"Dear BRK, I heard somewhere that Hit will eventually reach a point where it "maxes out" and adding more won't do any good. I figured if anybody knew where that point was, it would be you. I'm up to 167. Eric."

Great jumpin' night elves, Eric, you're stacking Hit like it was being replaced by Original Coke. Like hiding your Halloween candy because your older sister is trying to trade you all her mini-Snickers for your Pixy Stix. Like hoarding DKP because your raid group has Druids and Shaman oozing from every orifice. Like trying to sell Netherwing eggs.

You're stacking Hit for no reason.

Is that a problem? You bet it is. It's like running your 1987 Ford F-150 on super-unleaded. Like attaching an eleven-inch amber CRT to your $500 Nvidia video card. Like using 5-DPS bullets with your Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle. Like borrowing your dad's Porsche to take your first cousin on a bowling-date.

It's overkill for no purpose.

There's a lot of hullabaloo out there about what and why and why-not about Hit, and every class has a different set of rules when it comes determining the difference between smacking a mob in the face or whiffing into the air. So what are the mechanics of Hit, the least-understood Hunter statistic?

Let's take a peek under the Hunter-bonnet and see how we tick.

"Dear BRK, my guild of the past eighteen months is basically evaporating. So many people have left we've dropped below the critical mass necessary to do anything. We can't even put together a five-man instance run without a week and a half of chaotic scheduling. And this happened just as I hit 70. So at the point in the game where the focus really shifts over from solo content to multi-player content, I find myself effectively without a group.

"Last night I had a long whisper conversation with a recruitment officer for a larger, more active guild, and she basically handed me an open invitation. But I don't know whether I should take it because this guild is focused on raiding. Since I essentially soloed my way to 70, I barely even know what raiding is.

"I'm not a total noob; I understand my class fairly well, I can manage my pet, we make a good team. But the two of us have very little group experience. We've only been in three instances in a year and a half of playing the game! I don't want to join a hot new guild only to embarrass myself and frustrate my teammates with my ignorance. Where should I go, or what should I do, to learn the basics of how the multiplayer parts of the game work?

"Is there some quick get-up-to-speed briefing online that will at least let me get the vocabulary down, so I don't have to say stupid things like 'What's Kara?' and 'What does attunement mean?' -- Name withheld by request --"

What is Karazhan?

Karazhan is a 10-person instance where your guild goes to beat thirteen bosses and have loot drop that nobody in your raid can use. Basically, Karazhan is a place enchanters go to level their sharding skills.

But what is a hunter's job in this place? Why are we there and what do we do? How about we go through the bosses one at a time and talk briefly about what you can expect your role to be.

This shall be quick and dirty. We expect the comments to overflow with recommendations to help provide more details.

You know the sleuths at the BRK Patch Notes Spelunkers and Code-Crackers Institute have been hard at work delving into an ASCII-text dump of the new patch. They get paid little, get zero vacation, and are injected daily with vaccines and growth hormones. Their sacrifice is done for your benefit and our profits; they should be praised loudly and often.

But we're a little busy, so we're putting that on our BRK To-Do List.

Unfortunately, the results of several mangled code-scanning attempts had to be trashed, including what we thought was a new demon-minion for Warlocks but was really just the rantings of a highly-tortured programmer venting his misery in the code-comments. But we now think we got the parsing right and are ready to proceed. All systems are Go.

Since the blue-posts have been made and the workings have been finalized, we can release our report.

Believe us, it's a doozy.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

In the lovely dawn of the Burning Crusade era, before the bugs were patched, the mobs scaled-down, and the promise of ten more talent points gnawed on our brains like termites in a house made of sticks, there were some wonderful situations that required skill, patience, tenacity, and guile.

They needed, in a word, a hunter.

And you and your hunter brethren were there to fill the void, to complete the circle, to provide the key ingredients toward making those impossible dreams come true. It was glorious, it was awe-inspiring, it was waves of gratitude from the massive collection of the lesser classes crashing over the Internet and into your headphones inspiring you to greatness. You were giddy. You were excited. You were quasi-but-not-really god-like.

And then Blizz nerfed it all to Sporeggar and back again. Typical.

But the echos of past glory still exists. For many of us, those memories are fresh and intoxicating. For others, they are a myth and only spoken of in hushed tones and in quiet, dark places where we meet to plot our return to prominence.

Let's bring our pain and suffering into the light. Let's remember what has happened and what has been and talk about it openly and with pride. BRK teaches young hunters to hone skills that are not needed in today's game because the day may come when our talents are once again critical to our guild's success.

Do you remember when they were?

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

Your gear, bluntly, stinks. You thought all that mail gear from those quests was fabulous until someone pointed out it was all for Shaman. You've got Strength, Spell Hit and Crit, chance-on-melee hit procs, and Spirit out the yin-yang. Nice.

What are you gonna do now? Instances? Who's going to run an instance with hunter decked out in blue cloth leggings? PvP? You won't survive ten seconds unless it's due to your opponents laughing so hard they can't get their fingers to smash the Destroy the Incompetent Huntard button.

You're an outcast.

But we can help! One thing you can do is spend some of that gold you've been hoarding. The Auction House is loaded with super-duper bind-on-equip gear that is plenty good enough to get you through the first four bosses of Karazhan. Those guys drop gear that will keep you in line with the rest of your guildmates. But your current clownness isn't going to get an invite, so we've got to clean you up and make you look all sparkly.

Grab your two-handed mace -- why did you even choose that, you know hunters can't even equip them -- and hustle to the nearest Auction House. Let's go shopping.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

This week's collection of random blatherings, idiosyncratic spoutings and outright falsehoods concerning the Auction House and how you can gear yourself for raiding for less than 1000 gold has been shelved in light of a critical situation. We received a short email asking us a simple question:

"Are hunters a hybrid class?"

Before we could slam our auto-typed macro to respond, "The primary purpose of a hunter is to provide massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS," the fellow continued,

"I just don't think people understand how important a hunter's trapping skills are. Yes we do lots of damage, but getting locked into the mindset that dealing damage is our sole purpose is detrimental to our capabilities. Our class as a whole is not critical to any instance or raid and our individual ability to provide crowd control can either grant us entry or bar us from many instances.

"As a large voice in the hunter community, it would be appropriate for you to recognize this fact, adapt your column and blog to spreading this word, and put the idea in everybody's mind, not just the hunters, that our talents in the area of crowd control make us a hybrid class. If we are identified as hybrids instead of DPS, perhaps we'll get more invitations and respect."

Needless to say, we were floored. Several questions immediately sprang to mind, not the least of which was, "Why in the heck do these letters always arrive on a Tuesday?" BRK loves getting emails but if you're going to come up with a thesis question for us, send it on Thursday so we have time to formulate an appropriate response. As it is, we're flying by the seat of our pants and our executive assistant is going to scream her head off at us for sending this to her so late for review.

But we do have an answer to this emailer's question. Shall we pull up a couch or can we Tony Soprano this and just sit in a chair?

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

Last week, BRK introduced you to the first five commandments of how to be a good hunter. Let us now continue this journey and complete the list with the other five commandments.

So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.

Hunterdom Commandment #6: Know Thy Traps

We have loads of traps and some are better than others. The number one trap with which you must be an expert is Freezing Trap. This is our crowd control and your ability to master it will basically determine how far you go in your guild. If you can chain trap you'll be invited everywhere. If you can't, enjoy farming and battlegrounds because your spot in the raid will be filled with a mage.

You must practice using your Freezing Trap. Walking into Shadow Lab and expecting to be able to chain trap is unrealistic. When you break your own trap, trap the wrong mob, fail to pull your assigned mob from the tank, or run around like a squishy when your trap is resisted and you have no backup plan... you're going to make your friends hate you. There are great guides for learning how to chain trap if you're not comfortable with trial-and-error. Work with your tank to ensure your trap cooldown is up before your party pulls so that you can drop a trap immediately if your first one is resisted. And practice, practice, practice.

We wrote an entire column on the Snake Trap and all the spiffy uses it has. Learn it and love it. Freezing Trap, Explosive Trap and Volley can be used to aid your AoE classes burn down big packs of mobs. Learning how your traps can be an asset to your party will make you much more desirable when it comes time to select classes for the next raid.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

Verily, this imaginary reader may not have the Answers but he does have the correct Question. A hunter is most deadly to his enemies when properly employed, yet just as deadly to his friends when honked-up. Thus, we shall give thee our Ten Commandments of Hunterdom to aid thee in thy quest to improve thyself.

The accumulation of phat-loot is not an Answer; purples are gained as a result of pursuing the Answer. Any schmoo can AFK in a battleground enough times to get epic PvP gear or Auto Shot themselves into rewards. A Good Hunter is identified by the praise of his cohorts, not the color of the loot on his back. What we want is for you to become better at your class, help your guild and become uber in all that you do.

Here's how one does that. So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

Damh's first pet was a bear. A regular brown bear from the outskirts of Ironforge, nothing special, not unique, no cool talents. We called out to Mrs. BRK and asked her what we should name him.

"Ooo! You should name him Googlybear!"

We love Mrs. BRK and sleep quite soundly because we take great care not to get on her Enemies List, yet this naming-travesty couldn't happen.

"Honey, he's a ferocious killing machine. Remember I showed you the movie trailer to this game, the hunter standing in the snow outside the gates to the big city under the mountain, a massive bear at his side? That's me and that's my bear. He needs a name that inspires fear, that causes our enemies to flee in terror, and you give me Googlybear?"

"He's so cute! He needs a smoosh-kiss right on the nose. And his name is Googlybear. Type it. Now."

We typed it. /sigh

Thus Damh and Googlybear joined forces and ran around killing stuff and getting not-quite-so-phat green loot and experience and everything else that goes with it and things were good. Until our pet needed a new spell and we had to train another animal to get it; that's when our problems began.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

So just what is the deal with Scorpids? You've run around the Internet and seen folks yammering and flapping their pie holes about them and don't understand the hoopla. They're small. They scuttle. They don't Dash or Dive. They have lower white damage per attack than almost all other pets, although they do have the best armor of them all.

But why all the commotion?

Because something cool is afoot and the Scorpid-Hunters out there are living in fear, just like the Windserpent-Hunters did.

You don't know what happened and how the Great Windserpent Smackdown is causing a mild panic among our class to this very day? Oh this is a great story. Grab a snack; this is the best.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

BRK loathes professions. Obviously, someone has to be enchanters and leatherworkers, but why in the blue blazes does it have to be you? Please excuse our massive generalization, but these things just don't bring in the gold like farming raw materials does.

But you're enamored with engineering, aren't you. You're addicted to alchemy, love leatherworking, enraptured with enchanting and nobody better belittle your blacksmithing. It's a great part of the game! you squeel. Well, fine, have your fun. Just remember that our Epic Flying Mount Loan interest rates are mighty competitive, alright Mr. Trump?

Um. But you know... as long as you're going to be buying our materials from the auction house, perhaps you might like to know that we are available for hire. If you can manufacture some of the stuff we love, we'd be more than happy to work a little of the ol' barter system, capice? What do we mean? Well, tell us specifically what profession you're going to level and we can give you a little hint as to what we hunters like. Well, adore. OK, we'd trade our college fund for some of our favorite manufactured things. You need materials, well BRK is your farmer. What would we like? Well we're thrilled you asked!

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

Just this week, after having some fun in an Alterac Valley battleground, we exited the battlemaster room in Ironforge and were quietly chillin' beside the canker sore in the floor -- you know, that red-hot pile of rocks that has poked up through the ground and become an OSHA-nightmare for King Bronzebeard. Dang thing isn't even roped off or a sign posted or anything. You're trying to buy some Roasted Quail from the wandering meat merchant and BAM you're taking damage. You ever wonder why there aren't any goblins in Ironforge? They'd set up a fly-by-night legal firm and try to get a class-action suit filed with everybody who has been burned by that lava-mound as litigants, that's why.

Bronzebeard may not be able to keep track of his daughter or keep the boiling lava from running every which way, but the man's no fool.

So we were chatting with the guildies and making life miserable for a few of our friends when a little level fifteen dwarf hunter comes running up to us.

"WHOA! That's the meanest-looking Hobbes I've ever seen! HAHAHA!"

Our level-70 haughtiness kicks in immediately, natch, and we pop Bestial Wrath.

"No, this is the meanest Hobbes you've ever seen," we state smugly. The guy actually backed up; he had never seen an enraged pet before, we believe, and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. So of course we smash Eyes of the Beast and start chasing him around while yelling,

"Come back here, morsel! Little dwarves make great Snausages! Yum!"

And as the entire military wing of Ironforge begins to watch, applaud, laugh and cheer, he assimilates the idea that no harm is going to come to him. Bestial Wrath fades, Hobbes returns to our side and our new friend asks,

"That was incredible! What spell was that! Can I do that too?"

"Well, not for a few levels, but let's see your pet and we'll tell you how he'll look when you finally get to try it."

"I don't have a pet."

...

"You don't have a pet?"

"No. I don't know where to buy one."

...

What would you do in this situation, hmm? Laugh, cry, perhaps give him a /wetwilly emote? Before you answer, and before we tell you what we did, let's take a trip back in time and see how many head-smackingly stupid things we did as we learned how to play a hunter.

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary. Freezing Traps may be the bread-and-butter of the raiding hunter, but we've got other toys with which we can also be useful. Frost Trap is spiffy when you want to help your casters do tons of AoE damage. Explosive Trap can be used in conjunction with Misdirection to pull patrol mobs. But the most fun a hunter can have without Misdirecting a Fel Reaver onto a priest is with Snake Trap. Snake Trap is new with Burning Crusade and if you haven't played with it, we understand why.

The Snake Trap tooltip is one of the worst things we've ever seen in terms of explaining just what the bejeezus a spell does. But Snake Trap is so useful, so clever, so bloody brilliant and spiffy that you can use it just about anywhere, on almost every pull, and we're positive that you'll wonder why it hasn't been nerfed already; it's that good.

Now quit reading out loud. If Blizzard hears how much we love Snake Trap they'll be sure to downgrade it. Keep reading to yourself and when you realize how often you're going to use Snake Trap on your next raid, just chortle quietly.

Using our top secret, highly illegal, and mildly toxic BRK Patch Notes Discombobulator, the highly-trained yet massively underpaid engineers at the BRK Information Warfare Center and Crunchy Cheetos Research Facility have been able to root out the hidden agenda in the latest patch notes distribution. Hold onto your Stylin' Purple Hats, folks; this isn't gonna be pretty.

For The Top Ten Totally Provocative Changes Coming in the Next Patch, read on!

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

One of the problems with leveling a hunter is that one gets used to grinding. Nobody can deny that leveling a hunter is pretty dag-gum easy and it is all too simple to fall into the trap, "What was good for leveling is good for instances." But it is a trap and far too many hunters never realize that they're caught in it. We call it "Grinding-Think".

The perfect example of Grinding-Think is the use of Serpent Sting. Serpent Sting is first learned at level four. It's the first sting we're given and we use it on every mob we face. It's our opening salvo for level upon level and it becomes so ingrained in our thoughts that we can smash our Serpent Sting key blindfolded and wigged-out on "Mountain Dew and Red Bull" smoothies.

But Serpent Sting stinks and BigRedKitty wants you to quit raiding with it. There is a much better Hunter Sting that we want you to learn and use in its place. You guessed it: Scorpid Sting.

Scorpid Sting? But it doesn't do any damage!

That's right, Chester, it doesn't. But then if you think applying Serpent Sting is "doing damage" you might want to ask your friendly -- or not-so-friendly as is more likely the case -- Warlock what his opinion of Serpent Sting is. Just be prepared for a snort, giggle, and guffaw in response, in addition to:

"You call that a DoT? I've got moldy greenies from Scarlet Monastery rotting in my bank that'll do more damage than that. You keep playing with your kitties and puppies while we 'Locks summon our minions, use them for our personal pleasure, sacrifice them for fun, and drop 10,000-damage Seed of Corruption crits in 5v5 arenas. Now get outta the way; you're hogging all the darkness."

Warlocks. Do they all have mild personality disorders because they play warlocks, or do they all play warlocks because they have mild personality disorders? Someone should do some research into this; it would make a good paper.