This won’t be new information to many, but will be new and useful to some. Toward the end of Cataclysm, a clever hunter came up with a macro wherein we could summon and dismiss each of pets in rapid succession. If each of these pets was a Spirit Beast, we could cast all 5 Spirit Mends in a small window.
While this was clever, in practice it was troublesome. Lots of downtime for dps or movement, and we had to wait 1-3 seconds for the pet to fully inherit our stats before casting the heal. Otherwise, it would hit for almost nothing. And not every hunter had 5 Spirit Beasts to keep in his/her stable.
With Stampede, those worries go away, and we have a cool way to get a lot of heals very easily. First, make sure you’re using Glyph of Stampede. Second, be using a Spirit Beast. When Stampede is up, you can cast all 5 heals at once, for a substantial healing cooldown.
I hadn’t seen this strat explicitly mentioned on the WHU, so I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention. It’s not hard to find a variety of uses for it, particularly when soloing. It’s become a staple of a lot of high-end soloing, and also Brawler’s Guild, so it’s likely that Blizzard knows about it and isn’t planning on nerfing it anytime soon.
{edit} An astute poster below correctly pointed out that the Stampede spirit beasts don’t heal for the full amount (25% in fact). I’ve tested and confirmed this; it must have been nerfed a little while ago. Nevertheless, unless you NEED another pet in your stable, this is still a useful tactic. I also want to point out that this heal scales well with AP. So plan accordingly if you have that option. Pots, trinket procs or uses, various buffs, any of these will help.
WHU Update
In WHU news, there’s been some grumblings on posts recently, or lack thereof, and they’ve been heard. I can’t speak directly for Frost, but I know he’s been MIA for a variety of understandable and unavoidable reasons. I’ve been able to fill in some with Brawler’s Guild posts (diving back into Dark Summoner this weekend…fingers crossed), and I may try to up my article-writing for a week or two now to fill the void, but I’m not the blogging machine that he is. So in the meantime, trust that the WHU isn’t being forgotten, and thanks for being awesome!
Cheers Arth,
I for one really appriciate having something to read/watch whilst i’m supposed to be working during the day!
Hope Frost is okay, and these reasons for absence aren’t too terrible.
Keep up the Brawling, the GG Engineering one really helped me out. Can’t wait for the other 7 vids!
Cheers Arth,
I for one really appriciate having something to read/watch whilst i’m supposed to be working during the day!
Hope Frost is okay, and these reasons for absence aren’t too terrible.
Keep up the Brawling, the GG Engineering one really helped me out. Can’t wait for the other 7 vids!
Thanks for the update, and interesting info on spirit beast heals. Any word on new spirit beasts coming up in 5.2?
Just thought you should know, Blizzard actually nerfed this a while ago so that the four psirit beasts you summon via stampede only do 25% of their normal spirit mend healing. so in reality using the spiritmend-stampede trick only gets you 1 extra spirit mend worth of healing instead of found. On the bright side though, it does take 4 dispels to get rid of them all.
Not sure if this was a change only in arena or everywhere else too but you may want to check it.
Hm. I’ll test this. It may have changed since I used it last. I’ve still seen it referred to though, as recently as a few days ago, so apparently it’s still being used in soloing and Brawler’s strats.
Tested and confirmed. I edited the article to reflect this. Nice catch.
If you have use for any tips for brawler’s guild, I’m currently working on rank 8.
Battletag is Serphetes#1702 if you need any help.
I’m assuming you can also use the glyph and a Quilen with stampede to battle rez a party in quick succession?
A good question. While I don’t have a definite answer, this sounds a bit too good to be true. The Spirit Mend spellcast doesn’t differentiate between pets, so it casts simultaneously. So I think, at best, you’d cast rez on the same person 5 times all at once, but wouldn’t be able to bring up more than one person.
If that isn’t the case, this is awesome, and I may try to test it when I get the chance. But I have a suspicion that we would have heard something about this already if it were possible.
Hi Guys,
Ive been using a sprit mend heal macro for some time. Its either a help in LFR for healers or dungs or a saviour when the healer is down and the tanks about to die in a dung.
Many a time ive moused over “ person about to cop it “ and spirit mend. Or Stampede spirit mend for epic healing.
Stampede mega heal of absolute truth:
/cast [harm] Stampede
/cast [target=mouseover, help] Spirit Mend; [target=player] Spirit Mend
Just spirit mend:
/cast [target=mouseover, help] Spirit Mend; [target=player] Spirit Mend
Oh and someone mentioned the quillin battle ress:
/cast [target=focus,dead] Eternal Guardian; Eternal Guardian
Or
/cast [target=mouseover] Eternal Guardian; Eternal Guardian
Cool, thanks. I specifically didn’t include macros because there’s so many of them, and there’s no “best” way to do it. But this may help some who are looking.
Hope Frost is fine and a big “raspberry” to anybody who “complains” that he has not been doing “enough”. Thanks to Arth for the posts.
I would suggest only using 4 spirit beasts and then a Corehound for Ancient Hysteria.
Oh, and let me add: The pets summoned with Stampede do NOT share cooldowns with the real pets (I don’t know with the Stampede glyph though). However, if you want to manually cast a spell with the Stampede pets, that particular spell must be off cooldown on your main pet. Casting it will then cause all the Stampede pets to cast it as well. If your main pet has 25 seconds cooldown on Spirit Mend and you cast Stampede, you will NOT be able to cast Spirit Mend at will. There is another way though, but it is less reliable: If you leave Spirit Mend on autocast on your other active pets (or on your main pet if using Glyph, I presume), they can automatically cast it, but will only do so if a friendly target in range is below 50% hp, I believe.
For this reason, if you use pets that have different buffs, you’ll want to leave those on autocast. If you use multiple Spirit Beasts, you either want Spirit Mend on autocast, or you MUST make sure Spirit Mend will be ready before the Stampede pets expire, otherwise you will not be able to cast it.
An interesting side note: Last Stand gives YOU a buff. If you have 5 tenacity pets and Last Stand is ready on your main pet and you cast it, you actually gain 5 Last Stand buffs, giving your pet a ridiculous health pool. Since Mend Pet heals a percentage of your pet’s health, this can also be used as a crazy pet survival cooldown.
Because of the Stampede pets not sharing cooldown with the actual pets, it’s actually possible to have 9 Last Stand up at the same time (Main pet + 4 Stampede pets, then by dismissing and summoning the other active pets one by one and using their Last Stand, you get 5+1+1+1+1).
If you don’t believe me, I made a screenshot as proof. This is my wolf, unbuffed other than Last Stand, with 2147k hp :D
http://i.imgur.com/SmohF.jpg
Great info, Cari, and I’ve followed some of your exploits on EJ and Youtube. This was mostly a PSA on the basic strategy, since it’s new to many hunters, but there’s definitely nuances like this to our Stampede stable that help maximize our dps and survivability.
Really appreciate the WHU Update, Arth. Wishing Frost the best, and looking forward to further updates when possible.
On the one hand, I miss Frost’s well-written and highly-researched guides on spec, rotation, talents… and everything else that caught his interest.
On the other, thanks to WHU from Wrath to now, I know how to find most of what I need – comparing my own gear on FemaleDwarf, how to read the sometimes-dense EJ theorycraft articles… and thanks to the WoW Hunters Hall I’ve got a great source of new and interesting articles and guides.
Much as I wish Frostheim the same joy in theorycraft, max DPS, extreme soloing, and creative raiding… he has already done a ton to make me the hunter I am today.