one macro serves for all groups, as opposed to the macros I see people use which require that they remember to change a name in for every single group.

You Pet is a significant DPs contributor. Besides the reduction in skill that your 'guard' feature would encourage, you'd be robbing your groups of the DPS the Pet contributes to every fight.

My vote is for smart play to overcome issues, not more features.