We were in the AH when someone said, “Would somebody please give me one gold so I could buy some bags?”

A typical beggar, we didn’t think so. This smelled like someone brand-new to the game. We whispered and asked, and we were right. Level eight rogue, just installed the game today.

We told him about double-gathering, specifically mining and skinning. We taught him how to Track Minerals. We told him to not buy gear from the Auction House as he’d need 90 gold once he hit level 40, that the gear would take care of itself. He was very appreciative and happy as he set off with his mining pick. We hope he makes buckets of payola.

The Lesson: one don’t have to teach the Jump Shot to be a good WoW Citizen.

We’ve placed bids on the Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes pattern (which we lost) and two Hearts of Darkness (which we won). Three hundred for the pattern, three hundred fifty a pop for the HoDs, yikes. We won bids on five Primal Airs, we had one already. We got six Primal Waters from the guild bank, putting Primal Manas as well as about 10,000 Crunchy Serpent stacks, back in. We’ve got the leather on-hand, natch.

What was the killer was the sixteen Wind Scales. Just the other day, we farmed ten of them for the GM so he could get a belt made, now we had to get sixteen more! The wind serpents in Netherstorm are our favorite source because we can kill Warp Hunters for Warp Burgers at the same time. But the scales have only a 20% drop rate, and there are only 6-10 Wind Serpents alive at any one time. Killing another eighty of them just took forever. And it’s not like there any of these scales on the Auction House, either.

Let’s just say it: the Sun-daily quests are too bloody easy. The Nessingwary quests were harder, for crying out loud. Kill six demons and plant a flag on a dead one? Get four piles of mana-poo? Convert five robots? Even the bombing run has been nerfed. There is zero challenge, and we defy anybody to disagree.

What we DO like are the two Hellfire Sun-quests where there’s a 25-man world raid boss just waiting for someone to do something stupid. And stupid things, people do them. That’s more like it. Blizz should release those demons from the Dead Scar and let them run amok on the Isle. That’d shake those daily quests up.
We would love a return of the Aldor/Scryer vs Netherwing battles in SMV, transplanted to the Isle. Have us go with a Sun-battalion into a battle and have to survive, or keep the leader alive. There’s a war on this island, and we should get more involved.

The Netherwing mines are empty. Wanna make some gold? Take your skinner and do the Netherwing mine-dailies.

The skinning Sun-daily is awesome. We farm Clefthoofs for that, and we’ve been selling a stack of Thick Clefthoof leather every day for 40 gold. /ca-ching!

We spent and hour and a half killing the Netherstorm mana-forge elves trying to get the Plans to drop before it dawned on us that… we forgot to get the quest. /doh

It’s a d@mn free-for all in BEM with the boxes of mana one has to collect. Civility is out the window. You see a box and the mana worm guarding it, you engage the mana worm, and some b@stard runs up and steals your mana box. Over and over again, this happened to us. Did we descend to their level? Never. We got our ten boxes and kept our dignity. We hope you do, too.

You want to run heroic MrT, you’d better remember how to Trap. If you’re running with a protection Paladin, you’d better work with him on pulling. A method we’ve found useful is to use a modified BRK Pull Shot first:

/castsequence reset=5 Distracting Shot, Arcane Shot
/stopcasting

This will require you to smack your Pull Shot button two times, but generate a ton o-threat.

Once the mobs are in the Paladin’s range, he drops a single Consecrate. The hunter’s mob will continue to follow the Hunter as the Consecrate isn’t enough threat to overtake the Distracting/Arcane combo’s threat, and the other mobs will latch onto the Paladin. This technique has worked pretty well for us

Hunter pets should equip fist weapons. We thought of this at lunch today, and we’re really taken with the idea. And winged pets should be able to dual-equip daggers, like they were lashed to their tail. Hobbes with two fist-weapons, we need this ASAP.

Charlton Heston died. If you’ve never seen the original “The Ten Commandments” or “Ben-Hur“, do yourself a favor and add them to your Netflix queue. If you’re in a relationship with a girl, do not watch “The Ten Commandments” with her unless she’s 100% committed to you, because a young Heston and Yul Brynner will steal them from you in a second.

So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.