Fix Pet Attack

Classes Hunter
1

Just re-subbed after not playing for a few expansions and I’m a bit disappointed. I immediately noticed that pets are extremely unresponsive in their actions. Literally the only way to make pets immediately respond is to use kill command from what I can tell. With a bit of searching it seems like Blizzard changed the way they deal with pet commands to reduce server resource usage…

Sadly, the trade off is that pets, both on hunters and warlocks are ridiculously unenjoyable to utilize as they have awful latency between telling a pet to attack something and it actually following up on that command, same thing with telling a pet to follow you or go to a location.

Can pets, please, please get returned to their previous state of promptness, perhaps if server resource usage is really a worry make each petattack/petfollow/et cetera have an minimum time between uses (maybe make it an ability off the global cooldown with its own cooldown if need be), but please make pets immediately respond to commands, rather than this current abomination where pet actions have a horrendous 1-2 second latency between actions.

A wonderful example of how bad this is, is to select any mob, click pet attack then a moment later click pet follow, assuming your experience is similar to my own, the pet will hold for about 1.5 seconds after clicking attack, begin moving to attack, then about 1.5 seconds later return to you. Absolutely terrible. Very upsetting to return to this extremely disappointing implementation of pets, given that pet classes are (and have always been) my favorite classes, and yet, the latency produces a very terrible user experience, one that makes playing a pet class far, far less enjoyable.

(Side note: Why does a pet with auto-cast dash never actually use dash?)

2

My wolf uses dash all the time so I’m not sure what thats about.

As far as pet lag goes there are some ways around it.

Pet Attack Macros

By baking /petattack into some of your abilities, your pet will become more responsive and switch targets without delay. Prior to Battle for Azeroth, this was necessary for kill command, but now it seems like this functionality has been baked into that ability. However, it’s still useful to keep it in so when you spam the Kill Command button you can tell your pet where to attack even if its on cooldown. I wouldn’t recommend using this on Cobra Shot or Chimaera Shot since you’ll sometimes want to quickly shoot a target without removing your pet from its current target (example: Explosive orbs in Mythic+).

How to use: Replace your existing ability buttons with the appropriate macro.

Kill Command: Not necessary, but helpful.

#showtooltip Kill Command
/petattack
/cast Kill Command

Barbed Shot: Usually your pet will automatically switch targets when you cast Barbed Shot, but it works inconsistently when targets are close together. This makes it consistent.

#showtooltip Barbed Shot
/petattack
/cast Barbed Shot

Basic Attack Macros

Baking your pet’s Basic Attacks (Claw, Bite, or Smack) into abilities will maximize how many are cast. Basic Attacks have a 3 second cooldown, but your pet doesn’t always immediately auto-cast it on cooldown for unknown reasons, which results in numerous missed casts in a boss fight. The average delay is about 0.6 seconds. You can force out more basic attacks by adding them to all of your offensive abilities in macros. As you are spamming your abilities, there is a greater chance that basic attacks will be cast on cooldown or as close to cooldown as possible. If you’re someone who spams their buttons during GCDs, the actual gain from this should reduce the basic attack cooldown to about 3.1-3.3 seconds (down from 3.6 seconds) on average. Note that you still leave your pet’s basic attack on auto-cast, the purpose of these macros is to try and cast it sooner within that 0.6 second window.

Is this necessary? No, but you gain extra DPS for doing it, and there’s no downside. It’s highly recommended.

These are the necessary lines you should add to offensive abilities in a macro (just put them at the bottom of your macro)

/cast Claw
/cast Bite
/cast Smack

Talen from: https://www.wowhead.com/beast-mastery-hunter-macro-guide

So barbed shot ends up looking like

#showtooltip Barbed Shot
/petattack
/cast Barbed Shot
/cast Claw
/cast Bite
/cast Smack

3 Likes
3

Hey there Mátàlìn, thanks for the reply. I have built macros that include the appropriate commands included, sadly, they don’t actually fix the issue I’m describing.

Head to one of the training dummy spots in one of the main cities and position yourself so you can send your pet between two of the dummies across the room from each other, use a macro that contains just:

/petattack

and click between the two dummies sending the pet running back and forth between the two of them, you’ll notice that the pet has a latency that sometimes is reasonably short, maybe almost instantly and sometimes it won’t follow the command for roughly 1-2 seconds. Perhaps someone from Blizzard can clarify but this is reasonable to expect behavior given what I’ve found about how pets are working now-a-days, that is, pets will have their AI script evaluated roughly once every 2 seconds or so, meaning you can send a command and have it quickly executed or the command might be delayed many times longer for seemingly no reason (clicked at the “wrong time”).

Next make a macro with say Cobra Shot (because we can spam it fairly regularly) like:

/petattack
/cast Cobra Shot

Then do the exact same time (for consistency in testing my pet is set to passive), if you pay attention to the behavior of the pet, and ignore the Cobra Shot (whose animations can make it feel like things are more responsive since Cobra Shot is very responsive and whose travel time can make it look like the pets are responding along side the Cobra Shot) you’ll notice that there is no difference in the pet’s awkward latency whether using petattack with an ability or not (The exception seeming to be kill command which has priority and forces the pet to immediately move, yet, sadly, will not have this beneficial behavior when its on cooldown, only on successful ability activation, which would be fine it it was always up when we wanted to change our pet’s charges, but that is hardly the case).

Thanks for the response.

4

I Only read your response lightly, and only really got half of what you were saying. Granted this is an older thread, but as to a general rule as to why the pets seem somewhat laggy, etc. is to remember that unlike ranged classes pets are melee. If your pet is not within the range of the ability they will not cast it. IN general having the “pet” abilities macroed in, will not fix multi target swapping issues if you are switching between things that are more than 5 yards apart. Generally speaking you can actually decrease the amount of pet dps you are doing by macroing in your pet to change targets if they are not stacked well. I know it seems counter intuitive, but you need to pick a target and not try to swap your pets unless absolutely necessary. Even if you didnt have the macros, thats just a general rule for all ranged. why switch to a target that is far away during aoe, unless you need to burn that target specifically, its a loss in dps. More so for hunter pets due to travel time, and having melee abilities. If you play any melee classes you experience this drop in dps everytime you are more than a step away from adds. Part of the reason melees complain about tanks moving alot :stuck_out_tongue: