When TJ tells you she yells at us at 4pm every day, she’s not kidding. Today was a shriek-fest.

Johnsonville brats are not sausages. So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.

BRK’s Boy: “Daddy! Let’s play Scooby Doo! I’ll be Scooby Doo, the puppy can be Shaggy, and you can be Fred!”

BRK: “OK, Scooby Doo!”

BRK’s Boy: “Daddy! Fred doesn’t say ‘Scooby Doo’, only Scooby Doo says, ‘Scooby Doo’!”

BRK: “Well, what does Fred say?”

BRK’s Boy: “Nothing! Well, he does say, ‘Let’s split up’.”

Three words that let you know you’re in Florida: Caution, Burning Swamp.

Two words that let you know you’re in Florida: Gator Jerky.

Even if you tone down the Dueling Waterbottle-Lightsaber Battle with the girl from Systems Analysis, your boss will still get mad.

When Mrs BRK works late, ham and cheese crackers, fruit cocktail - extra cherries - and milk is a nutritious dinner for a child.

We haz them.

A good friend of ours recently took our advice and hired a BT-guild to get her a Amani War Bear mount. Cost her 5000 gold and she’s giddy. Each member of the raid earned 555 gold for 45 minutes work. Why aren’t more Tier-6 guilds doing this?

It is much more fun to kite the Mount Hyjal add-waves into the NPCs than it is to DPS them down. Our position on the damage meter may go down, but our enjoyment-factor skyrockets.

Having to do DKP-bidding during those same add-waves is a colossal PITA.

Watching your warlocks and mages break 2000 DPS on the Mount Hyjal add-waves makes our 1400 DPS look pitiful, which it really isn’t. Tuskbreaker plus a 3:2 Steady/Auto macro is pretty incredible, even we must admit. Yes that macro gulps mana like a Shuttle consumes liquid oxygen, but it’s really impressive to see those DPS numbers go up.

We are considering going dual-wield so we can use two Superior Mana Oils. We’d have to pass on the cloak we’re about to get, though. Veddy, veddy intewestink.

We’ve been playing around with a few of the popular shot rotation macros, to see how they perform with our gear. One reason we’re interested in these things is that the Kill Commands are included. While we still feel that a manual shot rotation is more hunterish, it cannot be argued that manually slapping Kill Command is more efficient. It is not; the macro wins that battle hands-down. If you wish to argue that you use a shot rotation macro so that you don’t miss any Kill Commands, we won’t disapprove.

So what are these macros? Well, there are two: the 1:1 Auto/Steady and the 3:2 Auto Steady.

Our 1:1 Auto/Steady Shot Rotation Macro

/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2 Steady Shot, !Auto Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Don’t freak out, this isn’t rocket science. Let’s look at the steps one at a time.

/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command - This macro will make your pet attack will a Kill Command if it is available and your pet is attacking something. However, if your pet is sitting by your side and not attacking when Kill Command activates, it will not cast Kill Command and your pet will not leap into combat. And we use the ‘castrandom’ instead of a plain ‘cast’ so that if the Kill Command will cause an error message, the Kill Command will be ignored.

Isn’t that neat? If you do a macro like,

/castrandom Spell A, Spell B, Spell C

and when you hit the macro, Spell A would cause an error, the castrandom command will eliminate Spell A from its selection process and randomly pick either Spell B or Spell C.

Thus, when we do a

/castrandom Kill Command

and Kill Command would cause an error, it won’t cast it. Very handy. Moving on, let’s break down the next line.

/castsequence - that’s going to make our macro execute commands one at a time, with each keypress

reset=2 - If you don’t press this macro in two seconds, reset it and always cast the first action in the castsequence line the next time the macro is executed.

Steady Shot - The first time you press the macro, cast Steady Shot

!Auto Shot - Oh ho! Auto Shot is a “toggle” spell for hunters. If we just put Auto Shot in the castsequence, it would turn Auto Shot on, then off, then on, then off, and we don’t want that. What the ! does is to tell the macro, ‘do not turn off Auto Shot, only turn it on’.

/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

If any Lua error messages are hocked-up on the screen, dismiss them.

So that’s the macro, and what it does is cast Steady, Auto, Steady, Auto, etc. with Kill Command automatically cast. Now there’s another popular high-DPS macro in vogue right now, that’s the 3:2.

Our 3:2 Auto/Steady Shot Rotation Macro

/cast !Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill command
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Not much different than the 1:1, is there. What we’ve done is break up the castsequence command into two casts. However, due to the workings of the global cooldown, the shots that will be fired now will look like: Steady, Steady, Auto, Steady, Auto.

The “jerks” out there will tell you that one should select the appropriate macro based upon one’s ranged weapon’s speed. Fast weapons will benefit from the 1:1 macro, slow weapons from the 3:2. Also, they say that the more Haste you pack with your slow weapon, the more effective the 3:2 macro will be.

We’re not going to break all that down, the “jerks” have done quite enough research and reporting in that area.

What we do want to look at is how these macros work with our gear.

The guns we’re going to test are Tuskbreaker and the Barrel-Blade Longrifle. We used the 1:1 and the 3:2 macros with each gun, four sessions each. For each run we made a fresh WoWCombatLog.txt file. After the run we stopped recording, logged completely out of WoW, and used WoWWebStats to extract and analyze the data. After the WWS report was generated, we trashed the old WoWCombatLog.txt file.

We used Aspect of the Hawk, no trinkets, no potions, and our digital Combat Grilling Timer - what we use to ensure our steaks are done perfectly - for perfect one minute testing intervals.

You can see the results of our testing in the spreadsheet above, and you can download it here. The first section of our spreadsheet shows the results in descending-DPS order. A Tuskbreaker 3:2 session is first with 849DPS and a Barrel-Blade Longrifle 1:1 session is last with 670DPS.

The next section of the spreadsheet is the averages of these runs. Our Tuskbreaker 3:2 runs were tops, averaging 817DPS and our Barrel-Bladed Longrifle 1:1 runs were last, averaging 742DPS.

But look at the data again. Those BBL 1:1 runs had the greatest discrepancy between best and worst DPS, from 809 to 670. If you look at the Auto Crit% for those last two BBL 1:1 runs, you’ll see that they’re the two worst of all 16 runs. Crank those Auto Crits up five percent and those two BBL 1:1 runs will easily fall in line with the other two. And if we did that, the BBL 1:1 average would surpass the Tuskbreaker 1:1 average, which due to the slow speed of the TBR, we would expect to see.

Speaking of the TBR, those TBR 1:1 runs are pretty interesting. Even with super-high crit percentages for both Steady and Auto, the TBR never surpassed the BBL 3:2, even at its worst. If nothing else, we’ve proved that using Tuskbreaker with a 1:1 Auto/Steady macro is the worst method of generating MQoSRDPS we tested.

How about the BBL 3:2 sessions? We’ve read that if one uses a 3:2 macro with a fast weapon, the macro behaves like a 1:1 and thus there is no benefit. Well, from our testing, a BBL used with a 3:2 macro may or may not generate a 1:1 Steady/Auto ratio. If one counts our number of Autos and Steadys and looks at the ratios, one sees this:

Of the four BBL 3:2 runs, two times we get a 1:1 ratio and two times we get a 3:2 ration. And a connection between ratio and DPS is not apparent, either. The highest BBL 3:2 DPS is a 3:2, the worst is a 3:2. The middle two BBL 3:2 runs have shots that result in a 1:1 ration. Fascinating!

Tuskbreaker with a 3:2 shot rotation macro produced the single-highest DPS run of all, and the highest average of all the runs. What we didn’t expect was that the BBL 3:2 was the second highest; we thought the BBL 1:1 would do much better. But even with boosting those last two BBL 1:1 runs crit percentages, it wouldn’t pass the BBL 3:2 average.

Haste! They say the 3:2 works wonders with a slower weapon, like Tuskbreaker, and Haste effects. Well we happen to have some haste-gear, our Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes.

But we can’t just slap those on; we have a two-piece Tier 5 gear bonus we must maintain. If we’re going to equip those shoulders over our T5 shoulders, we’ve got to put our T5 gloves back on, which means taking our Gauntlets of Rapidity.

Gloves off, gloves, on, shoulders off, shoulders on, equip Tuskbreaker, run four 3:2 macro sessions, record the data, and that’s the third section of our spreadsheet. That 850DPS run was the first one we did with the Haste gear, and we did backflips. ZOMG IT’S AWESOME! But we continued with the testing, doing three more runs. We averaged those four runs and compared it to the previous runs, which we show in the final section of the spreadsheet. And those other runs brought us back to Earth.

The hasted-TBR 3:2 average did not exceed the unhasted-TBR 3:2 average, and we think we know why: the gear switching was just too detrimental to our stats. The BoJ gloves are plain ol’ better than the T5s, and the Haste shoulders are worse than our T5s. What we gained in Haste we lost in stats. In our case, there just doesn’t seem to be a reason to swap our stuff around to gain a small Haste bonus.

But as we accumulate more Haste gear, we’ll continue to do more Dr. Boom testing to see just what is beneficial and what is not.

So we went to Dr. Boom to figure out, for our gear, which ranged weapon we should be using. The contestants are:

Tuskbreaker

Barrel-Blade Longrifle

Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle

And we’ve run into a snag. But first off, here’s the setup.

We went to Dr. Boom with 200 bullets in our ammo pouch. Nothing in our bags, just 200 shots. We equipped Tuskbreaker, used Aspect of the Hawk, but used neither Rapid Fire nor trinkets. We popped Fel Mana potions when necessary to maintain our shot rotation.

For that rotation, we used a variation of the popular 1:1 Auto/Steady macro:

/castsequence reset=2/target !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

We recorded our combat log, then parsed it to WoWWebStats. Here’s a link to that report.

The report says we did 746DPS. OK, that’s great. Small problem, though; the report says we only shot 177 bullets.

Wha?

We logged out, trashed our combat log, relogged WoW. Went back to the bank, grabbed another 200 bullets, equipped the BBL, recorded our combat log, and repeated the experiment. Here’s the WWS link for that.

755DPS for this gun, how nice it is. 2% more crits, both Auto and Steady shots. That translates to more Kill Commands and more Focus via Go For the Throat. On the surface, it sure looks like we need to put Tuskbreaker in the bank and keep the BBL for fun and profit.

But we only shot 140 bullets, according to WWS. /boggle

Log out, trash log, re-log, bank, 200 bullets, Wolfslayer, start combat log. WWS link. 711DPS and only 151 shots fired.

Where is our ammo going?

For kicks, we did the entire process over again, this time using Tuskbreaker and manually Auto/Steadying. Cr@p on a stick, but we killed Dr. Boom with 19 bullets left. That doesn’t ruin our data, but it affects it.

Regardless, here’s the WWS link. We clipped the bejeezus out of our Auto Shots, sheesh. 727DPS and only 139 shots fired. Same crit-rate as the other Tuskbreaker run, thankfully. Had we done a better job with our shot rotation, the DPS would’ve been more similar, as well.

But on every experiment, WWS “lost” 13% to 30% of our shots. This we cannot explain and we have a hard time reconciling any “this gun has more DPS than this gun” statements until the missing shots are identified.

Any ideas?

Without getting overtly sexist… can we recruit, or can we recruit. Redhead, female, dwarf, holy Paladin, foshizzle. /bask in the glow that is Us

Ahem.

5/6 in SSC down in exactly three hours, no wipes, we kept our DPS #1 for the night. Our newest competitor, Zasp from The Egotistical Priest, decided to push back against our demands that squishies and leather-scrubbers remain on the bottom of the epeen-pile. He did great, by the way, making us work for our numbers.

AC has retooled a little, as well. Our main tank decided to step down and join the filth in the melee-DPS group as a Fury warrior. Some shifting of tanks was required, promoting a new MT and brining in a new 3rd tank, and Mr. Fury had a respectable showing. The new MT did an awesome job, the healers were bored, no wipes, a few too many sharded drops for our taste, and it was a tremendous success.

And those ten BoJs pushed us past 75, so we nabbed a pair of these:

We spent over 1000 DKP for our Tier 5 gloves, and before we’ve finished clearing SSC, we replace them. /sigh

We love the crit! A little Hit Rating loss, but oodles of new Crit makes us a happy BM huntard.

EDIT: Were we really #1 DPS?

Total SSC run, including trash: Rogue, BRK, Mage

Hydross: Mage, Warlock, Mage, BRK

Lurker: Warlock, BRK, Mage

Leo: Mage, Mage, BRK

Fathom-Lord: BRK, Rogue, Fury Warrior

Tidewalker: Mage, Warlock, Mage, Rogue, BRK

Perhaps we really weren’t #1 DPS… this cannot stand! To Dr. Boom!

BRK’s Non-WoW Thought of the Day: Do you take your glassware into your bathroom at home? Of course you don’t. So why are you taking your coffee cup into the men’s room to clean it at work? There’s a kitchen across the courtyard! A kitchen, by definition, has no male nudity. Isn’t that where you want to wash utensils and ceramics that will eventually be placed in your mouth?

The GM of AC and the Squeekie Priestie are completing Fiopalooza (Fiopallooza?) and on their way home. Soon, the King of All Puns is going to lock horns with the loquacious and eloquent Ego. Drenden may experience latency issues that rival time-travel as the guild-chat explodes in a supernova of catcalls and chat-gagging.

We, for one, cannot wait. /popcorn

ZOMG!! The Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan is this Saturday! Are you ready, are you pumped? The BRK web-bots have been picking up lots of chatter on guild forums across the world about joining in groups. The French and Spanish sites we can sort of read, but the German, Slovak, and Russian ones completely mystify us. Remember, the race starts at 7pm Eastern Daylight Time, not server-time. That’s 11pm Greenwich Mean Time, foshizzle. Don’t screw it up and arrive an hour late, or you’ll get Shovel Detail.

Yes, that was a threat.

We finally captured a Hydross movie we like. We’ll be turning it into a BRK Hunter Guide Movie tonight, stay tuned. The next movie should be either Al’ar or Leo the Blind. The Leo movie will be rated R for all the BRK-screaming and cursing that will take place as Leo puts his Bleed on Hobbes and our pet dies again and again and there’s really nothing we can do about it.

We will be doing a comparison of 3x Tier 5 gear vs. 2x Tier 5 gear + Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes, as computed by Recount during a Dr. Boom session. Time, of course, is our enemy. Do not fret; this is totally on the BRK Honey-Do List.

We played around with a shot-rotation macro last night in SSC. Don’t Panic!

Some immediate observations:

We hate how slowly our shooting started. Every fight felt like an eternity before the first shot was fired.

We loved seeing the Kill Commands automatically being cast. In all honesty, we will never be able to manually cast KCs as efficiently as the macro did.

We missed not being able to throw Arcane Shots in the rotation when we wanted.

We appreciated not having to worry about the other gun-hunter’s sounds interfering with out shot-rotation concentration.

We felt detached from the DPS-experience. It was like driving a Porsche equipped with an automatic transmission.

There can be no arguing that a simple Auto/Steady macro can improve a hunter’s DPS, especially for those hunters for whom shot-rotation theory is a concept they wish not to study in-depth. We would never deride a hunter for not using one, but if their DPS is lacking, we would definitely recommend the one we used.

However we still believe that a shot-rotation macro is not mandatory to provide MQoSRDPS in a raid. We also feel that a properly executed, manual shot-rotation feels like more of an accomplishment than doing warlock-like, keyboard face-smashing.

What was the macro we used? We’ll cover that in a separate post.

We just had to have a Nethercobra Leg Armor for our new armor, so we spent 360 gold on the mats for one, plus a 40 gold blue gem to finish the thing. Raiding ain’t cheap.

We had to go with the Agi/Sta gem because our meta gem would’ve been blown without a blue there. The Shifting Nightseye is a standard red/blue socket hunter-gem, nothing difficult about that decision.

What’s even better about these things is they get our Hit Rating back to 142! Huzzah! No more misses, no more hooks, no more raid-leader’s dirty looks!

So how do we look now, with our new gun and leggings?

Pretty darn spiffy, if we do say so ourselves.

Wanna see something cool? Check this out!

Hunters doin’ it for themselves! #1 through #4 on the FLK kill, both total damage and DPS.

I say, Who’s that atop those damage meters?

It’s Hunters! It’s Hunters!

Thank you, Zul’Aman timed event! The Stat Summary is comparing this beaut against our Barrel-Blade Longrifle.

It’s at this point where we point out the Rating Buster has problems with the scope. And then we seem to think that a bunch of people will write in and say, “You noob, it works like this…” But we don’t remember “this” and it really does look like RB is not taking the crit-scope into account in its equations…

But both guns have the scope, so it’s irrelevant.

Are we going to get into the, “This gun’s too slow!” argument? Perhaps, but we wish to do some research and testing ourselves. What it does do is make us drool for the Tier 5 leggings we know are just a quick four-SSC boss clear away. Then, we can put our haste-shoulders back on.

Now here’s a pretty gorilla! She’s done a great job getting this guy to 70, now if we can only convince her to stop meleeing.

Yes, Lolliy, we totally went there.

You’ve run Karazhan and gotten through Shade of Aran. You’re karma is good, and the Drape of the Dark Reaver drops. The loot-gods smile and you win it. Huzzah!

You go further into Kara eventually down Prince. Your loot-hax hasn’t been discovered by Blizz, and you cause the Farstrider Wildercloak to drop. You ninja it, good and proper, hearth back to Shat, and slap that puppy on. It’s got an ItemLevel of 125; it must be better than the Dark Reaver cloak, of course!

Not so quick, sassafrass.

Our good buddy Rating Buster comes out, caresses your face and bonks you on yer noggin. Look at the stats, not the item-level:

You can configure Rating Buster to show you many stats and stat-differences. What we see here is the some of the computations that result from comparing the two cloaks against each other. We equipped one, compared the other to it, than reversed the process.

Is it good to know that the DotDR has 36 Agility and the FW has 12? Sure. But what happens to that Agility? It becomes Armor, Crit Chance, and Ranged Attack Power. And the cloak with the lower ItemLevel actually has more Armor and Crit Chance than the cloak with the higher ItemLevel.

But what about our bread-n-butter, Ranged Attack Power. The FW has more of that than the DotDR, doesn’t it. Well yes it does. One could then reasonably think, “What’s more important: +12 RAP or +0.60% Crit?” And one could actually make a mathematical model and calculate the effects these would have on one’s specific gear.

But wait!

The “lesser” cloak has one more thing going for it: Hit Chance. Is your Hit Rating 142, are you hit-capped so you’ll never miss against level 73 bosses, (those found in Kara and beyond?) If not, then DotDR is your choice, regardless of the Crit/RAP argument.

Missing shots can be a big loss of DPS over time. Getting your hit rating as close to 142 is a critical part of hunter-gear itemization.

If you look at our armory profile, you’ll see that our current hit rating is 117. We used to be hit-capped, but our Tier 5 gear and the Badge of Justice ring we’ve picked up have no hit rating and are replacing gear that did. Since our raiding party has been giving us +Hit bonuses, and our WWS reports aren’t showing that we’re missing more than one shot per raid boss, we’re not going to freak out and start putting our old hit-rating-gear back on.

But when the FW cloak dropped into our greedy clutches, we immediately assumed it was a good upgrade for us over our DotDR and spent the gold on the +12 Agility enchant. But we’re not going to use this cloak, as even though it is a “higher level” piece of gear, for us it’s not a “better” piece of gear.

Remember that ItemLevel is a guide, not a Rule. Do your research and itemize yourself based on stats, not ItemLevel.

Al’ar down. Yahtzee, foshizzle! AC is now 3/4 in Tempest Keep, Kael and Vashj are all that stands between us, Mount Hyjal, and a clear conscious.

The hunter trinket dropped. We screwed up our DKP-bidding and the hunter who has everything from SSC and TK got it. We would’ve punched the computer into a new dimension if we could have. We were madder… d@mn it this is a game and we were so mad… we shouldn’t have gotten so mad, but we did… we’re pathetic sometimes, we admit it.

/sigh

After three wipes on the very-buggy Void Reaver, we got him down and the hunter loot flowed. First off, we got these for a song:

They were a cheap, small upgrade, so we took them. We were not planning on taking a shot at one of the two Hero tokens that dropped, so we didn’t see a problem with spending a little DKP for a pair of leggings that would let us re-gem properly.

As we said, two Hero tokens dropped, but we weren’t going to bid on them because we really wanted the T5 leggings. Our new shoulders that we just spent more than 1000 gold on were fine with us, and we weren’t going to outbid the other hunter who has had horrible loot-luck along with us.

We stayed out of the bidding until he got outbid at a low price, and we couldn’t pass them up so cheaply. We got a pair and here they are compared to our “old” Leatherworking shoulders:

The big thing with Tier 5 for hunters is the 2-piece set bonus, which we now have: gloves and shoulders. Healing our pet 15% of our damage is insane. We can’t wait to see this in action.

And what kind of damage are we going to do? We gemed our shoulders and leggings and regemed our gun. Another Greater Inscription of Vengeance for our shoulders. A Nethercobra Leg Armor for the new legs. The meta gem is still active, all socket-bonuses are active, and although our Hit Rating is a little low for our taste, the encroachment toward 2000 RAP makes our mouth water.

First off, it’s a bitchin tabard. Best since the Scourge Invasion, no doubt. We’re still a jumble of colors, but that’s to be expected.

And this is the necklace a hunter can purchase once he reaches exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive, the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might (SSPoM). You’ve got to be exalted with Aldor/Scryers to make the proc work, though. Don’t bring your newbie 70 to MrT, run your rep to exalted with the Sun O, and expect to get this necklace working right away.

What’s going to happen when it procs? Well, it looks like this:

For us Aldor folks, the buff it gives is called Light’s Strength and it increases RAP by 200 for ten seconds. Want to see it working in a raid setting? Well, here ya go:

No trinket-popping, our RAP is a purty, sweet-smelling, raid-buffed 2496. Jenga, beyotches!

We one-shotted Morogrim in a little less than 10 minutes. Personally, we were sent to our Watery Grave one time. That took us out of combat for, what thirty seconds? In 9 minutes 30 seconds of pure, unadulterated DPS, how many times did our SSPoM proc? Well WWS has got that covered:

Light’s Strength proc’d twelve times in 9 1/2 minutes, which is the same frequency as Improved Aspect of the Hawk. That’s a pretty healthy proc-rate, and thus we don’t mind dropping our Hit Rating to 125 to keep it.

We Missed one shot against Morogrim in 9 1/2 minutes and gained 120 seconds - we’re assuming the LS-procs more than likely didn’t proc on top of each other - of an extra 200 AP. We’ll take it, cuddle it, and feed it puppy-treats. We likes our new necklace, we do, we do!

The SSPoM gets the BRK Growl of Approval.

And because we just can’t let a good epeening moment go by, here’s the WWS report from the Tidewalker kill. We are Phobos.

We would be remiss if we didn’t give props to the mages, especially Crucio who brought the Murlock-Smashing, AoE-Ban-Hammer in the form of 2001 DPS. Dude, you’re all uppity, and you earned it.