BRKs Top Ten List of Potential New Guild Names

10. Our Guild Name Is Offensive
9. We Love Repair Bills
8. Guildless
7. Professional Noobs and Ninja Looters
6. If You Can Read This, You’re Not Drunk Enough
5. Anyone Wanna Raid Molten Core?
4. We Are Kara Group 5
3. Hogger Drops Tier 0.01 Gear
2. Our Guild Name Was Taken
1. We Went To Karazhan And All We Got Was This Lousy Tabbard

“Hey BRK, this doesn’t need a reply, it is just a rant. I’m Zaw (level 42) on Echo Isles and have been doing well following your advice. Tried to help a couple of new guild mate hunters in their early 30s in STV. Was horrified that they hadn’t trained pets to growl and hadn’t gotten hunter’s mark, among other basic mistakes. One just ran up and bashed away with their sword, ignoring their pet, their ranged weapon, etc. One was spec MM, the other Survival and neither seemed to understand why their pets couldn’t hold aggro.

“I mostly have grown up solo and am trying to branch out into group work. So I have not seen that many hunters at work up close. It was very strange. Now I get the whole huntard thing. I’m sorry to say that neither had heard of Big Red Kitty, WoWInsider, nor Petopia - though I dumped the info on them, I’m not sure it will do much good. Though the least dreadful of the pair did train his pet to growl. sigh. Katherine.”

We feel your pain, Katherine. You’re not alone.

Our Rare PvP set, obtained before every Tom, Dick, and Hossenpheffer could sludge their way to a high PvP rank. Lookie at that Core Marksman Rifle, we near wet ourselves when the engineer gave us that in exchange for our mats and a 50 gold tip.

Almost 4000 health! Our Dal’Rend swords, they dropped at the same time. Our Royal Seal trinket for which we paid 40 gold and were outraged at the price. Oh yeah, we were 0/21/30 Survival spec with that spiffy crit rating.

Has nothing to do with the guild name, dislike it though we do. The Internet Guardians have killed our ability to generate a new sig for the past two weeks. We keep forgetting to do it when we have access. (Those who know us well know we are extremely forgetful.)

“I have a pet question, that while you may not know, I’m hoping you can post, and someone in the community can answer. One of the pets I have trained is the spawned “ghost” cat from Feralis, (the one you get from clicking on the statues).

“The question is this, since he is already semi-transparent, is he even more transparent when using Prowl? (I can’t test yet, as I don’t have him up to lvl 30 yet). Basically, does he gain more transparency that other cats since he is already transparent?.. or with Prowl do they all just look the same? If there is extra transparency, it would seem to be an advantage for PVP. If not, I may go grab a windserpent instead. Thanks, Halabar.”

Anybody out there got a semi-transparent cat with Prowl? Anybody? Hello? Bueller?

Edit: Do you all see why we love this blog? It’s because of YOU! In 30 minutes we got great information about a pet of which, frankly, we were totally unaware. Great answers, no flames, a really fun community. It’s a privilege to run this thing. You guys rock. Thank you.

As we’ve said before, we hate it. Also as we’ve said before, we weren’t going to guild-quit because of it. For those of you who read our WoW Insider column, you probably were just as unsuprised as we were that some people decided to jump on the guild-name as a reason to get upset. If some anonymous poeple want to get their undies in a bunch over a guild name and write to the WoW Insider editors and complain, we really don’t care. If WoW has a Big Problem with it, the guild officers will certain hear from them.

However.

When one of our good friends writes to us expressing her concerns, we listen:

“You need to not be in that guild. It does affect how seriously you are taken. It’s distasteful, and while you didn’t choose it, and while your opinion is that it’s not nice but you can deal with it to be in a decent guild… not everyone feels the same. It’s really unpleasant and it really does reflect poorly on you. I don’t mean that to be offensive. But it really does. Temerity Jane“

We value her council very much, and at this point, we must agree that the name does reflect poorly upon us and action must be taken. So what do we do?

We don’t like the guild name. Had we known they were going to pick it, we would’ve argued against it, vociferously. But we don’t see it as a sole issue to cause us to want to quit it. And if we did quit the guild, the name would remain. We would remove ourselves from the problem, making it look like we were covering our @ss and praying the flak would die down. That sticks in our craw; we cannot do that.

So instead of becoming righteous and indignant, throwing up our hands at the altar of Political Correctness and quitting the guild in a massive huff, we have decided to attempt to convince the guild to change the name. Our progress, of course, shall be documented herein.

First off, Volley and Misdirection. This combination sure did work for us.As you can see, we cast Misdirection on Hobbes and dropped a Volley on the yellow snake. The snake immediately targeted Hobbes and went for him. The difference from our previous post is that the first three strikes from the Volley counted as three “attacks”, so we didn’t have two more attacks available to use with the Misdirection spell. Since Multi Shot works in a similar fashion, and does a lot more damage, if you want to help your tank hold aggro during an AoE blitz, drop a Misdirection on him and Multi Shot the mobs. The tank will be higher on three of the mobs’ aggro list.

What would a BM hunter’s white damage look like if he had The Beast Within, a +Haste trinket, a Thundering Skyfire Diamond, and Ferocious Inspiration all proc at the same time? Like this:This was taken during our heroic Bloodfurnace run. Our Telescopic Sharprifle, which has a base 3.0 attack speed, is popping at an eyeblinking 1.47 attack speed. We wish we had remembered to slam Rapid Fire, too.

Our Kara run last night was very successful. Our guild’s first run since we formed last week, we took down Attumen and Morose. Attumen dropped his crossbow but we lost the DKP-bid to the other hunter. Our damage was very nice, as usual. Here’s the damage total after Morose was downed.Notice that we trained Hobbes with Bite 9. The 2/2 in Bestial Discipline and Go For The Throat has kept Hobbes’ Focus nice and plentiful during our previous Kara runs, so we thought we’d give Bite another try. Bite is still not very Focus-efficient but it did great thanks to the talent build we’re sporting. As long as Growl is not needed we’ll keep Bite active. What that means is that, while grinding, we’ll turn Growl on and Bite off, though.

If you have the time and motivation, take a look at the Armory profile of our hunter counterpart. He’s a heavy Marksman spec. He out DPS’d the priest and both tanks, but that’s it. Is the spec the problem? We’re not going to speculate on that, but look at his gear. No gems in his sockets. No enchants. No scope. He ran the instance without a pet. He trapped just fine, so he has some skill, but he has a complete and total lack of attention to detail.

This is the Wrong we try to Right at BRK. Many remark that we provide hints and tips for n00bs and casuals and that’s it. Frankly, that’s pretty true, but n00bs can be found at every level and in every instance in the game. If you know how to play your hunter well, you’re not going to find too many, “Gee, I didn’t know that.” moments here or anywhere else. But what we try to provide is a friendly place where those with questions can ask them without the stigmatism of being flamed and derided.

We’ve got all the hunter-flamers rounded up at WoW Insider, in case you couldn’t tell.

Edit: Two of the screenshots don’t seem to load in full-size mode. We’d reload them now, but we put them in the trash and emptied it. We’d get the email to which we attached them, but it went in the Deleted Items folder and that got auto-emptied.

/bash head on desk

Double Edit: The pics should all work now.

We have tried our best to preserve the integrity of the email. Where modifications were made for clarity, you will see brackets [like this] used. We hope you enjoy it, we sure did.

“I think SV got the shaft in [the White Damage] department. Mainly because of Master Tactician. It’s a great talent because of it’s reaction. A 6% chance on every hit to increase crit chance by 10% for 8 seconds. That equates to one extra crit in the next eight seconds and because it was proc’d off a crit, it’s one extra crit per proc that has its power increased by 25% of your agility, and when it does proc - which it will - every shot over the next seven seconds has its power increased by that same amount, crit or not. It’s a kind of ‘Double Exposed Weakness Proc’.

“That’s a serious damage increase which the paper doll doesn’t explain and [BRK's] spreadsheet ignores. Most importantly though, it has to be factored in because BOTH Expose Weakness and Master Tactician proc off of Auto Shots and will occur regularly over 1000 seconds whether we are using mana shots or not.

“Lastly, damage modifiers. Focus fire is a flat 2% added damage. Long range weapon specialization is a flat 5% added to damage. The slayer talents of the SV tree are 3% to monsters OR humanoids. It’s [a] 3% damage increase and then increases ANOTHER 3% to crit damage. Now because this damage is situational - even though it most the mobs on this game fall under these two categories - it’s important to note that has to be added in AFTER the paper doll numbers because the paper doll will never reflect this information. It does instead factor in the damage modifiers of the other specs.

“On paper, SV looks like cr@p. But that’s only because it takes a lot of extra factoring that both the paper doll and spreadsheet users tend to ignore. Is it THE uber DPS spec I want it to be? Unsure. The jury is still out. But I think it’s better than what [BRK has] displayed.

“And should I even bring up the hit rating that was used and how that would decrease that amount of damage done over 1000 seconds vs a SV hunter with an extra 3% to hit? With a hit rating of 48 against a lvl 70 you are way below what you should to make sure that 99.9% of your shots even hit, let alone crit. With Surefooted you are at least AT the hit rating for going against a lvl 70. SV doesn’t gain damage with this talent, but without it, BM and MM lose damage. SV is not paperdoll-friendly. I think that’s why I like it. You have to really know your [stuff] to do it.

“Lastly, can we please stop calling people who put more than 20 points in another tree a ’spec’ IMO, if you don’t grab the end talent after putting that many points in a tree, you don’t deserve to be known as a purebred. “SV” hunters who have Scatter Shot are hybrids. It’s that simple. I’m tired of them claiming they are a spec. Especially those that only have one or two more points in SV than they do MM, that does NOT make you SV. That makes you a hybrid. These people can go out and kill Dr. Boom all day long, cause that’s all they will be able to do. Thanks, Guy”

Moody Moony, (her choice of nom de guere, not ours), has returned from her hiatus and has provided a tremendous picture for this week’s WoW Insider column.

We were going to post it here, but we lost it. As soon as we find it again, we’ll slap it up here.

-5 BRK Cool Points from BRK

Edit: We found it. It was buried under a mountain of spam.

“BRK, I have a question about Lightning Breath. I saw your post about Gore vs Claw, so how about we make this a 3-way-match and rank them one through three…Which is most efficient and will cause the most damage. Thanks, Drizztz.”

Nope, we’re not gonna do it.

Why? Because of Spell Damage. Yes, it’s Math Time at BRK High.

Although we though so originally, neither Claw nor Gore gain any bonuses from a pet’s +Spell Damage, which is derived from the hunter’s RAP. We cannot find a Blue Post or a definitive “yes/no” answer anywhere confirming this, but from carefully monitoring our cat’s Claw, we have no choice but to report what our own eyes tell us.

However, it is a very-well documented fact the Lightning Breath most certainly does scale with +Spell Damage. In fact, it was heavily nerfed a few patches back. It’s an interesting subject, the LB Nerf. So interesting, in fact, that we should revisit it.

The formula for Lightning Breath is:

LB Damage = Base Damage + Spell Power Damage

Your pet’s Spell Power Damage was calculated by using a factor of your hunter’s RAP, and that looked like:

Spell Power Damage = RAP * 0.125

So our formula looked like:

LB Damage = Base Damage + ( RAP * 0.125 )

If you were a Marksman with 2300 RAP, your windserpent’s LB damage would be:

LB Damage = [ ( 99 + 113 ) / 2 ] + ( 2300 * 0.125 )

LB Damage = 394

And can you see why Marksmen hunters went nuts for Lightning Breath? It was obscene.

The problem was that the wrong formula for calculating the Spell Power was used. Lightning Breath is an instant-cast spell. Spells that are instant-casts are only supposed to receive a percentage of +Spell Damage, the specific number being 42.86%. Supposedly, everybody’s instant-cast spells use this modifier but the hunter-pet programmers didn’t know it. Thus, the LB Nerf was actually correcting a mistake in the formula. In its current form, the LB damage formula now looks like this:

LB Damage = Base Damage + ( RAP * 0.125 * 0.4286 )

Using our previous data, we get:

LB Damage = [ ( 93 + 113 ) / 2 + ( 2300 * 0.125 * 0.4286 )

LB Damage = 226

If you were wondering why the Marksman Hunter Community was outraged at the “Nerf”, now you know.

So why won’t we do a comparison of Lightning Breath, Claw and Gore? Because, as you can see, for each hunter the comparison will be different. As a BM hunter, BRK’s RAP is approximately 1700. If we had a serpent with Lightning Breath, his LB damage would be 194, which is 30 damage less than a Marksman hunter with a 2300 RAP. Also, Claw/Gore can be mitigated by armor whereas Lightning Breath is Nature damage. To do a true comparison, we’d have to take different damage-mitigation factors into consideration and, frankly, we’re not that motivated.

We recommend people not spec survival unless you have a very high agility to take advantage of Expose Weakness. Similarly, we don’t recommend Lightning Breath pets to hunters unless they have a RAP high enough to really pound out the nature damage as opposed to a melee pet that does naturally-high Claw/Gore damage. But if you do have a massive RAP, a Lightning Breath pet is a fabulous choice for you.