I’m assuming most of you who read this blog also read OutDPS, however, if you are one of the three or four people who doesn’t, I’m going to take a quick minute to bring a post there to your attention:
It appears that simply letting your pet auto-cast its attacks lags a bit and results in a DPS loss. You can find the details (and advice on how to fix it) right here.
Also note that this effects all pets, including warlock and mage ones.
Just a heads-up from your Friendly Neighborhood Pike!
I recently received an e-mail from Xanth over at Out of Range. He informed me that there is apparently a nasty bug going around that is affecting Call Stabled Pet which can make the cooldown 25 days or something fun like that.
Fortunately, he also told me that there is a fix, and sent me this picture to post up here to make sure everyone knows:
The more you know! *shooting star*
In other news, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever it is you celebrate! /nods
It all started when I was waiting around for my scheduled “Mirkblood Run” with my guildies in a couple hours. I figured I’d might as well work on some of those dungeon achievements that hadn’t been given to me, in the meantime, so off I headed to Blackfathom Deeps.
At least, that’s what the intended plan was.
Instead the boat disappeared out from under my feet and I wound up in the water in the middle of nowhere. Desperately I tried to swim back to shore but the Fatigue Bar was too much for me.
I spawned as a wisp ghost not at a Spirit Healer, but out in the ocean.
I made the long trek back to a graveyard outside of Stormwind, only to find… no Spirit Healer.
/restart game
/spawn as a ghost in the middle of the ocean again
/long trek back to Elwynn Forest again
This time, a Spirit Healer was there, so I rez’d and promptly got disconnected. Logged back in. And… I was alive! And things were back to normal.
Maybe.
I tried to mount. “You cannot use that while swimming.”
…
I got a whisper from somebody. “LOL, you’re running at 100% speed.”
…
Not long after that I was in Stormwind running around in the canals. Because I could walk on water now. People were stopping to stare at me and buff me. I pranced around on the water and had a blast despite the fact that my mana was stuck at 50% and using any aspect would immediately boot me from the game.
Then things started to get annoying. I tried to log into a battleground, no dice. I tried to go into Stockades, it wouldn’t let me in. I managed to ride a gryphon to Duskwood, but when I landed the flight master was gone. As were all other NPCs.
By this time I had sent a ticket into Blizzard and they’d already responded with an e-mail along the lines of “Thanks for your report and we’re glad you fixed it yourself!” Except, of course, I hadn’t fixed it myself (dunno where they got that idea), and things were getting worse by the minute. I sent in another ticket and went on a little personal fix-it spree; I moved my WTF, Cache, and Interface folders, I ran the Repair tool, I tried to run the game on both my Linux and Windows partitions, I ran the game on computers that weren’t mine and with routers that were not mine.
All that happened was it eventually got to the point where I couldn’t do anything, on any computer, with addons disabled or not. I couldn’t do anything because I got an “Another action is in progress” message. The worst part was realizing that this also meant I couldn’t feed Tux, who was getting more and more upset with me.
Or should I say, is STILL getting more and more upset with me. Because yes, this glitch has not been fixed yet.
I’m not in game right now, but my character still is. She can’t log out. She’s stuck. I have to force-quit the program and it doesn’t log her out. Tux is sitting there at maxed unhappiness; fortunately for me as of the latest patch pets don’t run away anymore (I… don’t know how I would have reacted to that happening. /shudder)
My guild went and did the Mirkblood quest without me. They have all been very supportive and understanding and wished I could go but… I couldn’t, and there was nothing anyone could do. That quest is gonna be gone in a few days. I hope this bug gets fixed before then you guys… I want that bat minipet and I want to see all the World Event content…
…but six hours later and no reply from Blizz, so here I sit…
You may have heard some hunters say they a have a “bug” with their cat pet, where they will very firmly turn Prowl off of Autocast and it will… automatically turn itself back onto Autocast. Everytime you mount or dismount or zone into someplace new, it comes back. There are “fixes” like resummoning your pet, or putting the offending Prowl on your pet’s action bar, and sometimes it will work, but sometimes it won’t.
Tawyn ran into this problem with Locke and Lunapike ran into this problem with Alyosha but they were both easily fixed. I dragged Prowl onto my pet’s action bar, turned it off, dismissed and resummoned my pet, and… problem solved. Neither of them are Prowling anymore and things are snazzy. Although even if they did have the prowling bug, it wouldn’t have been too big of a deal, because I have other pets I could use if it got too annoying.
So then I logged into Althalor. My hunter who only uses cats.
Guess what?
They won’t stop prowling.
Anytime I mount/dismount, Prowl. Anytime I log in and out, Prowl. Anytime I take a flight point and land somewhere, Prowl. It doesn’t matter how many times I turn it off. It doesn’t matter how many of those million tricks I found on the internet I try. It doesn’t matter that I did the little trick I did with both Tawyn and Lunapike to fix the problem. My poor cat hunter’s cats are simply not cooperating.
Why it’s only happening on one of my hunters and not the others, I have no idea, and why it had to happen specifically to my cat-only hunter I have no idea, but the result was that it wasn’t long before I got sick of the stealth noise and got tired of constantly having to tell my kitties to unprowl, and I decided to break protocol and go tame a non-kitty pet to use until this all gets sorted out.
At the suggestion of a commenter, I opted to go with a moth.
…let’s play the guess what game again. Guess what?
The only pre-Outlands-level moths in the game are in the Draenei starting zone. Althalor is a blood elf, on a PvP server.
Did I? You’d better believe I did!
It actually wasn’t that bad. I think a lot of people are distracted by the zombies running around so I didn’t run into anybody (except, well, a zombie) on the way there. Then I jumped into the water at Auberdine, drowned myself under the draenei boat, hopped onto the draenei boat as a ghost, rode over to Azuremyst Isle, and– still ghostified– ran myself to the Spirit Healer who is standing not too far away from where level 1 draenei first spawn. I rez’d there and, much to my luck, there was a moth right in front of my face.
/tame!
/yell Byebye Draenei!
/hearthstone!
I only had enough time last night to play with the moth long enough to realize that the moth’s special ability, Serenity Dust, does not seem to be autocasting and I have to manually trigger it. So now I find myself wondering… is this a known issue or is poor Althalor just having horrific luck with pets?
Oh, also, I need a name for the moth. Something other than PikesWorstNightmare (have I mentioned I have this phobia of moths in real life but the ones in WoW don’t bug me? …pun not intended.) I was thinking of something dreamlike or trancelike cause I think it would fit. Toss me your suggestions.
Something strange happened to me yesterday in Heroic Slave Pens. I was in the middle of “Totem Duty” on a boss fight when suddenly my Kill Command button seemed to get stuck. You know what a button looks like when you’re pressing it down and using it? It was stuck there.
No biggie, right?
Actually, yes.
See, the Kill Command Bug is a mean, horrible monster. The Kill Command Bug says “NO AUTO SHOT FOR YOU!” and then points and laughs as you cry.
Yes, so long as that Kill Command button looks like that, you cannot Auto Shot no matter how hard you try. You can Arcane. You can Steady. You can Multi. But you don’t fire any Auto Shots. And that, my friends, is Not Good when you’re mid-boss-fight in a Heroic.
Fortunately, amidst my panicking on Ventrilo, my boyfriend picked up Totem Duty for me as I sat there spamming Steady Shot over and over, feeling a bit like a lost and confused kitten. Auto Shot is the solid, unshakable rod that you weave your other shots around, and when it suddenly disappears, the defining aspect of playing a hunter– the shot rotation– just crumbles. It was a horrible feeling.
But then, suddenly! The button got unstuck and everything worked again! Hooray!
I wrote it off as a glitch caused by lag or something and didn’t worry about it. I got some new epic pants and spent basically the last of my gold gemming and armor-kit-ing them and went to bed satisfied.
This morning I went to go farm motes to make up for all the gold I’d spent on my new pants the day before. I figured I’d level a lowbie pet while I was at it; it makes things more interesting.
And then it happened again. The Kill Command button locked up and Auto Shot disappeared. Helplessly I watched my poor level 67 wolf’s health plummet as the level 71 Air Elemental pounded on him; some 40% of my DPS was gone and I couldn’t kill the mob fast enough. Barely he survived that thing. *shudders thinking about it*
This is when I alt+tab’d and turned to Google for help. It turns out the Kill Command Bug isn’t just something that happens to me, it happens to other hunters too. It occasionally happens with other things, like Rapid Fire. And so long as the bug is active, you also cannot feed your pet or log out.
And apparently, currently the only way to fix it is to crit.
So I ran around using Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot and Steady Shot until finally one of them crit. Ding! Auto Shot comes back home to me and everything is fine again.
It didn’t happen again for the rest of that playing session but lemme tell ya, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at the Kill Command button the same way again, at least not for a long time. It sits there taunting me. Just waiting to pounce. Just waiting to catch me unawares and pull the Shot Rotation Doormat out from under my feet again.
So what do we know about the Kill Command Bug? We know that Blizzard is aware of the problem although it doesn’t look like it will be fixed until the next patch (it’s in the “issues list” for patch 2.4).
We know that so long as the bug is active you cannot fire Auto Shot, or feed your pet or log out.
We know that the bug is “fixed” if you crit or if you forcibly restart the game (/reloadui does not work. It was one of the first things I tried too.)
It has been suggested that the bug is caused by hitting Kill Command too quickly after your Steady Shot. Guess that’s what I get for making Kill Command a hotkey and honing my reflexes so I pound it basically as soon as I can. =P I suppose I can take the bug as a compliment then?
Until the patch hits, hunters, be on the lookout. The Kill Command Bug could be coming for YOU next, when you least expect it.
Muahahahaha!
*huddles in the corner and whimpers*