You can't do that, Cyberbob. Macros are never conditional- the closest you can come to that is putting abilities you know will be on cooldown in the macro, and that trick will not help you here. You might be able to write a macro that had a castsequence, but you would still have to click/press it twice- once to start the BW/AotB, and once once it's done to reset it to AotDH.

Thrawn, rabid is a nice DPS boost on a 45 second cooldown. Having to wait until you use BW probably isn't worth it. Maybe timing it so that it's on for the first BW could be worth it because of the multiplicative nature of the BW bonuses, but I'd make sure that if it's off cooldown, it's being used whether you're under BW or not. As for the scorpid poison, I think that you might be able to get slightly more pet dps by only using focus every 9 seconds to refresh the whole stack. It becomes a question of micromanagement though... you'd have to have some sort of timer on screen that reminded you to manually cast it every 9 seconds, and this could easily interfere with the rest of your job and cost more dps.

Maybe one day Blizz will allow us to have fine grained control over our pets and force a delay on the casting of certain abilities while determining priority. Until then, I'd probably just leave it on autocast.

I was wondering what anyone thought about bringing a cunning pet to a raid. Are any of them good at dps at all (I don't expect them to come close to the cat/devilsaur/raptor/scorpid at the moment)? As a marks hunter, the ability that regenerates 30% of the hunters mana looks really, really sexy and seems like it would great to use in a raid setup.

I've seen people talking about it, but you'd sacrifice a bit of pet dps because of the talent setup. Some of the family skills look like they might bring utility to a raid though- there's spell interrupts from nether ray's nether shock and casting speed slowing from serpents, for example, but I don't know how many raid bosses are vulnerable to this type of thing. There's also some decently high DPS special attacks from wind serpents, dragonhawks, and the like.

In order for a real answer, you might want to calculate how much AotV time you'd avoid with roar of recovery (and how much of an average DPS increase that is), and compare it to a cunning pet.

I'll start off by saying that I don't have the time or energy to do a large sample of this but with a readiness spec on Patchwerk I would say that switching to AotB during BW's will provide a dps increase over AotD.

If anyone is willing to do ~40 sec dps bursts x ~50 or something with each aspect and come here with results it'd finally solve the suspicions. Problem with this is that you would need BoM/Battle shout, totem, int buff, consumables, debuffs, etc to make this accurate.

Next time we clear Naxx I will just start with AotB and switch to AotD after second BW is out and switch to AotB for every BW and see how that works out.

I just wanted to add in on this topic from what I've read on other boards as well as what I've heard from discussing various BM builds with other hunters on my server.

From what I have read and been told, the other problem with some pets currently is their special ability with regards to longevity. The cooldown on the pets special 10 second cast ability is lowered to 7 seconds. This presents a problem though for pets like the spirit beast who's special "dot timer" doesn't become lower with longevity. So, what happens is you lose out on half of the spirit beasts special damage because you never have the 10 second tick go off, the buff just constantly becomes refreshed.

I have read that this is a known bug and should be fixed, however none of the posts stating this were blue, so it could very well be just wishful thinking that it will get fixed. If anyone can confirm with a blue post, I wouldn't mind seeing the post.

Just as a final note, I believe this same problem exists with cat pet's as well, and their dot special although not to the effect it hinders the spirit beast (cat loses 1/3 of its special damage I believe).

EDIT: I just took my cat out and had him use only his special (on auto cast) while attacking a targeting dummy myself and he did overwrite his rake cooldown. However, it would seem the overall damage lost from the special is only about 1/4 due to the dot ticking 3 times during a full duration of it, plus the initial hit. With longevity and the skill on auto cast, you will end up losing out on the final tick of the dot (or ~1/4 of the attacks damage).

That's a start, but unless several other people do this there just seem to be too many factors involved to come away with anything definitive. You have variation in auto and special shot ranges, as well as pet melee and specials, plus there's the matter of when your auto timer starts and finishes within those 18 seconds and when your pet's swing timer starts and ends. Then you have procs and perhaps other things. How do we eliminate the variance so that our only control is the aspect?

I tend to wonder if it is not more practical to use a model with a controlled environment (such as the spreadsheet) where we can just change the aspect. Live testing supplements this and provides insights into where our model may have missed some factor or attributed it an incorrect value.

My pet does not cast another rake untill the current one has dropped off. This is with 3/3 longevity.

Has anyone else had massive problems with the devilsaur hitbox in regards to sartharion?, I have not once been able to get my devilsaur to dodge the lava wall with me.

I was having that problem a few days ago. The only way I could get my Devilsaur to live through that fight was to call him back during lava walls and position him as best as I could. He got hit by almost all of them so I preemptively cast Mend Pet, and with his talents and a few Prayer of Mending bounces, he lived through most of them. The only time he didn't was when he got hit by a tail swipe right before the lava wall.

-Your hit is transferred completely to your pet, even if it comes from the talent Focused Aim in the marks tree.


For some reason when I have 3+6.13% my pet shows 2.8% miss rate which is almost exactly what it should be with 6.13% hit. However, when I'm wearing zero hit my pet misses 6% of it's attacks so focused aimed does and does not work. Is there some kind of mechanic that if players hit rating value is above 3% hit (with 3/3 focused aim) the pet will not gain it's hit percentage from the talent + hit rating but instead it only picks hit from hit rating?

Both times I let the pet attack for ~3000 times.

Call of the wild stacks with trueshot aura. In fact multiple call of the wilds stack.