Roxanne Flowers

Even as I type, I'm researching modifications to my Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite and Counterattack macros that I use on my Melee Hunter build so as to conditional use of Dash and Dive upon the Target being 10 yards or more away from me so that my Pet isn't always burning up Dash and Dive while hanging around beside me in melee. I'll be posting those over in my Beast o' Melee Hunter thread though.

I actually have SuperMacro with its 7000 character extended LUA, but I'm trying not to use that so as to make macros that work even without use of SuperMacro.

Upon further reflection (and having the time to do so) I realized that the whole GetSpellAutocast portion of line 1 of my macro here was basically superfluous. It doesn't actually matter if Cower is on autoattack or not. That's because what matters is whether your selected Target is Targeting You (the Hunter) ... or not. If your Target is Targeting You, use Disengage, because your Hunter is tanking for your Pet and you want to switch. If your Target is NOT Targeting You, do not use Disengage, because your Pet is tanking for your Hunter and you want to switch. With that in mind, I pared the above macro down even further to 214 characters long. And if I change all the /script commands to be /run instead, I'll save another 9 characters bringing me down to 205 characters used, with room to spend 50 characters on doing a conditional for Dive. This yields a parsimonious (for this macro) character count of 235/255 and can be used with either Dashing or Diving Pets so long as Cower and Growl are in slots 5 and 7 on the Pet Bar. This particular macro is one where if I'm wanting to do any sort of ON/OFF toggling of Cower for Growl (or the reverse) the Pet is going to have to attack my Target in melee range in order to do so. Including the Passive command to also "disengage" my Pet from whatever they're doing before giving them a new target to attack and then Dash/Dive upon ought to make for the "cleanest" possible use of this macro for trading Threat with my Pet.

Upon further reflection (and having the time to do so) I realized that the whole GetSpellAutocast portion of line 1 of my macro here was basically superfluous. It doesn't actually matter if Cower is on autoattack or not. That's because what matters is whether your selected Target is Targeting You (the Hunter) ... or not. If your Target is Targeting You, use Disengage, because your Hunter is tanking for your Pet and you want to switch. If your Target is NOT Targeting You, do not use Disengage, because your Pet is tanking for your Hunter and you want to switch. With that in mind, I pared the above macro down even further to 214 characters long. And if I change all the /script commands to be /run instead, I'll save another 9 characters bringing me down to 205 characters used, with room to spend 50 characters on doing a conditional for Dive. This yields a parsimonious (for this macro) character count of 235/255 and can be used with either Dashing or Diving Pets so long as Cower and Growl are in slots 5 and 7 on the Pet Bar. This particular macro is one where if I'm wanting to do any sort of ON/OFF toggling of Cower for Growl (or the reverse) the Pet is going to have to attack my Target in melee range in order to do so. Including the Passive command to also "disengage" my Pet from whatever they're doing before giving them a new target to attack and then Dash/Dive upon ought to make for the "cleanest" possible use of this macro for trading Threat with my Pet.

Just finished posting this in Raziya's macros thread, but I also really want to include it here too, since it is highly relevant to playing a Melee Hunter to be able to "trade aggro" between your Hunter and your Pet when needed. I wound up using my entire 255 character budget for this. So what this macro does is it first goes to my Pet's spellbook and checks to see if the Pet Skill in slot 2 (in this case, Cower) is toggled on. The number for spellbook slots is top-down on the left then top-down on the right (basically alphabetical order in this case). It then returns a boolean value for that which gets put into variable y. This is then followed by an IF-THEN statement testing to see if y is TRUE (which it would be if Cower is toggled on) AND tests to see if my Target is targeting my Hunter. If both of these conditionals are true, then my Hunter casts Disengage ... if either of them are false, then Disengage is not cast (side note, Disengage is a melee range spell, so if my Target is beyond melee range, Disengage won't actually be cast). After that the macro flips the Autocast Toggles for Pet Skillbar Slots 5 (Cower) and 7 (Growl) every time without conditionals, counting the skillbar slots from the left. The macro then commands my Pet to attack my Target and then finally cast Dive to get to the Target as fast as possible (in case my Pet was not fighting right beside me) WITHOUT overwriting any previously established Follow/Stay or Aggressive/Defensive/Passive stance commands, so as to use either Cower or Growl on whatever I've been targeting as soon as my Pet gets into melee range with whatever I'm Disengaging from. If I had a bigger macro budget than 255 characters, presumably I could do some sort of /run if CheckInteractDistance("target", 3) conditional check, except invert it such that the conditional would need to return a FALSE result in order to command Dash or Dive to cast, and have it checking the distance from your PET to your Target (which, presumably, is not something you can do with CheckInteractDistance since that's a Player Only function). Basic idea being that Dash or Dive would only be cast when distance from Pet to Target exceeded the threshold value of 9.9 yards ... meaning your Pet would only Dash or Dive to cover distances of 10+ yards to THEIR target quickly, but wouldn't use it to move less than 10 yards fast. Doing that would probably require some straight up LUA scripting to do, which is way beyond my capacities as a novice macro writer, so ... moving on. I tested this new Disengage macro setup on an Ashenvale Wolf, so I could get aggro on myself to test the UnitIsUnit("targettarget", "player") parsing was correct and sure enough not only did my Hunter cast Disengage but my Pet also toggled off Cower and toggled on Growl and immediately seized aggro from me. Actually commanding a /cast Growl or a /cast Cower was not necessary because that function gets handled by the autoattack "hands free" as it were. As a side note, use of Disengage on a melee range Target will also cancel my Hunter's Auto Attack automatically, so at that point only my Pet was (still) attacking the Wolf that I'd engaged to get aggro from and then Disengaged. So the transfer aggro from my Hunter to my Pet part of this is working out beautifully. I then went to Darkshore to test the reverse case setup on a Critter (Rabbits mainly) to check to see if the UnitIsUnit("targettarget", "player") parsing would prevent Disengage from being used against something that was not targeting my Hunter while letting the rest of the macro execute to flip the toggles between Cower and Growl and so on. Again, the macro performed as intended and my Hunter did NOT cast Disengage when using the macro to toggle my Pet from Growl ON/Cower OFF over to a Growl OFF/Cower On posture. The test Critters all immediately died when my Pet attacked them, even though my Hunter "did nothing" besides invoke the macro, so that part was working. I edited the /script if UnitExists("target") then PetAttack(target) end line for convenience so as to minimize the annoyance of getting "I need a target" warnings when using the macro to flip Cower and Growl between their ON/OFF states when I have no target selected. If I spam this macro with no target selected, the only warning message I'll get is that Dive might not be off cooldown yet, since the macro always commands Dive to be executed whether it is off cooldown or not. Admittedly, because of the pressure of the character limits, this macro is so ... specialized/tailored ... that I can essentially only use it with a Pet (in this case, an Owl) with skills in the configuration I've shown. It has to be as specialized as it is simply because of the 255 character limit and needing to do a LOT of stuff all in a single keypress using a single macro. I'm sure that with a system of "chaining" where macros can call other macros, that 255 character limit can be overcome so as to refine the automation of the conditionals checking even further to the point where you can IF-THEN check for Pet Skills regardless of which Pet you're using, but for right now, this is good enough for what I need a Disengage macro to do while playing a Melee Hunter build. It lets me "trade aggro magnet duty" with my Pet via use of Disengage and gives me a single keybind click to flip between Cower and Growl. Note that this macro should work perfectly fine for Hunters who work at range (Beastmasters, Marksman specs) if they have both Cower and Growl on their Pet, since the purpose of the macro is to toggle between autoattacks of Cower and Growl, allowing you to "fine tune their aggro magnetism" (so to speak). Combining use of this Disengage macro with Distracting Shot on a target that your Pet is tanking (at a distance) could easily result in a ping-pong of aggro between your Hunter and your Pet in solo PvE play, should such a thing be desirable, with the potential to repeatedly trade aggro between your Hunter and your Pet, depending on the Player's skill level at handling their UI setup. In some kiting situations, that might be a useful thing to do, although executing such a plan of action would no doubt be more complicated than most Players have the patience for. Definitely an edge case possibility, since almost NO ONE puts Cower on their Pet. Obviously, if using this macro for different Pets, particularly ones with different Skills, a customization edit of the macro's parameters will be needed in order to produce an Exact Match Fit for the specific Pet you're using. This is why I wanted to explain which parameters correspond to what functionality as transparently as I have, because I know that there are a lot of Players out there who are not intimately versed in the parsing of macro command language and syntax (since I'm one of them!). (Specialized) Disengage macro for toggling between Cower and Growl autocasting

Think I might have found the functionality of what I was looking for, repurposed from a mashup of checking to see if Growl is enabled for autoattack or not, so as to turn it on or off. This was the functionality I started with, inspired by none other that Raziya's older work, apparently. What this line does is it searches through your Pet's spellbook to find the spell ID for Cower in an incremental fashion and then stores that value in variable g. In this case, the spell being searched for is Cower. It then follows up with checking to see if Cower is on autocast AND if your current Target is targeting your Hunter. If Cower is on autocast and your Target is targeting you, then Disengage is cast (note that if your Hunter is not in melee range, Disengage will not successfully be cast). I then wanted to take that and pair it up with all of the other functionality I wanted where Cower and Growl would toggle themselves ON/OFF interspersed in with the "standard" casting Follow (action 2) and go Passive (action 10) followed by commanding my Pet to Attack my currently selected Target. Well ... as you can imagine, that much text EASILY exceeded the 255 character limit. It did what I was wanting, but it took too much programming to do "legally" in the "as is" macro system, short of building a macro that will as its last step invoke a second macro ... which would have looked like a Disengage? (Y/N) function on the first macro which then at the end would invoke a second macro handling all the Pet action and autocast toggling work. Obviously the problem was that I was spending very nearly all of my 255 character budget on searching through my Pet's spellbook in an automated way in the first line. If I could cut the "search" out of it, because I knew exactly which Pet spellbook slot I'm wanting to reference, I'd be able to chop my way down to something that only did exactly what I needed it to do, rather than being an omni-tool. So I carved my way down to the absolute minimum I'd want to be using for the functionality I needed and eventually got to the following. I wound up using my entire 255 character budget anyway. So what this macro does is it first goes to my Pet's spellbook and checks to see if the Pet Skill in slot 2 (in this case, Cower) is toggled on. The number for spellbook slots is top-down on the left then top-down on the right (basically alphabetical order in this case). It then returns a boolean value for that which gets put into variable y. This is then followed by an IF-THEN statement testing to see if y is TRUE (which it would be if Cower is toggled on) AND tests to see if my Target is targeting my Hunter. If both of these conditionals are true, then my Hunter casts Disengage ... if either of them are false, then Disengage is not cast (side note, Disengage is a melee range spell, so if my Target is beyond melee range, Disengage won't actually be cast). After that the macro flips the Autocast Toggles for Pet Skillbar Slots 5 (Cower) and 7 (Growl) every time without conditionals, counting the skillbar slots from the left. The macro then commands my Pet to attack my Target and then finally cast Dive to get to the Target as fast as possible (in case my Pet was not fighting right beside me) WITHOUT overwriting any previously established Follow/Stay or Aggressive/Defensive/Passive stance commands, so as to use either Cower or Growl on whatever I've been targeting as soon as my Pet gets into melee range with whatever I'm Disengaging from. If I had a bigger macro budget than 255 characters, presumably I could do some sort of /run if CheckInteractDistance("target", 3) conditional check, except invert it such that the conditional would need to return a FALSE result in order to command Dash or Dive to cast, and have it checking the distance from your PET to your Target (which, presumably, is not something you can do with CheckInteractDistance since that's a Player Only function). Basic idea being that Dash or Dive would only be cast when distance from Pet to Target exceeded the threshold value of 9.9 yards ... meaning your Pet would only Dash or Dive to cover distances of 10+ yards to THEIR target quickly, but wouldn't use it to move less than 10 yards fast. Doing that would probably require some straight up LUA scripting to do, which is way beyond my capacities as a novice macro writer, so ... moving on. I tested this new Disengage macro setup on an Ashenvale Wolf, so I could get aggro on myself to test the UnitIsUnit("targettarget", "player") parsing was correct and sure enough not only did my Hunter cast Disengage but my Pet also toggled off Cower and toggled on Growl and immediately seized aggro from me. Actually commanding a /cast Growl or a /cast Cower was not necessary because that function gets handled by the autoattack "hands free" as it were. As a side note, use of Disengage on a melee range Target will also cancel my Hunter's Auto Attack automatically, so at that point only my Pet was (still) attacking the Wolf that I'd engaged to get aggro from and then Disengaged. So the transfer aggro from my Hunter to my Pet part of this is working out beautifully. I then went to Darkshore to test the reverse case setup on a Critter (Rabbits mainly) to check to see if the UnitIsUnit("targettarget", "player") parsing would prevent Disengage from being used against something that was not targeting my Hunter while letting the rest of the macro execute to flip the toggles between Cower and Growl and so on. Again, the macro performed as intended and my Hunter did NOT cast Disengage when using the macro to toggle my Pet from Growl ON/Cower OFF over to a Growl OFF/Cower On posture. The test Critters all immediately died when my Pet attacked them, even though my Hunter "did nothing" besides invoke the macro, so that part was working. I edited the /script if UnitExists("target") then PetAttack(target) end line for convenience so as to minimize the annoyance of getting "I need a target" warnings when using the macro to flip Cower and Growl between their ON/OFF states when I have no target selected. If I spam this macro with no target selected, the only warning message I'll get is that Dive might not be off cooldown yet, since the macro always commands Dive to be executed whether it is off cooldown or not. Admittedly, because of the pressure of the character limits, this macro is so ... specialized/tailored ... that I can essentially only use it with a Pet (in this case, an Owl) with skills in the configuration I've shown. It has to be as specialized as it is simply because of the 255 character limit and needing to do a LOT of stuff all in a single keypress using a single macro. I'm sure that with a system of "chaining" where macros can call other macros, that 255 character limit can be overcome so as to refine the automation of the conditionals checking even further to the point where you can IF-THEN check for Pet Skills regardless of which Pet you're using, but for right now, this is good enough for what I need a Disengage macro to do while playing a Melee Hunter build. It lets me "trade aggro magnet duty" with my Pet via use of Disengage and gives me a single keybind click to flip between Cower and Growl. Note that this macro should work perfectly fine for Hunters who work at range (Beastmasters, Marksman specs) if they have both Cower and Growl on their Pet, since the purpose of the macro is to toggle between autoattacks of Cower and Growl, allowing you to "fine tune their aggro magnetism" (so to speak). Combining use of this Disengage macro with Distracting Shot on a target that your Pet is tanking (at a distance) could easily result in a ping-pong of aggro between your Hunter and your Pet in solo PvE play, should such a thing be desirable, with the potential to repeatedly trade aggro between your Hunter and your Pet, depending on the Player's skill level at handling their UI setup. In some kiting situations, that might be a useful thing to do, although executing such a plan of action would no doubt be more complicated than most Players have the patience for. Definitely an edge case possibility, since almost NO ONE puts Cower on their Pet. Obviously, if using this macro for different Pets, particularly ones with different Skills, a customization edit of the macro's parameters will be needed in order to produce an Exact Match Fit for the specific Pet you're using. This is why I wanted to explain which parameters correspond to what functionality as transparently as I have, because I know that there are a lot of Players out there who are not intimately versed in the parsing of macro command language and syntax (since I'm one of them!). (Specialized) Disengage macro for toggling between Cower and Growl autocasting

Column 1 (the left most): YOUR Resistance value that you see on the Character screen frame Column 2: Your chance to resist 100% of the incoming damage. Column 3: Your chance to resist 75% of the incoming damage. Column 4: Your chance to resist 50% of the incoming damage. Column 5: Your chance to resist 25% of the incoming damage. Column 6: Your chance to resist 0% of the incoming damage (so chance you'll take full damage). Not exactly sure what Column 7 (the right most) is for, but I assume it's for your chance to resist non-damaging effects ... things like Polymorph ... or maybe even DoTs which work on an "all or nothing" system rather than on a partial resist system. If you can't read the numbers ... well ... that's your problem.

Some people just can't understand math and % signs. It's a foreign language to them.

Inspiring.

Here's a little something that I've been working on for my melee Hunter, but which I'd like to add an IF-THEN conditional to for casting Disengage. In this case, my Owl pet has Cower in slot 5 and Growl in slot 7, while slot 2 is Follow and slot 10 is Passive mode. The intended purpose is to have only one of these two toggles active at any given time. So I manually toggle on one of them and then just use the macro to flip between them. The wrinkle here is that I'm wanting to key this to use of Disengage, because when I use Disengage I'm wanting to transfer aggro from myself to my Pet. This means I want to reduce my Threat while increasing it on my Pet. The basic idea here is that I want to be able to "tandem tank" with my Pet and trade aggro with them. Default behavior is to have Cower On and Growl Off so as to get mobs to aggro on my Hunter in order to proc Mongoose Bite and Counterattack. But there are also times when I want my Pet to pull aggro off me, and in those cases I'd want to use Disengage to reduce my threat while simultaneously commanding my Pet to switch to a Cower Off and Growl On profile. Unfortunately, this isn't a symmetrically reversible situation ... because if I want to change from Cower Off and Growl On (so Pet tanking) back to a Cower On and Growl Off (so Hunter tanking) dynamic, I don't want to cast Disengage. This means that I want to cast Disengage to shed aggro onto my Pet, but I don't want to cast Disengage when I'm ready to regain aggro from my Pet. Essentially what I'm looking for is an IF-THEN conditional statement that will cause Disengage to be cast only if Cower is auto ON before toggling it off later in the macro. If Cower is auto OFF then Disengage is not cast. This way I can use a single macro to cover both cases to toggle between aggro management states. How would such an IF-THEN statement to check the autocast state for Cower need to be parsed?

Spend 30 talent points in Feral to get +20% intellect for use by Starfire/Moonfire/Wrath? Ummm ... I'd much rather spend 23 talent points in Balance to get Moonglow, actually, especially since you can't have both Heart of the Wild and Moonglow in the same spec (unless you go 23/28/0 which makes no sense to do whatsoever). Better choice than spending 30 talent points in the Feral tree to be a smarter spellcaster is ... to spend 13 talent points in the Restoration tree to get Improved Mark of the Wild and Reflection. Way More Better-ah™ for a Moonkin Balance Druid than going for Mark of the Wild 26-30 talent points deep in Feral given the tradeoffs involved.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?spell=7744 According to the database, Will of the Forsaken falls under the Physical school, which last I checked isn't covered by Silence(?). Any Horde Players around who can answer this one?

"I'm not real good with Cause & Effect. Why is that?"

In both cases, your Fishing skill went up ... so that part is working. Your complaint is that the skill ups aren't happening fast enough? Welcome to Vanilla ... leave your silver platters behind.

Not exactly sure when (or why) this started happening, since it wasn't a common occurrence a couple weeks ago, but now (on Darrowshire) the walk/run/stand animations for the Ghouls in Raven Hill Cemetary (Darkshire) are now extremely prone to moonwalking at all times. They animate as walking while standing still. They animate as running when their movement speed is only walking. They stand still and "glide" over the ground when they run towards you upon being attacked from range. This has all the hallmarks of an "off by one" function call for determining which animation to be playing for them whenever a particular action (don't move, walk, run) is called for. Probably something that ought to have been reported on Github, but it seems that my powers of DERP are too strong over there to let me post this issue, so I'm mentioning it here. Ought to be easy enough to investigate, since it involves practically all the Ghouls spawning in the corner of Raven Hill Cemetary near Abercrombie's Shack in the northeast corner of the cemetary.

So rather than the limiter being "can't proc from self procs" instead the limiter is "can't proc on any extra hits from any source" which makes life easier for the programmers.

Outsourcing your core competencies to others to do for you so you don't have to think as much for yourself is a founding American value! Oops, left the sarcasm toggle on ...

Winter's Chill is +2% critical hit chance that lasts 15 seconds and stacks up to 5 times and only affects/benefits Frost spells. At 2.5 seconds per casting, this would require 12.5 seconds of casting (at range) to build the stack using Frostbolt only to +10% (if you're the only Frost Mage). This is hardly an "always on" type of thing, but since it's a debuff, other party members can make use of the debuff if they're also using Frost spells. However, Mages are pretty much the only class with meaningful Frost damage spells Druids (Arcane/Nature), Hunters (Nature/Fire), Paladins (Holy), Priests (Holy/Shadow) and Warlocks (Fire/Shadow) don't do Frost damage, for the most part. Optimum deployment for fastest debuff stacking is 5 Frost Mages who all have this talent to build the max stack of debuffing very quickly (a single volley of Frostbolt from each of them) which would ultimately cost 5 talent points per Mage for a grand total of 25 talent points invested to bring +10% critical hit chance to Frost spells only for 5 Mages very quickly. Critical Mass offers the Fire Mage (and ONLY the Fire Mage) +6% critical hit chance with Fire spells. This is a self only buff. Costs 3 talent points for a +6% critical chance for 1 Fire Mage, with no benefits for others. Devastation offers +5% critical hit chance to the Warlock's own Destruction spells only. This is a self only buff. Costs 5 talent points for a +5% critical hit chance for 1 Warlock, with no benefits for others. Moonkin Aura offers +3% critical hit chance to EVERY party member within 30 yards, regardless of spell school, and requires no casting or debuff stacking to get the benefit of the buff since it's just ON. Costs 1 talent point for a +3% critical hit chance for self plus up to 4 others within 30 yards of the Moonkin. So, the options are: 5-25 talent points spent to achieve a +10% crit chance debuff stack that only applies to Frost (must have spent 30 talent points in Frost tree each) 3 talent points spent to achieve +6% crit chance to own Fire spells only (must have spent 23 talent points in Fire tree) 5 talent points spent to achieve +5% crit chance to own Destruction spells only (must have spent 15 talent points in Destruction tree) 1 talent point spent to achieve +3% crit chance to EVERYONE'S spells while they stay within 30 yards of the Moonkin (must have spent 31 talent points in Balance) Winter's chill is "great" only if everyone else is a Frost Mage (and has the same talent) and in a group of 5 Frost Mages is the equivalent to +10% to +50% crit chance (+10% each) at max debuff stacking for all 5 Frost Mages and costs 5 talent points to each Frost Mage to have. Assuming everyone is a Frost Mage with the talent, that's +50% crit chance with Frost only for 25 talent points spent, or +2% crit chance per talent point. Critical Mass is "great" for your own Fire spells, and that's it. It offers +2% crit chance per talent point to self only. Devastation is "great" for your own Destruction spells, and that's it. It offers +1% crit chance per talent point to self only. Moonkin form is "great" for every spellcaster in your party who is not also a Moonkin. It offers +3% crit chance per talent point to party reqgardless of spell school and does not require debuff stacking since it is an "always on" aura for the cost of 1 (extra) talent point. In a group of 5, this is adding +3% critical chance to up to 5 people, which equates to an up to +15% critical chance spead "evenly" amongst 5 party members. Yes, Frost Mages, Fire Mages and Warlocks can achieve greater quantities of critical chance with their spells (as can Holy Paladins and Holy Priests with their Holy Spells), but that's because their effects are all Self Only, meaning that the "shape" of their benefit is "greater" but also "narrower" at the same time. Moonkin Aura is a "lesser" yet at the same time "broader" benefit which compares quite favorably when looking at aggregate totals using an "area rule" method rather than compartmentalizing everything in terms of individual achievement(s) only (in a vacuum). In that respect, Moonkin aura is a "generous" (to the point of altruistic) buff to the entire party which they effectively don't get "credit" for under the standard benchmark of DPS meters. This makes it hard to quantify the contribution that Moonkin aura is ACTUALLY making in a way that actually accrues to the Moonkin's presence ... and since that quantification is difficult to do, most people don't do it at all and assign a value of ZERO to the aura rather than attribute the benefits granted to others to the existence of the Moonkin in the group. What happens when everyone benefits, but none of the credit gets awarded? Same thing that happens to all altruists ... they get taken advantage of and then discarded.

If you're just wanting a "pull shot" why not use Distracting Shot rank 1 instead of Arcane Shot rank 1? Costs less mana (20 versus 25, but who's counting, eh?) and doesn't put Arcane Shot on cooldown if you want to use it later for straight up damage.

Ahh ... another satisfied customer. *^_^* Welcome to the dark side of the shadows we Rogues live in.

As advertised, it's an attempt to make ALL of the Bag o' Tricks available to you, rather than "specializing" in any one particular trick. Fast generation of Combo Points for less Energy Cost means faster cycling through Finishers, with a decision at each Finisher to meet the needs of the circumstances you're currently fighting in. Yes, there are plenty of situations where the damage throughput generation of Garrote and Rupture will outperform that of Eviscerate. The problem is that in order to realize that (full) potential, The Fight Must Go On (and on and on and on). Ambush+Eviscerate is good for short sharp engagements that last less than 10 seconds. Garrote's duration is 18 seconds, while a Rupture lasts between 8 and 16 seconds. If you're expecting to keep fighting for longer than 10 seconds at a stretch, it might be better to use Garrote+Rupture instead of Ambush+Eviscerate ... assuming that what you're fighting is NOT Immune to Bleed effects. If it is Immune to Bleed effects, totally go with Ambush+Eviscerate. But yeah ... having a "surplus" of Combo Points (and Energy?) is a really nice thing to have on a Rogue. Being able to unload a 5 CP Finisher every 10-15 seconds (or so) instead of every 20 seconds (or more!) really gives you a sense of Rogue-ish purpose to stay on top of things and anticipate your next move(s) before you execute them. Going heavy Subtlety, particularly from Level 10+ is widely believed (around here) to be "inferior" for Leveling simply because anything other than Combat (Swords) is perceived to be "slower" at racking up the kills (and therefore the XP). Those who advocate for Combat Swords will freely admit that playing the spec is "boring" because it makes your Rogue something of a "straight ahead fighter" with not much variation in how to play. Suffice it to say, the wheel ruts for Combat Swords are well worn and they run pretty deep. The alternative of Assassination, particularly Seal Fate/Cold Blood type builds are next in popularity because their purpose is to "murder faces" with extreme prejudice (and crits and poisons). You just look at the tree and it's kind of obvious how it's supposed to work. Not too much to be said there. And then there's Subtlety, which most people aren't interested in looking at past the first 2 tiers, mainly because the tree doesn't offer "obvious" ways to supercharge your damage throughput like Assassination and Combat do. Subtlety is all about making your Rogue a "slippery bastard" to fight, and it does it very well, but for most people that isn't worth losing (big) DAMAGE numbers for, so the tree gets derided and discounted as offering anything beyond maybe 4-6 talents that are worth the price of admission (Master of Deception, Elusiveness, Camouflage, Hemorrhage and Preparation being the main ones, with Ghostly Strike earning a "Miss Congeniality" also ran status). The thing is, Hemorrhage, and the ways you can use it, is quite literally game changing, in large part because it's a Combo Point generator that costs only 35 Energy. Everything else costs 40-60 Energy, which means that everything else you could use as a Combo Point generator skill takes LONGER to build to 5 CPs AND have the Energy to use a Finisher. Think of it this way. Using a talented Sinister Strike 5 times costs 5x40=200 Energy, which takes 20 seconds to recover if starting from zero. Using Hermorrhage 5 times costs 175 Energy, which takes 18 seconds to recover if starting from zero. All of the Finishers cost either 25 Energy or (in the case of Eviscerate) 35 Energy. This means that when including the cost of using a CP builder skill 5 times PLUS the cost of a Finisher, a Sinister Strike build will need 225-235 Energy minimum(!), which will take about 24 seconds to recover at a rate of 20 Energy per 2 seconds. By contrast, a Hemorrhage build will cost only 200-210 Energy to accomplish the same thing, which will take 20-22 seconds to recover at the same rate of 20 Energy per 2 seconds. That means that the Hemorrhage build is inherently capable of being 1/6th faster to build to Finishers than a build relying on (improved) Sinister Strike. And that's before getting into any of the "free CP when you Dodge" proc in Setup, the intitial "freebie" proc for an extra Combo Point from Initiative when (re)opening from Stealth with Ambush/Garrote/Cheap Shot, or even the "free" Combo Point proc of Ruthlessness and the chance to generate "free" Energy in Relentless Strikes (although the latter two talents are of course Assassination rather than Subtley). As soon as Combo Points costing ZERO Energy get into the mix, the rate at which you can zoom from zero to five for a Finisher starts really coming down ... and delivering more Finishers in a shorter span of time seriously empowers the Player in ways that a slower buildup to 5 CPs just can't match. If you're Level 23 and still in the process of working your way deeper into Subtlety, you just need to be patient. Make sure that every point you're spending is a point going towards getting to Hemorrhage as fast as possible. As you gain Levels and earn more talent points, you'll see quite directly how everything starts to come together, especially once you can pick up Hemorrhage at Level 30. After that, it's gravy train time.

The word "viable" requires context. Do you mean "viable" in terms of elitistjerks endgame raiding of delivering maximum damage throughput in the shortest amount of time so as to speedrun through 40 man raids? Do you mean "viable" in terms of being "successful" at soloing and grouping for 5 man dungeons? Do you mean "viable" in terms of rushing through Level progression from 10-60 as quickly as possible so as to get on with the endgame raiding (already)? Do you mean "viable" in terms of being able to Level through progression from 10-60 in a way that is fun to play and not "self-gimping" in terms of Corpse Runs Per Hour of gameplay? Pretty much everything about your question hinges upon the context of which environment you want to be "viable" in, because different environments reward different build strategies and investments (PvE versus PvP, for example). For PvE play, I'm personally building my way towards using a 12/8/31 build on Darrowshire that is organized around Initiative/Lightning Reflexes/Dodge/Setup maximization for generating "free" Combo Points as well as Ruthlessness/Relentless Strikes/Hemorrhage for maximum energy efficiency at generating Combo Points "on demand" to use in Slice and Dice/Eviscerate/Rupture/Cheap Shot Finishers as needed given the circumstances I've fighting in. Slice and Dice offers either +20% (10-41) or +30% (42-60) melee speed, depending on skill rank (1 or 2), and offers a greater return on investment per talent point than Improved Eviscerate (and unlike Eviscerate is something you can keep "up" all the time rather than "saving" it for 5 CP Finishers only). Openers from Stealth will typically be either Ambush or Garrote depending on the situation, and I do a LOT of Pickpocketing to supplement my income (and to eventually gain Ravenholdt Reputation from pilfered Heavy Junkboxes). Garrote plus Rupture on this build amounts to a You're Already Dead, You Just Haven't Gotten The Memo Yet type of performance against highly armored targets, while Ambush plus Hemorrhage/Eviscerate makes short work of lightly armored targets. Currently, my Rogue is only Level 32 with all talent points spent in Subtlety thus far, but the build just keeps getting stronger and stronger as the talent points accumulate and get spent. In keeping with the Subtlety theme, the build plays very much like a versatile "bag of tricks" that allows it to perform quite nicely in almost any situation and circumstance. That's because rather than relying on riding a One Trick Pony™ into the sunset, this build makes use of very nearly ALL THE TRICKS that a Rogue can bring to bear. This is because the cornerstone foundation of the 12/8/31 build isn't any one single IWIN! one hit kill strategy, and if you can't pull it off then it sucks to be you, but instead relies on the synergistic potential to be found in efficient generation of Combo Points for very little Energy cost, reducing wait times before being able to unleash (another) 5 CP Finisher on your target. There's even a decent amount of Dodge Tanking potential in the build in the event that you find yourself needing to hold aggro (a common occurrence while soloing), which can result in earning "free" Combo Points to use with Finishers. Overall, the build is fast, responsive and flexible, making it a very fun experience to Level from 10-60 in PvE. And then there's this bit of heresy I wrote up for someone else in another thread that ultimately wound up making them very very happy with a PvP build, even though I don't PvP myself. See for yourself ...

Sadly enough, in this "era" of vanilla, the only way to accomplish what you're asking for is ... to reroll.

Probably way too late to request this, but ... apparently with the release of 2.0 there were added pet skill commands, namely: /petautocaston <skill name> /petautocastoff <skill name> What these commands did was turn on and off the autocasting for specific Pet skills, which is useful for doing things like switching Cower and/or Growl on and off being autocast depending on other factors like use of Distracting Shot (want to transfer aggro to the Hunter) and Disengage (want to shed aggro from the Hunter) and would be really useful to incorporate into macros for those skills to better coordinate Pet actions. Unfortunately, the functionality for these macro commands is something that wasn't found in 1.12.1 and wasn't introduced until patch 2.0. Any possibility of getting these commands added to this addon?

You don't need to have the Turtle attack anything. Go find the nearest Inn (wherever you are) and park your Hunter there inside. Your toolbar should show you your Pet Skills (Attack, Follow, Stay, you know the drill) and on that toolbar you ought to see Shell Shield Rank 1. Click it. Watch your pet Glow as they activate Shell Shield. If you didn't learn the skill on Click then wait 3 minutes to complete the cooldown. Return to step Click it and wash, rinse, repeat until you do learn the skill. Feed the Turtle enough food to keep them Yellow on Happiness (Green is nice but not necessary and has no influence on learning skills from Pets) so as to not "waste" food on a Pet you're going to Abandon as soon as you learn their Skill.