“Dear BRK, long time reader, first time writer. Last night while grinding away in the Hinterlands I noticed that every time my pet Void (a ghost saber) grabbed aggro both growl and cower would auto cast at the same time. I turned off cower and removed it from the pet bar and it still would cast. Do you have any ideas what is going on, and isn’t both of these counterproductive to each other? Sandier and Misha.”

Growling and Cowering at the same time are most certainly counter-productive and should never be both set to Auto-Cast.

Now neither your nor your pet’s spells need be on your action bars in order to use them. For example, one can cast Distracting Shot as part of a Pull Shot macro and Distracting Shot doesn’t have to be seen on your action bars at all.

Removing the Cower spell from your action bar doesn’t affect its effects. Your pet’s spells can be cast without them being on your pet’s Action Bars. And since your pet’s spells can be set to Auto Cast, they can Auto Cast from their quiet hiding place on your pet’s Spell Book without being placed on the pet’s action bar.

Open your spell book, click on your Pet tab, find that Cower spell and we’re pretty certain you’ll see the Auto Cast glowing, circling aura all over it. Right-click that icon to turn Cower’s Auto Cast off, and you’ll be good to go.

Now because you have Cower trained, you can make a Pet-Aggro Dump macro:

/cast Cower

This will make your pet cast Cower one time! Isn’t that great! /cheer

What might be more useful is to make a macro that turns on Cower’s Auto Cast:

/petautocaston Cower

Now we don’t have Cower trained as our tanks hold aggro pretty well. Can’t bloody well take down Gruul without them, know what we’re saying? But what we do have are two macros for Growl:

/petautocaston Growl

and

/petautocastoff Growl

We have these on our action bars and have mapped keystrokes to these slots. We use Shift-W to turn Growl on and Shift-E to turn Growl off. Very handy stuff for when your going into Karazhan and realize a little too late that you left Growl on from your leather-scavenging expedition. Just smack Shift-E and keep on trucking.

Why two macros? Because we have not seen a successful Growl-Switch single-button macro. A “toggle macro” for Growl would be awesome, but it hasn’t been done yet, (that we know.)