Neat Pet Macro: Random Pet!

[CrystalKitten]

So, I know it's not really useful when running dungeons, or for BGs, or some other things. However, for many daily things, or farming/archaeology, it doesn't really matter which pet you have out. I'm the kind of person that can never make up her mind... For example.. I will stand infront of a shelf in the grocery store for soemtimes almost half an horu staring at flavours unable to make up my mind... Until someone comes by and says "that one" and I'm all "OKAY!" (if it was on my list, heh). So, I thought it would be neat if I could have something similar for my pets. I remembered doing a random poly macro for my mage... so why not for my pet! Not sure if anyone else have ever thought of it.. but it's neat for when you don't care what you use, and want to give everyone an equal chance

So.. you can probably figure it out yourself if you've ever played with macros, but here it is!

/castrandom Call Pet 1, Call Pet 2, Call Pet 3, Call Pet 4, Call Pet 5

As I said.. very simple.. but I think it might be my new favourite macro, heh. I've tested it, it works, not sure what would happen if you had an empty spot, but probably just the "you don't have a pet to summon" error, and then you can roll again

[Lupis]

I never thought of that... But that's a good idea!

[Worba]

That is a neat idea. You could even go a step further and break it out by family type, like...

Make a habit of keeping tenacity pets in slots 1 and 2, and ferocity pets in slots 3 and 4

Random Tenacity
/castrandom Call Pet 1,Call Pet 2

Random Ferocity
/castrandom Call Pet 3,Call Pet 4

(I normally leave slot 5 empty, but YMMV)

This way, you retain some control over the pet's talent tree but still have a nice element of randomness, e.g. if you're solo'ing, hit macro 1, or if you're entering a pug hit macro 2 (at least if it's a regular dungeon where pet buff is not really such SRS BZNS)

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah, I'd thought of something like that too. It would be relatively easy to split it up, and so on. Or filling your stable with ONLY dungeon pets when you know you're going to chain run some dungeons, or BG pets when you're gonna chain run BGs... and so on.

Largely I wanted it for my solo stuff. I have so many neat pets now.. I can never decide which to use! And, it doesn't matter so much what I use for solo. But the splitting it up is good too. You could probably even mod it so it could be done all in one button. I don't know much about using shit/ctrl/etc modifiers, but could probably make it so if you just click, it's all random, if you shift click, slots 1 and 2, ctrl click, slots 3 and 4. (maybe someone that knows more about macros could wright that up! Assuming it wouldn't be too many characters that is)

[Worba]

I do know more about macros, and have been thinking of building a small addon that would let you do line commands as...

/rpet_callrandpet <tenacity/ferocity/cunning>
==> Calls a random pet from active stable, choosing only from a certain family tree if same is provided else it picks randomly from entire active stable

/rpet_refreshactivestable <# tenacity # ferocity # cunning>
==> Only works when talking to a stablemaster. Rebuilds your active stable slots from those in the inactive stable; if you provide desired # of each family type it works within that restriction else the new pets are chosen completely at random

EDIT: Actually may not be possible from an addon - never needed it for combat pets before now, but looks like CallCompanion only works on mounts and vanity pets. Poo...

[CrystalKitten]

That would be neat, Worba. I'm not really much of an addon user, but that could be one I'd make an exception for. I like ones that more.. do something you can't for fun, not to make the game easier in any way, for example. My stable is starting to get a bit larger now, and I'd love to swap out random ones. Is there any way while building it you could have it so that you KEEP certain pets in your active stable? Example.. I don't think I ever EVER wanna pack my Suki up into the stable(she's super special, story's in my taming thread though, heh)... But it would be nice to be able to have 2-4 slots randomly chosen every few days!

[Worba]

I'll keep looking - hopefully I can find an alternative to CallCompanion.

[CrystalKitten]

Well, I'm happy with my new macro either way Everything else is just a bonus.

[Worba]

I don't normally like to use mod keys, but in this case it's probably the only way, so it looks like your idea is probably the most feasible at the moment:

#showtooltip
/castrandom [mod][btn:2] Call Pet 3,Call Pet 4;Call Pet 1,Call Pet 2

Again assuming you load tenacity pets into slots 1 and 2, and ferocity pets into slots 3 and 4...

If you click you get a random tenacity; if you hold down a modifier + click, or if you right click, you get a random ferocity pet.

One nice thing about /castrandom is that it allows you to weight your results, so let's say you like slot 3 more but occasionally want to see slow 4 just to "mix things up", you could do:

#showtooltip
/castrandom [mod][btn:2] Call Pet 3,Call Pet 3,Call Pet 4;Call Pet 1,Call Pet 2

Is that what you were looking for?

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah, that's what my idea was Totally happy with this macro now Hehe. I just can't believe I didn't think of it sooner, heh. Then again, until recently I didn't really have very many cool pets, heh.

[CrystalKitten]

Noticed some strange behaviour with the macro.. sometimes it will "stick" on calling my empty pet slot... Not sure why, sometimes it works fine though. Any thoughts? Maybe it's just band random rolling though.. But getting 10+ Call Pet 2s in a row seems a little more than bad luck, heh.

[Worba]

Did you weight it or are you just running it as:

#showtooltip
/castrandom [mod][btn:2] Call Pet 3,Call Pet 4;Call Pet 1,Call Pet 2

[CrystalKitten]

I'm just running it straight up for now, so no extra weighting at all. It definitely seems to get stuck. I'm wondering if it's a macro bug.. as if I change it slightly (ie.. add spaces after the ,) I'll get ONE successful cast.. then it'll get stuck again.. and then if I change it back... I'll get one more successful cast, then it'll get stuck. For now, I've just removed the empty slot, but it'd be nice to keep them all in there. As I'm not sure if I'll always keep it empty.

[Worba]

So, you're running this, with one slot being empty?

/castrandom Call Pet 1, Call Pet 2, Call Pet 3, Call Pet 4, Call Pet 5

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah. I tried it with [btn:2] (with the thought of I could put stuff I can run randoms with in those slots) but it doesn't seem to make much of a distinction whether I click, or rightclick. But, I can live without that. Getting stuck on the empties is annoying though.

[Worba]

Hmm. Yeah, sounds like it probably doesn't like /Call Pet # for slots that are empty... even as a potential condition. Might be that it's running a precompile of some kind, and choking on a hairball.

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah. Ah well... It's strange that sometimes it works.. It's almost like.. it caches the error or something.. cause it'll work.. and then once you get the error.. you ALWAYS get the error. I guess I'll just have to edit my macro when ever my slot usage changes, heh.

[Worba]

It should always work so long as you only run it when all 5 slots contain pets... no?

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah, it works fine as long as no empty slots are in there. But if you have an empty slot, once it hits the empty slot, it won't work anymore. (Unless you mean with the modifier, in which case it always just picked a random pet from my full list no matter what I set my macro/button to, but I'm good with that, I usually chain run randoms anyways, or would more likely use a random pet in a regular heroic.. where it wouldn't matter so much which family I picked so long as I turned off the taunts, heh)

[GormanGhaste]

This is a great idea for doing dailies! I usually choose a pet based on what random mini-pet my add-on summons, but sometimes I'm not near a stable master to pull out the appropriate hunter pet, or the mini-pet isn't related to any of my hunter pets. And as this patch seems to desummon my hunter pet frequently, I foresee this macro getting a lot of use!