Ya wanna play with the piper, ya gotta dance with the girl that brung ya. That’s what we’re saying.
Anonymous WWS report, we’re Titan. NOT ONE ELEMENTAL got through to Vashj. Except maybe on the last attempt when the Tainted elementals ALL spawned at the same spot.
For the most part, we have Phase 2 nailed. Now it’s just staying alive during the poison bombs.
5%. We got Vashj down to 5%. So. So. SO. Close.
Key you identify all our keys? Six rows, four columns, twenty-two keys. We’ll put up the solution on Tuesday.
Odds n Ends from This Weekend:
No, the feather-gatherer has not returned.
Yes, a Tier 5-geared group can wipe in Karazhan, even on the trash. Especially when one mage decides to pop his Voodoo Gnomes and watch them attack and pull an 8-pack of elites. Yes, he got a guild-kick.
Oh stop worrying; we re-inivited him 10 seconds later.
The first round between Fio and Ego has occurred. We scored it 10-9, Fio. His recitation of “The Brave Sir Robin” song from memory clinched it.
We think TJ has decided to quit living in The Black Morass all by herself, but we could be wrong.
BRK: “You live in a swamp, thus you have swamp@ss, and you are Shrek.”
TJ: “Girls cannot get swamp@ss. Only boys can because only boys have butt-hair.”
BRK: “Girls have butt-hair, Shrek, it’s just blond and fine and not scraggly.”
TJ: “QUIT TALKING ABOUT MY BUTT HAIR AND DON’T CALL ME SHREK!!”
Next time our guild takes out the first five bosses in SSC, we’re bringing a certain shadow-priest, foshizzle.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs BRK! We cleaned the fridge! All the pork blood we spilled, gone. /score
And the pepperoni we found behind that drawer that we threated to eat? We tossed it. Guys, want to know when you’re an adult? It’s when you throw out an unopened bag of spicy meat slices that look perfect but have an expiration date in 2007. If we were back in college, it’d totally be scarfed, right?
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 Non-WoW Thought of the Day: Who the <bleeping> <bleep> took our eyedrops!! Oh. Here they are. /doofus
“Dear BRK…why would a mob exit a trap (wasn’t broken, trap just expired) and go for the tank, and not me? Happened several times during the run. You can’t gain aggro on a mob when it’s still in the trap, right? Can a mob be taunted while it’s still in there?
“It seems that at best you’re going to be able to do 3 traps before you’re sitting there taking a beating waiting for the fourth trap to cool down. That right? Are most hunters expected to trap a mob twice, or three times, or more?
“How do you guys work trapped mobs into the kill order? We’re doing them after saps and seduced mobs, but before sheeped mobs. Same for you? I know a sapped mob can’t be re-sapped, but with the longer length of sap, would seem to make sense to take down the trapped guys first. How do y’all do it? Paul”
BRK Emailing Etiquette Update. No double-spaces after periods, period. Don’t make us get uppity. Just knock that cr@p off right now.
So what causes aggro?
-When you damage a mob
-When the mob damages you
-When the mob “senses” healing
-When aggro-generating abilities are used against the mob
If a mob is trapped, nobody is doing damage to it and it is not doing damage. Simple.
If a mob is trapped and a healer is standing right next to it, spamming heals on his party, the trapped mob will indeed have an aggro-gain on the healer. Healing-aggro is proximity-based. If that healer stands far away from the trapped mob, the mob will not “sense” the heals and the healer will not rise on the trapped mob’s aggro list.
Hunters have the job of trapping away from AoE attacks, but healers have the job of not standing right next to trapped mobs.
But what happens when you see that priest standing on top of the trapped mob, spamming heals and getting trapped-mob aggro? Did you know that a hunter can fire a Distracting Shot at a trapped mob and not break the trap? Sure can. Distracting Shot does no damage and thus will not break the trap.
You trap your mob, nice and pretty, but your healer decides to stand right beside it and do his thing. You yell at him to move, but he isn’t paying attention. You, Captain Smart-Hunter, stop firing, retarget your trapped mob, smack it with a max-rank Distracting Pull Shot:
/cast Distracting Shot
/stopcasting
You’ll rise above the healer on the mob’s aggro list! Retarget the Main Tank’s target and resume MQoSRDPS. When the trap breaks, the mob goes for you, not the healer, you chain-trap and prevent a wipe.
How many chain-traps should you be able to perform? We would say Three is the number.
Pull and Trap (1)
Trap breaks
Re-pull and Trap (2)
Trap breaks
Re-pull and Trap (3)
Tank breaks Trap.
Being able to perform a triple-chain-trap is not required for most pulls, but for Moroes it could be mandatory, like in our BRK Hunter Guide Movie. Anything more than three and your guild owes you a great big, tall, frosty glass of Now That’s A Hunter! juice.
In what order do we take down crowd-controlled mobs?
Skull dies first. Anything else is Wrong.
Sap is second.
Trap is third.
Fear is next.
Roots/Shackle are next to last.
Sheep/Banish are last, unless the mage/warlock dies – a frequent squishy-occurrence – in which case this mob moves to the top of the list; a hunter can chain-trap if necessary, a dead mage cannot re-sheep.
Now if a sheep/sap/etc goes bad, the hunter can double-trap. Only one un-tripped trap can exist at a time, but multiple mobs can be trapped at the same time.
Your assigned mob is trapped, nice and proper. Sap breaks early, the MT is not ready to handle it. You, uber hunter extraordinaire, target the “sapped” mob, hit it with Distracting/Arcane and get its attention, drop another trap away from the healers, pull that mob into it, ka-ching, you just earned your pay for the day. Tell the MT, “Handle square first, I’ll chain-trap circle until you’re ready.”
/accept accolades
AC took Ego and Company into Tempest Keep, bought them a nice dinner and showed them a good time. Three bosses down, one silly wipe on Al’ar. We didn’t die at all! /score
Void Reaver is doable in its current incarnation, that much is certain. Harder, yes, worth the effort, we think so. Hunters, watch for the bombs and if they come at you, turn away from the boss and run toward the wall. After the bomb explodes, turn back around and re-engage the boss. Losing ten seconds of DPS-time is much better than dying.
Will Ego have a commentary on her first 25-man raid with her new guild? We can only hope!
Holy Crud, the Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan is tomorrow!! We expect you there, ya know. /glare
You have donated $127 for Sharvan, much gracias. If you haven’t contributed a dollar, please consider doing so. We get 6000 readers per day; we’d love to hit $500 by race time.
The BRK Non-WoW Thought of the Day: If you want us to order lunch from your restaurant, keep your best selling items in stock. Telling us every week that you’re out of tostones makes us order from the Chinese restaurant next door, and they give us free eggrolls. Free, foshizzle!
“Dear BRK, so WTF, where’s _________? Angry readers everywhere want to know. Your friends, the Angry Readers.”
OK, so you see… there was this thing we had to do, it was kinda important. Sort of. But the result was that we didn’t finish our movie, our macro post, or the shot-rotation thingy at Dr. Boom. Saturday we have to do some yard work, so that’s going to pie our type as well.
If someone volunteers to prune our Washingtonians, we could do some warcraft-theorycrafting like we all know you want us to do. Just admit it; you won’t trim our trees because you’re selfish. Pathetic.
Ratshag the Spriest is level 70. We can’t wait to Misdirect something in Karazhan onto him.
Speaking of abusing Misdirect, it’s time for a “BRK Honks It Up Again!” story!
One of our jobs in the Al’ar fight is to drag the adds off of the platforms and over to the bear-tank. We have the bear-tank as our Focus and we use our Misdirection Macro to help us. This isn’t a hard thing to set up, not at all. Click on the bear-tank, click our Set Focus Macro, and off we go.
We wipe on our first try, not quite sure what happened. While the raid recovers and rebuffs, our enhancement shaman types in raid-chat,
“Please please PLEASE don’t Misdirect on me anymore.”
Who the h3ll is MD’ing on an enhancement shaman? That’s just stupid, our hunters know better than that… and we look at our Focus. Bingo. We set the shaman as our Focus, not the bear-tank, resulting in us dragging an exploding fire-bird onto a melee shaman.
/epic fail
The newly acquired Egotistical Priest and her buddies were four-manning regular MrT. Um, Ego, we have thirty-eight 70s on right now, why don’t you say in gchat, “LF1M DPS reg MrT”? She gave us some silly excuse involving a zoo of tea bags and how states that are wider than they are tall should be excommunicated. We wisely ignored all that and threw a Tier 5-geared druid in their run. Ego completed MrT, the druid got a phoenix hatchling, and we’re a hero. /hero
Another hunter in our guild got the ZA hunter helm. You know the one with the big eye? We’re not sure if he should be happy or sad. Frankly, ZA helms are a total abomination, a practical joke played by Blizzard on their paying customers.
BRK Email Etiquette. If you’re asking us a question about your gear or talent points, including an armory link is mandatory. If you’re not asking us about your gear or talent points, you don’t have to include an armory link. Y’all are going silly with the “Just wanted to say Hi, here’s our armory link like you asked for” emails.
Aetherial Circle is no longer recruiting. We got what we needed and a little extra. Thank you for considering us, we really do appreciate the enthusiasm. Next time we have an opening, we may have to make Aetherial Circle Idol and demand application videos…
/blink
Wow, that’s a really good idea, isn’t it. We may have to guild-kick someone just to implement this.
Hi, my name is TJ and sometimes I’m too busy doing my real job to put in appropriate links. I also haven’t been bribed in a while.
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.
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.
We are through Phase 2; Aetherial Circle can get all four generators down. Now we just need to not die, kill the adds a little faster, and clean up phase 3.
We’re almost there!
We are using an elemental Shaman as the kiter, and we personally are doing dual-zone duty, keeping the population of the elemental-adds at zero and tossing cores when needed.
Tomorrow is Al’ar and Solarian, and then our first look at Mount Hyjal.
We remember when Burning Crusade was coming out and the attunement chart was… daunting. Well, heck, here it is:
BC came out January 16th, 2007. Tomorrow is April 21, 2008. That’s how long it’s taken us to get here. No we haven’t completed the original final-attunement requirements, but still, tomorrow is a Big Day.
And a final note.
For The Horde (Because It Sounds So D@mn Sexy) had a great bit about what it’s like to be a BM hunter who understands shot-rotations and aggro and mana-management:
“My DPS goes through the roof and even though I keep up the same shot rotation, the difference is totally noticeable. I’ve been soloing group quests, killing elites and just pretty much running amok on anything that crosses my path.”
Yeah, baby, that is sexy. /applaud
Five bosses in SSC down in three hours, eleven minutes, including a wipe on Leo the Blind. Huzzah!
We wore our old T4 leggings, leaving our new Void Reaver Greaves in the bank, ’cause we screwed up Outfitter. Huzzah!
The Tier 5 bonus so that 15% of our total damage goes to heal Hobbes wasn’t affected by our Outfitter Idiocy. Phew.
Health Link is the “spell” that does the pet-healing. Look at that; that’s just nuts, that is. Heck, we were #10 on total heals! Hobbes only died one time the entire night, right after Leo the Blind died and we couldn’t damage anything to keep Hobbes alive through Leo’s Bleed.
The entire anonymous report is here, we are Phobos and Smidge.
And if you would kindly allow us a modicum of back-patting, we are really happy with this one stat from the WWS report:
Five million total damage. /drinks it all in
We employ a manual 1:1 Auto/Steady shot rotation with alternating phases of pure-DPS and mana-regeneration. No shot-rotation macro here. Can you use one? Sure. Do you Need one? No you don’t.
Get into that anonymous WWS report we linked. Poke around, think big thoughts. Come up with some questions.
A hunter’s job is to provide Massive Quantities of Sustained, Ranged DPS.
What are you doin’?
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