As hunters, the best and most important addon we can use is…

Well, let’s let you guess! Omen? Nope. Fubar? Not even close. Proximo? Nah.

PetEmote, foshizzle.

So you’ve got PetEmote and it’s nifty. But it’s not You. Your pet says distinctive things, not the same things ever other cat and boar and ravager say. How can you make your pet’s style come through?

We’re gonna hack PetEmote. Yeehaa!

First, find the PetEmote addon on your hard drive and then find the “localization.lua” file inside the PetEmote addon folder.

Open this file with a non-formatting text editor. Apple’s default TextEdit works fine, you PC users gotta figure this part out for yourselves.

Here’s what this file looks like when you open it:

That’s right, it’s German. Dude who wrote it has a German-localization setting. Not to worry, we’re just going to scroll down to the English section, like so:

Now we want to find our favorite pet by scrolling down a little more to the Cat section:

Bingo, cat! The [1] subsection is for Unhappy cats, [2] is for Content cats, [3] is for Happy cats. Keep your pet well-fed and he stays Happy, duh. For our little demonstration, we’re only going to worry about the Happy subsection.

Break out your Creative Hat, slap it on your noggin, and think of the things your pet likes to say while running around Shattrath and in between pulls in raids. Type them over the quotes already in the [3] section, like so:

If you want to add more, go right ahead. Just be sure to follow the formatting EXACTLY.

How spiffy! Now your pet’s emotes are as unique as he is. Save the file, launch WoW, and watch the magic begin.

Let us know what you come up with!

The BRK Non-WoW Thought of the Day: If a restaurant doesn’t have a fax machine, do not call ahead to order lunch-to-go. Quiznos has a fax, Arby’s does not. Game, set, match.

“Dear BRK … I’ve been having issues targeting mobs during a raid. I’ve been running Kara a lot lately and when we pull 4+ mobs I spend most of my time just trying to click on the mob (and not my fellow raid members). By the time I finally get a shot off, the mob is almost dead anyway and then the cycle starts over again with the next one. Are there good strategies / macros / addons that could help?

“I already use a lot of addons and macros, but they always seem to have some kind of flaw that keeps me from trusting them. For example, we were running Kara tonight to break in a new MT. My macros work off of “focus”, so I made the MT my focus. Unfortunately, in the middle of a large numbered mob pull, I hit my “Assist” macro and then my Pet Attack macro. I’m guessing that our new MT was looking ahead at the mob in the next room because my pet pulled the whole next room. I didn’t trust my macro after that and just started to do things manually. Should I ditch the macros all together? Balrok”

We use an assist-macro as well. Do not allow a single incident of miss-targeting on the MT’s part to discourage using it.

There is one good way to lessen the chance that you’ll attack a target you’re not prepared to pull, and that’s by always using raid symbols.

Put a raid symbol over every mob in each pull. If you assist your MT and see he’s targeting a mob that doesn’t have a raid symbol, don’t send your pet.

Now the “attack the main-tank’s target” model works great in 5-man instances, but what about bigger raids. In 10-man and 25-man instances, you’ll have multiple off-tanks to switch among. How do we handle this situation? Well, we have two methods that work well.

The Main Assist is a similar concept to the Main Tank, but in this case the Main Assist is a DPS class. His job is to keep track of the order of attack and the rest of the DPS classes use him as their Focus and attack his target.

You’re running Kara, trying for Attumen. You’ve got a 5-mob pull with which to deal. MT and OT handle one each, hunter traps one, priest shackles one, paladin fears one. You mark the mobs:

Skull = MT
X = OT
Blue Square = Trap
Orange Circle = Shackle
Moon = Fear

The kill order is going to be Skull, Moon, Square, X, Circle. Once the MT’s mob is down, he grabs the feared mob. That guy goes down, the MT grabs the trapped mob, it dies. DPS switches to the OT’s mob while the MT grabs the Shackle. X dies, than Circle.

Can you follow the MT’s target for the proper kill order? Nope, the raid has to switch to the OT’s target and then back to the MT’s. With a Main Assist, the raid follows the MA from target to target, using the MA as their Focus and attacking their Focus’s target.

Being a Main Assist is a challenging job, as a very good sense of situational awareness is required. Rogues are usually a good candidate for the job as they don’t have crowd-control responsibilities after the pull begins.

Another method of organizing Focus Fire is to use CT_RaidAssist. For DPS classes, our favorite functions of this addon are twofold:

1. It allows the raid leader to assign multiple main tanks.
2. It allows us to target the target of these tanks via a keybind.

In our SSC raids, we’ll have five tanks. We assign them in CT_RaidAssist as MT1, MT2, … MT5. In the Keybinding section of our preferences, we have setup our number pad with MT assists.

If we wish to target MT1’s target, we press our number pad “1″ key.
If we wish to target MT2’s target, we press our number pad “2″ key.
…
If we wish to target MT5’s target, we press our number pad “5″ key.

SSC begins, the tanks grab their targets, we press our number pad “1″ key, BAM we’re targeting the first DPS target so we hit our PetAttack macro key. The PetAttack macro casts a Hunter’s Mark, sends Hobbes to attack, and hits the mob with a Scorpid Sting.

That mob dies, we press our number pad “2″ key, KAPOW we’re targeting the second DPS target, we hit our PetAttack macro … etc.

See how fast that is? Two keystrokes results in switching targets and accomplishing all our preliminary tasks, leaving us ready to watch our threat and adapt our shot-rotation accordingly.

How sweet it is.

/ahem

WE DEMAND THAT PETEMOTE WORK AGAIN.

Petemote is more important than mana.

Petemote is more important than Omen.

Petemote is more important than CT Raid Assist.

Petemote is more important than healers.

Petemote is more important than breakfast, the most important meal of the day.

Petemote is more important than beer.

YEAH, YOU HEARD US! BEER!

/flop-pout

We want Hobbes to playfully toss his food in the air before he devours it again. We want him to randomly growl at our raid members. The silence, oh the perpetual silence…

WE WANT HOBBES BACK!!

/sniff

If you or anybody you know has any pull with the Petemote developer, it is your Patriotic Duty to smack him right in the kisser and demand, DEMAND! that they get this cr@p working again.

SO SAYETH BRK…

oh gees, we can’t go on.

Edit: So the Petemote developer has commented on this post. First off, that rox our sox. Second, we found the problem thanks to his info.

Petemote 1.41 doesn’t even load on our iMac.

Petemote 1.4 works just fine.

/cheer!

Double Edit: “The problem with 1.41 is that the toc file PetEmote.toc, is called PetEmote0.toc, and that doesn’t work. it is possible that PCs allow this, the mac client doesn’t. If you rename the TOC file to PetEmote.toc, it works like a charm. Helfi and Humar”

OK OK OK. There’s more 2.4 goodness than we can summarize, so we’re not going to try. A few quick notes, though:

All our addons updated nicely and worked without incident, except Omen2. The thing makes our screen flash and sirens to blare and we didn’t see how to turn that off, so we disabled it. We still like WoWMatrix, it worked really well and updated all our addons perfectly.

But that Omen2 crapola has got to go.

ZOMG! The AV claxon that sounds when we get aggro/targeted? That’s from Perl. We realized that since we’ve switched to ag_UnitFrames, the claxon is gone. We’ll be trying PitBull soon, as we’re just not satisfied with ag_UnitFrames. The lack of a pet-happiness indicator is a total no-go in our book.

The new Horde starting point in AV is more conducive to Horde playing Defense, there’s no question. We used to pass them at Belinda, now we’re almost meeting them at Iceblood Graveyard. Yikes. We went 0-2 due to running out of time, not due to the Horde Offense taking out Vann. The Horde Defense was too thick for Alliance O to get past Frostwolf. We’ll see how this progresses.

We got our Vengeful Gladiator’s Chain Armor and a Vindicator’s Band of Triumph, huzzah! Resilience is now 274, do you approve? Almost 11K unbuffed health while in our raid-spec. You know what really tickles our oysters, though? We have +413 to Ignore Armor. Perhaps we shouldn’t care so much about that stat, but we love it. Welcome to Squishy-Beatdown City, population Us.

Our six-person 3v3 team split into two groups, and we’re now working with a Frost Mage and Feral Druid full-time. No more splitting matches, and everybody seems to be happy with more time to work together.

We didn’t get to run the new 5-person instance as we had to work late. However, we did do some of the new daily quests in Hellfire, and we have a question:

Just WTF happened to hunter-pets?!! Hobbes died and died and died again! The beatings he took we’re brutal to say the least. Holy bat-dung, this had better be us just playing like a complete and total noob. We used the crystal thingie to make the elves “dimished”, or whatever they became, but still each one could remove half of Hobbes health before we killed it.

This… shall not stand.

Oh. And if you make your little fel-ball into a big-fel-ball, do NOT mount up and fly back to the quest-giver. The big-fel-ball hates that, and you’ll have to start all over.

And finally, Battlechickn, our purple Tallstrider, has been released back into the wild. Goodbye Battlechickn, we hardly knew ye.

To replace him, we picked up one of them new-fangled green Ravagers to play with. We had an orange one and hated it, but perhaps greenie will be more to our liking. Is he taller than the oranges ones from the Netherwing mine? We think so.

We wanted to try out AG_UnitFrames but were going crazy trying to align all the unit frame boxes. Bingo, we remembered reading about the addon Align.

We downloaded and installed it, tried out a bunch of settings and settled with “/align 64″, and got the nice grid pattern you see there.

We like AG, we might go back to Perl, but we’ll keep Align regardless.

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.

Big stuff in the latest version of RatingBuster. We’re not an addon-discussion site, but we love RatingBuster so we’re going to break this down, see what’s new, and do a little report.

First, here’s the official RatingBuster change notes:

* NEW: Default gems for empty sockets! Set the gems to use for each socket using /rb sum gem

* In 2.4.0: Spirit-Based Mana Regeneration: This system has been adjusted so that as your intellect rises, you will regenerate more mana per point of spirit.

* Fixed: Will now work with [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond]

* Fixed: Profiles should now work

* Changed: Use “/rb win” to open the options window instead of “/rb optionswin”

Auto fill gems in empty sockets

1. You can set the default gems for each type of empty socket using “/rb sum gem ” or using the options window.

2. To specify the gem of your choice, you will need to give RatingBuster the ItemLink or the ItemID of the gem.

3. ItemLink example: type “/rb sum gem blue ” (last char is a space) and link the gem (from your bags, AH, ItemSync or whatever), then press .

4. What if you can’t link the gem? Well thats what ItemID is for. Find your gem on http://www.wowhead.com/ and look at the URL, for example “http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32193″, 32193 is the ItemID for that gem. Go back in wow, type “/rb sum gem red 32193″ and press .

Note 1: If you have “/rb sum ignore gem” on, the auto fill gems won’t work.

Note 2: Meta gem conditions and SetBonuses work, so if you don’t meet the conditions, StatSummary won’t count them.

Note 3: RatingBuster will only auto fill empty sockets, if the item already has some gems on it, it will remain.

Note 4: Empty sockets filled by RatingBuster will keep the “Empty Socket Icon” so you can still easily tell what color socket it is.

Note 5: Gem text filled by RatingBuster will be shown in gray color to differentiate from real gems.

OK, let’s dig in and play. Open the RatingBuster window with that nice, new “/rb win” command:

Click that “Show ItemID” option. It will allow us to see the WoWHead ID of our gems without having to look them up.

Open an item of yours that is filled with a gem you want to use in a comparison. We’re going to use our gloves that have +8 Agility gems.

RatingBuster knows the ItemID of our Delicate Living Rubies is “24028″. That’s the number we need!

Let’s open RatingBuster again and look at the Stats Summary section. See that? Gems! Type in the number for that red gem we have in our gloves, like so.

When you hit Return, Rating Buster will fill in the gem for us!

Now let’s see RatingBuster gemology in action. We’re going to link a pair of gloves we found in the Auction House and disable the gems-feature in the Ignore Setting sections.

See the Stat Summary for Agility in the Crystalhide Handwraps? It’s showing a total of 11 Agility on the gloves and not counting any gems.

Now let’s re-enable the gemology feature by un-clicking the Ignore Gems option, and take a look at our Crystalhide Handwraps again.

Oh, spiffy! Look at that down there! Rating Buster is using Delicate Living Rubies to “fill in” the empty red sockets in the Crystalhide Handwraps. Now we’re getting a much better picture of the differences when the new gloves are gemmed.

Notice that Agility, Crit Chance, and Ranged Attack Power have all been recalculated as if the gloves were socketed with two Delicate Living Rubies. Just tremendous!

Do you see the limitation, though? If you want to see a comparison if you socketed those gloves with two different red gems - one Agility and one Attack Power, for exaple - you’re outta luck.

But still, this is a great way to enhance your gear-comparison theorycrafting! If you don’t have Rating Buster yet, get it today. It totally has the BRK Growl of Approval.

BRKTestBed has presented us with the old, Jeebuz the Quest Window Stinks-problem that we remember from our BRK-leveling days. Fortunately, there are a ton of solutions nowadays for this.

We really like the combination of Doublewide and Lightheaded. Doublewide puts the quest-list in a separate window from the quest-text. Superhandy. Then Lightheaded searches the WoWHead database, fetchs all the quest-info, then makes another widow right beside Doublewide.

Frankly, we’ll never level again without this functionality. Both addons are now linked on our sidebar. Great stuff.

The two addons we discuss in this movie are Khartus’s Hunter Timers and CooldownTimers2.

We continue to re-learn a very important lesson: capture more video than you’ll ever think you’ll need. We did that at the beginning and it worked great; we had plenty of time to talk about the addons. But we hit the stop-capture at the end much too soon and it almost ruined the whole thing. Breaking our trap by accident would’ve been great film but we honked that up. /sad panda

You can download the QuickTime video here.

“Dear BRK, I’ve been a loyal reader of your blog for quite some time. Nice job with it. It’s helped me and many other hunters I’ve sent your way over the past year or so.

“To the point, I just wanted to point out a little addon I just wrote. Shameless self promotion for the win You might consider it too much automation, given your view on the castsequence macros, but I’d be curious as to your opinion on it. It’s new and I’m still working out any remaining kinks, of course. No software is ever completely free of bugs

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8081-PetInstance.html

“Thanks much, Brannis (42 dwarf hunter) & Renfield (albino bat)”

Smells like a nice idea to us. Turning off Growl is one of the first things most experienced raid leaders remind hunters to do, so having an addon do it for you automatically might just be a whole lotta Win. Having the option to turn off Dive and Dash and Screech is even better. Nice Job.