So we hit 75 which means this tasty morsel from Violet Hold is equipped. /score

Yes, we bought an Eternal Belt Buckle. It’s only money, right?

“So what’s with the Armor Penetration gem?” you may ask. We’ll tell you.

In the next podcast.

But here’s the thing. We’ve found a little bug with Rating Buster; it’s not calculating Armor Penetration Rating or Armor Penetration Percentage properly. We are replacing our War-Feathered Loop which had no belt buckle and thus no gems. We should have a net gain of +2 Armor Penetration Rating, not a loss of ten. We played with Rating Buster’s ignore-settings but couldn’t make it work properly. Something in the addon is amiss.

Watch the math. If an addon’s report looks wrong, double-check the results yourself.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

This Leads Into A Huge Discussion

“Dear BRK, have you noticed a bug with Growl? I think I remember you mentioning it in the beta, but I figured it would have been resolved before going live. I’ve noticed growl hasn’t been working 100%, sometimes it will, sometimes I’ll go several fights without it going off. My Devilsaur isn’t holding aggro cuz he isn’t growling properly. TLO”

TLO, you’ve got the Cower Bug.

Growl and Cower accomplish the opposite things; Growl generates threat, Cower reduces it.

Growl and Cower share a cooldown. If Growl is cast at T-0, neither Growl nor Cower can be cast again for five seconds. This is why people see their cooldown timers showing Cower “cooling down” once a Growl is cast; Cower isn’t casting, it just can’t be cast until the Growl/Cower shared cooldown is up. So if your Cower is casting before Growl, Growl will never be cast, and your pet will never generate Threat.

Why is Cower autocasting? Because it’s bugged. It’s been bugged for a while, this isn’t new. Basically, whenever you summon your pet, either from zoning into an instance or dismounting, your pet’s Cower could set itself to autocast.

And this isn’t limited to Cower, either. Any autocasting spell can enable all by itself: Smack, Thunderstomp, Rake, Claw, Bite. We’ve seen all of these start autocasting, personally.

The solution? Double-check your pet’s spellbook frequently, and/or make macros to set everything the way you want it.

A Gorilladin-Tanking Setup Macro

/petautocaston Thunderstomp
/petautocaston Growl
/petautocastoff Smack
/petautocastoff Cower

A Gorilladin-DPS Setup Macro

/petautocaston Thunderstomp
/petautocastoff Growl
/petautocastoff Smack
/petautocaston Cower

Or whatever floats your boat.

Growl costs 15 Focus to be cast. If you’ve got a pet with a Focus-dump spell autocasting -Bite or Claw or Smack - you will find that there will not be enough Focus for Growl to be autocast every five seconds. If your pet is tanking, it is more important for Growl to be cast than the Focus-dump spell. Turn off your Focus-dump spell so Growl is not Focus-starved.

Non-Focus-dump spells are usually fine, though. Thunderstomp will not starve your Gorilladin of Focus - it has a ten second cooldown - so you can have both of those spells autocasting while your pet is tanking.

On the other hand, Cower costs zero Focus. Did you notice that? There is no reason not to allow your non-tanking pet to autocast Cower during fights, especially if you have a high-DPS or high-threat pet. A Devilsaur can do a load of damage, so allowing its Cower to autocast isn’t a bad idea. Gorilladin’s Thunderstomp does damage and additional threat, so if you’re taking your gorilla into instances for tanking or off-tanking duties, use Cower on boss-fights where Gorilladin shouldn’t grab aggro from the main tank.

Remember that Cower only works on a single target. This is critical information, especially with Gorilladin.

Let’s pretend you’re running an instance with a Prot Pally who is pulling with his shield and Consecrating the daylights out of 3-4 mobs at a time. Since that Pally’s Threat is so great, you can send Gorilladin in there and let Thunderstomp run wild; Gorilladin isn’t going to pull aggro from a Paladin-tank.

Now let’s swap that Prot Pally for a Feral Druid bear. The bear has AoE tanking capabilities with Swipe, but it’s not as strong an aggro machine as Consecrate. If you send Gorilladin into a pack of mobs that a Bear-Druid is trying to AoE-tank, Gorilladin will pull aggro, and that’s Bad Mojo.

“Well I can just set Cower autocasting ON for my Gorilladin and he’ll never grab aggro from the Bear-tank, right?”

Wrong. Cower is single-target only. Your Gorilladin will reduce his Threat against the one mob he’s attacking, but will do nothing against the other mobs Gorilladin is aggroing from Thunderstomp.

“So what’s the point of Cower?”

To keep your pet from grabbing aggro, one mob at a time. Are there pets that can overtake a tank in aggro? You bet. Ferocity pets, especially Exotic ones, can out-TPS (Threat Per Second) some tanks, especially at the beginning of a fight when the Bears and Warriors have little Rage accumulated. If you want your Moth or Devilsaur to do his max-DPS, let him have Cower on autocast so he doesn’t grab aggro and screwup your party-healer’s concentration.

Managing your pet’s aggro capabilities is one of the more intricate facets of being a BM hunter. In WotLK, with our pet’s enhanced DPS and aggro-generation talents, it’s also one of the most important ones.

Don’t honk it up, foshizzle.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

Cower Question and Answer

It’s a short movie, so just the full-sized (13MB) version is available for download.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

BRK Down Elevator Mammoth Movie

“Dear BRK, another lovely morning in Sholazar Basin doing my Nessingwary quests. After clearing out the cobras and crocks. I ran up the coast to the camp and lo and behold there it was. Over near the Rhino bones a short jog to the camp and back and a couple frost traps later it was mine. Just figured I would share. Good luck with yours. Ungey”

Shirt-related note. As you’ve seen in the comments, some people are starting to receive their shirts. All the first-generation orders have shipped. We had a small snaff-eroonie with three shirts going out without postage, but that’s totally corrected now! /huzzah!

Some of the second-generation shirts have shipped, but the vast majority have not. We’re awaiting word from the manufacturer that they’ve shipped to us. Once that happens, we’ll get ready to mail even more shirts without postage. /double-huzzah!

Yes, there is at least one more shirt in development. No, we’re not gonna tell you what it is.

Hint: It’s not Sporebat.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

We Refuse To Be Jealous

BRK’s Top Ten Thoughts About Mammoth-Mounts

10. A BM hunter, a druid, and a Mammoth can make short work of the 3/4/5-person quests. Tenacity-pets make healers happy. “You, me, and Gorilladin could take on 5-person instances!” she extolled. Don’t forget Mammoth, druid; he’s the one who got us here.

9. Mammoth got us here? Yes. Hop on Mammoth, druid gets a coffee while BM Hunter drives Mammoth through some Horde cities, flagging PvP in the process, never getting touched by the NPCs, eventually arriving at the quest spot.

“Why am I flagged?”

“We discovered that Horde town!”

“You rode through a Horde town?”

“Mammoth likes short cuts.”

8. Mammoths are down-elevators. Movie incoming tonight; you’ll see.

7. Mammoth loves to aggro huge packs of mobs, which works great with Gorilladin. Round up mobs on Mammoth, dismount, Gorilladin is on Defensive so he drops a Thunderstomp instantly, aggroing everything. Volley FTW, our XP climbs and climbs.

6. We have not yet been chastised for blocking quest-givers or mailboxes or vendors, but we were teased that we were blocking an entire city.

“Hey! You’re blocking it!”

“Apologies… what are we blocking?”

“Stormwind. I can’t see anything! That mount is huge!”

5. Mammoth brings the party wherever he goes. But nowhere does he inspire frenzy more than Goldshire. We’re not going to try to recreate the insanity of thirty-five lowbies demanding rides, but you can imagine.

4. We use AutoProfitX to dump our worthless items on a vendor whenever we open a trade window with one. We use AutoRefill to stock-up on the necessities of hunter-life whenever we open a vendor trade window. Both of these addons make Mammoth just that much more incredible.

/get quest

/hit the road

/open trade with mammoth-vendor

/autoprofitx dumps our gray items and other things we’ve programmed the addon to sell, automatically

/freerefills buys water and food and wood and everything else we’ve programmed it to buy, automatically

/repair

/arrive at quest-location

/giggle uproariously

3. Mammoth is big, but even more impressive, Mammoth is frisky. The Mammoth “jump of joy” is So. Much. Fun. He’s a very happy Mammoth!

2. Mammoth has a new macro:

/say Welcome to the BigRedKitty Worldwide Amalgamated mobile store! Buy, Sell, and Repair quickly, ‘cause Mammoth is hitting the road soon!

1. Mammoth craves an addon developer. When we kick Gnimo and Hakmud off the Mammoth, they say the same things, every time, and we’re tired of it. We want to change their lines. Who can do this? Anybody? Hello?

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

Mammoth Trivia

Download the YouTube-sized (26MB) movie here, and the full-sized (37MB) movie here.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

BRK Covert-Ops Gorilladin Movie

Gorilladin looks forward to meeting the Lich King. Hope he washes his hands first, though.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

Now That’s Contempt

Well BRK, you’re here. What are you going to do next?

Freak out, brain! We’re just gonna Wallow in all that is Expansion. /wallow

You know you could…

SILENCE! You interfere with the Wallowing!

…

…

OK, you may speak again.

BRK, you know you could run help some people out.

Help people? That sounds suspiciously not like Wallowing.

Yes, these people in general chat didn’t get to level to 80 on the beta. You should answer their questions.

But that would involve stopping Gorilladin from pwning all of Howling Fjord!

Yes it would. Be benevolent.

We wanna Wallow! We have Mammoth! We have Gorilladin! Space Shuttle interfered with two days of leveling, we’re so totally behind!

Benevolence.

Benevolence?

Benevolence. Think of it as leveling-karma.

…

OK, we’ll answer a few questions.

Very good. Proud of you.

1. General [Noob1kanoobie] how do I get to dalaran?

1. General [Bigredkitty] There are several ways: 1) find a mage…

1. General [Noob1kanoobie] you noob! where is the city dalaran!

1. General [Bigredkitty] It’s in another zone, but to get there you have to find either a mage or, there’s a neat trick you can use…

1. General [Noob1kanoobie] noob shut up! just tell me where to go!

1. General [Bigredkitty] Find the orca in the ocean. He teleports you there.

1. General [Noob1kanoobie] orca?

1. General [Bigredkitty] Orca. He’s an elite, but he’s nice. He swallows you and that’s the port to Dalaran. Mages hid the entrance there so Arthas couldn’t follow it.

1. General [Noob1kanoobie] k thax noob

…

Hey BRK?

Yes brain?

Feel free to wallow.

D@mn right.

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

Brain Hits Northrend

The first shirts… are away!!! They’re in the mail, delivery on Monday, or so we’re told.

For the next shirts… we hope you’ve been to Borean Tundra and got yourself a Baby Rhino… remember this?

Well here’s our new take on a Rhino Bowling shirt. We hope you like it.

Visit the BRK Pet-Shirt Store by clicking here. These shirts are limited time only, again, ’cause selling and shipping shirts isn’t a full-time job.

We’ve got long and short sleeve, medium to 3XL. That should be enough, yes? Oh. You can get the Gorilladin shirt in all the same ways, too.

International orders… we’re really REALLY sorry, but we need more time to develop the proper method of calculating the shipping before we offer these to you. You’re not going to pay $38US for shipping, that’s nuts. Please, be moar patient… /beg

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

This Is Harder Than We Thought

We ran Utgard Keep and The Nexus, but getting our Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth was what we wanted more than anything. And we can check that off our list!

What was your #1 goal for the day?

Post from: BigRedKitty, foshizzle.

Job One: Complete