BRK will scold you and take away your licence otherwise.

Well, it works for me. (grin) It didn’t used to, but one of the patches (and no, I don’t remember which) made petattack a secure command. Secure commands accept options – which include conditionals (the things in brackets). (Options are a subset of parameters. Further I’ll not go here – this way be dragons and worse, and I’ll save that exploration for my own blog.)

Oh, a ‘by the way’ – /petattack works for all pets, be they hunter ‘permanents’ or caster ‘temporaries’ (demons, elementals, fiends…)

Kirk
priestlyendeavors.wordpress.com

Very nice :)

Does the “/petattack [target=focus]” actually work? I remember looking for something like that, and getting results along the lines of “no modifiers if it’s not a /cast command”, but it’s been a long while ago so something might have changed.

One macro that I’ve always had is my “PetTankIT” macro:
/petattack
/petautocaston Growl
/cast Intimidation

(just remember to turn Growl back off before the next pull!)

If the target=focus works, then a TankTheFocus one would be very nice to have. (or one macro, with a keypress modifier like you showed above)

I’m survival so don’t tend to get a lot of resists, but there are a number of ways to deal with them. If you have scatter shot, on a resisted trap it’s a fine time to use it… that’s a few seconds extra of trap cooldown where your mob isn’t beating on anyone. As survival I have Deterrence, which I find allows me to hold the mob for a few more seconds, allowing it to beat on me (as I dodge and parry a lot). Once I’m fed up of taking a beating, it’s time to feign and let the mob head for the healers.

Head for the healers? Scary! Yup – but as long as you are a distance a way from the healers, the mob will have a way to run. Wait til he is just outside melee range (casters are more of a pain to do this with but the principle still applies) of his target, and whallop him with a distracting shot and an arcane shot, which is almost certainly enough to get his attention again… and watch in amusement as the chump starts out back towards you. A concussive shot will buy you a little more time, and hopefully, your trap wil be off CD and ready to lock him down again.

Obviously, BM hunters can just sick their pet on the mob and not worry too much, but I figured a survivalist’s point of view might be of some use.

First I just wanna check that when you say you weave auto and aimed shot -you actually mean auto/steady. If thats not what you meant then it should be from now on :)

As for targeting and trapping and OT’ing with pet.

I use my focus target for my MT so I will be able to get of an MD real fast in case of need Read squishy in danger or aggro loss by MT). So I dont use it on blue! What I use for skull is my /targetlastarget macro or if I need to trap and send pet to OT I use the /targetlasttarget for blue so I can sen pet straight on the pull to his target and then either assist via focus or just manually target MT’s target.

So for a real tricky pull with me MD’ing, trapping and OT’ing with pet it would go like this:

Drop trap, target pets mob then target skull. hit MD macro that casts MD on focus (MT) and let fly on skull. After ur 3 shots (or if u abort after 1) hit /targetlasttarget macro and push petattack key. Then in this case you would have to target blue manually and get him with distracting, then target focus and slap assist -now u are blasting skull!

Ohh, now I sound like I’m showing off :)) Well you have impressed me a lot with ur tips for my Drood so I guess I’m trying to return the favor :)

Anyway the point I wanted to make was to make sure u are weaving steady and not aimed and to shor the usefulness of a /targetlasttarget macro

Thanks for the tips and GL with ur hunter

Besides that i have bound a key (Q) to petattack and one (E) to assist pet + autoshot, this makes it easy to get that pet in fast and use him as an anchor if needed.

Every bracket is a test, done in order. The first one that’s ALL true gets used, and that ends the macro.

modifier:alt — modifiers are shift, alt, and ctrl. Pretty obvious.

test “harm”. Is the target hostile? Note that this is a flaw in the macro I wrote – too much time doing priest-based. What really needs to happen is replace every “harm” test with a “nohelp” test. Help – is the target friendly. nohelp…

warcraft’s macro language has similarities to German – you can string some words together to be a ‘new word’ that has meaning. There are rules and variations, but we’re going to only mention two. The first, here, is “no” can be appended to darn near every test and limiter. It means, literally, “everything that is not X”. So why am I using “nohelp”? Neutrals. A test for harm only works for hostiles. Friends and neutrals escape. “Nohelp” is everthing that is not friendly (green).

And last item in every bracket is … a weirdness. It is of the category I call qualifiers instead of tests. They are by default true IF the rest of the bracket is true. If the rest of the bracket is true, then the target is…

the focus, what I put my mouse over, or the target. Or – and here’s the second german-like structure – I can chain “target” together after every potential basic target type for several steps. (Yes, I can say “target=pettargettargettarget”. That is, if my pet is attacking a mob, and it’s attacking raid member, well, then I’m attacking THAT RAID MEMBER’s target. Don’t think about it too much, it’ll make your head hurt more. Just stop at one iteration – if you accidentally target a friendly, then target is really that friendly’s target. Auto-assist for the win.)

So you can actually chase that whole mess really simply:

/petattack [modifier:alt,nohelp,target=focus] [modifier:alt,nohelp,target=focustarget] [nohelp,target=targettarget] [nohelp,target=mouseover] [nohelp,target=mouseovertarget] [harm,target=targettarget] [target=target]

command the pet to attack the target, target being the first true statement of:
a) If I’m pressing alt, target the focus if it’s a bad guy;
b) If I’m pressing alt and the focus is a good guy, assist the focus;
(a series of just the button with no alt keys)
c) mouseover if bad guy;
d) If mouse is over good guy, assist;
e) If my target is a good guy, assist;
f) Attack my target.
(If none of those are true, I get an error message. If none of those are true I probably deserve an error message.)

Yah, it takes time to figure out how to WRITE the macros, but reading them turns out to be simple. Oh, I said simple deal. There is more – lots more – that could be done. Qualifiers and modifiers and “and then” and sequence and… bah. Never give everything as one lesson.

Except Kirk. Dude, you’re insane. Do you really come up with that shit YOURSELF? I’m talking basic addition, and you’re into da calculus.

Man… I can’t even read it, let alone parse it. WAY too advanced for me… LOL.

On the other hand… I want to see you post hunter stuff, damn it. If it’s like that, I wanna read it.

/petattack [target=focus]

Now if you want to be fancy (grin), try this bit of fun:

/petattack [modifier:alt,target=target][target=focus]

Obviously, this means normally the pet attacks the focus, but you can select a target and have your pet attack THAT with by keying while using the alt key.

Now fancier yet is the one I’m playing with:

/petattack [modifier:alt,harm,target=focus] [modifier:alt,harm,target=focustarget] [harm,target=targettarget] [harm,target=mouseover] [harm,target=mouseovertarget] [harm,target=target] [harm,target=targettarget]

All of that, by the way, should be on a single line.

Let me break that down. I can set a foe as the focus, or I can set something like, oh, say the main assist as the focus. When I alt-key, if the focus is a mob my pet attacks that, if my focus is my main assist then the pet attacks the mob the main assist has targeted. I also have three options in the event I don’t want to slap the alt key. The target I’m mousing over if it’s a mob, its target if I’m mousing over a friend (note – doesn’t have to be in my party or raid, just its target has to be a foe), and if all those fail the pet attacks my current target if foe, or its target if that’s the foe.

Kirk
Priestlyendeavors.wordpress.com (but yes, I do have a hunter alt)