Hello again, my lovelies! How have you all been? I felt myself inspired today to pen a post, and here I am. I had a couple interesting discussions today that I’d like to share and expand on. The first: the upcoming changes to trapping and how that will affect game-play. The second: pet macros, specifically macros for making sure your pet is attacking what you want it to. Let’s dive right in!
Trap Changes
The first thing I’d like to touch on today are the changes coming to traps in Patch 3.2. Specifically, for those of you who may have been living under a rock for the past week or so (or just like to skim a lot):
“The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.”
and:
“Traps now have separate 30-second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.”
The first aspect of these changes are what I really jumped on, if you want the truth. Essentially what the changes to trap duration mean is that chain trapping for crowd control will basically be a thing of the past. For long time readers, you’ll recall the video I did instructing how to chain trap. Guess what? That video is now obsolete.
For Hunters whose primary occupation is raiding, the changes to trap duration mean very little. In truth, the duration changes mean very little for PvE Hunters as a whole. Crowd control in raids and instances has become unnecessary, where AoE is the order of the day. But, I have to admit to a bit of nostalgic disappointment regarding this change none the less. As I mentioned to Galomesh in the comments on our previous post, I miss the days of having more to do than stand there, pew pew and avoid poop on the floor. There were few things I found more exhilarating in-game than maintaining multi-mob chain trapping through the judicious use of cooldowns and set bonuses. But alas, those days are gone.
Now, to address the change that the rest of you are probably more interested in: certain traps will no longer share the same cooldown. The good news here is that, for example, you would be able to use your Freezing Trap or Snake Trap and still fire Black Arrow. Because our traps are so seldom used these days in PvE content (or at least the ones not still tied to the Black Arrow cooldown), this is really more of a nod to the PvP Survival crowd.
What are your thoughts on these changes?
Pet Macros
The second part of today’s post (yes, I know I shouldn’t combine different subjects into one post, but both were brief enough to warrant it, I think) was inspired by a question I saw on Twitter today:
@grimtorn: anyone have a good macro for pet focus/attack? Want to make sure my pet is attacking what I’m attacking. Yay for being out of practice!
Now, my initial response to the question assumed that a focus target was already set. The macro you would use to simply have your pet attack your focus target would be:
/petattack [target=focus]
However, if a focus target was not set, you could adjust this macro slightly to set your current target as your focus and then have your pet attack it:
/focus
/petattack [target=focus]
If you’d rather not mess around with a focus target and just want to make sure your pet is attacking your current target, you have two options. You could simply use:
/petattack
Or, you could just keybind your pet’s attack button on your action bars. This is actually keybound by default to Ctrl+1 but can be changed to anything else you like in the Interface options menu.
Additionally, if you’d like to spruce up your Pet Attack macro a bit to include the first shot in your rotation, you can do so simply with something like this:
#showtooltip Serpent Sting
/petattack
/cast Serpent Sting
And this macro would send your pet to attack your current target, as well as fire Serpent Sting. You can substitute any opening shot you’d like to customize this macro.
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For the Record, I usually have the Main tank,(or the off tank if I’m on add burn duty) set as my focus, to use a simple MD Focus Macro.
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Most people do use a MT/OT focus MD macro (in fact, one is included on the Macro page for just that reason). However, that wasn’t what we were asked about today.
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Fair enough, Posted before I read the whole article
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/petfollow
/petattack [target=focus,exists,harm,nodead][target=target,harm,nodead]
This will send your pet to attack your focus target if set, not dead and an enemy. Otherwise it will attack your current target, if an enemy.
If there’s neither a focus, nor a regular target to attack, your pet will come back to you from wherever it may be right now
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Slyzer: That’ll teach ya
Talldar: I always forget to add the “exists,harm,nodead” bits, so good call on that addition!
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LOl ya i do the:
/pet attack
/cast Explosive shot
when i usually fight kirastrasa in nexus so my pet dosnt die. i usually couple it up with:
/pet passie
/cast Aimed shot
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I also felt the first trap change was a big deal, but I’m not sure why you say it will be the death of chain trapping. As I understand it, the change means that an un-triggered trap will remain in place for 30 seconds, not 1 minute. However, once triggered, shouldn’t the trap target remain trapped for the normal period? I don’t see how this change would affect the chain trapping I practiced. It’s been a while since I watched your video (I watched it when you first made it, and haven’t since), so maybe I’ve forgotten a trick you tried to teach me, but what I did remember from your video served me very well throughout BC! Am I missing something important here?
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About the traps, So if you were to lay a Freezing trap and a explosive trap, will the freeze trap break when a mob is CCed?
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I have a Nostromo n52 for my left hand, in an awesome little device thats basically the left third of a keyboard (three rows of 5 keys, 5, and 4) but the beautiful thing is that it has a spacebar, d-pad, and another button for you thumb. As both a PvE and PvP hunter i find the whole thing amazing, the D-Pad is set up as all pet handing keys: IE Ctrl 1-4. Up is attack, down is follow, left is Special ability 1, and right is special ability 2. I find that this is an easy way to command my pet in even the worst of fights. Second great thing is that when commanding a vehicle the pet buttons double as attacks, nothing is more annoying than trying to drive a tank forward, aim at the door, and fire all at once without using the thumb controls.
An excellent use of 70 dollars.
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I always set MT to focus. Then my macro looks something like this.
/target focus
/assist
/cast Hunter’s Mark
/petattack
/startattack (not sure of the command to cast auto-shot)
I throw this onto my action bar and it allows for the maximum time on target.
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ARGH! What more do they want to “rebalance”?
I do use a trap in pve, sorry, but I do. If I am attacking something big and mean (such as me being lvl 30 and the mobs being red to me at 35 or 36), I will place a ice cicle trap incase my Meggie can’t hold the mob or incase I happen to attract the attention of another mob (I am a delicate little orcen flower of orcen malehood, here. I mean it’s not like I’m a Tauren you know!). Why, oh why the rebalancing changes. Not all raid nor do we pvp in arena’s… tt’s just the facts of life, so of us prefer to solo (unless my granddaughter is with me!).
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