spirit wolves and pet food?

[nafreyue]

couldn't find this in the search, so my bad if its out there..

Was told the other day that the DK's ghoul is able to use the pet food that hunters use, spiced mammoth treats,
so i decide to try them out on my spirit wolves and noticed that it did actualy increase my wolves STR by 30, and increased its AP by 30 also.

Now i know its not that much, but adding a /use.. in a macro with the wolves you just hit the key twice, once to summon and again to use the food, which i never noticed caused a GCD or any thing.

Would this be worth doing every CD or not?

[stevos]

Interesting, might have to visist a test dummy tonight to test it.

[MushroomBomb]

You can't use food in combat, can you? It strikes me as impractical...

[nafreyue]

hmm, never thought about the incombat part, will have to try it out

[lycian]

You can do it. I have from time to time, but i ran out of treats so i didn't bother making more. It's doesn't trigger another GCD, but you have to click it twice as stated so it just depends on if you want to try and add it into your rotation/remember to use it.

As far as dps increase, i didn't do any significant, controlled testing so i can't say how big the benefit is, but it will certainly be an increase if you use it each time. The down side is that you need A LOT of them since you have to use one on each summon.

[nafreyue]

yup, can confirm they are usable in combat,

as for using them, adding them into a rotation is nothing really, just spam your FS key bind more than once, when they are summoned 2nd press use's the food.

plus, the extra 30AP gain might make some difference when raid buffed, but therocrafting has never been a strong point of mine

[Levva]

Interesting!! Especially if it doesn't use a GCD. It would add 30 Str = +60 AP (wolves get 2x their str as AP) interesting to test thoroughly though as we have two wolves, does it only buff one of them? Does it use two treats and buff both? We might need a hunter when testing to do a Beast Lore to check the stats of each wolf.

60AP boost (or average 30 AP if its only on 1 wolf) would mean an extra 4.286 dps (or 2.143 dps). The effect over the CD of the wolves would be 4.286 * 45 / 180 = +1.07 dps not exactly earth shattering, and quite expensive given that the recipe takes 1 Northern Spice to make for only a 45 sec buff.

NB. When wolves despawn they lose all buffs, you'd have to use another Treat next time they spawned.

[kudzupo]

A few notes on this as I have way too many northern spices .

Using the pet food does not trigger the GCD.

It (on glance) seems to only affect one wolf. At least the buff only shows up on one wolf. It only uses one. I didn't test trying to use two treats.

Of course this will be different in a raiding scenario, but to give an idea, wolves did (for me) ~507 DPS on the dummy without the treats or any other buffs/cds, ~534 DPS with them. Both were averaged over 4 trials each. There was VERY little variance. I entered combat by wind shearing followed by having auto-attack on but was too far away to hit the heroic dummy. So 0 buffs, 0 dps from me.

Take what you will from this silly test. Perhaps something to look into.

edited: the food does NOT trigger the GCD as i originally stated.

[Levva]

Suggest using http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33874 for cheaper testing

Was your AP constant for the entire time of the test? What debuffs were on the Target dummy - eg: from someone else attacking it? Its an annoying fact of life that seldom do you get time alone on the target dummy without someone else attacking. What level was the target dummy? I take it no totems or anything were dropped?

[kudzupo]

0 debuffs on the dummy, constant AP (my current AP is 4761) as I only wind sheared so did not trigger any abilities. I play on a low-pop server, there was no one on the dummy. It was the heroic boss dummy. and yes, no totems dropped.

[Levva]

Hmm ok. What did the pet panel on your character sheet say? If you have ShockAndAwe installed it auto activates this panel so you can see your wolves stats & dps figures. Hint: the most interesting figures are in the tooltips when you hover over the basic figures.

Oh and a /combatlog capture would be most interesting, especially if you upload it to www.worldoflogs.com so we can analyse it.

[kudzupo]

I don't usually use S&A (use a combo of a few other addons) but I disabled a few things and put on S&A. It confirmed that at least one wolf was receiving the +30 str. Though I was unable to determine if it applied to both.

On another note, I ran another 5 tests with the treats and without and DPS varied a lot more this time. I ended with 527 dps on average with treats and 511 on average without. The low without treats was 495 and the high was 518. The low with treats was 509 and the high was 537.

So, likely the first four were flukes to be so close or there was indeed an issue with recount.

Tired now, so I can run a worldoflogs report tomorrow maybe.

Here are the pictures of the wolves:

[kudzupo]

So I went back to the heroic dummy and did 5 tests with and without food and recorded a combatlog.

You can find the data here: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/3qg8u7oyogs3v6x5/

Again it was impossible to see if both wolves were getting the food buff. But the results are interesting. Ignore time 982s-983s I screwed up . Here is a short summary:

NO FOOD:

432s-475s: 524 dps

619s-662s: 536 dps

801s-845s: 521 dps

1005s-1049s: 512 dps

1189s-1231s: 524 dps

AVG NO FOOD: 523.4 dps

WITH FOOD:

1372s-1414s: 533 dps

1552s-1595s: 553 dps

1736s-1778s: 535 dps

1921s-1963s: 536 dps

2103s-2145s: 571 dps

AVG FOOD: 545.6 dps


So, at a quick glance, a 22 dps difference. Again, no buffs, no combat from me other than wind shear (in this case, for the treat tests, wind shear was macro'd to the spiced mammoth treats) to start the wolves to the dummy once they were summoned.

Going a bit further, 571 dps on the last try seemed very high compared to the others. If you do not include that data point then you get 539.3 dps, which is still a 16 dps difference. Though I am inclined to include it for such a small sample size.

So again, disclaimer, this is ONLY a test dummy with NO BUFFS OR DEBUFFS on the target or myself. My AP was constant at 4761 for the entire time.

Cross posting this on EJ.