Or are you just happy to see me? Looks like our pets are not auto-casting as fast as they should be. If you leave an ability on auto-cast, pets apparently take a variable amount of time more than they should to cast it. There are reports of this going down to almost nothing in deserted areas, but clearly a raid zone is not deserted. Edit: Tchann from Crowd Control has tested and confirmed this data. Thanks Tchann!
Here’s the good news- this is not new, but has only recently been discovered. If you fix it yourself, you can potentially increase your DPS.
The fix
Chances are you already have kill command macroed into all your shots, and possibly silencing shot if you’re marks. Take a look at the pet abilities you leave on auto-cast, and simply add them to your shot macros.
/cast Furious Howl
/use [@pettarget,harm,exists] Bite
edit: changed the bite command to work if you have to leave your pet on another target.
The above is what I will be adding. Pay close attention, however, to the abilities you do not put on auto-cast. There are many people who choose to leave furious howl off autocast so they can time it with their trinkets.
A final note- I’ll have to test this to be sure, but I suspect that we’ll get a higher ability use per minute if we continue to leave these on auto-cast, and just use the macro to shorten the wait whenever we can.
This is a very interesting topic. I’ve thought that it’s just a visual problem that pet’s Bite doesn’t go off all the time, but maybe it really is lagging. Please post your results when you have done some tests.
I’m only testing whether to leave autocast on anyways- this is a verified and tested fact. Using a macro to force pet casts adds a significant amount of DPS on a dummy.
Leaving the abilities on autocast makes sense to me. It’ll increase the possible activations per second and will keep the pet biting (if slowly) even when you aren’t using your macros.
Er, maybe “attempted activations” would be a better way to put it.
I did some testing and didnt see any difference in pet dps with leaving it just on auto or using a macro or macro + auto. My pets dps stayed the same no matter how I tried it.
With that being said I don’t see what it will hurt using the macro+auto just in case your pet doesn’t auto cast for some reason.
thx for the tip, how much dps might this account for?
probably about 100 raid buffed. That’s just a guess though.
I read the post about mage/warlock pets and was wondering if hunter pets were the same… I’m too lazy to do testing though, so I’m glad someone is :)
I’ve noticed an unwanted side effect with this.
When you add furious howl, bite, rabid etc. to your shots it sends your pet back in to attack. Putting your pet on passive doesn’t solve the problem. It’s as though /petattack is baked into these abilities. Kill command, however, is unaffected. I’m guessing because it technically a hunter ability.
Looks like furious howl is causing this problem btw. Any suggestions?
It seems that both Bite and Furious Howl cause the pet to attack even when on Passive.
If this is unavoidable, I’m not sure macroing pet abilities to shots is a great idea as it gives up pet control.
I’d happily trade a bit of pet control on the few fights where my pet is not on my target for up to 100 dps.
Also, maybe if we add /petfollow it will prevent the pet from leaving our side?
Is there a way to check if your current target and your pets target are the same? If so, you could macro your shots to only “manaully” cast pet skills if the targets are the same. If your targets are different, you’ll lose a bit of a DPS, but much less than if your pet were running back and forth between targets.
You can keep the pet from attacking when macro’ing in Furious Howl by adding it this way:
/cast [@player] Furious Howl
Slightly off topic: I’ve followed the first advice and added Kill Command to all of my shots. However, now I constantly have a stream of the red “spell not ready” prompt at the top of my screen (since I use abilities when Kill Command is on cooldown). Any way to prevent the prompt from constantly popping up?
You can do this:
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
A little lengthy, but it will prevent anything between those two scripts from spamming you with “unusable” errors.
I’ve never really noticed any kind of a difference with focus dump skills like claw, bite, etc., only with skills like charge.
I went to Blood Princes encounter with these new additions to my shot macro’s.
I was on orb duty, so ofcourse I sent my pet on one (I always keep it on passive)… only to find out that the bomb hit the ground after a short while because my dumbass pet ran off to a new target I was shooting at because of these lines in the macro’s :P
But, no, it didn’t cause the raid to wipe ^^
There’s no reason to macro in Furious Howl as it provides no noticeable gain in uptime. There’s further detail in my post on EJ as to why this problem occurs and some test results.
http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t44519-fd_bug_other_issues/p16/#post1545623
Thanks Arrowed! I put it in there when the data was first coming out and nobody had discovered what you have. I’mm leave it up because unless people are timing this to their trinket procs, there’s no reason not to.
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