The BRK Executive Assistant is out sick. She’s a sad panda and we’re not going to ask her to comma-check our WoW Insider column today. We’re delaying that particular load of bunkum until tomorrow. Or later.

On top of that, we just got back from a visit to the BRK Doctor Of Uberness. We’re not going to say he’s the best general practitioner who’s ever walked the surface of the earth, but he does two things that makes us swoon:

1) No computer in the exam room. We hate doctors who spend more time slapping keys than they do talking to their patients.

2) Dude knows how to poke and prod, (nothing p0rnographic, folks, calm down.) We don’t want a doctor to take our word about what’s good and what isn’t. What do we know about our own body; most of us can’t even feed it properly.

The BRK Pulse was a resting 56 beats per minute, blood pressure was 97/60, 6′ tall still, (thank Elune, we fear the day we start shrinking,) and a very tidy 189 pounds. We thought we’d been good but he ordered about 1200 blood tests, we assume to punish us for some unspoken faux pas. That pink paper was marked up like our highschool English essays; X’s everywhere.

/insurance rant

Why the bleeping h3ll can’t the nurse at the doctor’s office take our blood?! Why do we have to drive 35 miles to the f-ing “insurance approved” phlebotomist?!”

/insurance rant off

So here we are drained of blood, bruised, no food, no coffee, no executive assistant and no gumption to do much of anything.

Well, we should say the following:

Nobody here appreciates the efforts Shifttusk has given the hunter community more than we do. He’s popped on Drenden and we’ve said Howdy in-game. No bad feelings exist from us. Frankly we thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but we’re gonna accept blame for presenting it in a manner where people could have thought otherwise.

Shifttusk, we’re sorry if we caused you any problems. That wasn’t out intention.

As for the Auto/Steady debate, we have a nice simple solution to show you, but thanks to the Patch we can’t do it.

Did anybody else feel like everything was a mess last night? The sounds of our shots didn’t sync with the graphics. It felt like we were pressing buttons and nothing was happening. This phenomenon was experienced by everybody in our Black Morass and Steamvaults runs last night.

We really dislike advancing This Is Right theories without statistical analysis to back them up. But right now we don’t trust the WoW universe to provide a stable platform for study. So until things settle down on the server and we can trust our action buttons again, we’re going to put the Auto/Steady debate on hold. We’ll then boogie to the ol’e BRK Proving Grounds and do our statistical analysis and make a pretty spreadsheet and chart and everything and slap it up here for all and sundry to peruse.

One of the problems of running this blog is responding to all the great comments and emails. There just isn’t enough time. For example, Pelides made a great comment about allowing Auto Shot to run unfettered during bonus-haste periods because he didn’t want to clip his Auto Shots. Very wise, we advocate that thouroughly.

Then we have the “missing 57 shots” disgrace of an analysis and the “what was going on” illogic. That deserves a giant /slap. If you’ve been in Gruul’s you know exactly what’s going on - people are dying and running and healing and potting and learning! 57 shots missing shots? Call it 60. Say our attack speed is 2.0. That’s 120 seconds we’re “missing shots”. Does you actually think we’re AFK-AutoShotting for 2 minutes? OMG yes, that’s EXACTLY what the comment says! That’s a pretty astounding statement; it takes us aback, it does.

And the next person who calls us “old guy stubborn” is gonna get a whuppin. We take a lot of abuse from Mrs BRK, we’re not gonna get it here, too. /shakes fist menacingly

The reason we don’t do the Auto/Steady/KC macro isn’t because we morally object to it - although we do - it’s because we have tried it, don’t like it, and never saw a DPS increase because of it. But you might be different! You may love it. You may think it’s all that and a bag of Funyons. There are hunters who adore it and wouldn’t leave home without it. Just because we don’t espouse it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it.

Now Rionsy made a point about how we shouldn’t, “…expect everyone to accept that your play was flawless.” Oh no, no no no. We most certainly aren’t without flaws. We’re not the best hunter who posts here. We’re not the best hunter on our server or maybe even in our guild.

Our pathetic claims to fame are a fun anti-Forum blog and having advocated the BM spec before BM was cool. We don’t have the best gear, the most experience, or the biggest accomplishments, and we’re certainly not perfect. Anybody who has heard us scream obsenities into Vent knows we screw up quite royally on an almost minute-by-minute basis.

(We hope to add BRK Screw-Up Movies to the blog soon!)

Now we don’t disagree that adding more Steady Shots to our arsenal is a bad thing. The next time we’re AFK-AutoShotting, we’ll see if we can muster the energy to push another key or two.

But going Auto/Steady Macro-happy? That’s not us.

And finally, Jabari asked, “Who was responsible for keeping Scorpid up in those fights? Those shots don’t show up in WWS.”

We were. We always volunteer to keep Scorpid up, even against two mobs. Another of the “things we were doing” that affected the number of Steady Shots we used.

Two mobs?

Well, certainly. Let’s take the Attumen fight. Midnight and Attumen have to be tanked separately until they join. One hunter can keep a Scorpid up on each of them at the same time. What’s even cooler is that our timer bars even keep track of each Scorpid Sting separately. Tab-target, Scorpid, Tab-Target, Scorpid and resume DPS.

OK, so for a post where we were going to say, “we’re not going to be posting much today,” this has turned into one mongo-blather of a post. To everybody who comments and emails, thank you, we love getting the stuff. This Auto/Steady discussion has been heated but informative and, most of all, pretty un-Forums-like. We’re proud to be a part of this community.