pet abilities priority (wind serpent lightning breath)

[Nightsights]

saw someone else on the wow forums with the same issue as my wind serpent. not a huge deal but annoying and a slight dps loss. after lightning breath falls off it doesnt always refresh immediately. i've seen it go up to about 20s before reapplying. even manually clicking on the ability on the pet bar, i can see (omnicc) the gcd clock moving on all my pet's abilities. seems to me that lightning breath is low on the pet's priority que.

[Kurasu]

Actually, I have a problem with the GCD and my Core Hound as well. The abilities with a long CD are supposed to be off the GCD, but the Core Hound haste is on it. I usually have to turn bite off to be able to activate it at all so it's not spamming the GCD.

With the Wind Serpent, have you tried checking which of the moves it's using before it activates Lightning Breath?

[Comett]

Yeah, I've noticed this issue with my dragonhawk also. It's annoying to have to take "time out" to spam click the icon a few times in order to try and beat a gcd.

[Sarantha]

All the "good" abilities seem to be low on a pet's priority cast list. I noticed this while using my windserpents in combat and how they COULD cast lightning breath more often than they seemed to be, but were using other stupid abilities like bite. I tried turning off all abilities except growl and lightning breath (since I was doing dailies, I wanted her to keep aggro while I dps'd the mob) and she still seemed to prioritize auto-attack over lightning breath.

[Anyia]

Yeah to cast Ancient Hysteria I use a macro that does a /petfollow first to give me a chance to sneak in the cast!

[Sodequis]

Prior to more recent patches on my unholy dk, I would have to macro my ghoul's claw ability with my scourge strike because there was a known bug where the ghoul would wait about the equivalent of time it took to regen 10 focus over what was needed before using it again. Blizzard has corrected this to a large degree but maybe a similar macro would help with hunter pets. I would say depending on spec.. macro it with steady shot or arcane shot should minimize some of the buff loss.

[Nachtwulf]

I've seen this too; all of the pet abilities (most annoyingly the ones that are on obligatory manual-cast like Worm Burrow, Corehound Hysteria, and Rhino Stampede) are on the GCD and thus your pet will use ANYTHING IT POSSIBLY CAN for as LONG AS IT POSSIBLY CAN. In order to get these to even go off, I've had to turn off EVERYTHING, including bite/claw/whatever, just so I can manage to get the damn thing to go off at the time I want it to. Otherwise I have to stop everything and stare at that spinning cycle and try to sneak it in before the pet does anything whatsoever else. This nerfs the hell out of my dps since I'm not hitting buttons AND my pet has to be nerfed to the ground just for me to get it to function (I'm habitually BM so the last thing I want to do is turn off all my pet's attack abilities and leave them there...)

This -really- needs to get fixed.