Wednesday, 3:00pm. You know what that means by now, we hope. BRK on WoW Insider is primed and ready for launch.

What else is going on? We ran heroic Ramparts last night through the first boss. Loads of fun trying to remember the pulls we haven’t done since January. Typical heroic instance, the boss was cake while the trash was mean and nasty.

We’ve given up on the Sha’tari Skyguard as there are only two daily quests while the Netherwing area has eight. Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money, and a dragon too. We should have ours by Sunday.

Holy bird-dung, the proliferation of mining bots isn’t more obvious than when one mines on Netherwing Shelf. There’s adamantite and khorium littering the place. Why? Because one cannot go out there without the “disguise” one receives for getting started on the Netherwing quests. And to start those quests, you have to have the epic flying skill, which cost 5000g. What gold farmer is gonna blow 5000g for the privilege of mining on the Shelf? None. So they just send their d@mn bots everywhere else and leave that area alone. If you’re a blacksmith or other profession that needs ore, getting your epic flying mount just added another side-benefit; access to the best mining in Outland.

Did we mention we respec’d back to BM? We decided that since we’re running with a shadow priest, we’re gonna turn off Aspect of the Viper and stick with Aspect of the Hawk. Since AotH is gonna be our partner, we added 5/5 in Improved Aspect of the Hawk. We missed the screenshot, but at one point we had IAotH, our Thundering Skyfire Diamond, The Beast Within, Ferocious Inspiration, and our Abacus trinket all procing at the same time.

Speaking of the TSD, as soon as we see one of the meta gems that give +12 agility and +3% to crit damage, we’re gonna splurge and grab it. The TSD procs neither often nor long enough for us at all.

In the BRK Market Watch, Primal Fires are selling like crazy, 20 gold each. Stacks of Netherweave Cloth are down, fetching only 3-4 gold per stack. Primal Earths are going for 4 gold each, which really surprises us. Knothide Leather is down around 5 gold per stack, and the Scraps are barely getting 1 gold per stack. Adamantite, Khorium and Eternium remain steady at 20 gold per stack. BOE greenies aren’t selling worth a d@mn; we’ve having to vendor everything. You want fast cash? Get your good-for-nothing carcass to BEM and farm some Motes of Fire for an hour.

Finally, several our super-close friends are considering splintering once again and forming a Heroic-Instance guild. Kara is nice, but the logistics of it are a pain, we only run it 3x per week, and we have to deal with some unsavory types. The idea is a GM-only leader, no officers, no invites, just us friends. No forums, no website, no DKP. Anybody out there doing something like this? We’d love some feedback.

“I was wondering if you used two different builds for the rush from 60-70, one that was feasible for speedy level gaining and one for raiding. Many Thanks, Stillwater.”

For grinding, it’s hard to find fault with the Beastmaster spec. Yes, you can level as a Marksman easily enough and if that’s your preferred method, more power to you. Grinding as a Survivalist is tough; one crits so often that mobs are pulled off your pet.

For raiding, it’s a different story. First off, personal preference is always encouraged at BRK the Blog. Playing a spec you don’t like is pretty painful and having fun is the name of the game.

That said, inter-raid dynamics is important. If you’re running Karazhan with two hunters and the raid leader is going to put you both in the same party, don’t have the same specs. Any mix of BM/SV/MM is better than two of the same. If you know your hunter-partner, work out which specs you wish to play. If he insists on BM, you might try SV. If he insists on MM, you might want BM. And remember that only one of you needs Improved Hunter’s Mark, so the other gets Efficiency.

Now if you’re the only hunter in the raid, you might want to consider the raid makeup to maximize your helpfulness. If you’re going to be in a party with two rogues and a dual-wielding shaman, and your agility is high enough, Expose Weakness and the SV tree is going to be tremendous. If you’re party will consist of a shadow priest, a boomkin, and a mage, Ferocious Inspiration and the BM tree will provide better party bonus-damage.

There are other considerations, such as are you going to be asked to Chain Trap every dang pull, or does the raid need Silencing Shot for caster pulls because your raid doesn’t have a priest who can Silence, (whatever the spell is named).

Adapting your spec to the needs of the raid earns you solid BRK Cool Points.

One, it’s a very pretty and clean site. One thing BRK wishes he could do is to build a nicer-looking home.

Two, the girl has a nice blog, content-wise. Good reading.

Three…

Ah h3ll, what can we say but we’re really touched. Amethyst certainly didn’t set out to make us this happy, but we are.

We write a column for WoW Insider, right? Right. WoW Insider has a horde guild on Zangermarsh. The name of this guild is “It Came From The Blog”. ICftB has a publically-accessible website/forums:

http://itcamefromtheblog.com/index.php

If you want to create/transfer a toon there, all applicants are accepted. It’s 100% casual and there are something like 500 members or more. BRK tries to make appearances with his level 27 Blood Elf hunter and cause havoc and commotion, usually by commenting on the number of hunters online and encouraging them to offer assistance to the Lesser Classes.

Edit: /replace Zangermarsh Zangarmarsh

“Dear BRK, for the past year or so I’ve played a Tauren hunter on Bloodscalp as my main. He’s got a fine black cat named NinjaNed, who I acquired in the barrens - Humar, I’m sure you know him - and we’re very happy together. I’m a part-time, casual player. I lead a busy lifestyle for the most part but I am I dork by nature, so I go through stints on weekends mostly where I’ll sit down and play WoW with my guildies for a good several hours at a time.

“It was one of the coolest moments in my WoW life. My party gave me huge gratz. I tipped the tank and healer and went on my way. Worst part was I didn’t even get the blunderbuss. Thanks BRK, you’ve helped me quite a lot. Grazeland - Tauren Hunter on Bloodscalp”

“The other day I was messing around in Hellfire Peninsula and saw a 67 rouge and decided to attack. Me being 67 as well I figured it would be at least a fair fight. I switched to track hidden as he vanished before I marked him or could even get a shot off. To my surprise I could see him. I remember a long time ago when ever I used track hidden I couldn’t see the rouge till it was right up on me.

“Now I’m watching this dagger spec rouge try to sneak around me going very slow. I’m wondering was this a fluke or does track hidden actually work now. Because I’ll tell you once he got too close to me and I marked him he was surprised as hell. To top that off when I trapped him and he immediately vanished after it broke I was able to re-mark him and finish the job. This went on for three more fights, all ending with his eventual demise. I’ve been reading your blog for quite some time now and figure you have what it takes to figure this one out. SSgt Means.”

Rogue Dynamics are not our speciality, however we do have some insight into Hunter-Rogue Interplay. Let’s say you see a rogue and you lay a Hunter’s Mark down on him. He could do the following:

He Vanishes which wipes the Hunter’s Mark and you cannot track him, period.

He Steathes which will not wipe the Hunter’s Mark and you can track him using Track Hidden.

Track Hidden is contentious because many hunters will say they’ve never seen a stealthed rogue using it. We have. We have tracked stealth druids and rogues many times. We usually we “see” a steathed rogue who is attempting to sneak around us and get to our back, (which is why we always keep a fresh Freezing Trap right behind us.)

If your rogue Vanished to rid himself of the Hunter’s Mark, then came back and Stealthed, you would see him on your minimap if you had Track Hidden active, thus, you could mark him again. What a rogue can or cannot do while Vanished, we’re not sure, but when we fight a Rogue and he Vanishes, we usually don’t see him again.

A Fun Tip for Messing With Stealthed Rogues: With your Track Hidden you see him, but he doesn’t know you see him. You want to “funnel” him to a stealthed rogue buddy of your own. Pop a Flare into an area where you don’t want him to go. Any rogue worth his salt will avoid your Flare like the plague, so he’ll move away from the Flare, directly into the path of your steathed rogue. At the perfect moment, when the enemy rogue’s back is facing your rogue, you pop a Hunter’s Mark on the enemy which allows your rogue to see him, and he slices and dices and rips the enemy a new one while you sit there and laugh.

You can do a similar trick with your pet if he has been trained with Prowl, but there is less laughing-time as you have to kite the rogue before he dies.

“If I drop Misdirection on a tank how does it work with multiple mobs and multiple attacks? Logic would suggest if I misdirect, and then multi-shot a group of 3 mobs, they’re all going to the tank, but I’m not sure. If this not the case, please let me know. SPC Jones, Iraq”

Let’s get the tooltip text and take a look, just so we don’t make anything up.

“Threat caused by your next three attacks is redirected to the target raid member. Caster and target can only be affected by one Misdirection spell at a time. Effect lasts 30 sec.”

Notice how this does not say, “Threat caused to a single mob,” or otherwise quantify the number of mobs. It’s the threat caused by your attacks, period. If you Misdirect and fire a Multi Shot, the threat from that shot, whether the ammo hits one, two or three mobs, will be redirected to the recipient of the Misdirection spell.

What else could you use like this? Volley. Volley is a single attack and can damage as many mobs as fit in its radius. All the threat caused by the Volley attack will be redirected. Misdirecting with a Volley on a swarm of mobs before an AoE-class nukes them is a nice way of saving a clothie some repair bills.

Misdirection also works with traps. Want to pull a patrol to the tank around a corner without firing a shot? Move the tank to his safe position, cast Misdirection, drop the Explosive trap in the patrol’s path, and when the patrol hits it they will react as if the tank had dropped the trap himself and run right to him.

If it would ever be useful we don’t know, but Raptor Strike with Misdirection would also work. Engineering bombs are attacks and they would work with Misdirection too. So would hitting a mob with throwing knives or even whacking ‘em with your fishing pole.

But a Body Pull would not work with Misdirection because you did not “attack”; you just happened to wander into the aggro-radius of the mob.

So what do you do when your Internet is shot to h#ll? We take a long lunch and give the IT folks a chance to fix it. If it ain’t up in that 90 minutes, we go the heck home. Shazzam!

Well we’re back today, feeling a little less stressed about our backload of work and trying to catch up on everything. And we have our homemade raspberry latte so things are looking up.

How about we start with something sure to fuel the flame-fires, shall we?

“BRK, have you seen this hunter macro:

Regards, Tosviolation”

Yup, we’ve seen that. For the non-macrophiles out there, what this thing is designed to do is to allow a hunter to just spam the beejezus out of a single button and capture every Kill Command as it becomes available while simultaneously firing Steady Shot whenever its cooldown is up. The inherent problem with the macro is that it will throw errors all over your screen. The author has “solved” that problem by turning off the error frame, clearing it, and then showing it again to reset the system.

In the programming world, this is called a Kludge. It is inelegant, inefficient, and wasteful.

It’s like strapping a nitrous kit made from a used fire extinguisher on your Porsche 911 Turbo.

It’s like putting John Travolta in drag on Desperate Housewives.

It’s like letting Barney have a guest-appearance on a Bugs Bunny / Road Runner cartoon.

It’s like letting Larry the Cable Guy be the first man on Mars.

It’s like that British game show opera singer who won their television talent contest on the same stage as Pavarotti back when he could hit nine tenor high C’s without breaking a sweat.

It’s like BRK being survival spec. (Note: don’t check our armory profile; it’ll freak you out and you haven’t heard the story behind it or what the h#ll we’re doing. Don’t worry, everything is fine and we’re not on smack or under the influence of a suspicious redhead, for whom we have been known to do some really stupid things.)

You are a Hunter! You have so much more to offer than Steady/Auto spamming. If you’re incapable of smacking Kill Command when it procs then you need more help than a macro can provide. If this macro increases your DPS you’ve been AFK-Fighting for too long; put the nachos down and use two hands to play.

Macros should be used to make complex tasks more simple, not make simple tasks more complex.

Edit: Tosviolation as a name ranks right up there with Thunderpants. We totally dig it.

So we received a long and detailed letter from a priest who reads BRK. We’d call it “excellent” but the only thing we know about priests is that we kill them first in battlegrounds. Now although it’s not a hunter-specific letter, it does contain some useful information on how we should behave in instances. Thus, we present a BRK Exclusive:

“Prayer of Mending (PoM) is THE best healing spell in the game – hands down, no questions asked, pack your bags and go home. This spell will save rogues, pets, tanks and anyone else taking damage within melee range of the original cast. The problem is that in order for this divine spell to reach its full potential, the entire group needs to understand its basic mechanics. That said, let us gaze upon the tooltip for PoM:“Now I hear you muttering “WTH? 800hps? That’s nothing!” Well, the tooltip assumes zero +healing gear. My priestly wench runs a reasonable amount of +healing and her PoM clocks up close to 1500 per jump – now we’re talking!

“Learning the mechanics of this spell is a win/win, for not only do you keep your priest happy but you get ‘free’ heals on your pet in the mix. Learn it, work it, love it – Prayer of Mending is your friend!”

* For the more curious, Ancallagon’s Spreadsheet of Awesomeness can be found at: www.randyland.biz/priest.xls

We’re busier than heck, have tons of cr@p to write about, and have BRK fan-mail out the ying-yang that has some really cool info. Until we can tell the bosses to get the h#ll outta our hair, here’s something to sate your hunter-appetite:

“Anything you’ve heard about your petting being useless in Gruul is a lie or old information that is no longer true. I respec’d MM for the fight so that while still remaining high up on the damage meter’s I could secretly scout out the future possibility of using my pet in there as a BM.

“Honestly, I didn’t even pay much attention to him and I think he died once (we wiped 2x got him on the 3). He rarely even lost health. The biggest problem was the “cave ins”, in which case the MT would usually back out of it or I’d simply just call him back to my side for the remainder of the aoe. And concerning the rumor that he does damage to nearby party members during the ground shatter, it appears to be untrue. Although he is effected by the slowed movement speed, I’m almost positive he didn’t give off any damage to anyone.

“All in all I’d say BM is a perfectly suitable build for a hunter to enter Gruul’s Lair with. In fact, out of the 3 hunters that went, the one with the most DPS was a BM we picked up at the last minute. He placed 2nd in DPS overall, just falling short of a rogue. Mike.”