“Dear BRK, I was looking at your character on the armory and noticed your ranged weapon speed. It’s 1.96. Your weapon is 2.70. I believe the formula for the speed is WEP Speed 2.70 * ( 1 - 20% for Serpent’s Speed) = 2.16. I’m guessing you’re using a ammo pouch to get to 1.96. My question is how is a quiver/ammo pouch factored in? Is it added to Serpent’s Speed making it ( 1- 35%) for a 15% pouch or counted in two steps? Or am I way off base and totally wrong here?

“Anyway thanks for your time, patience (an assumption here), and help you may give. Zebediah”

Basically, weapon speed and Haste effects are calculated thusly:

Final_Weapon_Speed = FWS

Base_Weapon_Speed = BWS

FWS = BWS / [ ( 1 + Haste_A ) * ( 1 + Haste_B ) ]

If you have Serpent’s Swiftness, then that’s a 20% Haste increase.

Haste_A = 0.2

If you have a Smuggler’s Ammo Pouch, then that’s a 15% Haste increase.

Haste_B = 0.15

And if you have a Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle, your ranged weapon has an attack speed of 2.7.

Base_Weapon_Speed = 2.7

Let’s do the math!

FWS = BWS / [ ( 1 + Haste_A ) * ( 1 + Haste_B ) ]

FWS = 2.7 / [ ( 1 + 0.2 ) * ( 1 + 0.15 ) ]

FWS = 2.7 / ( 1.2 * 1.15 )

FWS = 2.7 / 1.38

FWS = 1.9565 which rounds to 1.96 and, if you check BRK’s armory profile, you’ll see this matches.

Tada!

“But BRK! What if I get the 10 Haste Rating enchant, what does that do?”

We modify our formula to take the new haste bonus into account, of course!

FWS = BWS / [ ( 1 + Haste_A ) * ( 1 + Haste_B ) * ( 1 + Haste_C ) ]

At level 70, it takes a 10.51 Haste Rating to increase our haste 1%. So we can calculate that a 10 Haste Rating gives us 0.95%. Notice that this is less than 1%, right?

Haste_C = 0.0095

FWS = 2.7 / [ ( 1 + 0.2 ) * ( 1 + 0.15 ) * ( 1 + 0.0095 ) ]

FWS = 2.7 / ( 1.2 * 1.15 * 1.0095 )

FWS = 2.7 / 1.39311

FWS = 1.9381 which will be rounded to a 1.94 attack speed.

Friday Afternoon Musings

If you haven’t seen Patton, you must. Fire up Netflix and put it in your queue.

What the h3ll happened to Doritos? Are we the only one who think the Nacho Cheese recipe changed in the past couple of months? They’re terrible!

If you’re going to make Raspberry Latte with a Senseo machine, we recommend the Dark Roast pods. They stink in the package but make killer lattes.

Since TJ is going to be busy in Winterspring, we are offering the job of videos of hot chicks answering BRK’s email to the Diet Coke of Evil and Cayleigh, the Squeekie Priestie. Stand by, there will be more on this to come.

And now, a PUG-Rant, brought to you by BRK Worldwide Amalgamated - We Let You Scream Because We Care:

Dear BRK, I am cranky right now so if this sounds short-tempered I’m sorry. I just got out of the absolute WORST pug group ever. but I want to make sure I wasn’t adding to it with some sort of leet-uber-ness.

Oh, and another frustration, the @ss leading kept asking me to use my fire trap…. againandagainandagain- “Fire traps would be cool.” “you have fire traps don’t you?” (and this guy is a GUILDIE!! but I won’t pull you into that drama.) Keep in mind here there are five in the group and we were in Sunken temple where the pulls are three big, three lil guys. I was ready to scream. Actually, i think I might have. I feel sorry for anyone on Vent at the time. V_______ and unnamed pet [Ed: Names withheld to protect the Screamer]

BRK won’t PUG anymore. We’re done. Fineto. Kaput. No guild-run, we’re doing our dailies. Our sanity is not for sale.

An Aspect of the Viper question:

“Dear BRK, with the new Aspect of the Viper [coming in the 2.2 patch] I’m wondering if there’s a flashpoint where preserving mana might take precedence over the DPS advantage of AotH. Freejack and Blackjack”

We have played with the new Aspect of the Viper on the public test realm but are withholding analysis until we see the final implementation of the algorithm.

Basically, the new AotV will do more regeneration as you lose mana; an inversely-proportional relationship if you will. However, it is not a linear relationship so we can’t express it simply. Also, there are minimums and maximums that are not mana-dependent but Intellect-dependent.

Just hold that thought; we’ll report more once we know something more definitive.

A quick note from a BRK proselytizer:

“Dear BRK, my main is a 70 BE Paladin (Holy, and yes I heal pets), but I’m also playing around with a BM Hunter for my DPS-fix, (level 27 and advancing rapidly). I’ve found your archived posts to be a great source of information for leveling my alt and for understanding the hunters I group with.

“When I suggested he place his trap away from the fight, he said that he kept forgetting to turn off Auto Shot. Instead of inquiring how much he had paid for his account, I suggested your Pull Macro. I’m pleased to report it was a great success, and the rest of the instance went smoothly. Trilian”

The Pull Shot Macro, in case you’ve forgotten, is:

/cast [nomodifier] Arcane Shot(Rank 1)
/cast [modifier:alt] Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

Let’s say we assign this macro to the F4 key. We can fire a low-threat pull shot by pulling with F4 or a very high-threat shot with Alt-F4, and then the Auto Shot is disabled so we don’t break our own trap.

And we shall conclude with a pet question:

“Dear BRK, for PvE-grinding I find that throwing my cat’s extra points - after maxing his damage potential of course - are better spent on as much armor as possible rather than some armor and some stamina. While grinding [one] encounters mostly melee damage, and [armor] let’s him shrug off blows a little better while he tears the face off that mob that won’t politely lay down and die for me.

I have noticed that when you talk of instance builds you favor mostly stam with some armor. Does a cat so-built have much in the way of “save the squishie” emergency off-tanking ability? Clay.”

The maximum armor spell grants an additional 1600 armor to your pet. For our cat, this equates to an additional 4-5% damage mitigation. Sending your pet with a Mend Pet cooking should solve any grinding problems much more effectively than extra armor.

As for instances, we recommend health and resistances. In non-heroics, a pet can off-tank just about any trash mob you find. In heroics or Karazhan, a pet can off-tank-with-heals almost any non-boss. There are non-bosses that a pet just can’t tank. In heroic Underbog, the last pull before the first boss are two non-CC’able bog monsters. Hobbes, even with heals, was unable to off-tank one and survive. Could another pet do this? Turtle or Bear perhaps? We haven’t heard of it but it could be possible.

But killing things quickly is the ultimate solution to eliminating trash mobs. We were super-successful letting our warrior tank two while BRK and Hobbes went b@lls-to-the-wall DPS. We suggest this is the most effective method of employing pets.

“Dear BRK, while inspecting your profile on the WOW Armory I noticed you’re leveling Leatherworking atm? Does that - by any chance - have something to do with the Ebon Neherscale Set which becomes available when you’ve gained 375 skill points and specialised in Dragonscale LW?

“Whether it is or isn’t, could you give us some advise on that set with respect to its usefulness for Beastmaster hunters. The set has decent AP values, Mana Regen, Armor, Stamina, Intellect as well as considerable Crit Ratings! Unfortunately it lacks Agility. Putting in the BRK approved gems increases that agility a bit but not much. On the other hand, crit is crit, whether it’s obtained via agility or crit rating… and hence, more crit means more Kill Commands. The armor set also has a nice bonus of +20 Hit rating when wearing all three items and a high hit rating is one of the bare essentials for a Beastmaster hunter! Thanks for the advice! Camaxtli & Leo”

OK. So. Here’s the deal. Many of you know BRK has long been an advocate of Dual Gathering, (mining, herbalism and skinning,) to make mucho mondo payola. And for anybody who is not a 70, and for every 70 who does not have an epic flying mount, this is still the case. However we’ve been mulling a thought for a few weeks now and the time has come to implement it.

It is now Our Learned Opinion that once your epic flying mount is safely in your bags, the ability to make quick cash via daily quests surpasses the money-making madness that is gathering. Taking this new philosophy to heart, last night BRK dropped his 375 mining skill and started Leatherworking. Again.

When we were grinding our way to 60, we were a full 300-skill Dragonscale Leatherworker. We found very little to recommend about the craft and soon dumped Skinning and Leatherworking for Mining and Engineering. Throwing our efforts into this profession with a crazed abandon, we achieved a 300-skill level in Goblin Engineering. That bored us to tears too, and the stupid Goblin Jumper Cables XL always failed at the wrong time. We decided to take Make Money as our profession, dumped Engineering, took up Skinning again, and turned our mad grinding skillz into 10,000g over time. Flying mounts, movie stars, etc. were ours.

BRK has the Laughing Skull Battle-Harness and it’s really a fine piece of gear. Replacing it has been impossible. We’ve been trying to get the [Beast Lord Curiass] to drop from Warpy in Botanica forever. We know Nightbane drops a pretty chest piece too. What’s the best way to cause the Loot Fates to make these drop? Spend oodles of cash trying to make the Ebon Netherscale Breastplate, of course.

So yes, that one piece of gear is our primary goal. We considered Blacksmithing and Armorsmithing for the high-armor mail gear that that profession can make. We considered Axesmithing for the nasty Legacy-like cleaver. But in the end, the availability of materials in the Auction House for leatherworking made us go this route.

The biggest problem is going to be the 250-300 grind. We’ve got loads of Outland leather and will crank those 300+ skill levels easily enough. But getting all the Rugged Leather we’re going to want is going to be a pain. Who wants to go to, oh say Winterspring, and farm beasts for a month to get all that leather?

Sure would be nice if we had a friend out in Winterspring already, doing something silly like grinding Wintersaber Trainer reputation, who would sell us all that leather cheaply. Wonder if we could manage that somehow? The plan would be:

A) Convince someone that farming beasts in Winterspring was in their best interest.

B) Convince them to sell all that leather directly to us and bypass the AH.

C) Do it in a way such that once they found out our plan, they’d have no choice but to continue to the plan anyway.

It would be tricky, but we think it could be done.

So anyway, back to the gear. The [Ebon Netherscale Breastplate] is our primary goal. How does it compare to the [Laughing Skull Battle-Harness]?

Ebon Netherscale Breastplate
Chest Mail
846 Armor
+25 Stamina
+23 Intellect
Blue Socket
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Agility
Requires Level 70
Requires: Dragonscale Leatherworking
Equip: Increases attack power by 80.
Equip: Restores 8 mana per 5 sec.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 31.

Laughing Skull Battle-Harness
Binds when picked up
Chest Mail
635 Armor
+28 Agility
+29 Stamina
+20 Intellect
Red Socket
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: 2 mana per 5 sec.
Requires Level 68
Equip: Increases attack power by 40.

Upgrading, we have the following deltas:

Agility: -28
Stamina: -4
Intellect: +3
RAP: +12
Crit: 1% Crit for 40 agility and 1% Crit for 22.08 Crit Rating means the LSBH gives 0.7% Crit and the ENB gives +1.04% Crit, a delta of +0.7% Crit
MP5: +6
Armor: +211

Looking at gems, we have a very pretty red/blue +20 RAP gem in the bank we may just toss in there. And depending on what our helm’s meta gem requires, we may fill the other two slots with +8 agility gems and not worry about the +2MP5 we get from filling according to color. More thought is needed here, but since our leatherworking is only at 143 we have the time. Although we did get our first Primal Nether from Heroic Underbog last night.

And the whole point is that we hope to get a drop before we finish leveling our Leatherworking. But now that we’ve said that, perhaps we’ve jinxed ourselves. That’s not good…

What should be noted is just how good the Laughing Skull Battle-Harness really is. It is available from Black Morass at level 68 and will last a heck of a long time. BRK has been 70 forever it seems, has almost cleared Karazhan and we’re still using it. If you want a Really Good Blue that will stay with you a long time, head to BM and farm for this piece.

As you may or may not know, BRK was the first “class specific” column on WoW Insider. When we began our career there, a large number of the comments directed at our column were written in this manner:

“OMG this truly is the worst writing I’ve ever seen. It’s trash. It’s filth. I print the pages out and let my bird use them as a toilet. I feel violently ill after reading BRK. Gross, stupid, ignorant and so are the editors who allow this filth to be published.

“And just when is the mage/paladin/warrior column coming out?”

Good times for all.

Now as BRK’s popularity spiked their traffic to heights never seen for several weeks running, the WI bean-counters thought it would be a fine idea to have all classes have a weekly column they could publish. Everything was gravy until the Warlock Column commenced.

The person writing this column was not a Professional Warlock exactly but, we think, merely a casual ‘lock who had a lot of experience writing for WoW Insider and wanted to complete the ranks of the class-bloggers.

She was utterly destroyed in the comments. The abuse this person suffered was beyond inappropriate. The foul language and cruelty written by the arrogant and uncaring readers was beyond the pale. We were embarrassed and ashamed to be affiliated with the situation at all.

In a move we anticipated and highly encouraged, the nice author gave the virtual middle-finger to the whole concept of the warlock column and went back to writing about the stuff she liked. But today someone decided to write to WoW Insider and ask, and we paraphrase, “Hey! You haven’t written anything about warlocks for a month! What gives?”

To which we at BRK Worldwide Amalgamated say, “What gives is that you’re getting exactly what you deserve: Squat.”

Paid or not, blogging isn’t easy. Blogging on a schedule is harder. Blogging to the mindless rabble that spew hate and vileness, to unappreciative, degenerate and spoiled children, to people with an intellect so keen the can’t spell “rogue” properly most of the time yet demand seven-decimal place precision when discussing the damage potential of a warlock’s spell against a specific mob in a specific instance during a specific period of the day when a buff is available because of a PvP objective being taken but then lost before your Darkmoon Fair trinket procs but you don’t notice but WoW Stats does and how that all relates to the gibbous moon over Tanaris… it’s a punishment Michael Vick should be required to endure.

What’s our point? Let us re-read this and see if we can remember…

Oh yeah. We had no point. But we can make one.

Our Point: When you beat the messenger often enough, she may just pick up her message and go home. Warlocks, we think you’re outta luck for a while.

Well, since the Firefly Bet was so much fun, we’ve come up with a new one for TJ to try. Can you think of the most diabolically horrid reputation grind in the game? The most mind-numbingest, eye-poppingest, finger-achingest, mouth-clenchingest, hair-rippingest quest series ever devised?

That’s right, the Wintersaber Trainers.

Our beloved warlock has been challenged: grind her way to Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers in two months. TJ had never heard of the Wintersaber Trainers, let alone met them, before tonight. She has the entire grind ahead of her.

And what is the reward for achieving Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers? An epic ground mount that looks EXACTLY like Hobbes, the Reins of the Winterspring Frostsaber.Frankly, we’d do just about anything to attain this mount. We love mounts and this one, looking like Hobbes as it does, has been a dream of ours since we first read about them. But try as we might we just can’t do the quests. We go nuts. We went out there tonight to try again. But the solitude, the boredom, the endless and mindless grinding… it drives us insane.

TJ, on the other hand, is psyched. Go figure.

How bizarre is the grind? The first quest is called Frostsaber Provisions. You must get five Shardtooth Meat and five Chillwind Meat to turn in for 75 reputation. The drop rate for these items is approximately 15%. That’s 67 kills to acquire 10 quest items.

To get from 0-3000 reputation for Friendly, one must complete forty Frostsaber Provisions quests. 67 kills 40 times? 2680 kills to attain Friendly. TJ needs Exalted in two months.

Granted, there is another quest one can pick up at 1500/3000 into the grind called Winterfall Intrusion. This is a simple “kill 5 of these and 5 of these” quest and is repeatable, so the insanity of the Frostsaber Provisions quest does end a lot sooner than 2640 bear/chimera kills. But with the Firefly grind, every Needler was a potential End. Now ever bear and every chimera is just another after another in the long count to the barely in-sight goal… of Exalted.

22 October 2007, 2359 hours. If she is Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers and can show us her Wintersaber mount she wins another BRK-dollar. If she fails for any reason, not only do we get a TJ-dollar but we get our original Firefly dollar back.

Why the inequality? Because she knows that for us to see her on a Wintersaber… to see that short mouthy warlock riding a Hobbes… it’s going to kill us. It’s going to rip into our soul, it’s going to hurt like nothing else we’ve ever experienced. Even worse, she’ll keep riding her fire horse except while we’re around. Then she’ll bring it out with some macro that says, “Here Hobbsie!” and prance around until we want to smack her.

So it’s a totally cool bet, right? Darn tootin’ it is; we’re psyched! The BRK-TJ Wintersaber Countdown has begun!

Elune help us all.

Is there a way we can do this better? Can we improve upon it? We notice that when we make a bookmark, it doesn’t inherit the favicon. Did we screw this up?

Edit: Our bookmark icon works now. We didn’t change anything in the code, though. /puzzled

“Dear BRK, PLEASE BAIL ME OUT FROM THE HOLE I DUG MYSELF IN YOUR COMMENTS. MAKE THEM STOP SAYING PLEASE. TELL THEM IT’S A FAMILY SHOW. TELL THEM I DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST BELOW THE SHOULDERS. TELL THEM I’M AN ALIEN AND I CAN’T REVEAL ANYTHING OR THE GOVERNMENT WILL TRACK ME DOWN FOR TESTING. TJ”

Gentlemen, please stop saying please. It’s a family show. She doesn’t actually exist below the shoulders. She’s an alien and can’t reveal anything or the government will track her down for testing.

/shakes head and makes another cup of raspberry latte, hopefully remembering to warm the milk first this time

“Dear BRK, I have gone onto the Armory and taken your direct build, minus the gear of course. But for some reason everyone wants me to Respec MM/SURV, pretty much the standard raiding build. Their excuse is having to send pet back and forth is a pain, doesn’t do enough damage, and Pet being feared can cause unnecessary wipes. They say The SURV part of the build is for CC because without it Traps are horrible.

“I disagree with them on this and tell everyone about your blog yet I still get harassed. They say respecing would be my ticket into every Kara raid and I wont be able to do heroic or raid without respecing. Yet i still am always invited to Gruuls and we down high king on first pull and got gruul to 80% on first try. Let me know what you think, hopefully your good advice will help once again. Psychoric”

My friend, there is one bit of advice you need to heed. One small tidbit of information that shall put your mind at ease. One itsy bitsy teenie weenie morsel of truth that shall set you free:

People are stupid.

Unfortunately, too often in our lives we have to deal with People. Friends are cool. Acquaintances are nice. People are dumb. People are ignorant. People are loud-mouthed schnooks. People need to take a long quaff from a great big tall frosty glass of Shut The H3ll Up juice.

You have three choices when dealing with People: let them control you, get away from them, or shut them up. Thus, your future in your guild is on one of three paths:

Path Weasel - Respec MM/SV and go play in kara. If you want to be in Death and Taxes or any other legendary raiding guild you’ll have to play by their rules, too.

Path Sanity - Drop guild and go somewhere where you’ll be appreciated. Very few guilds will turn down a hunter with decent gear, spec, experience, and the knowledge of how to play the class properly.

Path Facepalm - Challenge the People and their smugness. “You let me run Kara through the first boss as BM, and if my pet and I combined aren’t #1 or #2 DPS, I’ll hearth to my hunter trainer and respec on the spot. But if I AM #1 or #2, you gotta say in guild-chat, ‘I am a worthless raider and a NooB for I tried to make someone respec when I clearly don’t have a clue about hunter mechanics.’ “

You can guess which path BRK would take.

As a BM hunter, we’ve raided Kara up to Prince and have always been #1 in DPS. We’ve trapped in heroics without problem. Hobbes only dies when we send him on a Save the Squishy suicide mission. He takes attacks from Maiden, Curator and Aran without so much as a complaint.

Survivalists are better trappers. Marksmen do more burst damage. Survivalist have a great melee-buff. Marksmen have a great melee-buff. BM have great pets, we do more damage, we have a great melee-and-caster buff.

A good spec does not make a good hunter, but there is no reason any of the three trees cannot be viable in raids anymore.

Do you smell what BRK is cookin?

In case you haven’t heard, WoW Insider needs more bloggers. They really need one specifically for PvP and want another dedicated columnist.

BRK is a “columnist” and generally writes one huge mongo post per week. Our contract - and there is a legal contract - calls for 1000 words but we usually churn out 1500-2000. Our post today - 1:00pm EST, a little early again - is a neat 2001 words. A blogger will be asked for two or three posts per day, in the 400-words range each.

Blogging for WoW Insider FAQs:

Ya get paid. Not enough to cover tuition for a semester but enough for books and an Orangina. Bloggers get $10 per post, so at two posts per day you could bring down $600 per month if you’re really prolific like our editor, Elizabeth.

Ya get slammed. People love to be rude, crude and lewd in the comments and frankly don’t care about hurting feelings. Fortunately, we laugh a great deal at the flamers and derive much pleasure to see them make fools of themselves. But if your ego is fragile and your constitution delicate, you must prepare yourself for the maniacal rantings of the masses.

Ya get shamed. Sometime you make a mistake. When you say that a gorilla’s Thunderstomp stuns mobs and it doesn’t, when you mess up a mathematical formula, when you are positive that something works as Method A but it really works as Method B, your ego takes a battering. Over 3 million people read WoW Insider every month and your mistakes are made public, Big Time.

Ya get praise. The amount of love we’ve received from the readers is enormous. Each “thank you” is worth 100,000 “you sux”. We love getting emails from people who have learned something from our blog and column and are happier for it.

Let us know if you apply. We have been credited with pushing a lot of people into the blogging arena and would be fascinated to see if a new WI blogger was borne from the BRK Ranks.

OK folks, we’re going to break out of the box and try something innovative and, hopefully, fun. We have collaborated with Temerity Jane, someone who we consider a good friend, to bring you a BRK-TJ Production.

That right, a home-movie.

The Concept: BRK forwards a “Dear BRK” email to our short yet vocal warlock friend and she writes a TJ-esque response in a quick movie for fun and profit. OK, no profit.

But the point is that it’s supposed to be entertaining and not at all informative. Zero information, that’s the goal.

Now of course the comments section is going to be open; we do want feedback. However, we don’t want insults, slander, personal inquiries into family history, or other such Forum-Worthy claptrap. If you hate it, that’s fine. If you have suggestions, we want to hear them. If you love it as is, you might need pharmaceutical assistance.

Be honest, be helpful, be nice. OK? OK.

Now that you’ve seen it, comment away. We like it a lot and really appreciate the effort she put into this. Thank you, TJ.

And if you ever write a “Dear BRK” email and don’t want it considered for a “TJ Answers BRK Email” movie, just slap that at in the email somewhere and we promise she’ll never see it.