This patch contained a lot of awesome. One of the smaller awesomes, however, was that our pets gained some new functionality from cower and lost the old functionality. Today we’re going to go over the changes, as well as some potential use cases.
Before the patch, we would typically leave cower on auto-cast because it reduced pet aggro and cost no focus. Patch 3.3 completely changed this. Cower now reduces the damage taken by our pet, but reduces it’s movement speed. How will this affect us? If you’re an extreme soloing type of hunter, this is probably huge news for you. That will be covered in another post, hopefully written by someone better at it than me :P. For the rest of us, this change is still neat, in my opinion. Assuming you’re not BM, there’s very little danger your pet will ever be able to pull off a tank, so the old cower mechanic was something we didn’t really need anyway. The new one could conceivably come in useful once in a while!
When
- Your pet pulls aggro on something (an add, usually)
- Your pet is taking a lot of damage despite not having aggro (90% reduction to AOE reduces the frequency of this, but it still happens)
- You are in PvP (or the faction champs fight) and your pet is being focused
All of these situations normally call for a mend pet anyways, so why not combine a new cower into that action? Cower is a pet cooldown you will waste if you’re just mending pet for health or happiness, but in those rare clutch situations like the above, macroing cower to mend pet will simply increase the chances that your pet will survive.
#showtooltip Mend Pet
/cast Cower
/cast Mend Pet
You could alternately have a conditional in there to allow you to press shift or alt to avoid casting cower if, for example, it’s more important for your pet to run at full speed than it is for him to take less damage, and you still need to get a mend pet off.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
If you want to combine the new Cower with the universal pet care macro, something like this will work:
/cast [modifier:alt] Cower
/cast [modifier:alt] Mend Pet
/cast [target=pet,dead] Revive Pet; [nopet] Call Pet; [nopet] Revive Pet; [nomod] Mend Pet
This macro will cast Cower and Mend Pet when you press alt and the macro. Otherwise, it’ll revive your pet if it’s dead, call it if it’s dismissed, and mend it if it’s present and alive.
The macro isn’t perfect, and I haven’t tried it out in all situations, but it worked in what testing I did.
Ah, it does not appear to work all that well if the pet is not present and dead (dead and no body). I’ll have to work on that.
To be honest, I’ve always personally resisted “universal care” macros because I am terrified that it will just not work when I need it some day. I keep separate buttons for all of my normal abilities, and I reduced my bar clutter another way :)
Excellent informative post! I’ll have to add that macro to my “Macros to Implement When I Reactivate My Account” list.
Can this be added in with the Mend Pet macro that prevents you from recasting Mend Pet to soon?
I think the best way to to avoid casting it too soon is to have a bar/aura/timer tracking Mend Pet on your screen. That way, you are making the choice of when it is best to reapply Mend Pet, not a macro. I think macros that constrain choices (like cast sequences or cast delays) tend to create more problems than they solve.
When to use it: When you’re soloing Molten Core and are using it in conjunction with Shell Shield to have your pet take 90% less damage (and another 90% reduction from AoE) for 6 seconds :P
Well, you can always modify this macro of mine (I have originally used multiple buttons, but because of lack of space moved all of them into one) –
normal function is to Mend pet, call missing pet or revive pet when there is a corpse nearby, otherwise Alt will force Revive, Ctrl is for stables access and secondary mouse button for rare case when you need to dismiss pet (usually to save its life). With Shift it will cast Cower in addition to Mend:
#showtooltip
/cast [btn:1,nopet,nomod] Call Pet; [btn:1,@pet,dead] Revive Pet; [mod:Alt] Revive Pet; [mod:Ctrl] Call Stabled Pet; [btn:1] Mend Pet
/cast [mod:Shift] Cower
/cast [btn:2] Dismiss Pet
Does it really stack that way with shell shield? That’s awesome.
How do you add cower to this macro?
#showtooltip Call Pet
/castsequence [nopet] reset=20 Call pet, Revive pet
/cast [modifier:shift] Dismiss Pet; [target=pet, dead] Revive Pet; Mend Pet
/cast [modifier:Ctrl][pet:cat/devilsaur/spirit beast] Heart of the Phoenix
Thanks for the ‘macro to Mend Pet’ suggestion. I’ve been using it a lot recently.
It’s saved me a pet loss several times :) Welcome!