Just thwacking away with our new staff to raise our skill-points, and its enchant decides to proc. The raid leader says, “Which melee guy has Deathfrost?” We yelled, “I do! BUWAHAHAHA!”

WTB BRK Melee-Hunter Guide movie?

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.

“Dear BRK … I’ve heard a lot of circulation about “arcane” hunters. Hunters that get a lot of +spell damage gear, then go and crit arcane shot constantly for over 5k damage.

“I’ve seen the youtube videos, and was left with a bit of shock. They’re really glass cannons. Yeah, you hit me for 5k, but that’s only half my health, and I can box you in 2 regular shot hits. So, what’s the point? Matt.”

The point is: It Can Be Done.

A long time ago, pre-Burning Crusade, there was Hunter Versus World guy. He would make videos of his hunter soloing basically everything there was to solo in Azeroth. You’d watch what he could do and wonder just how much time this guy had on his hands to think of and implement his eyebrow-raising techniques and strategies.

Then there was this one PvP hunter who just could not be beaten one-on-one. His jump-shot videos were mesmerizing. None of the horrible, metal-thrashing movies and epeening crits cr@p that infests YouTube today, he simply showed how to run away from an enemy forever while still doing damage. His fights against Paladins, our personal nemesi, were legendary as he’d Viper Sting and Kite them for what seemed like ages until their mana was exhausted and then became easy pickings.

The Kite Guys. You must have seen movies of Stitches running around Goldshire, yes? How about Doom Lord Kazzak laying waste to Stormwind? One of the Scourge from the EPL to Booty Bay? An Un’goro Crater stone gollum to Astraanar? And we mustn’t forget the modern marvel of kiting Fel Reavers to the opposing faction’s headquarters in Hellfire Peninsula, Feigning Death, and then /popcorn the fun.

Oh! Then we’re not sure if this was the same guy as Hunter Versus World dude, but this one hunter crammed himself full of +Healing mail gear. His pet was indestructible and he made a video of him and his pet soloing a world-boss dragon in Azashara. It took him almost an hour, as we recall, but he did it. The video was sped-up and covered the hour in something like five minutes, but his pet tanked that dragon! Blizz nerfed +Healing for Mend Pet specifically because of this guy.

The +Spell Damage hunters have been around a while, and the 5k Arcane Shot crits aren’t unheard of. While not the traditional method of providing MQoSRDPS, it’s just another was to roll your hunter. You’ll want to put five talent points in Improved Arcane Shot to get the one second cooldown reduction on Arcane Shot, and one will drastically lower one’s RAP as one isn’t gemming and enchanting Agility/AP anymore.

But Arcane Shot can be fired on the run, unlike Auto/Steady/et. all. If you’re good at kiting and can jump-shoot, the Arcane Hunter can be very effective. The whole, “That’s only half my health” argument can easily be switched to, “Holy Crud, he just took half my health with one shot!”

Well if you read the comments, you’ll understand why we nuked the preceding two paragraphs. Apparently, in the dead of the night and in total silence - except for a possible patch notes that we’ve forgotten - Blizz nerfed +Spell Dmg for Arcance Shot. Now we knew that RAP boosted our Arcane Shot but hadn’t heard that the nifty +Spell Dmg buff was wiped out. It’s actually kind of depressing. All this cool stuff we used to be able to do getting the Ban Hammer.

So this post has turned into a “Way back when I was a pre-BC hunter” stroll down memory lane, hasn’t it. Back when PvP gear could be used for raiding and The Rookery was the schiznit and running Molten Core 27 times before you got your first piece of tier-gear was standard and Alliance owned AV and Shaman/Paladins were one-side only and one didn’t see Dranei/Blood Elf women in short, revealing winter-wear all over the dang place.

You realize that we’ll be making similar judgements about pre-WotLK, yes? 

Note: So a while back we linked to one of our favorite Cuban lunch spots. Today we’re going to give a shout-out to the independent coffee house we frequent whenever we can.

Wahoo Coffee

You know we go for the raspberry latte, natch.

“Dear BRK, please, please … talk about spell hit and its correlation with Freezing Trap.

“The reason I’m asking is because I’ve noticed that my traps are being resisted a lot more and traps are breaking earlier than they’re supposed to lately. I just got into doing heroics two weeks ago and I think it has something to do the level of the mobs I’m trapping and their resistances, but I’m not quite sure. I’ve read somewhere (in your forums) that by adding spell hit, the chances of one’s traps being resisted will reduce, as well as it breaking early.

“Can you kindly shed a light with regards to this? Like, how many points should I try to invest in spell hit? I was thinking of re-gemming two of the Beast Lord Set for the trap bonus. Jim.”

Let’s start this investigate with a definition, shall we?

“Spell hit is a combat attribute that increases a caster’s chance to hit with spells.” So sayeth WoWWiki, so let it be done.

But what does that mean?

When Mr. Warrior smacks something upside the noggin with his sword, he can Hit or Miss. When he Misses, his combat text says, YA MISSED, NOOBCAKES!

When Mr. Mage conjures and launches a fireball at the same target, he too can Hit or Miss. When he Misses, his combat text says, SPELL RESISTED, NOOBSAUCE!

This is where the confusion sets in for hunters. When we miss a shot, we know we Missed. When a Mage misses a spell, he too Misses but the game calls it a Resist. There is a difference, let’s see what it is.

When Mr. Warrior smacks something upside the noggin with his sword, he can Hit or Miss. When he Hits, sometimes the full effect of the attack is diminished. This is known as Mitigation, and shows up on combat logs and in WWS reports.

Mr. Mage conjures and launches a fireball, he misses. This is called a Resist. Mr. Mage conjures and launches another fireball, he hits his target, but the mob Resists some of the damage from the spell. This is the real Resist, and it too shows up in combat logs and in WWS reports.

As you can see, there are duplicate dynamics at work:

1. Both melee and spells can Hit or Miss. For melee, a miss is a Miss. For spells, a miss is a Resist.

2. Both melee and spells can have their effects diminished. For melee, a dimished attack is a Mitigation. For spells, a diminished attack is a Resist.

How does one make one’s melee attacks hit more frequently? With Hit and Expertise ratings.

How does Hit work? We’ve covered that before; it reduces one’s chance to Miss, actually. The chance to miss is based upon the differences between the attacker’s skill rating and the defender’s Defense rating, as well as the difference between the attacker’s and defender’s level.

How does Expertise work? Expertise reduces a chance an enemy will Dodge or Parry one’s attack.

How does one avoid a melee attack? Dodge, Parry, Block, by being a higher level than the attacker, and causing a Miss by having a higher Defense rating than the attacker’s weapon skill rating.

How does one avoid a spell attack? By being a higher level than the attacker, that’s it. For equal-level opponents, the spell attacker will have a 96% chance to hit with his spell.

How does one mitigate melee attacks? Armor.

How does one mitigate spell attacks? Resistances.

So what is the spell caster’s equivalent of Hit? You got it; Spell Hit. If you read notes about Spell Hit, they’ll say that it reduces the chances a spell will be Resisted, but read that carefully. What it really means is that it reduces the chances a spell will Miss.

And what really reduces the chances that a spell will be Resisted?

Spell Penetration, foshizzle.

Spell Penetration reduces a target’s resistances to spells. If you’ve got a dwarf with the +10 Frost Resistance racial, a mage will need some Spell Penetration to counter that resistance when attacking with frost spells in order for his spell damage to not be mitigated.

Got it? When one Hits with a spell, the defender can have the damage mitigated with Resistances, but the attacker can overcome those resistances with Spell Penetration.

Let’s bring this all back to Hunters and their traps.

You drop a Freezing Trap and trap a mob. With every tick, that mob has a chance to Resist your trap-spell. If that mob has high magic resistances, like those that inhabit Karazhan, the chance that they’ll Resist your trap increases. Since the mob was trapped, you Hit it; any mechanic that affects initial trap Miss/Resist has been rendered moot.

To decrease the chance that that trapped mob will break early, i.e. to decrease the chance your trap-spell will be Resisted, you need Spell Penetration, not Spell Hit.

Freaky, eh? You bet.

“But BRK, what about the initial Resist? You know, when that mob runs over your trap and he immediately Resists? Was that a spell Miss or a spell Resist?”

Now this is where it gets murky. According to all the research we’re read, Spell Hit should decrease the chance that traps will be Missed. The question is: does Blizz consider that initial trap Hit/Miss a Miss or a Resist?

We’re of the opinion that all trap mechanics are Resists. We arrived at this conclusion based upon two things:

1. The Trap Mastery talent tooltip:

“Decreases the chance that enemies will resist trap effects by X%.”

It would make little sense for a hunter to get the uber-trap talents and have no bonuses to avoiding that initial trap-Miss. We must assume that an initial Miss is calculated in a fashion similar to a ticking-Resist.

2. We are aware of no mathematical evidence that shows that Spell Hit affects trap Misses/Resists. There has been research into Spell Hit and trap mechanics and no correlation has been seen. This bolsters our assumption that traps are only Resisted, as Spell Hit should indeed affect whether traps are initially Hit or Missed/Resisted.

Instead, we believe that Spell Penetration will work in the same manner as Trap Mastery when it comes to initial and ticking trap Resists.

As we stated, there has been research to determine if Spell Hit affects trapping, and those results indicate that there is no correlation.

But, and this is a Big But, we are unable to find any research into Spell Penetration and its effect on trapping; all our yapping here is conjecture. Now we think it’s pretty solid conjecture and it all falls into line with the rest of the spell-mechanics in the game.

But we could be 100%, totally wrong. It’s not a habit to which we’re accustomed, but the probability exists.

ZOMG you’re kidding us!

/chuckle

The Snake Trap Bug!! Hello?!

/guffaw

Ok, ok. You’re a hunter standing at the Karazhan or Zul’Aman summoning stone. Flag PvP and drop a Snake Trap. The snakes…

/teehee

The snakes…

/hahahaa!!

For some reason, our snakes are completely ignoring PvP flags. They will attack any opposite-faction player that is nearby when they are tripped. They won’t turn that player’s PvP flag on, but they will attack and do damage. Dude or dudette is just standing there, minding their own business, and BLAM these snakes just start slapping them around!

/Woohoo!

A level 70 hunter’s Snake Trap against any level 70? They do nothing really, it’s really just an annoyance.

A level 70 hunter’s Snake Trap against the Blood Elf lowbies in the Ghostlands?

/BUWAHAAAA!!!

…

/HAHAHAHA!!!

/sniffle

OMG it’s so wrong. Don’t do it, we beg you.

/chortle

Do NOT duplicate our depravity. Bad-BRK!

Pulled from the Animal House that is the WoW Hunter Forums, both US and EU, here are some very important blue-posts you should know about.

If you don’t know, a blue-post is a post on those forums written by a Blizzard employee. They are as Official a post as you will see and can usually be trusted to be accurate.

================================

I have a bit more information for you all based on some dialogue I’ve had with our QA department.

First, we’re not seeing any change in the loss of Happiness at current from our own tests. If you all have more specific information in regard to the pet you are using, the level, etc, please feel free to post in the Bug forum so that our QA team can try to reproduce the issue and track it down.

We are also not able to see the stair issue in our own testing. Again, if you have more specific information on what exactly is happening (specific boss, mob) , please go ahead and post in the Bug forum so we can better track it down. There may be a particular situation or key element that is causing this issue for you.

We also are working on a fix for an issue where pets weren’t attacking if a player had their back up against a wall or corner.

Any further pathing issues that seem strange, please keep note of where you are and what mob it may be related to. We’ll do our best to see if we can find these issues if they exist.

===============================

Just to reiterate from another thread, we are planning to allow Hunters to feed their pets during combat in a future patch. It’s in the works right now.

===============================

One concern that has come up in this thread is the ability to feed pets during combat. I just wanted to stop back in the thread here to relay that the ability to feed a pet during combat is in the works for a future patch. Hopefully that will be one less concern for hunters in general. Once we’re a bit closer to implementing this, we’ll do our best to get you more information on what we have planned.

================================

Just so everyone aware, there was a bug fix that unintentionally didn’t make it into the release patch notes, but has been added into the bug fix listing on the forum as well as is being added onto the Web version of the patch notes.

Here is the actual note for you in regard to this-

• Fixed a bug in which Hunters were able to disengage from combat using Feign Death during boss encounters.

Please note that this should only apply for when you are engaged in a boss fight and shouldn’t affect trash mobs.

================================

I was just about to get to this one. This was another bug fix that unintentionally didn’t get into the patch notes. It’s getting added in now in order to clear up the confusion. Here is how the note actually reads:

• Fixed a bug in which Hunters were able to use Readiness in conjunction with Freezing Trap on two different targets.

Being able to double-trap was not intended to happen so the bug has been corrected. As always though, constructive feedback on changes are always welcome. What should happen is if you trap another target, the first trap should release much like what happens when a Priest Shackles Undead or a Mage Polymorphs a target.

================================

“I was really excited to make a 24 slot ammo pouch come patch day, and have a bunch of hunter guildies that had gathered the mats, and got in line to have one made. Only one problem… even though the pouch is BoE, it is also Unique, meaning after I make one for myself, I can’t make any more for friends or selling.”

This is being fixed in an upcoming patch.

================================

“Please list the Arrow Maker and Shell Machine under the Projectile tab in the Auction Ho[u]se.”

Done! Upcoming patch will have them listed in the appropriate section of the Auction House.

================================

Blizz listens and will implement your ideas. However, they also sometimes say, “No”. Feeding pets after a FD looks like it’s coming back, but it sounds like Double-Trapping is gone.

/cry, we never even got to make a BRK Hunter-Guide Double-Trapping Movie

So some unexpected nuances to the Hunter class have been gently nudged into the game mechanics. And as expected, there’s such an outcry on the WoW Forums that their collective screams have managed to change the Earth’s orbit around the sun. They’ve caused panic not seen since Cabbage Patch Kids hit the scene. People are huddling together to survive the hysteria in such numbers that the BRK Center for Population and Pudding-Pop Analysis is predicting a ‘Hunter-Nerf Baby-Boom’ in September, 2008.

We’ve received thousands and thousands of emails begging for guidance during these dark times. To these scared and jittery people we have one thought that should calm and soothe you:

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD! RUN!!

OK seriously. There are big differences when comparing a correction to an obvious game-mechanic flaw, an “oops!”, and a nerf.

Removed the ability to double-trap: Corrected game mechanic flaw. Yes it rocked but no other class can crowd-control multiple mobs, why should we. Our “speciality” is that we can crowd-control just about any type of mob; beasts, undead, humanoids, mechanicals, etc. It was never intended that we could crowd-control multiple mobs. It was cool, it was clever, but it was not intended.

Lower ranks of Arcane Shot not scaling: That’s an “Oops!” of course. They’ll fix this, don’t worry. Stay tuned for 2.3.1 OK?

Feign Death not taking hunters out of combat: That’s another “Oops!” except in the case of boss-fights. They’ll take care of it.

As for FD’ing against bosses, we kind of think of this of a nerf, but not a really big one. As a hunter, if you’re taking cr#p-loads of damage, usually that’s a sign that something in the party-mechanics has screwed up. Either you’ve grabbed aggro or you’re too close and absorbing AoE attacks, or something else that has put you in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only really big reason we ever FD’d against a boss was to feed Hobbes after he was killed…

Can’t feed pets after a FD in a boss fight: Corrected game mechanic flaw. If you allow your pet to die in a boss fight and rez him, you’re supposed to take a hit of some kind. The hit is supposed to be that your pet decreases his happiness and thus his DPS is decreased. Perfectly legitimate but was easily overcome by FD’ing and feeding your pet back to 125% damage capability. Sorry, Blizz is not going to re-break this.

Pets not attacking: Big-time “Oops!” but completely expected. When they changed pet-behavior so that they always try to attack from behind, it should hardly be a surprise that something in the code got a little wonky.

We were grinding Wind Scales yesterday and watched helplessly as Hobbes refused to get into combat when the wind serpents were facing a particular way while on an incline. We knew that this was a problem most like caused by the reworking of the pet-attack mechanics. They’ll fix it, don’t freak.

Do you see any real nerfs there? Not really, no. Of course, you are totally allowed to feel disappointed, like when you ask your dad for a cookie and he says Yes but then mom catches you grabbing your “legal” cookie and she brings the hammer down. You know the law; no cookies before dinner, no matter what dad says.

You may be cookie-less, but it was never really your cookie to begin with.

Are we temporarily gimped with the pet-attack thing? Yeah, we’ll agree with that. Should this have been seen on the PTR? Frankly, yes it should’ve been. We’ll even go so far as to say that this is a big ‘WTF’ and those in charge should be flogged. But it’ll be fixed, we have faith.

Does the loss of Double-Trapping make us sad? It does, and it also really hurts those Survivalist hunters who could astound their friends with their flair for Double and even Triple-Trapping. Is there a hunter out there who has been double-trapping their way through heroics because their guild has zero other crowd-control options? Dude or dudette, you have our sympathies if you answered ‘yes’.

Oh. Does this relieve you of your obligation to learn how to properly Chain Trap? H#ll no.

Does the Feign Death stuff hurt? Yes. Will you have to become a better hunter to overcome it? Yes. Will more non-Beastmaster hunters suddenly decide their pets aren’t worth the electrons they’re made of because they can’t “repair” their pets on the fly? We sure hope not.

You want some BRK Happy Thoughts to tide you over until 3.2.1? You got it.

Arcane Shot removing a buff from a target makes us giggle. Even those silly wind serpents in Netherstorm with their stacked electric field get that buff totally removed with a single Arcane Shot. Our favorite shot gets some unexpected love and Blizz better not touch it again. They tossed that ball in our yard and now it’s ours!

Loss of the Dead Zone. Now this is a bit of a misnomer. We still have a Dead Zone, it’s just five yards instead of eight. Helpful? Sure, especially now that we can get a Concussive Shot off earlier. We did a massive Halaa engagement and had tremendous fun kiting warriors with our improved Dead Zone. Can we point-blank pop a cap in someone’s noggin’, a la Trinity? No. You must still have mad skillz to know how to get to range.

Twenty-Four Slot Ammo Pouches and Quivers. Do you have yours? You’d better get one. No more storing extra ammo in your regular bags for those long instances. Load up a 24-slotter and go crazy for a long, long time.

Aimed Shot reducing all healing a target takes by 50% for 10 seconds is one of the biggest buffs this hunter has ever seen our class get granted. We used Aimed Shot right before Magtheridon’s channelers healed themselves. When an interrupt failed, the channeler only healed himself for half of what he normally did. Yes it hurt our own DPS to change our shot rotation, but holy batdung, if a channeler normally heals himself for 80k and we prevented 40k, that was essentially a 40k Aimed Shot.

A 40,000-damage Aimed Shot. Chew on that, ya whining, sniveling b#stards. Makes Curse of Doom look like a kid popping bubblewrap.

Complaints or deeply-held grievances? Go ahead and let the comments fly.

P.S. The time-stamp on this post is appropriate to those of us with an Air Force background. /teehee

“Dear BRK, I am trying 41/20/0 (after seeing a lot of more progressed raiding hunters switch and from your long standing advocacy) now from my 0/45/16 marksman build, and need some advice from an experienced BM hunter. My guild can clear Karazahn and are trying to setup runs for Gruul’s, Magtheridon, and possibly BC outdoor world bosses so I want to be able to step it up a notch.

“When should I pop Bestial Wrath? As a MM hunter the closest I had to this was rapid fire for a long cooldown ability. If I pop bestial wrath should I pop the bloodlust brooch and rapid fire too? It hardly seems worth doing on normal mobs or am I mistaken? Gorgor & SpiderPig”

There are three keys to the effective use of damage-enhancement spell and items:

1. Do not overload yourself with attempting to execute a memorized script and then freaking out when the battle diverges from what you expect.
2. Do not allow your trinkets and spells to cause you to overtake the tank on the threat list.
3. Do use them for maximum effect during the battle-sequence by paying attention to DPS-interruptions.

You’re fighting Shade of Aran and you know what you want to do; pop Bestial Wrath and a haste trinket and start beating Aran’s @ss. Wham, Aran casts Blizzard as soon as you walk in the door. Start running, don’t worry about your plan. Don’t allow this unforeseen event to frustrate you into inaction. Go with the flow, get through the Blizzard, wait for a Flame Wreath and then pop your trinket. Beat his @ss.

You’re fighting Gruul and you’re ready to tear him up. The fight begins, you pop Bestial Wrath, your trinket, Rapid Fire, and a leatherworking drum. Your DPS rocks the house! You grab Gruul’s aggro, you get crit for 102,000 and are punched so hard you come out on the other side of the WoW universe. Bad hunter.

Allow your tank to get aggro and don’t go DPS-insane right off the bat. Use Misdirection and an Aimed/Steady/Arcane salvo to help him establish aggro. It shouldn’t take too much time before he’s solidly in control of the threat list and then you can give Gruul what he deserves.

You’re fighting Nightbane and your Rapid Fire spell’s cooldown is up. You’ve been watching your cooldown bars and are salivating to jam your attack speed through the roof. You pop it just in time for Nightbane’s Fear bomb to hit you. Not good, you just wasted almost the entire Rapid Fire bonus.

Pay attention to the raid warnings and the sequence of the fight. If you know Nightbane is about to drop his Fear on you, hold off on the Rapid Fire until you can extract maximum benefit from it. This means paying attention to your environment and the battle, not just your macros and your cooldown bars.

As for popping Bestial Wrath with your trinkets, our opinion is that you should use Bestial Wrath by itself and combine a trinket with Rapid Fire.

Bestial Wrath decreases the mana cost of your specials by 20%. Extract as much benefit from that as possible. Get off as many Steady/Arcane/Multi combos as you can without interrupting your Auto Shot. If you pop a haste trinket or Rapid Fire during a Bestial Wrath, your Auto Shots will come much faster and you will clip them frequently with your specials.

Pop Bestial Wrath, take advantage of the mana-savings and get as many specials in as you can. Once Bestial Wrath fades, slam a haste-trinket and Rapid Fire and let those Auto Shots flow. When they crit, grab the Kill Commands as they become available.

Don’t interrupt the Auto Shots, don’t clip them, by trying to insert specials during this phase of your DPS. You just got 20% mana-savings for specials during the Bestial Wrath, now let the super-fast Auto Shot damage accumulate and your mana to regenerate during the trinket/Rapid Fire session. Greater mana-efficiency leads to higher sustained DPS.

Say it with us, “The purpose of a Hunter is to provide massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS”. Notice we chose the word ’sustained’ not ‘burst’. Always use your trinkets, Rapid Fire, and Bestial Wrath to maximize your sustained DPS, not your burst-damage.

So we just get our new Aspect of the Viper running and before we can proclaim “Buff or Nerf” we’re getting rumblings of Patch 2.3.

The Big Thing in this patch is, of course Fel Reavers as hunter pets. Yes, we’ve advocated this development in many forums and columns and it looks like sending those prepaid subscriptions to Playgnome have paid off.

Fel Reaver pets are gonna rock for many reasons:

They’re immune to Fear and Fire. Totally and completely.

X-Ray Vision replaces Bite. Rogues get hit with the biggest nerf-howitzer ever as Fel Reavers can see through Vanish.

Aspect of the Fel Reaver is only available when you have a Fel Reaver as a pet. AotFR gives the hunter a buff to all Aimed Shots where the damage from it has a 10% chance of inflicting 100% of the total health of the enemy. Basically, AotFR reintroduces One-Shotting to PvP and it makes us quiver in places we shouldn’t while at work.

This is all super-nice and all, but we’ve been toying with a Fel Reaver pet for a few days now on the PTR and we must report that there’s one huge obstacle to having one.

Taming it.

Basicially, you need to be able to tank a Fel Reaver in order to tame it. As everybody has been smooshed by one of these contraptions, y’all know how hard they hit. They are immune to Freezing Trap so you’ve got to stand there for 30 seconds and take some serious blows to the head and shoulders to complete the taming process.

Now pre-2.3 it was “illegal” to assist a hunter while he’s taming a pet. No longer. But one healer isn’t going to cut it. You’ll need at least three level 70 healers popping instant and HoTs on your @ss in order to survive the taming process. Guild-assistance will most definitely be needed in order to get yourself a Fel Reaver as a pet. Expect to be blackmailed most enthusiastically by your squishy-heally buddies.

Oh. And Fel Reavers eat Defias Brotherhood bandits for food. By the cart-load.

Now as for the other stuff, the more boring and yawnable things we’re reading about, we still have some big-time questions.

20 and 24-slot ammo bags. Craftable? Purchasable? World drops? Faction rewards? Who knows. They’re coming, though, and it’s about time. We just want to know to whom we need to suck-up.

Serpent Sting getting bonus damage based upon RAP and Marksman hunters of the world rejoice. Just how long it take before we hear the cries of “Improved Stings FTW!” we don’t know and don’t want to know.

Arcane Shot Rank 6 will now also dispel a magic effect. You want to talk about buffing hunters for arenas, well this is just the ticket, holy cr@ppola. That’s mean, that is.

The mechanics, however, concern us.

Hunter attacks Paladin. Hunter shoots Arcane Shot Rank 6 and gets to dispel a magic effect. Which one gets dispelled? Does it just randomly dispel, does it dispel alphabetically, by order of power, by a list the hunter can create? How is the spell-to-be-dispelled get chosen?

Personally, Zul’Aman is the biggest and best thing coming. To say Karazhan hasn’t been the most fun we’ve had in WoW would be a lie. Gruul’s is great but much harder to coordinate. The 10-man instance is our favorite mixture and we can’t wait to get into a new one.

The BRK Executive Assistant is out sick. She’s a sad panda and we’re not going to ask her to comma-check our WoW Insider column today. We’re delaying that particular load of bunkum until tomorrow. Or later.

On top of that, we just got back from a visit to the BRK Doctor Of Uberness. We’re not going to say he’s the best general practitioner who’s ever walked the surface of the earth, but he does two things that makes us swoon:

1) No computer in the exam room. We hate doctors who spend more time slapping keys than they do talking to their patients.

2) Dude knows how to poke and prod, (nothing p0rnographic, folks, calm down.) We don’t want a doctor to take our word about what’s good and what isn’t. What do we know about our own body; most of us can’t even feed it properly.

The BRK Pulse was a resting 56 beats per minute, blood pressure was 97/60, 6′ tall still, (thank Elune, we fear the day we start shrinking,) and a very tidy 189 pounds. We thought we’d been good but he ordered about 1200 blood tests, we assume to punish us for some unspoken faux pas. That pink paper was marked up like our highschool English essays; X’s everywhere.

/insurance rant

Why the bleeping h3ll can’t the nurse at the doctor’s office take our blood?! Why do we have to drive 35 miles to the f-ing “insurance approved” phlebotomist?!”

/insurance rant off

So here we are drained of blood, bruised, no food, no coffee, no executive assistant and no gumption to do much of anything.

Well, we should say the following:

Nobody here appreciates the efforts Shifttusk has given the hunter community more than we do. He’s popped on Drenden and we’ve said Howdy in-game. No bad feelings exist from us. Frankly we thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but we’re gonna accept blame for presenting it in a manner where people could have thought otherwise.

Shifttusk, we’re sorry if we caused you any problems. That wasn’t out intention.

As for the Auto/Steady debate, we have a nice simple solution to show you, but thanks to the Patch we can’t do it.

Did anybody else feel like everything was a mess last night? The sounds of our shots didn’t sync with the graphics. It felt like we were pressing buttons and nothing was happening. This phenomenon was experienced by everybody in our Black Morass and Steamvaults runs last night.

We really dislike advancing This Is Right theories without statistical analysis to back them up. But right now we don’t trust the WoW universe to provide a stable platform for study. So until things settle down on the server and we can trust our action buttons again, we’re going to put the Auto/Steady debate on hold. We’ll then boogie to the ol’e BRK Proving Grounds and do our statistical analysis and make a pretty spreadsheet and chart and everything and slap it up here for all and sundry to peruse.

One of the problems of running this blog is responding to all the great comments and emails. There just isn’t enough time. For example, Pelides made a great comment about allowing Auto Shot to run unfettered during bonus-haste periods because he didn’t want to clip his Auto Shots. Very wise, we advocate that thouroughly.

Then we have the “missing 57 shots” disgrace of an analysis and the “what was going on” illogic. That deserves a giant /slap. If you’ve been in Gruul’s you know exactly what’s going on - people are dying and running and healing and potting and learning! 57 shots missing shots? Call it 60. Say our attack speed is 2.0. That’s 120 seconds we’re “missing shots”. Does you actually think we’re AFK-AutoShotting for 2 minutes? OMG yes, that’s EXACTLY what the comment says! That’s a pretty astounding statement; it takes us aback, it does.

And the next person who calls us “old guy stubborn” is gonna get a whuppin. We take a lot of abuse from Mrs BRK, we’re not gonna get it here, too. /shakes fist menacingly

The reason we don’t do the Auto/Steady/KC macro isn’t because we morally object to it - although we do - it’s because we have tried it, don’t like it, and never saw a DPS increase because of it. But you might be different! You may love it. You may think it’s all that and a bag of Funyons. There are hunters who adore it and wouldn’t leave home without it. Just because we don’t espouse it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it.

Now Rionsy made a point about how we shouldn’t, “…expect everyone to accept that your play was flawless.” Oh no, no no no. We most certainly aren’t without flaws. We’re not the best hunter who posts here. We’re not the best hunter on our server or maybe even in our guild.

Our pathetic claims to fame are a fun anti-Forum blog and having advocated the BM spec before BM was cool. We don’t have the best gear, the most experience, or the biggest accomplishments, and we’re certainly not perfect. Anybody who has heard us scream obsenities into Vent knows we screw up quite royally on an almost minute-by-minute basis.

(We hope to add BRK Screw-Up Movies to the blog soon!)

Now we don’t disagree that adding more Steady Shots to our arsenal is a bad thing. The next time we’re AFK-AutoShotting, we’ll see if we can muster the energy to push another key or two.

But going Auto/Steady Macro-happy? That’s not us.

And finally, Jabari asked, “Who was responsible for keeping Scorpid up in those fights? Those shots don’t show up in WWS.”

We were. We always volunteer to keep Scorpid up, even against two mobs. Another of the “things we were doing” that affected the number of Steady Shots we used.

Two mobs?

Well, certainly. Let’s take the Attumen fight. Midnight and Attumen have to be tanked separately until they join. One hunter can keep a Scorpid up on each of them at the same time. What’s even cooler is that our timer bars even keep track of each Scorpid Sting separately. Tab-target, Scorpid, Tab-Target, Scorpid and resume DPS.

OK, so for a post where we were going to say, “we’re not going to be posting much today,” this has turned into one mongo-blather of a post. To everybody who comments and emails, thank you, we love getting the stuff. This Auto/Steady discussion has been heated but informative and, most of all, pretty un-Forums-like. We’re proud to be a part of this community.