Improv Pet Tanking in 3.3

Hunter pet tanking doesn't need to be a huge undertaking anymore. If you have a tank gear set, a BM tank spec and a turtle pet spec'd to tank, that is great. It is pretty awesome.

But now you -- yes, you -- can with very little preparation go ahead and tank some minor bosses or adds.

Improv Tanking
Put your pet on growl. Turn off cower. Toss on your PvP set. Get your resilience to 460. If your resilience is high enough then you don't need a tenacity pet to make him or her un-crittable. The advantage of using a DPS pet is that they will have a little easier time with threat generation. Note: the tenacity pet talent Guard Dog really just helps for the tenacity pet's lack of dps-threat.

Mob Level	Chance to be Crit	Hunter Resilience Needed to Avoid Crits on a DPS Pet	Hunter Resilience Needed to Avoid Crits on a Tank* Pet
80	1%	410	82
81	1.2%	427	99
82	1.4%	443	115
83(Boss)	1.6%	460	132

Tank* refers to a tenacity pet with 2/2 pet talents in GotM.

After you've improv pet-tanked a few things, you'll probably want to grab a better pet, spec the pet as a tank for the big pet talent advantages, and maybe even put together a tank gear set. You can also want to go off the deep end and try a BM hunter talent spec and glyphs for a lot more pet survivability including the extra four pet talent points.