TrackThat! addon

Can't nobody say Gweryc never did nothing for the peoples.

Improved Tracking's requirement of constantly swapping tracking types annoyed the ever-loving crap out of me, so I did what any good Engineer would do and fixed it. I sat down last night and created the TrackThat! addon, downloadable now from wowui.worldofwar.net.

Here's the description I put up on the site:

TrackThat! was designed in response to the Improved Tracking talent, introduced in the WoW 3 patch. The increase of 5% damage to targets being tracked is nice, but the mechanic of switching tracking types in-game isn't nice at all, just annoying!

This addon simplifies life by changing your tracking type to match the type of mob you have targeted, if you're capable of tracking it. Just add either of these slash commands to the top of your main attack macro:

/tt
/trackthat

Yes, this works in combat! No, it won't kill you by continually tripping the global cooldown! It's simple, it's functional, it might even be international.

Enjoy!

Good luck out there, fellow survival hunters. Let me know what you think!

PTR Notes

Here is I, on the PTR! It's still pretty buggy, and I could throttle whoever ruined my Survival Instincts talent, taking away the 4% melee boost and forcing me to take 1 point each in Trap Mastery and Survival Tactics instead. Otherwise, it's wonderful to have my pet wolf back at my side, and to get 300 more melee AP just through talent and spell changes.

The now useless Wing Clip costs an insane 202 mana, compared to 135 for Raptor Strike, and 101 for the Mongoose Bite. Deterrence is a baseline talent. Furious Howl's effect is raid-wide, making it an inarguably valuable buff. (Welcome home, Cafall. I've missed you.)

Oh, and Aspect of the Beast isn't removed -- it's just bugged. You can't cast it unless you have a pet out.

With Wing Clip in the rubbish bin and Mongoose Bite its worthy successor, it's time to update my main attack macro:

/castsequence [nopet] reset=5 Call Pet, Revive Pet
/cast [target=pet,dead] Revive Pet
/stopmacro [noexists][nocombat]
/petattack [target=pettarget,noexists]
/castrandom Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite
/cast Kill Command

Ordinarily Kill Command has conditionals attached -- [target=pettarget,exists] -- but in this macro I don't need them. Between the stopmacro and petattack directives, I know my pet will have a hostile target by the time /cast Kill Command is reached. The /castrandom ensures that we'll hit the Kill Command, too, since Raptor Strike, as an "on next hit" spell, is a fall-through.

Cafall's pet bar is stocked with Dash, Rabid, Furious Howl, and Bite -- no room at all for Growl or Cower. Who cares? Seriously. A dps pet has no business growling in a raid, and no tank in the world should lose aggro to my pet.

As I write this, it looks like instances are down on the PTR, so I'm off to farm motes on the live server. I'll try to hit up an instance soon and test out my new dps capability.

WoW Heroes (and their pets)

I stumbled on a neat little site, WoW Heroes, which offers "World of Warcraft PvE character info & ratings". My personal review suggests I should be running in MH/BT, which I am, so I'm actually performing somewhat inline with what a regular hunter in my gear should be. That's kind of a neat affirmation.

Besides inspecting your own character, WoW Heroes can rate your guild as a whole, giving you the chance to see where you rank relative to your guildmates. My score of 709 puts me behind one of our ret paladins, and ahead of one of our arms warriors. WWS shows that last night, on our Naj'entus kill, my dps and damage dealt fell between those two, as it should. The ret pally was 7th on damage out, I was 8th, and the arms warrior was 9th. The paladin out-dps'd me, and I out-dps'd the warrior. When you look at it that way, I'm actually doing reasonably well. Crisis of conscience averted.

On review, I found that part of what hurt my dps before was an unnoticed pet death. I vowed never to let that happen again, and here's the tool I'm using to keep that vow:

/castsequence [nopet] reset=5 Call Pet, Revive Pet
/cast [target=pet,dead] Revive Pet

I stuck these two lines at the top of my main attack macro. If you have no active pet and there's no pet corpse on the ground, the first line tries to call your pet. If that fails, it must mean that your pet is dead, so the second keypress will rez your pet. If your pet's corpse is on the ground, the first line is skipped entirely and your pet is immediately rezzed. If your pet is alive and well and at your side, neither line does anything. It's a really superior semi-automated way to keep your pet up.