Sounds like you're getting it.
I'd recommend always having your pet on passive all the time. It's a good habit to get into and you have so much more control if you learn to command your pet yourself. (I use ctrl+1 to send in pet but I think shift+t might work too).
I
tend to stick a trap quite far away (hmm, sometimes too far away) and pull it off the tank with arcane shot once the tank has pulled (although this will not work with body pulls, which s/he probably won't be using anyway).
Ideally you want to have laid
the trap some time before the pull, so it's a good idea to lay it as soon as you are in position. Once the mob is trapped I sometimes run across to another part of the room, laying a trap either near the already trapped mob (if cooldown is up... and don't
lay it to close or it will mess up) or near my new position. Quite often you won't need to use the second one. If it resists then you could try sticking the pet on them, intimidation is good, if you have it. Sometimes you can be lucky with cooldowns and resists and sometimes... not.
Kiting can be useful if you are awaiting cooldown but there are a few limiting factors.
Hope that makes sense and hasn't been rendered obsolete by other posts that have been made while I've been typing this.So I took my alt hunter into her first instance
last night. It was a group of alts for Deadmines. I was level 22, and we had two warriors, a paladin, and a priest. It was a rough start until the level 15 warrior dinged 16 and promptly left the group. After that, we four-manned it and it went much smoother.
Anyways, I hadn't really had much opportunity to try out my frost traps and figured the instance was a good place to start. LOL, I'm just lucky the whole group was forgiving as they were all learning their new roles as well.
Here's how it went:
I laid a trap too close to the warrior. Thunderclap broke it. I laid a trap near the priest when one went after him. The priest broke it trying to defend himself. I laid a trap away from others, but the mob hit me and my kitty was on defense so kitty broke it. I
put kitty on passive and laid another trap, my auto-shot broke it.
So, what did I learn from this?
1. Lay trap away from where the tank is tanking.
2. Make sure others know you are trapping. (Marking helps as well.)
3. Put pet on passive.
4. Don't
use auto-shot on trapped mob.
Did I miss anything?
Oh, once a mob has been successfully trapped, what's the best thing to do if it breaks early or the fighting lasts longer than the trap? Retrap? Sick pet on it? Kite it? (I still need to practice kiting.)