How many Taurens does it to lag a server almost to oblivion? We had at least 373 baby bulls rev’d and frothy, not including those people who weren’t in Guild Moo. Like the people from European servers who couldn’t join a guild, we couldn’t count everybody.

So what do you do with 373 baby bulls when the prescribed Shatt-port fails due to lack of mages? You raid Ironforge of course.

Can 373 level 1-3 Taurens really raid IF? Well of course not, take a look.

Actually, a good majority made it to Eastvale Logging Camp, where they proceeded to reform and take out Hogger, we kid you not!

We’ll be doing our Big Honking Movie as soon as our fingers recover.

And the donations for Sharvan…

/bawl

You people are beyond the best. We are humbled to be among you. Be proud of yourselves, and Sharvan has probably not yet stopped laughing.

If you post pics, movies, or commentary about the run, let us know and we’ll link to you here!

For the Herd!

Aspect of the Capricious

Tigersoul’s Teeth

The Meandering Blog

The Big Bear Butt Blogger

Warlock Therapy

Grumble N’ Autumn

Yellow Mohawk

One big photobucket of bull-pics from Andy C.

Warcraft Family

Single-Handedly Justifying Our Belief In Man’s Goodness, Even If That Goodness Comes With a Screaming Halloween Head

Cuppycake

The Game Dame

Uber Nqqb

Power Word: Totem

Lock and Roll

Cursed With Melvin

Nihilum

My Own Little World

UPDATE 6:45pm EDT

Here’s what 345 level 1 Taurens look like… /flabbergasted

UPDATE 5:50pm EDT

Thanks to the generous folks at WoWMacros.com, we are proud to announce that the Ultimate Winner of the BRK/Team Ratshag Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan will receive a 60-Day Prepaid WoW Card!

Thank you, Forgotmycow, for your generous contribution!

UPDATE 5:36 pm EDT

If you’ve seen anything stranger than 85 purple-wearin’ baby Taurens, you’ve been around a lot longer than we have.

UPDATE 1:44pm EDT

The Finish Line is Zinzi. From Ratshag’s own orcish mouth, “She’s gonna be manning the finish line. First person ta opens a trade window with her be the winner.”

So you get to Hammerfall, find Zinzi, be the first to open a trade with her, you win!

And hilarity is in full moo-mode out at the kiddie pool.

UPDATE 12:56pm EDT

The Guild Moo has broken the 100-member barrier already, and the first Ratshag sighting has been reported.

The donations for Sharvan have broached $325. We feel like Jerry Lewis! Pour it on, folks. One dollar at a time, we want to send $500 to Sharvan’s family tonight. To those who have already contributed, thank you, thank you, thank you. /big hugs

FYI, we are “Bigredkitty”, level 1 Tauren, and “Brk” level 28 Blood Elf with Links the cat.

UPDATE 11:11am EDT

Guild “Moo” is accepting all applications!

UPDATE 10:15am EDT

That’s more like it, we’ve got some maniacs playing with their cows already.

If you want to join the race chat channel, type: /join RODB

Starting Post 9:00am EDT

Ten hours before the Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan and we’re the only level 1 Tauren out here?

Gentle reader, we dub thee Slacker. If you can’t spend twelve hours standing around as a level 1 Tauren on a Saturday, we think your priorities aren’t straight.

But we’ll see you there, yes? Yes! We expect a few guilds, some purple shirts, and other goodies to be handed out. Remember - stay in the kiddie pool and don’t get any XP. No questing, no purchasing stuff from vendors.

Cheating at a Running of Da Bulls contest is bad karma. Totally.

There have been a couple generous $5 and $10 donation, even a $20 or two. But somebody, and you know who you are, donated $100 for Sharvan. May Elune bless and keep you. Be sure to play lotto somewhere, Capt. Generosity, for karma like that will be returned in force, we know it.

We’re up to $250. You guys are making us proud, but there’s till time for 50 more people to donate $1 and get us to an even three hundred bucks. Will you help?

7pm EDT, 11PM GMT! Don’t forget, and we’ll see you there!

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.

Number Uno: WTF is wrong with our Search? We’ve used the default search widget, our custom Google widget, and two addon widgets. All of them go to PayPal when we try to seach. We don’t have a clue how to fix this.

Numer Dos: The Powered by WoWHead code has changed.

This:

<script src=”http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js”></script>

Does not work anymore. Update your html to:

<script src=”http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js?lol”></script>

We don’t know the in-and-outs of why this works, but it does. We couldn’t get our WoWHead links to work until we implemented this change.

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.

At has been brought to our attention that our sidebar links have some issues. Well it seems that that analysis is quite correct. For example, The Egotistical Priest has moved her place to a custom domain, and we just this morning corrected it. We’ll address the rest of those linkies as quickly as possible.

You know, if you happen to stumble over to her little web-abode, be sure to say hello and ask, “What’s new?”

Perhaps, just maybe, if you’re mannered and proper, she’ll even tell you what guild she’s in now.

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

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

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

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

Pretty darn spiffy, if we do say so ourselves.

Wanna see something cool? Check this out!

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

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

It’s Hunters! It’s Hunters!

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.

The new BRK-Demanded WoW iMac is here!

24” (1920 by 1200 pixels) widescreen flat panel
2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
6MB shared L2 cache at full processor speed
1066MHz frontside bus
2GB (two 1GB SO-DIMMs) of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM;
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
320GB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive
Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi wireless networking2 (based on IEEE 802.11n draft (specification); IEEE 802.11a/b/g compatible
Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
Built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)
Built-in stereo speakers
Internal 24-watt digital amplifier
Headphone/optical digital audio output (minijack)
Audio line in/optical digital audio input (minijack)
Built-in microphone
Built-in iSight camera
One FireWire 400 port and one FireWire 800 port; 7 watts each
Total of five USB 2.0 ports: three ports on computer, two ports on keyboard
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
iLife ’08 (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, GarageBand)

$1949

Yes, you can get a faster CPU, more memory, or a bigger hard drive. But now we mortals can get a very modern video card in a Mac for under $2k. If Mrs BRK brings home the bam-bam this month, we’re gonna bogart her paycheck big-time and bring one of these babies home.

Just don’t tell her, capice?

The BRK Non-WoW Thought of the Day: Dr. Pepper has commemorative Indiana Jones cans. Dr. Pepper was established in 1885, which by remarkable coincidence is basically the same year that Dr. Jones was born. We wonder if the thriller “Ironman” will commemorate its lead actor, Robert Downey Jr. with a similar commemorative beverage, and if that beverage can be purchased by persons under the age of twenty-one in the US.

Loot Karma: We raided TK without DKP last night, as the SWAPS addon wasn’t working properly and the site that hosts it was wiped out by storms. Solarian dropped her hunter-boots last night, and even though all loot was being roll-decided, we passed. We have Boots of the Crimson Hawk which are basically the exact same thing as the drop, and we wanted another hunter to get some phat loot. As we said to The Egotistical Priest’s gang last night:

“Loot is fun. If we take your loot, we’re taking your fun. What kind of person would that make us?”

Size matters: What a difference a gun makes! Last time we took down Al’ar, we used our Ashtongue disguise and hated how we looked. But give us that Tuskbreaker gun and put our disguise on, and the new gun makes us look totally bad@ss. Yes, of course we forgot to screenshot it

Lunch: We’ve had spicy Kung Pao Chicken, two days in a row. We ask for spicy, we ask for hot, we get mild. Well, it least it’s better than the food poisoning that Chicago Uno’s of Merritt Island gave a bunch of our coworkers a week ago.

Movies: Thank you to everybody who wrote and expressed their pleasure with our Lurker Below movie. Yes, we are making more, but they take time. When we present a movie, it has to be showing the Right Things to Do. Take last night’s Solarian fight. We did everything right, but still died at the end when we got tossed in the air and blasted at the same time, resulting in us being dead before we even hit the ground. “How to Die with Solarian at 3%” is not a good hunter-guide movie, we think you’ll agree.