Does cower work on autocast now? I've been in 5-mans, raids, and solo since the patch and I've never seen it fire. Ironic that after all this time of being annoyed with it constantly getting reset to autocast, now when I want it to fire it won't.

Pets have become fairly straight forward and pet management has taken a backseat with new pet friendly boss mechanics, but on the DPS wow forums a mage has brought up an interesting topic regarding demon and elemental pets.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Pet latency costing 3.5% - 5% DPS

Now I'll be without wow for a week taking care of business and plan to test when I get back but the general summery of the topic asks if latency in wow is reducing pet DPS. Most hunters here raid with a wolf who uses no "fireball" spell, but I am curious if a pets special abilities (bite in particular) or his melee attack are being lowered by latency? Another theory is the pet is waiting to make sure the ability hit the boss, then checks if it is dead, then attacks. Something worth looking into?

So, yes it seems to affect Hunter pets too, if somewhat less. Of course if you are BM then this is big news, and we are back to macroing all our shots.
Also, this appears to be an issue regarding latency, since some people who tested in low pop periods basically got no advantage our of the 'spam pet ability' while those that tested during peak hours got incredibly increased results.

Again, less of an issue for most Hunters since pet damage isn't too high, and Culling the Herd has a fairly high uptime already. But even so, perhaps 100DPS more for the pet and a few percent more uptime for CtH and the results should begin to become quite visible.

While this is negative news, I'm actually a little glad. Since it now affects a lot of people (Warlocks and Mages), there might actually be a fix on the horizon. Especially considering the fact that those that are hurting the most from this aren't exactly overpowered in raids.

I think this is good news, extra DPS we didn't know we had. What I'm wondering about are the pets with a no cool-down racial. Also, was that testing just for bite, or all the wolf's special abilities, and on top of that how does gftt play into this. I picked a rotten time to be away from wow.

I was talking more about Rabid, it does have a 45 second cool-down so I can't see it doing anything, but I am not sure if all this is messing with abilities being used at the same time. Once again I can't test to find out. More importantly I was referring to pet race specific abilities. Fire breath, lighting breath, froststorm breath ect.

Pet abilities - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

Furious Howl is a race specific ability, if it isn't adversely affected then others won't either. Just add in thier abilities instead.

Rabid is of the GCD isn't it? Even if it isn't, the thing is that you would have to pretty much spam Steady Shot to lock it out. Whenever you would use other abilities there would be an opening for it. If that isn't enough, then that too can be added whatever macro you would want to use for forcing the focusdump earlier.

But furious howl isn't an attack (i assume), the theory, and these are theories as no one really knows why this is so at the moment, is the pet could be performing these 3 step process (or something similar).

Pet uses ability
1. pet checks if ability hit boss
2. pet checks if boss is dead
3. pet uses ability

If this all turns out to be latency then we just throw it in the macro and forget about it till its fixed (if it can be fixed). If it isn't latency related then we should consider looking at other racial abilities previously ignored because they weren't used to full potential (BM hunters could benefit from this), and more importantly put us one step closer to getting the problem fixed. This isn't a huge deal, but other then smash our faces against people asking armor-pen or agility what else is there to look into.

Edit: I was looking through a few, but are there any pet abilities with a cast timer? The usefulness of macroing the ability in to spam is supposedly increased if the ability is a cast. I was pretty sure they were all instant so i checked them out and was right, none of our pets have cast timers