On Spiders, pet special ability issues and macros

It's exciting times to be playing a hunter there's no doubt about that. As I alluded to a in a recent post I've been running around training some new pets. My choices are a combination of research, analysis and 'zomg cute factor' just so you know *grin*.

I've got Snaggle as my Ferocity pet so I wanted to try out a Cunning and a Tenacity pet. After some reading at the most brilliant pet resource of all Petopia I opted to train a spider as my Cunning pet. My reason was because spiders have the special ability Web and I could foresee this being very useful in PVP against melee classes.

I decided to train one of the spiders that lurk in Terrokar forest since a) the location was convenient and b) I like the skin. After putting the lurve onto my spider and feeding him some Clefthoof Ribs to make him happy I specced him out and played around a bit with killing other spiders to get comfortable with using him. I found myself to be pleased.

Next I hopped over to Ironforge to pick up some glyphs from the Auction House and realised that a couple of fellow guildies were duelling out the front, a warrior and a rogue. Eager to try out spideys Web ability I joined them. I duelled the warrior first and won and then fought him again and lost. Mr Rogue had been observing and was very interested in seeing Web in action so then we duelled. I lost the first one and won the second. Now Mr Rogue is one of the top PVPers in our guild, very skilled so the fact that I managed to beat him was awesome! He however was not very pleased with spidey at all! I was not very pleased to discover the rogue ability Dismantle. We experimented a bit and discovered that when under the effects of The Beast Within it's still possible to be affected by Dismantle. Not happy. Still all in all I was feeling the joy of having a new tool in my PVP arsenal and in honour of the discombobulation Mr Rogue was experiencing trying to find a counter for Web I adopted his name suggestion for spider: Smithers. Hehe.

The main thing though of course is working out how to manually trigger Web. In a PVP situation against more than one player it's going to be pretty useless if the ability is on autocast and spidey uses it on a ranged caster while a warrior is all up in my grill. During these initial duels I had an autocast macro set up to toggle the ability:

/petautocasttoggle Web

But this didn't give me the fine control I was looking for. Someone suggested I modify a warlock pet macro for my own use and this is what I ended up doing. The bonus being that I can use one macro to trigger a special ability for each pet depending which one I'm currently using thus:

/cast [pet:spider] web; [pet:cat] rabid; [pet:bear] swipe

I haven't decided whether it's worth having the cat and bear abilities on manual cast yet. I can see a future where I get yelled at for having Swipe on autocast for bear in a crowd control situation. Rabid I will probably end up working into a macro associated to a shot rotation. Anyway the macro works and that's good. Well it kind of works. I've been grinding elementals up in Nagrand for pet levelling purposes (as well as hopefully some profit) and using the time to experiment with 'on demand' casting of Web. I soon discovered that I would frequently get a 'ability not ready' error when trying to cast it. Huh?

I'm no guru as I've often stated before so it was time to search the interwebs to see what more intelligent people than me are saying. What was puzzling me is that Web is a no cost instant cast so it's not like I needed to make sure Smithers has enough focus before I try and cast it. What then is causing the issue? To Elitist Jerks! I waded through the massively long Hunter WoTLK thread and on page 185 came across this comment:

Hey guys, I've noticed with my crab that while claw is on autocast, it triggers the 1.5s GCD and thus it makes it very hard for me to using pin or roar of sacrifice.

I have noticed however that intervene doesn't have this problem since the pet can intervene while in the GCD of a claw. However, I wish blizzard would do the same with pin and roar of sacrifice as these are all on demand skills.

The way it is currently, I have to turn off claw, cast pin, then turn claw back on. Even though I have a macro to do this, it requires 2 button presses and is kinda inconvenient.

Does anyone have any opinions on this? =P

I know that blizzard removed focus costs from almost all the pet special abilities since people were complaining that due to the focus dump skill, no pet could ever have the energy to perform their special abilities without the hunter first disabling the auto cast. However with the special attacks on the GCD, it is still pretty annoying =P.

What do you guys think?

Aha! So it seems that pet special abilities are using the 1.5 second Global Cool Down. That's not very cool since even with the changes to Autoshoot you're generally spending a lot of time managing the GCD to keep up a steady rotation working in your shots as you need them. Initially I tried inserting /stopcasting in front of my macro but this didn't yeild consistent results. Further research revealed that pet special abilities share the GCD with Bite. So I turned off Bite and ran around killing Basilisks. Result - Web cast everytime I wanted it to. I removed the /stopcasting command from the macro and experimented with firing the macro mid cast of steady shot and no problem. This would seem to indicate that the special ability is tied only to Bite and not the GCD for hunter abilities. No idea if this is actually true though.

Conclusion: At this time the only way to manually cast a pet special ability on demand is to have Bite turned off. Whether this is at the detriment of your DPS is not a question I have the theorycraft skills to answer, but for me, in a PVP situation the ability to control when I cast Web is more important to me than the damage from Bite.

Of course now I need to work out whether I should manually cast Wolverine Bite or just leave it on autocast. Questions, questions, questions! Like I said, these are exciting times! I'm sure I'll have more to report once Smithers is level 70 and I've mixed it up in a BG.

What has your experience been? Got any wisdom to share?

Pet, growl & PVP

So I've had this question rattling around in my brain lately: should I turn off Growl on my kitty in PVP? I'm reasoning yes since Growl uses 15 focus which could be more usefully allocated to Claw and therefore have been running BGs and Arenas with it turned off. The only time I am using Growl is when soloing. I thought I would do a little research to find out if I'm not being a complete noobtard and actually found something intelligent on the official Blizz forums (I know, I know, crazy right). A poster in the thread in question also provides a handy tip which I had never thought of:

Growl works against other pets in PVP.

You can manually trigger Growl to force another pet to attack yours. Then you can send the pet to attack another enemy player. That will drag the enemy pet away from you until the enemy hunter or warlock tells it to attack you again.

It can save you from a lot of damage if the enemy hunter/warlock isn't paying attention.

I've been meaning to set up a growl macro for, well, ages and here is an excellent incentive to do so, not disregarding squishie saving requirements in PVE. So, what should the macro look like? Time for more research! The macro I like the look of best is one in the comments of a BRK post which looks like this:

/petautocastoff [nomodifier] Growl
/petautocaston [modifier:Shift] Growl

Time to set one up methinks.

Maybe also time to set up a macro to turn on Aspect of the Monkey and cast Wingclip for those unfortunately unavoidable melee moments too.

Anyone able to recommend any good PVP specific macros?

To macro or not to macro: redux

BRK has recently made a post on his testing of two different shot rotation macros based on his gear. In what is quite a change considering his vehemence not all that long ago BRK is looking more and more like he will move to using a shot rotation macro. Some of his readers are professing their disappointment in this change in BRK's attitude, for myself I think that you do what you want to do and it's not up to anyone else to judge. If using a shot rotation will result in more Kill Commands getting used and higher DPS for BRK then he should go for it. Fo'shizzle.

This post raised the spectre of shot rotations macros again for me. Some time ago I posted about how I don't use a rotation macro at all and prefer to manually fire my Kill Commands and get into the zen rhythm of shot rotation. Well that hasn't changed, but if there's a chance that using a macro could improve my DPS then I should try it since moar DPS is going to contribute to my raids ability to succeed.

I'm using the BoJ Crossbow of Relentless Strikes which has a 2.80 speed. This is only slightly different than Tuskbreaker at 2.90 and I have read that a 3:2 macro is best for slower weapons and specifically the bow I'm using. However according to some of the commenters on BRK's post 3:2 is the only way to roll since the changes to autoshot.

Reading a thread in the BRK forums has been elucidating... great googly moogly as Ratters would say.. there's a lot of mathimafications going on. Too much for this boingy eared elf. I always feel like I'm wading through molasses trying to understand all the hardcore theory craft stuff. A fellow called Manito has put together a couple of macros that you put on separate buttons with one macro triggering the other so designed to help get around the KC 'lock up' issue which is sometimes experienced by players and is a 'known issue'.

Apparently this macro also 'flexes' to a 1:1 rotation depending on various factors (such as lag, item procs etc) during use. I believe this relates to no longer using the /castsequence command.

I've also gathered from my reading that an attack speed of between 2.00 and 2.10 is considered optimal for the 3:2 rotation. There was a lot of talk about haste but since my weapon is slightly faster than the optimal I don't think this is an issue. I don't have any haste items at the moment, just the passive haste from things like my quiver and my attack speed is 2.03 so within the 'comfort zone'

There are two issues which concern me as regards using this new 'the' macro: latency and mana consumption. Actually make that three, I should include FPS as well.

Since the last time I tried using a rotation macro several things have changed:

1. The whole evolution from /castsequence


2. I am now using a utility that allows me to connect to WoW through a specific proxy via my ISP (all checked out and kosher with Blizz) which has seen me drop from an average of 6ooms too a more comfortable if less than perfect 260ish


3. Also one of the changes in 2.4 got rid of the need apparently to use /stopcasting in macros since your client will now let you fire off a new action without waiting for the 'action executed' notification for the previous action from the server. I think that's how it works now anyway...


4. The changes to mana regen post patch 2.4 and my subsequent speccing out of ImpAotH and into 5/5 efficiency


5. While my ping is improved ever since 2.4 my FPS has gone to sh1te. I even upgraded my rather old graphics card to try and improve matters - and while I'm fine most places - even seeing great numbers like 70+ fps in 'questing' mode my FPS during boss encounters in 25 mans is craptacular - sometimes as bad as 3-4 fps. I've turned down spell detail to the minimum and etc and am not really sure what else to do. This is probably a topic for another post anyway.

As can be seen there are some good things and some not so good things. I think ultimately I'm going to need to head over to Dr. Boom and try out the macro for myself. I happen to have Tuskbreaker sitting in my bank all scoped out and ready to rock so I might as well grab some ammo and do testing with both the gun and my currently equipped crossbow.

It will be interesting to see if I notice any difference from manually timing my shots. The other thing of course is that a raid is drastically different from being able to stand still and pewpew in a controlled situation so even if the results are an improvement when using the macro against Dr. Boom I'll still be reserving judgement until I see how I fare in a 25 man.

I also think it's important to take into account that your overall damage and DPS isn't just about your shot rotation. I review the wowwebstats from each of our weekly raids, and whilst I don't do any serious number crunching (not math literate remember) I do look at my performance compared to the other hunters in the raid. One thing I have noticed is that as long as my presence and DPS time is on par with the others we tend to have comparable damage, which tells me that I'm doing ok without a macro. Still it's worth checking out. I'll be sure to post my findings.

Once I get Seph to 70 though - currently 69 wooot!

Hotkeys or Clickity?

If you've been following along up until now you may have noticed references in my posts to key bindings and what not. Basically I am a hot key fiend. I like to have as much as possible bound to my keyboard. It is for this reason that I have the lovely G15 gaming keyboard.

It's interesting to me that Emelin who has been playing FPS style games since forever has a completely different playstyle from me. He ascribes to the 'clicker' school.

Clickers
Move around using the the WASD keys - plus strafing using Q & E. Points and clicks to activate spells etc.

Butan-stabbers
Move around using the mouse and bind keys to use different abilities and macros.

Since I'm firmly in the butan stabbing camp I'll give you my reasoning for why I prefer this style

1. Quick reaction times.
   I don't have to move my cursor to the point I want to click except for some out of combat things that I haven't bothered to hot key - like activating profession windows and the like. I can pretty much touchtype so I don't need to look at my keyboard while playing and keep 'like' items grouped so that I don't need to move my hand around too much while in combat.



2. Cleaner UI
   Because I can bind so many things to hot keys (especially with the G15 swoon) I don't need to have all those buttons appear on my screen. I use the bongos2 mod and set up some actions bars with abilities and etc which I bind keys to and then set the bar to invisible. This is great when you are using several macros as well.



3. Better movement
   When using the mouse to move you also have the ability to use the camera independent of the direction you are facing/moving. For instance I do this in BGs a lot when I'm on defence and scanning my surroundings for possible 'incs'. I also have the button 'v' bound to reverse camera so I can quickly see if X mob/horde toon is still chasing me.

Since I happen to have 3 toons that have reached a reasonable level this works well with the 3 different 'slots' for the 18 extra keys you have per slot with the G15. My slot for Jezrael is completely full with each key bound to an ability or macro. I have more macros key binds I want to set up too! Recently I've decided I want a hotkeyyed macro to turn growl on or off as I have been finding I am doing this quite a bit lately via clicking.

/play Intermission Music

I started this post about a week ago and since then I've been playing my mage a fair bit which has got me thinking.

I'm wondering whether the efficacy of clicking vs hotkeying is also impacted by the class you play. What I have noticed with my mage is that I will move around a lot more - in particular running in and out of melee range to drop arcane explosions and frost novas before returning to range. I've found it more effective to use the WASD keys to move around in this fashion - which therefore means I am using my other hand to trigger the keybound effects. This means I don't have that hand free for utilising the camera via my mouse.

On my druid I have found hotkeying to be fine - and especially good when I am tanking and need to use the camera to keep an eye on other mobs around my big bear butt (yes that is a purposeful reference to BBB one of my favourite feral druid bloggers).

I wonder what thoughts other people have? What's your experience? Do you think I'm smoking crack or just playing it? Teehee. Get it? Warcrack?
...
bah
...

To macro or not to macro: that is the question.

The question of using a shot rotation macro is one that all hunters face and I've read up on all sides of the argument. I first learned about the macro from reading BRK and the discussion that was carried out there. Sometimes the pro-macro squad would put me off with their "L2Macro nub lolz" comments but after some discussions with intelligent hunters on my guild forums and reading some more measured commentary within the hunter community (both at BRK and Elitist Jerks) I decided to give it a go. I mean it couldn't hurt, right?

About this time we first started raiding Gruul's and since it had been touted as useful when learning a new fight (apart from allegedly making your DPS godly) I figured now was the time to try it.

This also meant trying to get a clearer understanding of the impacts of weapon speed, the global cool down, latency, clipped shots and etc. I kind of grasped the principles. As much as my inability to decipher all the formulas allowed me to - no math fu here.

I dutifully got hold of 'the' macro:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide() /castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, !Auto Shot /castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command /script UIErrorsFrame:Clkear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

added it in game and then set up a hotkey for it. Note: since the latest patch means that ! needs to be added to cast sequence macros where you want a cast to keep firing (casting, whatever I'm a hunter!) without needing to press a button the above macro is corrected to show this.

I also downloaded the recommended mod Quartz and voila I was all set to become the most awesome DPSer EVAR.

So I've used the macro for I suppose 2 or 3 months roughly. I actually used a variation of the macro which had stop-casting built in to assist with high latency. However since the changes to how client and server communicate re client actions as of the last patch it's not really relevant anymore.

So did the macro help with learning the Gruul's fight? Yes it did. Less time concentrating on getting shots off meant more time learning how to avoid cave-ins and shatters and etc. All said and done though I've reached the conclusion that ithe macro really doesn't do that much for me.

/semi tangent alert
I didn't see a massive increase in my DPS at any rate. In fact my DPS or lack thereof is often to do more with deciding not to blow all my cooldowns all the time. I figure if we're not dying because we are taking too long to kill mob X then there is no need to. When I put in a concerted effort I can top the damage meters in an instance. But I'm not there to outdamage people I'm there to do my job as part of the team.
/end semi tangent alert

When I was first reading up shot rotations and the macros and so on I didn't really know or understand much about it. I felt like I had a pretty good rotation going but was confused by what was meant by clipped shots and weapon speed and etc so assumed I must be doing some thing wrong.

Now after using the macro and getting more edumacated I'm more confident that I in fact wasn't doing something inherently wrong and now that I'm using Quartz it's easy for me to time my shots manually, something I was doing in a more instinctual and zen way pre-macro.

So last night I removed the macro from my hotkey and instead linked it to steadyshot. I set up a hotkey for Kill Command on the key next to it and farmed some ethereals to see how I did. What I found and liked was that as Kill Command is not included in the global cool down I can stab the hotkey everytime it procs and still continue casting my steadyshot without having to wait on the cast sequence.

Now maybe I'm getting this all wrong, but that's how it seemed to me. Maybe I was using the macro wrong all along :P Enlighten me!

Now this post has been brewing in my mind for the last week and in another case of happy blogging serendipity I came across a fantastic explanation of shot rotation by Drotara over at Less QQ More PewPew. It is far and away the best explanation I have come across to date - and with diagrams! I'll also note that I discovered the blog via the new Blog Azeroth site which is a great forum for people blogging about WoW.

Another reason I think I have turned off of the shot rotation macro is running more bgs and arenas. There is simply no place for this macro in a PVP situation in my opinion - you need to be able to change up gears at any moment and the macro doesn't require you to do anything but stand still and 'push butan'. That will get you killed dead before kill command can even proc in a bg and even more so in arena. So now I understand more fully what Shifttusk was talking about in his comments on BRK's blog.