In battlegrounds, honor-kills are not the goal, we agree. But likewise, neither are capturing towers, flags, or bunkers, prothletizing offense or defense, nor espousing epeenery or modesty. Winning is the goal!

We like to win, regardless of what we have to do to achieve it. It just so happens that the vast majority of our wins occur when we kill lots and lots of the enemy. Put us in a premade and our HK-totals will go way, way down because our team employs Strategy to win. Put us in a pug battleground, and we’re going to kill and kill and kill some more. We’re kinda good at it, and it works more often than not.

In a raid, topping a damage-meter is not the goal, we agree. Defeating the boss is! It just so happens that the vast majority of our boss-kills occur when we provide massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS and occupy one of the top spots on the WoWWebStats reports. We’re kinda good at it, and it works more often than not.

In a WoW-blog, having the most readers is not our goal. Having fun is! It just so happens that we have a lot of fun when we write about basic hunter skills, advanced hunter theory, practical application of both, and the results of those actions in the form of links to epic loots, screenshots of PvP wins, and boss-kills.

Are we good at it? Does it work? Well, that’s completely subjective. We are thrilled with how the blog is running. We enjoy the pics and the stories. We love doing the movies. The feedback you provide makes us smile. If you’ve got a complaint, you’re doing a nice job of being honest and not crude or becoming an @sshat. Overall, we think We - the deeply disturbed BRK readers and your humble author together - are providing a primo product.

We’re going to slap our email address back on the blog and start taking questions again. We love your questions and providing answers! But Time continues to be our enemy. If you truly want an answer and cannot risk not getting one, the BRK Forums are just one of many places you can be assured of having a good chance of receiving some immediate attention.

But if you think you’ve got a question or screenshot or story that will capture our attention and stand out from the 100 questions, prescription medication ads, “marital aid” spam, demands for cash, and threats against our person we get every day, send it to us. Note - it will be read, but we can no longer promise a reply.

Things still in the BRK To Do Queue:

Hunter Guide to Gruul video. Recorded and requires production.

Hunter Guide to Lurker video. Recorded and requires production.

Hunter Guide to Hydross video. Kinda boring, but we’ll do one.

Hunter Guide to Void Reaver video. Really boring, but we’ll do one.

BRK in Battlegrounds Highlights videos, one for each! We haven’t decided if we’re going to do pugs or premades for the movies. And these might have to wait for our new gaming rig before we can make these. The processing power required to compress and produce four 15-minute movies would bring our current iMac to a crawl.

A Hunter-Duel series? Maybe. To highlight the trips and tricks a hunter can employ in one-on-one situations is the idea. Volunteers might be the speedbump here.

Your questions! As we said, we’re gonna start those up again, foshizzle!

And finally, we’d like to ask your opinion if we should do a Guest Post feature. Not stuff from any of the established WoW bloggers; they have their own audiences already. But if there’s someone just starting out who’d like their writing to be read by the BRK Audience, we could publish a post of theirs and give them some exposure. Yes? No?

Kitties!

The ‘Lock Did 1700 on Hydross

Who Invited the Rogue?

We Stopped at 25k for Almost a Year

Let’s have a little fun! You may know the way to Ironforge Airport, but have you ever been in the hidden chamber in Ironforge? Have you been to the king’s old throne room? We can show you the way!

3v3 Arena: BM Hunter, Affliction Warlock, Discipline Priest

Match 1. Loss, BEM: Warrior, Pally, Rogue. We were going to put Hobbes on the pally and let him interrupt heals. We put Hobbes on the rogue. Stupid targeting error. Why do we always start out the night by doing something stupid?

Match 2. Win, BEM: Priest, Warlock, Priest. Smooshed the warlock easily enough. Our partners were doing their stuff, whatever it was, perfectly.

Match 3. Win, Nagrand: PWP again. Killed the same.

Match 4. Win, BEM: PWP again. Killed the same. Can we have extra helpings of PWP, please? This is yummy.

Match 5. Win, BEM: Hunter, Pally, Warrior. This time we got Hobbes on the Pally! Hunter went down quickly thereafter.

Match 6. Win! Nagrand: HPW again. Hobbes on the pally again. A five-win streak is our best ever! /cheer!

Match 7. Loss, Nagrand: Druid, Rogue, Priest. First off, we totally killed the streak by mentioning it, we know that. Second, this two-healer stuff really pisses us off. We think the solution here is to fear-bomb, wait for their trinket, fear-bomb again, and Lefaye and we burn down the rogue. We wanted this team again to test our theory, didn’t happen though.

Match 8. Win BEM: Mage, Warrior, Priest. Smoosh the mage. BM hunters love mages. Do your Ice Block, Bela dispels it, we kill you. Fun for the whole gang!

Match 9. Loss, Ruins: Hunter x 3. Yep, three hunters, two BMs and a MM. We went for the MM, burned him down. The BM hunters took out Bela. We got killed the first BM hunter and were ready to celebrate killing the second when the first got back up and healed by 10% and burned us down. Feign Death and eat? How the heck did he do that? Still perplexed, and quite annoyed, too. This was a win for us and it turned sour. Phoeey.

Match 10. Win, Mage, Warrior, Priest again. Same tactic of killing the mage and dispelling Ice Block.

You’d think we’re feeling groovy, right? Seven and three! WooT! Well, just wait.

2v2 Arena, BM Hunter and Discipline Priest

Carnage 1. Loss, Ruins: Shadow Priest and 27/34 Warlock. Screwed up and went after the warlock. Dummy. Didn’t put a dent in him.

Carnage 2. Loss, Ruins: Resto Druid and Subtlety Rogue. We killed the rogue and they killed Bela. We kited and fought and trapped and tore our hair out trying to kill that resto druid. We were able to Bestial Wrath two times and still couldn’t kill him. Looked him up later, he and the rogue are in a 3v3 team with a 1843 rating. He’s fully S3 geared and he’s a really smart player. Grats. Now get our of our bracket!

Carnage 3. Win, BEM: Destro Warlock and SV Hunter. Kill the warlock? Yeah. Match over in 22 seconds. Where did they come from; why are we in their bracket?

Carnage 4. Loss, BEM: SV Hunter and Affliction Warlock. We killed the warlock but he put 1024 DoTs on us in about 3/10ths of a second. SV Hunter versus Discipline priest, the SV hunter wasn’t very good, chasing Bela and meleeing her. She OOM’d and that was that.

Match 5. Win, Nagrand: MM Hunter and Disc Priest. We were so happy to win this one! BM Hunter kills MM Hunter while the priests slap each other around. We called this one a match because one side didn’t totally dominate the other for the first time in our 2v2s tonight.

Carnage 6. Loss, BEM: MM Hunter and Disc Priest. Not the same team, amazingly enough, and that priest was totally geared up the wazoo. Spell Haste, Bela wants it now that she’s seen it in action. They killed Bela before we could kill their hunter, and it was fast.

Carnage 7. Win, Nagrand. Frost Mage and BM Hunter. We destoyed that mage in five seconds, he had no chance. Again, as much as we’re losing tonight, two of our three wins have been equally lopsided.

Carnage 8. Loss, BEM: MM Hunter and Disc Priest, same team. That priest is a mean SOB. On the armory, she’s wearing all Tier 5 for raiding, one can only imagine what she’s got for PvP. Spell Haste is again showing its power.

Carnage 9. Loss, BEM: Assassination Rogue and Resto Druid. Best team we’ve faced, period. Made us so mad we wanted to punch the computer. Totally dominated us. We don’t get dominated, but this rogue made us look really stupid. We couldn’t for the life of us get out of melee range. Everything he did kept us locked down. When we could finally Bestial Wrath, he’d sprint over the bridge until the BW faded. If this had been anywhere but BEM, we could’ve chased him down somewhat, but on that *&%^&!! bridge, we couldn’t do jack.

Carnage 10. Loss, BEM: same PoSs. Same tactics, everything. Then they toyed with Bela, just to rub it in. These last two matches make us consider if we’ve got what it takes to be a competent arena player.

Three and seven. Below 1600, from 1633 to 1558! We must have lost to some crappy teams, even though it feels like nothing was ever close. Feeling pretty worthless, actually.

We did get a new PvP cloak tonight, though. Yay.

/crawl in the corner and cry

Remember the first time you heard your hunter get buffed? Whoa! What a cool sound! Those blessings and prayers and gifts sound incredible.

Well we finally captured our 25-person raid buffing all at the same time, right before we started clearing the trash to Leo the Blind. It sounds so cool! We especially love the “chewing” as the movie fades out.

Eventually one comes across something so wickedly cool that there’s no way to adequately express just how cool it is.

This is such an occasion. For us, at least.

A great big BRK Growl of Admiration and Thanks to Daniel at RedForty.com for his donation of a new vamp for our BRK Hunter Guide Movies. Be sure to pump up the volume!

3708th Basic Military Training Squadron, Flight 262, Dorm A7, Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas. March 30, 1991.

Four o’clock in the morning. Maybe. Didn’t have a watch. It was f-ing early, that much I know.

They woke us all up at 3am yesterday in NYC, hustled us to the airport, flew us to San Antonio, ran us all over the place until we finally were allowed to go to bed at 4am. Forty-nine guys asleep and me lying there awake. On the first night of basic training, the guy next to me wouldn’t stop snoring.

Not just your ordinary snoring, of course, but the deep, wet, sloppy, “you think he’s done but then he’s not” elephant-snoring, the kind that ruins marriages. The kind that reduces concrete dormitories to rubble. The kind that keep me awake.

The beds were aligned side-by-side, but alternating head/feet directions so nobody breathed on each other at night or could look each other in the eye. So when I reached over to wake him up, I tapped his calf with the tip of my index finger.

He didn’t stop snoring. Heck, he didn’t even move. If anything the snoring grew worse. I pushed his leg. No effect. I shoved. Nada. I ever so slightly closed my fist and tapped him with that.

Zero.

I sat up and hit his leg. With authority. How could he sleep through that? He must be dead, but he’s still snoring, so he’s obviously not. And I punched his calf again. And again.

He. Is. Still. Asleep.

Now I was really torqued. From my fist, I extended the knuckle from my middle finger while keeping the fingers coiled, reared back like Tom Seaver, and blasted him in the calf with that. Twice. Three times! Stop snoring, you tree-climbing bed-wetter!

He was still asleep.

Whatever sense of rational thought I had left got up and hotfooted it back to the airport. Grabbing his ankle with my left hand, I drove my knuckle-fist deep and hard into his flesh, hoping to reach his bone and leave an imprint upon it. Although I didn’t make a sound, in my head I was screaming like a blood-thirsty warrior demanding my enemy submit to my will!

And he didn’t even flinch. But he did let out one h#ll of a good “snark-snore”.

OK, I surrender. He’s going to snore all night, I’ll just have to live with it. I laid back down and stared into nothingness as the snores shook the ceiling tiles. Eventually, thankfully, and fitfully, sleep finally took me.

GET UP!! Five in the morning and the guy bashing a trash can woke us up to blazing lights and screaming instructors wearing big black hats. Their invasion reminded us all that the previous day was no dream, we really were in basic training. We all jumped out of bed and stood quivering with our backs to the wall lockers and let them scream at us, as it seemed that’s the only thing that really made them happy.

Except our bed-side neighbor wasn’t with us against the lockers. He was on the floor, actually, screaming and clutching his leg. Nobody had heard him over the trash-can percussion and insult-chorus. What the heck was wrong with him? The instructors ran over to him and spat-screamed at him, demanding to know why he wasn’t making them happy and standing against the lockers.

They lifted him up and his calf was purple. He had tried to jump out of bed, but his leg gave out from under him due to the blindingly intense pain that was shooting up it. Wow, look at that mess. What the heck happened to his leg? Bedbugs? Scorpions?

…

Um. Oh. Yeah.

They made him shake it off and stand on one foot against the locker, then spat-screamed at him once more because they had stopped and needed to get their vocal-engines primed. And they all took off down the line, skipping me entirely. My face was quite dry.

On the one hand, I felt really bad. I’d never injured a defenseless person before. Honestly, in my sleepless delirium, I had no clue I was injuring him at all. Resorting to fisticuffs is just not how I roll.

But if I have to be completely honest, I must admit that I had to work really, really hard not to grin. I knew the instructors would’ve used it as an excuse to spittle-scream in my face. Which they never did the entire time I was there.

There are three more Airman Howell at Basic Training tales, minimum. No more injuries occur, but one involves a rather unpleasant and unfortunate reference to male genitals, while another permits me to get to tell one of my two famous Dancing Stories.

Which one should I write first…

On Sunday, Aetherial Circle cleared Hydross and Lurker and got our first look at Leotheras the Blind. Monday night we went back for Leo, looking for our first kill of this whirlwinding b@stard.

By the skin of our teeth, he succumbed. We died, the Diet Coke of Evil died, then Leo died, but almost all exactly at the same time. We were pumping every bit of DPS we could into him. Screw the whirlwind, he’s gotta go down! The Squeekie Priesie demands to let loose with a First Kill Squeek!

Yes, two Gloves of the Vanquished Hero dropped. No, we didn’t win either of them. Uber phooey.

Here’s the anonymous WWS report and a quick screenshot, we are Titan. Not only did we keep our pet back during the humanoid phases, but we did not go full balls-to-the-wall crazy with DPS; we were much more concerned with staying alive and being in the proper position for the transitions. Our raid had plenty of damage-potential, that wasn’t our concern.

Let’s try answer a few questions about pet survivability against Leo.

1. Pets can easily tank the Inner Demons and Intimidation is great. We saved our Bestial Wrath just in case we had to stand there and melee, but we didn’t have to. We will be using Bestial Wrath at the beginning of the demon-phase from now on.

2. Speaking of which, pets can easily whoop some Leo-@ss during his demon-phase. Send your pet and let him chew face.

3. Pets will die in an f-ing second if you let them anywhere near Leo during his whirlwind or if your pet gets his bleed DoT. Improved Mend Pet did not cleanse Hobbes of the bleed effect, ever. Our recommendation is to keep your pet by your side whenever Leo is in humanoid form.

You need your pet for the Inner Demon, so keep your pet alive for when it really matters and don’t let him anywhere close to possibly getting that bleed. Your total DPS will go down - you can see we’re #5 - but your raid’s chance for a victory goes way up if they don’t have to kill you because you couldn’t kill your Inner Demon.

4. Improved Revive Pet FTW. If your pet does die, IRP his tuckus back into the fight. MM and SV hunters, you’re going to wish you had this handy little talent.

Leo is down and AC is 3/6 in Serpentshrine Cavern!

/pop a cold one

We’re always on the lookout for a really good WoW addon-manager for Mac. The best one we’ve found yet? WoWMatrix.

Yes, they make a PC version, too.

Horde are blockading the Tower Point-Ice Blood pass! If Alliance tries to trickle in to IB, they get destroyed. If Alliance tries to take Galv first, Horde just runs in behind us and massacres us. The solution is for the Alliance to assemble right before the horde defense and go in with overwhelming numbers.

Alliance never does this.

We either trickle in, go half IB half galv, or all galv, and in all cases get hammered back to Defense. At which point the Horde can’t “win” either, but they’ll get all the towers and bunkers and win via attrition.

And we hate that.

Our personal favorite solution at this juncture is to do the unthinkable and take SH. Yes, the one thing that is supposedly inviolate Alliance strategy, we violate it. If we take SH when the horde is holding that pass between IB and TP, they all rez back at IB and cause a pandemonium, usually breaking the hold at IB. We may win, Horde may win, but at least it’s not a 60 minute turtle.

So we took SH with help. The Alliance D saw they had nobody left to kill and came forward to SH. We wiped the Horde back to SH, where their D at IB smashed us back. Gotta love the killing fields in the middle of the map. It was chaotic enough that a small contingent of Alliance were able to sneak through to Frostwolf and take the graveyard.

And when the Horde saw that, they all collapsed back to FW, the Alliance O and D kept pouring in, shoved them off of FW, out of their Aid Station, and back to their starting tunnel. It took a while, but it felt WONDERFUL to finally defeat that bloody Horde D at TP-IB.

/whew

Sometimes, winning really is the only thing.