“Calling all those attuned for Kara! Emergency non-planned Kara run happening now! Who wants to go?”

“OHMEMEME!!” Sayeth BRK.

“Sorry, we’re already full.”

Awww, shucks. /sulk

Off to Netherwing to make leather and money…

Fifteen minutes later:

“Hey BRK, our boomkin has to split, family problem. Wanna come in for Moroes?”

“Summon my massive-DPS @ss and let’s get some!”

Moroes down and two Badges of Justice. Sweet.

Opera, Romulo and Julianne down and two Badges of Justice. Sweet.

About to start Curator and we check our bags. One Badge of Justice. Not sweet.

“Hello, Blizzard? I got hosed. I’m missing three BoJs. Can you help? Love, BRK” /send

Curator down, two BoJs. Sweet.

Aran down, two BoJs. Sweet.

“HEY BRK! GM Phizzle here. Heard you got hosed out of some BoJs?”

“Totally, Phizzle. We’ve done Moroes, Opera, Curator, and Aran, and I only have five BoJs in my bags.”

“Dude. That totally sucks. Does everybody else in your raid have the right number.”

“Yeah Phiz, and they’re mocking me for my non-BoJ’ed-ness.”

“Rude! We can’t have a hunter being mocked. Lemme escalate this.”

“You rock Phiz!”

“BRK, I know I rock, but appreciate the love. Last question, though: Could you have forgotten to loot those bosses? :p”

“Phizster, I totally could’ve forgotten to loot those bosses, except I didn’t. I know I didn’t. I’m a loser and I forget where I’m going sometimes, but I know I looted those guys.”

“My heart bleeds, man. I’m all over this. Escalation in progress. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Dude! Good Infernal drops on Prince, can ya work on that for us?”

“You know it. I’ll punt the Infernals to Goldshire for the next thirty minutes.”

“Sweet. Hasta!”

“Keep rockin’ it, BRK.”

Chess down, two more BoJs. Sweet.

Prince down, Infernals were cruel. Phiz was laughing at us, we know it. Three more BoJs. Sweet.

Warlock? Check. Mage? Check. Illhoof Time!

Illhoof down, two more BoJs. Sweet.

Everybody awake? How about Maiden?

Maiden down, two more BoJs. Sweet.

Attumen? Why not. Attumen down, a final BoJ. Sweet.

Fast-forward eighteen hours into the future, BRK checks his email:

“Dear BRK, heard about the hose-osity and the cruelty you suffered as a result of your lack of BoJs. Check your in-game mail, you’ll find three BoJs waiting for you. Kisses and Hugs, Taiono.”

58 + 3 = 61

Our new leggings are getting closer. Sweet.

Yes! Finally the cooking daily quest offered up the dreaded and mystical Kibbler’s Bits recipe. A quick jaunt to Hellfire Peninsula and we nabbed 20 of the Buzzard Meats we need to cook up a batch.

Now most of the time we’ll want Hobbes to chow down on the DPS food, but sometimes we want him to have his stamina treats. ZOMG, it sounds like we need a new PetBuff Macro!

/use [nomodifier] Kibbler’s Bits
/use [modifier:ctrl] Sporeling Snack

There we go. If we hold down the CTRL key (Command key on Macs), and mush our macro, Hobbes will eat stamina food, otherwise he’ll get the DPS stuff.

What does Kibbler’s Bits do to Hobbes? Well, let’s look at an un-food-buffed cat first:Then we feed Hobbes his new DPS-food and take another screenshot, like so:And that’s a 5.6 DPS increase! Isn’t that just peachy; a 3.3% buff and we think this new pet food totally rocks. If you’re not doing your cooking dailies, knock them out just for this recipe at at least.

Ladies, how does Johnny Depp the have 42% of the vote? Explain yourselves. Is he a protest-vote because we left someone off else our list?

“Dear BRK, I am a Warcraft Widow. My husband plays and plays and plays. I love him, though, in spite of his stupid game. What can I get him for Christmas that he might look up from his computer for 1/10 of a second and acknowledge me. Sincerely, Mrs BRK… I mean, Anonymous Female.”

RAZER Copperhead Razor High Precision Gaming Mouse.You cannot run an instance or demolish people in PvP with a battery-operated, wireless mouse. Our GM almost wiped us on Prince when he started changing his batteries but the game was stuck with him running onto Prince’s terrace. Get him an awesome mouse like this one. $49.99

Belkin n52te Tournament Edition SpeedPad. Do you really want to capture his attention? Shove one of these under his nose and watch his toon die a horrible death as it goes ignored while he rips the packaging to shreds. Intimidating to the novice, hardcore users swear by this accessory. $69.99

ViewSonic 19″ VA1903wb Wide LCD Computer Monitor.Not a primary monitor, but a second monitor. There is very little that helps a Warcraft addict more than being able to have the game run full-sized on a main monitor and WoWHead, WoWWiki, or BigRedKitty open on a secondary monitor. For under $200, this high-quality LCD display rocks. $173.74

Plantronics DSP-500 Digitally-Enhanced USB Gaming/Multimedia Stereo Headset and Software.Can’t stand listening to him and his friends call each other “noobsauce” and hearing their raid described as “Epic Fail on Steroids?” Cut out one side of the conversation by slapping a sweet pair of USB headphones on his noggin. If you shove some cookies in his yapper, you’ll solve the problem of his white-noise, too. $24.99

eVGA e-GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB PCI-Express 256-P2-N761-AR Graphics Card. Is this the meanest, most bad-@ss video card on the planet? Nowhere close. But if your loved-one doesn’t have a 256MB video card and you want to save some dough for your hour-long massage at the new spa, this little card should make him very happy. $141.99 after rebate.

OK, so if none of these gifts wouldn’t make you happy, what should are you going to put on your list?

You want the link to our GM’s critkin blog? OK, don’t say we didn’t warn you, though.

The BoP FAQ:

Fiodrahal? Fiodraphal? Don’t bother; it’s just Fio, (Phi’-oh or Phee’-oh).

He has a propensity to discover alchemy recipes during raids.

Puns. Be innoculated and insulated or don’t visit.

Do not taunt the BoP. He controls the raiding schedule!

Do not let him feed his wife candy. A Squeekie Priestie on sugar… you should be afraid.

He cannot tank. He can Boomkin, he can heal. Tanking isn’t in his repotoire.

He is responsible for the lion.

He runs a mean guild-bank. Although most of the cloth-stamina gear we put in there has disappeared…

Sonic Spear w/o Color

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 0

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 1

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 2

Sonic Spear w/Correct Color 3

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 4

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 5

Sonic Spear w/Wrong Color 6

We had to remove the Thottbot Java in order to get the WoWHead Java to work. They kinda… mish-mashed.

Put this:in your template. We put ours right before the head-close tag.

Then, insert hyperlinks in this format:Where the q3 is the level of the item.

Leave out the class=”qX” for just black text.
q0 = poor (gray)
q1 = common (white)
q2 = uncommon (green)
q3 = rare (blue)
q4 = epic (purple)
q5 = legendary (orange)
q6 = artifact (yellow? butterscotch?)

And now the kind and extremely talented people at WoWHead have sent us this jaunty little email:We have incorporated these changes and, hopefully, that little problem will be solved.

WoWHead reads BRK? Makes you wonder who else does…

/Austin Powers look of surprise

Almost 800DPS on tooltip with raid-buffs, Bestial Wrath, Ferocious Inspiration, Rapid Fire and Improved Aspect of the Hawk. By one second we missed the screenshot with the Abacus of Violent Odds cooking, too. Shucks.

This was taken in Zul’Aman a few days ago on our way to the Dragonhawk boss. We took down the Eagle boss earlier this run, making AC 3/6 for this instance.

You can see in this shot we hit our white damage Auto Shots for 630 and 573, an average of 600 per shot. That is down from the tooltip because of the mob’s armor mitigating our damage. Our Auto Shots are critting for an average of 1377 and are occurring almost every third shot. We love haste, it is our best friend aside from Hobbes.

Since we started Missing with our Hit Rating at 88, we tossed on our Violet Eye ring which bumped our Hit Rating to 100. We didn’t miss a single shot on this run. Theorycrafting is all well and good, but if the theory says we must have a Hit Rating of 120 or 130 or whatever, but we’re not Missing with a Hit Rating of 100, we’re obviously not going to increase it. This is the benefit of doing testing and analysis yourself instead of relying on others, and why we recommend that all hunters get out there and see their own data for themselves.

Yes, we will use Scorpid Sting on trash mobs. Our tank is a BWL-raiding hunter in a previous life, knows what SS does, and says he has no problems generating rage with SS applied. We do not recommend you start dropping SS on trash mobs without your tank’s understanding of what the shot does. Interfering with a tank’s rage is bad mojo. Talk to him and get his opinion. Follow up with him after some testing with SS applied and without it. An informed tank is a hunter’s best friend.

For the addon questions we’re going to get, here’s a quick list.

• The map addon is Squeenix.
• Our action bars are Bartender 3 and CyCircled.
• We use ClearFont 2 for the pretty fonts.
• The UI is classic Perl.
• We use both CooldownTimers2 (below and to the right of our toon) and Kharthus’s Hunter Timers (below and to the left of our toon) as they track different cooldowns.
• The criticals are announced thanks to Critical Alert.

These are all linked on our sidebar for easy downloading.

New Patch Notes, brothers and sisters! The latest from the PTR is Patch 2.3.2! No preamble, let’s just dig in!

Um. Wait, we just did a preamble. Saying there’s no preamble is a preamble.

Uh Oh. Saying there’s no preamble then realizing there really is a preamble is two preambles…

Ah heck. Here’s what we care about:

Arcane Shot: Ranks 1-5 will once again deal bonus damage based on attack power. Well we’re glad they’re fixing this “Oops”. Thank you fellas.

Aspect of the Viper effect increased. So it wasn’t just us who thought it was more than a little underpowered. We need AotH up for our IAofH to proc, but sometimes we’ll kick in AotV to speed up mana-regeneration. Dang if it didn’t seem like it was unimpressing us. Another check in the Woot-Column.

Freezing Trap is no longer limited to one target at a time. Well this smells like double-trapping has been re-bugged, un-nerfed, or whatever you want to call it. We’re surprised but thrilled; we’ll be able to do our BRK Double-Trapping Movie soon, we hope.

Pet leveling speed has been increased. Oh happy day! Now give us a bloody reason to want to level more pets, like more pet slots in the f-ing stable.

The Netherscale Ammo Pouch [and the Knothide Quiver are] no longer … Unique item[s]. Whoa whoa whoa, hasenpfeffer! The 24-slot ammo bag is no longer unique, and the 20-slot quiver is no longer unique, but the 24-slot quiver IS still unique? That doesn’t make sense.

No, you don’t understand. The 24-slot quiver was never Unique but the 24-slot ammo pouch was. Blizz is making all four of the new recipes - 20-slot ammo pouch, 20-slot quiver, 24-slot ammo pouch, and 24-slot quiver - non-Unique. If you are a non-LW gun-hunter and desire a 24-slot ammo pouch, you should be able to get one without paying epic-mount-quantity gold soon.

“Dear BRK … running through The Underbog the other day, I ran into a small problem. I’m with a group of guildies including a warlock who is the party leader and also the #2 guy in the guild. He insists on being the puller. Since he’s a big cheese in the guild, I back off after sharing my ideas about the advantages of a hunter doing the pulls.

“In the end it worked out OK because we were a bit overpowered for Underbog to begin with, but I was left unsure what to do, so I thought I’d drop you a line to see what your thoughts are. Amava”

The correct answer is, E) Let the squishie die in a pathetic pool of his own demon-possessed, get yer @ss in the back, let the tank get aggro, you’re not a pulling-class blood. Multiple times if necessary. Then wait for the party to get sick of him and ask you or the tank to start pulling.

If the warlock wants to pull, the hunter should demand to heal, his pet should demand to do ranged-DPS, and the tank should demand to hearth back to Shatt because he needs more consumables to give the party their buffs.

Gear does not indicate competence. Guild-rank does not indicate competence. Neither class nor spec nor gold nor epic mount nor title after or before your name does either.

Granted, telling a high-up muckety-muck in your guild that he sucks isn’t the quickest way to guarantee your participation in raids. However, that doesn’t mean you should subject yourself to down-right stupid theories of party dynamics.

When you need to trap an add, have the tank pull and you grab the add with a pullshot appropriate to the situation. With a paladin-tank you may need a combination of Distracting and Arcane shots to overcome his initial aggro. With a warrior who pulls with a thrown weapon, you may only need an Arcane Shot(Rank 1).

It is your responsibility to be flexible and adapt to your tank.

But as for casters pulling? We won’t put up with that here and you shouldn’t either.

Mrs BRK hates William Shatner. Obviously, today was a sad day in the life of Mrs BRK.

“WTF did I ever do to deserve this?! I can’t escape that communist, tree-climbing, bed-wetting, has-been-that-never-was with a tiny-misshapen-pen1s hack!! As Charlie Brown would say, AUGH!!!!”