“Dear BRK … [I] did Shattered Halls tonight for the first time. Nice run except for breaking my own traps. /bangs head.

“However the bonus was that the Skyfire Hawk Bow dropped and I won the roll. Given I have the Valanos and so did the other hunter we thought about DE’ing it. However I felt that the higher hit rating and slightly more ap was an improvement over the +crit of the Valanos. What are your thoughts? Kolan & Jaguar.”

First off, no more breaking your own traps. Remember your Pullshot Macro:

/cast Arcane Shot(Rank 1)
/stopcasting

Get that on your action bars, pronto.

As for the gear, let’s take a looksie!

Valanos’ Longbow
130 - 242 Damage Speed 2.80
(66.4 damage per second)
+10 Intellect
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 10.
Equip: Increases attack power by 22.

Skyfire Hawk-Bow
108 - 202 Damage Speed 2.40
(64.6 damage per second)
Equip: Improves hit rating by 14.
Equip: Increases attack power by 26.

OK, so these are both 65-DPS-Class ranged weapons. The SHB has less pure DPS but the +Hit is nice when you break into Karazhan. The Valanos is, of course, a world drop an easily bought on the Auction House; you see these everywhere.

Is there a huge reason one should choose either based upon these stats? Not really, no. If you’re a SV hunter, the Valanos is probably your choice because you’re trying to jam that +Crit as high as you can. But for BM and MM hunters, the stats we’ve talked about here aren’t anything drastically dissimilar.

What is the big difference for MM and BM spec here? The attack speed. Notice that the Valanos is a 2.8 seconds per shot and the Skyfire is 2.4 seconds per shot.

If you’re a Marksman hunter, you’re probably going to want the Valanos for the bigger crits that are the hallmark of your spec. Big RAP and slow weapons equals mongo-crits and a happy MM hunter.

If you’re a Beastmaster hunter, you should have Serpent’s Swiftness and maybe IAotH. Put these talents together with a 2.4-ranged weapon and you’re a frickin’ maching gun, causing frequent crits which spawn Kill Commands and, if you have Go For The Crotch - we mean, Throat! If you have GftT, your crits build Focus which make your pet do even more damage. The BM spec is about pet-damage and haste, so you might like the SHB a lot.

“BUT BRK!! Everyone knows that Auto/Steady works best with a 2.7 ranged weapon! You’ve got to take the Valanos as it’s closer to that!”

/sigh

Fine. Go ahead. Do your auto/steady macro and use the Valanos if that’s your playstyle.

Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say a BM hunter will do 10DPS more with the Valanos than the SHB. But what if a BM hunter combines his 2.4 SHB and Serpent’s Swiftness and IAotH and Rapid Fire and a haste trinket and morphs into a Massive Arrow-Depletion Brigade with a firing-rate of 1.4 and expending arrows at a rate that would make Rambo proud. Wouldn’t that be fun?!

We think there should be more to playing a hunter than spamming an auto/steady macro if for no other reason than it’s more fun to get involved with the shot rotation, modify it based upon specific situations, and working hard to maximize one’s DPS while launching more ammo against a target than anybody has even seen.

But that’s just how we roll; you might like slapping your F5 key for three hours. Do what ya gotta do.

We have our Gruul raid tonight, tomorrow is working with WoW Insider to possibly get the Moroes movie over there for mass-distribution, and Wednesday we have to be at work at 1:00AM for a very-early morning launch. Thursday will probably be spent abed. Friday is back to Karazhan.

All in all, quite the busy little bee we shall be.

“Dear BRK … how do you get WWS reports to add your pet’s dps properly? … Modrak.”

You know, we should do a post on how to run WoWWebStats, with screenshots and all the trimmings. We’re putting that on the BRK To Do List.

“Dear BRK, how do I tell someone in our raid group how to be a better hunter not the huntard that they are. Killall”

Always remember: One cannot shove enlightenment into a black hole.

But if a 43 year old Vinnie Testaverde can lead the Panthers to a victory having only been on their team for five days, anything is possible.

If you are of some position of authority in your guild, you can “insist” they perform in a certain manner lest they be gkicked, but that’s the Stick approach. Most people respond better to the Carrot.

You need to give them something nice, something small, something to whet their appetite to learn the Hunter Way. Teach them a Feed Pet Macro:

#show Clefthoof Ribs
/cast Feed Pet
/use Clefthoof Ribs

With one button you feed your pet the proper food, but it also shows how many ribs you have in your bags. Simple yet very handy, they should be intrigued. Then you hit them with more goodies, or even, “You know, there’s a hunter blog out there I’ve read that I think you’d really like,” and send them our way.

There’s a nice community of smart and helpful hunters here who can tackle just about any subject with decorum and a smile. Even huntard-conversions.

“ZOMG BRK!! The patch! Talk about the patch! Sincerely, Everybody on the Planet.”

Okay okay okay. Wow, y’all can be a pestering cult following, ya know?

While the entire Test Realm patch notes are linked here…

What BRK Cares About for All Hunters in the 2.3 Patch Notes:

Zul’Aman is a 10-player, level 70 outdoor instance located in the Ghostlands. Players will be able to confront six new bosses including the Forest Troll Warlord Zul’jin. Bring it, baby. We’re totally psyched.

Dwarf/Troll: Gun/Bow Specialization now increases chance to critically hit with Guns/Bows by 1% rather than increasing weapon skill. If we have to lose Crit to get our Hit back, it’s a moot point. If we can raise our Hit without losing Crit, this could rock. But this really seems to be a subtle maneuver to get more folks to go Survival for raiding. That’s where Surefooted gives the 3% Hit bonus and where Crit is King. Survival hunters are cheering this development, that’s for sure.

Pets will try to get behind their targets when engaging in melee combat. Now this is fascinating. Just how much melee-time will be lost as our pets reposition will have to be measured against the amount of damage they end up not taking by being behind mobs. Take Ramparts for example. A pet standing in the dragon boss’s flames dies quickly and does zero DPS. If he positions so that he’s behind the dragon, and thus totally avoids that fire AoE, he does a lot of DPS, and a heck of a lot more than if he were dead. We are cautiously very optimistic.

Arcane Shot (Ranks 6 and above) now dispel 1 Magic effect in addition to their normal damage. An obvious attempt to boost hunter-use in arenas, this could be pretty spiffy. Now if a warlock throws underwater breathing on his team and this is what the Arcane Shot dispels, it’s either a pretty crappy addition to our arsenal or just smart play on the warlock’s end. Or both.

Explosive Trap: The initial damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.

Immolation Trap: The total damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power. We are wary of the differences in the implementation of these bonuses. What strikes us as interesting is that these are RAP-based. Most hunters who use traps for damage are Survival. Had these been agility-based we would’ve appreciated the buff to traps more. As it stands, we’ll take a wait-n-see approach.

Misdirection: This spell will now always be removed correctly if multiple Hunters overwrite each other’s Misdirection. We may actually miss having our Misdirection over-written by another hunter and watching the chaos ensue. Currently, this potential ‘whoopsie’ requires hunters to coordinate their Misdirection in raids. If this change comes to pass it’ll make Misdirecting less deadly, but maybe a little less fun.

Serpent Sting: The total damage dealt by this sting is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power. Another Marksman buff and yet another temptation to take Improved Stings. If your Serpent Sting does 660 damage over 15 seconds and you take 3/3 in Improved Stings and get the 30% bonus damage to stings, your Serpent Sting will do 858 damage over 15 seconds. That’s nice but not good enough to justify taking it over something else. Now take that Marksman hunter and his 2300 RAP and give his Serpent Sting another 230 bonus damage, boosting it to 1088 damage over 15 seconds. Perhaps the warlocks out there would even say that this constitutes a real DoT, (probably not, but they don’t usually cheer us on anyway.) We’re scared to say it, but we actually think this is pretty nice.

Trueshot Aura (Marksmanship) no longer costs mana to cast and will last until cancelled. ‘Bout time. Next!

New recipes are available from Grand Master leatherworking trainers to make 20 slot quivers and ammo pouches. Spiify. But we’re not going to get to make one because…

New recipes are available from the Honor Hold, Thrallmar, and Lower City quartermasters to create 24 slot quivers and ammo pouches. Why Lower City? Could there be a 24-slot ammo bag with a 15% haste rating from Honor Hold and Thrallmar at Revered, and a 24-slot ammo bag with, can we dream, an 18% haste rating from Lower City? We are looking forward to jumping on the PTR just to see these vendors.

New macro command to target by entire name: /targetexact Woohoo! Your “/targetexact Demon Chains” macro won’t target someone your raid named Doomilias or Demetria anymore.

New macro command: /petautocasttoggle Again, woohoo! Our Growl macros shall be halfed.

When you inspect another player, you can now see their talent choices as well as their equipment. Huntard examinations just got a lot more fun. And probably scarier; how many Pathfinding level 70 hunters do you think we’re going to find?

“Dear BRK, long time reader, first time writer. Last night while grinding away in the Hinterlands I noticed that every time my pet Void (a ghost saber) grabbed aggro both growl and cower would auto cast at the same time. I turned off cower and removed it from the pet bar and it still would cast. Do you have any ideas what is going on, and isn’t both of these counterproductive to each other? Sandier and Misha.”

Growling and Cowering at the same time are most certainly counter-productive and should never be both set to Auto-Cast.

Now neither your nor your pet’s spells need be on your action bars in order to use them. For example, one can cast Distracting Shot as part of a Pull Shot macro and Distracting Shot doesn’t have to be seen on your action bars at all.

Removing the Cower spell from your action bar doesn’t affect its effects. Your pet’s spells can be cast without them being on your pet’s Action Bars. And since your pet’s spells can be set to Auto Cast, they can Auto Cast from their quiet hiding place on your pet’s Spell Book without being placed on the pet’s action bar.

Open your spell book, click on your Pet tab, find that Cower spell and we’re pretty certain you’ll see the Auto Cast glowing, circling aura all over it. Right-click that icon to turn Cower’s Auto Cast off, and you’ll be good to go.

Now because you have Cower trained, you can make a Pet-Aggro Dump macro:

/cast Cower

This will make your pet cast Cower one time! Isn’t that great! /cheer

What might be more useful is to make a macro that turns on Cower’s Auto Cast:

/petautocaston Cower

Now we don’t have Cower trained as our tanks hold aggro pretty well. Can’t bloody well take down Gruul without them, know what we’re saying? But what we do have are two macros for Growl:

/petautocaston Growl

and

/petautocastoff Growl

We have these on our action bars and have mapped keystrokes to these slots. We use Shift-W to turn Growl on and Shift-E to turn Growl off. Very handy stuff for when your going into Karazhan and realize a little too late that you left Growl on from your leather-scavenging expedition. Just smack Shift-E and keep on trucking.

Why two macros? Because we have not seen a successful Growl-Switch single-button macro. A “toggle macro” for Growl would be awesome, but it hasn’t been done yet, (that we know.)

Not much else to say. Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera…

Well, we had Dorothy and The Crone for the first time as a guild. [Legacy] did not drop, of course.

And Curator. No muss, no fuss, we dinged exalted with the Violet Eye and got our ring. Oh, and we love our Curator Macro!

/target astral flare
/petattack
/cast Auto Shot

Just spam this macro when an astral flare drops and everything happens automatically.

Friday Afternoon Musings

If you haven’t seen Patton, you must. Fire up Netflix and put it in your queue.

What the h3ll happened to Doritos? Are we the only one who think the Nacho Cheese recipe changed in the past couple of months? They’re terrible!

If you’re going to make Raspberry Latte with a Senseo machine, we recommend the Dark Roast pods. They stink in the package but make killer lattes.

Since TJ is going to be busy in Winterspring, we are offering the job of videos of hot chicks answering BRK’s email to the Diet Coke of Evil and Cayleigh, the Squeekie Priestie. Stand by, there will be more on this to come.

And now, a PUG-Rant, brought to you by BRK Worldwide Amalgamated - We Let You Scream Because We Care:

Dear BRK, I am cranky right now so if this sounds short-tempered I’m sorry. I just got out of the absolute WORST pug group ever. but I want to make sure I wasn’t adding to it with some sort of leet-uber-ness.

Oh, and another frustration, the @ss leading kept asking me to use my fire trap…. againandagainandagain- “Fire traps would be cool.” “you have fire traps don’t you?” (and this guy is a GUILDIE!! but I won’t pull you into that drama.) Keep in mind here there are five in the group and we were in Sunken temple where the pulls are three big, three lil guys. I was ready to scream. Actually, i think I might have. I feel sorry for anyone on Vent at the time. V_______ and unnamed pet [Ed: Names withheld to protect the Screamer]

BRK won’t PUG anymore. We’re done. Fineto. Kaput. No guild-run, we’re doing our dailies. Our sanity is not for sale.

An Aspect of the Viper question:

“Dear BRK, with the new Aspect of the Viper [coming in the 2.2 patch] I’m wondering if there’s a flashpoint where preserving mana might take precedence over the DPS advantage of AotH. Freejack and Blackjack”

We have played with the new Aspect of the Viper on the public test realm but are withholding analysis until we see the final implementation of the algorithm.

Basically, the new AotV will do more regeneration as you lose mana; an inversely-proportional relationship if you will. However, it is not a linear relationship so we can’t express it simply. Also, there are minimums and maximums that are not mana-dependent but Intellect-dependent.

Just hold that thought; we’ll report more once we know something more definitive.

A quick note from a BRK proselytizer:

“Dear BRK, my main is a 70 BE Paladin (Holy, and yes I heal pets), but I’m also playing around with a BM Hunter for my DPS-fix, (level 27 and advancing rapidly). I’ve found your archived posts to be a great source of information for leveling my alt and for understanding the hunters I group with.

“When I suggested he place his trap away from the fight, he said that he kept forgetting to turn off Auto Shot. Instead of inquiring how much he had paid for his account, I suggested your Pull Macro. I’m pleased to report it was a great success, and the rest of the instance went smoothly. Trilian”

The Pull Shot Macro, in case you’ve forgotten, is:

/cast [nomodifier] Arcane Shot(Rank 1)
/cast [modifier:alt] Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

Let’s say we assign this macro to the F4 key. We can fire a low-threat pull shot by pulling with F4 or a very high-threat shot with Alt-F4, and then the Auto Shot is disabled so we don’t break our own trap.

And we shall conclude with a pet question:

“Dear BRK, for PvE-grinding I find that throwing my cat’s extra points - after maxing his damage potential of course - are better spent on as much armor as possible rather than some armor and some stamina. While grinding [one] encounters mostly melee damage, and [armor] let’s him shrug off blows a little better while he tears the face off that mob that won’t politely lay down and die for me.

I have noticed that when you talk of instance builds you favor mostly stam with some armor. Does a cat so-built have much in the way of “save the squishie” emergency off-tanking ability? Clay.”

The maximum armor spell grants an additional 1600 armor to your pet. For our cat, this equates to an additional 4-5% damage mitigation. Sending your pet with a Mend Pet cooking should solve any grinding problems much more effectively than extra armor.

As for instances, we recommend health and resistances. In non-heroics, a pet can off-tank just about any trash mob you find. In heroics or Karazhan, a pet can off-tank-with-heals almost any non-boss. There are non-bosses that a pet just can’t tank. In heroic Underbog, the last pull before the first boss are two non-CC’able bog monsters. Hobbes, even with heals, was unable to off-tank one and survive. Could another pet do this? Turtle or Bear perhaps? We haven’t heard of it but it could be possible.

But killing things quickly is the ultimate solution to eliminating trash mobs. We were super-successful letting our warrior tank two while BRK and Hobbes went b@lls-to-the-wall DPS. We suggest this is the most effective method of employing pets.

The Squeekie Priestie was up late and slapped together a spiffy video of our destruction of Aran. Of particular note to us BM hunters is at approximately 7:00 minutes into the video we see the raid pulled to the center and everybody runs away.

Except Hobbes.

Aran was close to death and Hobbes had a boatload of health, Avoidance 2, and Arcane Resist 2. We wanted him to chew Aran’s face off and then piss on his corpse, so we let him take the arcane explosion and keep fighting. Hobbes rocked the house and at the end of the video, you can see his Kill Command make the killing blow.

Other cool stuff…

Before we tried Illhoof, we were standing outside his room working on our macros. We remade our two that we use here:

Attack Illhoof Macro

/target illhoof
/cast auto shot
/petattack

Attack Demon Chain Macro

/target demon chain
/cast auto shot
/petattack

We assign the Illhoof Macro to F5 and Demon Chain Macro to F6. And as we’re all standing in the hallway outside his room, we test our Demon Chain Macro. Works great. Then we test our Illhoof Macro…

We target Illhoof through the wall, it says we can’t fire, but Hobbes LAUNCHES at Illhoof with Dash kicking in!

With lightning reflexes, we recall Hobbes before he aggros the boss. The raid leader says,

“And Bigred, DON’T do that again!!”

We reply,

“Um… we were testing our macro. Good news; it works!”

Yes, we scared the everliving bejeezus out of ourselves.

Edit: The Positive Warrior has published his take on the Aran fight. Protection warriors doing DPS is always a good read.

“Dear BRK, grinding is boring and dull and tedious. I like to mix it up by pushing the envelope.

“When the mob is down to about 25% health, I click off the target or unclick the auto-fire, left click another non-aggro mob, send my pet to attack that, switch back to my original target, pew pew pew, and when it dies switch to the new mob which by now has a lovely level of aggro built up against my pet. This way there’s no waiting for pet aggro to build, no down time, and the slight risk that the first target might live just long enough to stop chasing after Wilf and discuss matters with me. That slight risk keeps things interesting.

“First, am I nuts? Should I resign myself to boredom while grinding instead? Second, any suggestions on writing a macro to help doing this? My attempts so far are embarrassing fails, but I really want to do this because there’s an awful lot of clicking involved. Wilf and Garuk”

Nothing wrong with Power Grinding at all; BRK completely endorses it.

As for macro help, though, we can help you some, but not completely. There is no macro command or castsequence series that will auto-select the mob 2nd closest to you or sequence through the mobs in close proximity. At least none of which that we are aware. Aside from that limitation, we can help.

You and your pet are fighting Mob A. If you want to target Mob B, you either have to tab-target or left-click on him. You select Mob B and now you want to send your pet, switch back to Mob A and finish it off.

/stopcasting
/petattack
/targetlasttarget
/cast Auto Shot

This will stop your Auto Shot so you don’t grab aggro from Mob B, send your pet to Mob B while you retarget Mob A, and resume firing at Mob A.

Poof, Mob A goes down. Now you want to engage Mob B. If you had set your pet as your Assist, you could use your Assist Macro to automatically attack your pet’s target. When Mob B gets down to 25%, repeat these steps all over again.

Now for those who choose to grind just one mob at a time, we can simplify this process with the addition of the /targetenemy command to our Pet Attack Macro.

/targetenemy
/petattack
/cast Hunter’s Mark

No more tab-targeting or mouse-click-selecting, this macro will target the nearest enemy mob, send your pet to attack and cast a Hunter’s Mark on the mob. Wait for a Growl to land, then start shooting. Rinse and repeat.

We ran Botanica twice last night trying to get the Beast Lord Curiass to drop. Nada. But the other predicament we faced was changing our pet from Tank to DPS-mode and back again with seemingly every other pull. Growl on, Bite off. Growl off, Bite on. We missed it a few times and had to chain-trap to make up for the mistake. There has to be an easier way!

There is. Pet Spell Macros.

With one press of a button, we want to turn Growl on and Bite off. We have a PetTank macro for that:And when we want to switch to DPS-mode, we have a PetDPS macro:Now to use them, we added two more slots to our Bartender 3 action bars - and we use CyCircled for aesthetics - and mapped keystrokes to the macros:See the two macros at the top of the bars? Notice how we have mapped Shift-W for the PetDPS macro, and Shift-E for the PetTank macro. We used these key combinations because it’s very unlikely that we’ll hit either of those by accident, and they can be smacked using just our left hand.

We like ‘em a lot.

Edit: And a big BRK Shout Out to Raster for the cool header-graphic. Thanks man!

So what do you do when your Internet is shot to h#ll? We take a long lunch and give the IT folks a chance to fix it. If it ain’t up in that 90 minutes, we go the heck home. Shazzam!

Well we’re back today, feeling a little less stressed about our backload of work and trying to catch up on everything. And we have our homemade raspberry latte so things are looking up.

How about we start with something sure to fuel the flame-fires, shall we?

“BRK, have you seen this hunter macro:

Regards, Tosviolation”

Yup, we’ve seen that. For the non-macrophiles out there, what this thing is designed to do is to allow a hunter to just spam the beejezus out of a single button and capture every Kill Command as it becomes available while simultaneously firing Steady Shot whenever its cooldown is up. The inherent problem with the macro is that it will throw errors all over your screen. The author has “solved” that problem by turning off the error frame, clearing it, and then showing it again to reset the system.

In the programming world, this is called a Kludge. It is inelegant, inefficient, and wasteful.

It’s like strapping a nitrous kit made from a used fire extinguisher on your Porsche 911 Turbo.

It’s like putting John Travolta in drag on Desperate Housewives.

It’s like letting Barney have a guest-appearance on a Bugs Bunny / Road Runner cartoon.

It’s like letting Larry the Cable Guy be the first man on Mars.

It’s like that British game show opera singer who won their television talent contest on the same stage as Pavarotti back when he could hit nine tenor high C’s without breaking a sweat.

It’s like BRK being survival spec. (Note: don’t check our armory profile; it’ll freak you out and you haven’t heard the story behind it or what the h#ll we’re doing. Don’t worry, everything is fine and we’re not on smack or under the influence of a suspicious redhead, for whom we have been known to do some really stupid things.)

You are a Hunter! You have so much more to offer than Steady/Auto spamming. If you’re incapable of smacking Kill Command when it procs then you need more help than a macro can provide. If this macro increases your DPS you’ve been AFK-Fighting for too long; put the nachos down and use two hands to play.

Macros should be used to make complex tasks more simple, not make simple tasks more complex.

Edit: Tosviolation as a name ranks right up there with Thunderpants. We totally dig it.