“Dear BRK … I am primarily a PvE player but I do dabble in the [battlegrounds] from time to time. Recently some guildies and I had the notion of giving arenas a try. Now, I’m not expecting miracles but I also don’t want to be smashed into the ground a laughed at every match. Which brings me to my question.

“Am I better served playing my arena matches in my Kara and crafted epics or should I pick up the blue PvP gear available from the faction quartermasters?

“I know I will gain a ton of resilience and stamina but my other stats take a nose dive. Balancing act between survivability and damage output I guess. What do you recommend? Gothyelk“

Know this, new arena person: You’re gonna die.

You’re gonna die in the blue arena PvP set.

You’re gonna die in the epic arena PvP sets.

You’re gonna die in epic crafted gear, Kara gear, T5, T6, and Merciless and Vengeful and whatever else gear you get. Gear is not the savior of arena. It helps, no doubt, but there is something much more important:

Skill.

And you don’t have it. At least, not yet. And since you don’t have Skill, you’re gonna get destroyed by those teams that do. Wiped out. Obliterated. Smushed into dust.

But don’t look at it like that’s a bad thing.

Look at it as a Learning Experience.

When you die - and did we mention you’re going to? - don’t just queue for match after match after match. After you lose, take a minute and write down what you did, the team you faced, the tactics that beat you. Discuss with your partners what they saw, and tell them what you experienced. Talk about the terrain, the LOS issues, your group dynamics, and the abilities you used and when you used them. You’ll be shocked at what you find out happened.

You know, there are movies and descriptions and tutorials about raid bosses. There are numerous websites dedicated to raid encounters and tricks and everything a guild needs to progress from Attumen through Sunwell.

But it’s an extreme rarity to one-shot any raid boss, on the first visit. What you need is Skill, and practice gives that to you.

The same theory applies to arenas; you’re not going to go 10-0 your first time. Heck, you’ll probably go 0-10 your first time. But that’s OK! Your goal is not to Win, no it’s not.

Your initial arena-goals should be twofold:

1. Have fun.

2. Learn.

Now we have only participated in one season of arenas because we violated Goal #1; we didn’t enjoy it all that much. We learned as we went, got better as the season went on, and finished with a Challenger title. But we dreaded arena-Mondays and the stress they induced. We loved Tuesdays because it was the longest time before the next mandatory-arena matches. So we stopped and haven’t missed it at all.

There are loads of arena-bloggers who can help you with Goal #2. Megs of OutOfMana is the place we recommend you start.

So go get your buddies and do some research. Then queue up and go do some arenas. Go have fun. Go learn.

Go die.

WoWHead has ‘em. Go play.

Part I.

In the Air Force, officers do not load C-5s; enlisted people do.

In the Air Force, officers do not move all the equipment out to the C-5 to be loaded; enlisted people do.

In the Air Force, officers fly the planes. They plan the routes, they devise the equipment lists, and do all sorts of planning and operational work.

But generally – and I could write a few notable exceptions – officers don’t lift things. Thus, enlisted people tend to… be creative when it comes to moving things about.

Part II.

“Airman Howell, want to go to Saudi?”

“Yeah!”

“OK, you leave in two days.”

That’s how I was chosen to go to Desert Storm for Operation Southern Watch.

Part III.

When taking stuff to a far-away location, the Air Force has lists. Many, many lists. In order to take a squadron of U-2 aircraft from Beale AFB to Taif AB, KSA, there was a great, honkin’ list of stuff we had to take. Assemble the stuff, get it to the C-5, load it, that’s the idea.

The aircraft load master gets a list of stuff that has to be loaded, uses a computer or formulas to calculate exactly where each piece of gear is going to be placed. This is done to optimize the weight distribution of the aircraft. This is critical stuff and mistakes can be deadly.

Part IV.

When first assigned to Beale AFB, I was part of the Electronic Security Command, not Air Combat Command. The U-2s belonged to ACC, the sensor systems belonged to ESC. As such, we were a “tenant unit”. We got all the privileges of living on an ACC base, and all the privileges of not owning the base.

We got a nice hunk of the maintenance facility in which to work, wired and polished to our specifications. The rest of the U-2 maintenance group got crap.

We got leased Ford trucks with air conditioning and radios. The rest of the U-2 maintenance group got crap.

Our supervisor brought a pool table and set it up in our maintenance bay. Because he wasn’t governed by ACC rules, that’s how.

Part V.

So we’re going to Saudi, we gotta get our stuff on the C-5. Test sets, tool boxes, and the rest of our junk. We got it all on pallets and the supply people came with their forklifts and hauled it to the flightline to get loaded. As a joke, our boss put the pool table on a pallet, strapped it down with webbing, and had it properly tagged as “Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Supplies”. Ha ha, very very funny, right?

Since our unit had never deployed, our stuff took longer to get ready than everybody else’s, so our pallets were the last ones to be loaded on the C-5. And at the back of that line, sat our palatalized pool table.

Part VI.

Paper-pushers have very little of a sense of humor.

“OK, we’ve got to make room for that last pallet, let’s get this stuff off the deck and upstairs!” the load master called. I tapped him on the shoulder and said,

“Hey guy… um, Sergeant? That thing isn’t coming.”

“It’s got paperwork and it’s on my manifest. It’s coming.”

“No no, it’s a joke. It’s not equipment.”

“It’s… MWR equipment, my load-plan is done, I’m not redoing it. Load it!”

“It’s a f-ing pool table!”

“I don’t care what it is. It’s on my list, my aircraft is balanced. It. Is. Going.”

And thus, the very last piece of equipment stuffed into my C-5 to Desert Storm was a very dirty but completely functional pool table.

Part VII.

California, Dover, Spain, Saudi. Slept with my head on a metal oxygen bottle. We landed at Taif AB, KSA, and taxied where a member of the local team met us on the plane.

“OK folks. When you disembark, form up on the line you’ll see on the ground, open your luggage, and the Saudi inspectors are going to check you for illegal material.”

“What’s illegal material?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Anything forbidden by their government, like pornography, alcohol, or gambling equipment.”

Is a pool table gambling equipment? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t want to deal with that kind of questioning from Saudi officials. Fortunately, I wasn’t anywhere close to senior or in charge. Heck, I wasn’t even in ACC; I was a “tenant unit”. And as such when we were lining up to exit the airplane, my lowly status ensured I was the very last person in line.

“OK, the forward door is jammed, we’re exiting down the ramp in back! Turn around!”

I was now the very first person in line. Lucky me, as the first person off the plane, I was first to meet the small contingent of Saudi inspectors.

Across the steaming hot tarmac, the C-5 started to disgorge its contents. Two hundred twenty members of the US Air Force, a couple hundred million dollars of high-tech surveillance and maintenance equipment, and leading the technology and manpower parade… the pool table.

And the inspectors started pointing and gesticulating at the thing, like it was the monolith from “2001 A Space Odyssey”. They got their translator and the ACC-contingent commander together and had a loud pow-wow. Then the commander came back to the group of us who just arrived.

“Who the H#LL owns that!” the commander yelled.

“It says, ‘ESC’ sir!” said the load master.

“Who here is from F-ING ESC!”

“He is, sir!” and of course, the load master pointed at me. The commander made a beeline…

“Airman Howell, is that your pool table?”

“It’s not really my table, sir. It belongs to my supervisor and it was put on last and I didn’t do the paperwork…”

“They want to try it.”

“Sir?”

“The inspectors would like to try your pool table.”

“Try it? Well they can have at it, sir.”

“Where are the cues and the balls?”

…

“Airman Howell, where are the cues and balls!?”

“I don’t think we packed them, sir…”

“YOU BROUGHT A POOL TABLE 5000 MILES TO SAUDI ARABIA AND DIDN’T PACK CUES AND BALLS?!”

“No sir. Well, yes sir, but you see the table wasn’t supposed to be…”

“You’re making me look like a G*DD@MN IDIOT in front of these inspectors, you know that! You think they’re going to BELIEVE that we brought a D@MN POOL TABLE and didn’t bring cues or balls!?!”

“It’s not my table…” and i shoved my chin into my chest, trying to hide.

And he stomped off, told the inspectors that nobody was going to be allowed to play the pool table because some dumb@ss from ESC forgot to pack cues and balls for the MWR pool table they put on the C-5 as a joke.

The inspectors looked mad. Really mad. I’d been feet-dry for 30 seconds and already pissed off the Saudi government. They walked off, gesticulating in a manner I swear looked like they were using a cue to break.

Three weeks later, as requested, my supervisor had a brand new set of cues and balls shipped to Saudi, at his personal expense.

The pool table, of course, had been commandeered by the pilots and put in their ready-room. It was being used as a conference table. I never got to use it.

And as far as I know, it’s still over there.

So with a locked-and-loaded group, AC took down Azgalor in a one-shot. Tier 6, we gotcha.

Well, we don’t, but some of our friends do. You know what we mean.

So Anetheron is still bugged. The infernals “drop”, but don’t “land”. We thought this had been fixed, and when it wasn’t, it freaked our raid out so much, we wiped. Yes, we wiped on a nerfed boss on Mount Hyjal.

/epic fail

“OOHH!! Infernals are still bugged!! Doh.”

And we took him down painlessly the second try. Still, we felt really silly.

But we got a pretty pair of new shoes!

These are tremendous upgrades over our Boots of the Crimson Hawk. We even splurged and got some of those spiffy Sunwell gems for a few badges we had lying around, doing nothing: a Delicate Crimson Spinel and a Wicked Pyrestone. This is our first loot out of Mount Hyjal, so we think it deserved some nice stuff shoved in those sockets.

Tomorrow, we go back for Azgalor, and try to avoid another 1% wipe.

/shudder

1. Our initial foray onto the WoW Insider Podcast is available here!. It’s probably on iTunes as well, yes?

2. Tommy, thank you for the screenshot!

Download the full-sized movie (118.5MB) by right-clicking here.

So how much damage can a BM hunter do in this fight, and how important is it that a hunter perform that role? Well here’s the WWS for this fight. One quarter of the total damage is Our Responsibility.

What do our individual stats look like? Well we’ve got that covered as well.

We’re gonna try to foist the BRK progeny on grandma and thus be available for the live WoW Insider Show on Saturday at 3:30pm EDT.

We’ll try not to get WoW Insider banned by the FCC, but that’s the limit of our promises.

CNN News Flash! Dateline, Orlando.

Today, the legal division of BRK Worldwide Amalgamated filed suit in Federal Court against the owner and proprietor of The Big Bear Butt, Inc. for violations of copyright and patent fraud.

“That’s right, B^4 dropped, with malice and forethought, a “foshizzle”! He taunted us with it! We’ll put up with a lot, but that ain’t gonna stand!” BRK himself screamed, from the top of the steps, perched upon a small piece of luggage.

“We’ll take that bear, kite his @ss up the courthouse steps, and shave him down! His Mark of the Wild is gonna expire and he’ll get no rebuffs! Stealth isn’t gonna save that guy now; this is war!!” blathered the obviously hung-over and stressed-out CEO.

In its filing, BRKWWA enumerated several hundred blog-posts where he uses “foshizzle” and proclaims eminent domain over its use.

“Snoop is totally tight with several board members of BRKWWA and regularly plays putt-putt with our HR director. He totally let us have Bogart-Rights to ‘foshizzle’ and we intend to defend those rights, all the way to the Supreme Court if we must. Scalia plays a hunter, did you know that Bear-Boy?!” BRK stumbled to one knee at this point, muttered several inappropriate invectives, but didn’t appear to spill any of his… water.

“We’ve defended our content-rights in many lawsuits in the past two years. We had tremendous victories over several bloggers who dared invade our turf. The one hung-jury was not our fault; we don’t know how that weasel got in the courtroom, or who put the “Rogues: Exhibit A” sign on its back.”

As BRK’s gaggle of lawyers and boot-lickers attempted to form a human chain to prevent him from reaching the podium directly, he performed a really bad impression of Darth Sidious, whipped out a Mr. Microphone and spittle-yelled one final time to the assembled mob.

“As Elune as our witness, we’ll never allow a druid to beat us in battle! Be it PvP, arena, DPS, or the courtroom, BRKWWA will be there to ensure to dominance of hunters over the lesser classes.

“It just so happens that today we’re taking aim at the druids in the world, and making people realize what sleazy cheaters they all are. Form-shifting sure sounds like a dirty rogue-trick to us! Dressing up as trees is just camouflage! They have their own ZONE for cryin’ out loud; they’re aggressors! Down with Druids! Make ‘em all become hunter-pets, like they were designed to be! Let the smell of burnt cat hair be our war cry! AAAUUGGHH!”

Of course, a war-cry is a sound, not a smell. This has been CNN’s Robin Meade reporting.

CNN Editor’s Note: In the interest of fair reporting, it should be noted that Mrs. Meade plays a female Blood Elf Shadow Priest on an RPPvP realm.

Go Play.

Edit: Of course, you might have to go play here, too, so don’t put too much credence into either of these.

But they are fun. (We prefer WarTool’s talents, BTW).