So we went to Dr. Boom to figure out, for our gear, which ranged weapon we should be using. The contestants are:

Tuskbreaker

Barrel-Blade Longrifle

Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle

And we’ve run into a snag. But first off, here’s the setup.

We went to Dr. Boom with 200 bullets in our ammo pouch. Nothing in our bags, just 200 shots. We equipped Tuskbreaker, used Aspect of the Hawk, but used neither Rapid Fire nor trinkets. We popped Fel Mana potions when necessary to maintain our shot rotation.

For that rotation, we used a variation of the popular 1:1 Auto/Steady macro:

/castsequence reset=2/target !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

We recorded our combat log, then parsed it to WoWWebStats. Here’s a link to that report.

The report says we did 746DPS. OK, that’s great. Small problem, though; the report says we only shot 177 bullets.

Wha?

We logged out, trashed our combat log, relogged WoW. Went back to the bank, grabbed another 200 bullets, equipped the BBL, recorded our combat log, and repeated the experiment. Here’s the WWS link for that.

755DPS for this gun, how nice it is. 2% more crits, both Auto and Steady shots. That translates to more Kill Commands and more Focus via Go For the Throat. On the surface, it sure looks like we need to put Tuskbreaker in the bank and keep the BBL for fun and profit.

But we only shot 140 bullets, according to WWS. /boggle

Log out, trash log, re-log, bank, 200 bullets, Wolfslayer, start combat log. WWS link. 711DPS and only 151 shots fired.

Where is our ammo going?

For kicks, we did the entire process over again, this time using Tuskbreaker and manually Auto/Steadying. Cr@p on a stick, but we killed Dr. Boom with 19 bullets left. That doesn’t ruin our data, but it affects it.

Regardless, here’s the WWS link. We clipped the bejeezus out of our Auto Shots, sheesh. 727DPS and only 139 shots fired. Same crit-rate as the other Tuskbreaker run, thankfully. Had we done a better job with our shot rotation, the DPS would’ve been more similar, as well.

But on every experiment, WWS “lost” 13% to 30% of our shots. This we cannot explain and we have a hard time reconciling any “this gun has more DPS than this gun” statements until the missing shots are identified.

Any ideas?

Without getting overtly sexist… can we recruit, or can we recruit. Redhead, female, dwarf, holy Paladin, foshizzle. /bask in the glow that is Us

Ahem.

5/6 in SSC down in exactly three hours, no wipes, we kept our DPS #1 for the night. Our newest competitor, Zasp from The Egotistical Priest, decided to push back against our demands that squishies and leather-scrubbers remain on the bottom of the epeen-pile. He did great, by the way, making us work for our numbers.

AC has retooled a little, as well. Our main tank decided to step down and join the filth in the melee-DPS group as a Fury warrior. Some shifting of tanks was required, promoting a new MT and brining in a new 3rd tank, and Mr. Fury had a respectable showing. The new MT did an awesome job, the healers were bored, no wipes, a few too many sharded drops for our taste, and it was a tremendous success.

And those ten BoJs pushed us past 75, so we nabbed a pair of these:

We spent over 1000 DKP for our Tier 5 gloves, and before we’ve finished clearing SSC, we replace them. /sigh

We love the crit! A little Hit Rating loss, but oodles of new Crit makes us a happy BM huntard.

EDIT: Were we really #1 DPS?

Total SSC run, including trash: Rogue, BRK, Mage

Hydross: Mage, Warlock, Mage, BRK

Lurker: Warlock, BRK, Mage

Leo: Mage, Mage, BRK

Fathom-Lord: BRK, Rogue, Fury Warrior

Tidewalker: Mage, Warlock, Mage, Rogue, BRK

Perhaps we really weren’t #1 DPS… this cannot stand! To Dr. Boom!

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.

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!

Thank you, Zul’Aman timed event! The Stat Summary is comparing this beaut against our Barrel-Blade Longrifle.

It’s at this point where we point out the Rating Buster has problems with the scope. And then we seem to think that a bunch of people will write in and say, “You noob, it works like this…” But we don’t remember “this” and it really does look like RB is not taking the crit-scope into account in its equations…

But both guns have the scope, so it’s irrelevant.

Are we going to get into the, “This gun’s too slow!” argument? Perhaps, but we wish to do some research and testing ourselves. What it does do is make us drool for the Tier 5 leggings we know are just a quick four-SSC boss clear away. Then, we can put our haste-shoulders back on.

Now here’s a pretty gorilla! She’s done a great job getting this guy to 70, now if we can only convince her to stop meleeing.

Yes, Lolliy, we totally went there.

You’ve run Karazhan and gotten through Shade of Aran. You’re karma is good, and the Drape of the Dark Reaver drops. The loot-gods smile and you win it. Huzzah!

You go further into Kara eventually down Prince. Your loot-hax hasn’t been discovered by Blizz, and you cause the Farstrider Wildercloak to drop. You ninja it, good and proper, hearth back to Shat, and slap that puppy on. It’s got an ItemLevel of 125; it must be better than the Dark Reaver cloak, of course!

Not so quick, sassafrass.

Our good buddy Rating Buster comes out, caresses your face and bonks you on yer noggin. Look at the stats, not the item-level:

You can configure Rating Buster to show you many stats and stat-differences. What we see here is the some of the computations that result from comparing the two cloaks against each other. We equipped one, compared the other to it, than reversed the process.

Is it good to know that the DotDR has 36 Agility and the FW has 12? Sure. But what happens to that Agility? It becomes Armor, Crit Chance, and Ranged Attack Power. And the cloak with the lower ItemLevel actually has more Armor and Crit Chance than the cloak with the higher ItemLevel.

But what about our bread-n-butter, Ranged Attack Power. The FW has more of that than the DotDR, doesn’t it. Well yes it does. One could then reasonably think, “What’s more important: +12 RAP or +0.60% Crit?” And one could actually make a mathematical model and calculate the effects these would have on one’s specific gear.

But wait!

The “lesser” cloak has one more thing going for it: Hit Chance. Is your Hit Rating 142, are you hit-capped so you’ll never miss against level 73 bosses, (those found in Kara and beyond?) If not, then DotDR is your choice, regardless of the Crit/RAP argument.

Missing shots can be a big loss of DPS over time. Getting your hit rating as close to 142 is a critical part of hunter-gear itemization.

If you look at our armory profile, you’ll see that our current hit rating is 117. We used to be hit-capped, but our Tier 5 gear and the Badge of Justice ring we’ve picked up have no hit rating and are replacing gear that did. Since our raiding party has been giving us +Hit bonuses, and our WWS reports aren’t showing that we’re missing more than one shot per raid boss, we’re not going to freak out and start putting our old hit-rating-gear back on.

But when the FW cloak dropped into our greedy clutches, we immediately assumed it was a good upgrade for us over our DotDR and spent the gold on the +12 Agility enchant. But we’re not going to use this cloak, as even though it is a “higher level” piece of gear, for us it’s not a “better” piece of gear.

Remember that ItemLevel is a guide, not a Rule. Do your research and itemize yourself based on stats, not ItemLevel.

Al’ar down. Yahtzee, foshizzle! AC is now 3/4 in Tempest Keep, Kael and Vashj are all that stands between us, Mount Hyjal, and a clear conscious.

The hunter trinket dropped. We screwed up our DKP-bidding and the hunter who has everything from SSC and TK got it. We would’ve punched the computer into a new dimension if we could have. We were madder… d@mn it this is a game and we were so mad… we shouldn’t have gotten so mad, but we did… we’re pathetic sometimes, we admit it.

/sigh

After three wipes on the very-buggy Void Reaver, we got him down and the hunter loot flowed. First off, we got these for a song:

They were a cheap, small upgrade, so we took them. We were not planning on taking a shot at one of the two Hero tokens that dropped, so we didn’t see a problem with spending a little DKP for a pair of leggings that would let us re-gem properly.

As we said, two Hero tokens dropped, but we weren’t going to bid on them because we really wanted the T5 leggings. Our new shoulders that we just spent more than 1000 gold on were fine with us, and we weren’t going to outbid the other hunter who has had horrible loot-luck along with us.

We stayed out of the bidding until he got outbid at a low price, and we couldn’t pass them up so cheaply. We got a pair and here they are compared to our “old” Leatherworking shoulders:

The big thing with Tier 5 for hunters is the 2-piece set bonus, which we now have: gloves and shoulders. Healing our pet 15% of our damage is insane. We can’t wait to see this in action.

And what kind of damage are we going to do? We gemed our shoulders and leggings and regemed our gun. Another Greater Inscription of Vengeance for our shoulders. A Nethercobra Leg Armor for the new legs. The meta gem is still active, all socket-bonuses are active, and although our Hit Rating is a little low for our taste, the encroachment toward 2000 RAP makes our mouth water.

First off, it’s a bitchin tabard. Best since the Scourge Invasion, no doubt. We’re still a jumble of colors, but that’s to be expected.

And this is the necklace a hunter can purchase once he reaches exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive, the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might (SSPoM). You’ve got to be exalted with Aldor/Scryers to make the proc work, though. Don’t bring your newbie 70 to MrT, run your rep to exalted with the Sun O, and expect to get this necklace working right away.

What’s going to happen when it procs? Well, it looks like this:

For us Aldor folks, the buff it gives is called Light’s Strength and it increases RAP by 200 for ten seconds. Want to see it working in a raid setting? Well, here ya go:

No trinket-popping, our RAP is a purty, sweet-smelling, raid-buffed 2496. Jenga, beyotches!

We one-shotted Morogrim in a little less than 10 minutes. Personally, we were sent to our Watery Grave one time. That took us out of combat for, what thirty seconds? In 9 minutes 30 seconds of pure, unadulterated DPS, how many times did our SSPoM proc? Well WWS has got that covered:

Light’s Strength proc’d twelve times in 9 1/2 minutes, which is the same frequency as Improved Aspect of the Hawk. That’s a pretty healthy proc-rate, and thus we don’t mind dropping our Hit Rating to 125 to keep it.

We Missed one shot against Morogrim in 9 1/2 minutes and gained 120 seconds - we’re assuming the LS-procs more than likely didn’t proc on top of each other - of an extra 200 AP. We’ll take it, cuddle it, and feed it puppy-treats. We likes our new necklace, we do, we do!

The SSPoM gets the BRK Growl of Approval.

And because we just can’t let a good epeening moment go by, here’s the WWS report from the Tidewalker kill. We are Phobos.

We would be remiss if we didn’t give props to the mages, especially Crucio who brought the Murlock-Smashing, AoE-Ban-Hammer in the form of 2001 DPS. Dude, you’re all uppity, and you earned it.

Well that’s one reason we want the Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes, ’cause they look totally boss.

The differences shown by Rating Buster are over our Pauldrons of Primal Fury. That data is pretty interesting, isn’t it. We took a healthy Hit Chance and Health hit in exchange for some Mana and Haste%. Is the haste good? We think so, at least in moderation. Wanna see?

Here’s the old BRK:

And here’s us rebuilt:

D

Now it’s not a one-for-one item exchange. If you look closely, you’ll notice our necklace has changed as well. We used to equip the Saberclaw Talisman and we’ve swapped it for our Choker of Vile Intent. We’ve been swapping these two things to maintain our Hit Rating of at least 142 for as long as we can remember. When we get new gear with +Hit, we put on the Talisman. When we start losing +Hit, we grab the Choker.

Another problem was that of our helm’s meta gem. We need two each of yellow, red, and blue gems to activate the meta gem, but now we only have three regular gem slots in all our gear. Plus we want to try to maintain the socket bonus we like.

Now a green gem counts as a blue and a yellow, a purple counts as a red and a blue, and an orange counts as a red and a yellow. We can mix and match “solid” gems and “mixed” gems to satisfy our meta gem’s requirement. But with only three slots - one in the helm and two in our gun - we’re going to have to use “mixed” gems.

Fortunately, our helm had an orange in it already, so thats a red and a yellow down. Our gun has one socket with a purple gem in it, so that takes care of a red and a blue.

Two reds, a yellow, and a blue. We need a yellow and a blue gem to make 2/2/2 of each primary color. What single gem makes a yellow and blue? A green, yes!

Are there any good green gems for hunters? Well, there’s the Steady Talasite for PvP work. Unfortunately, the AH is out of ‘em. But you know what we’ve got hidden in the BRK Bank? A Sundered Chryospace. It’s green and will complete the 2/2/2 red/blue/yellow out meta gem needs to activate, so into the ole gun it goes. Blamo!

How will the haste affect our total DPS when our shot rotation is employed? Well you can bet we’ll write about it once we test it out on Al’ar on Sunday night, foshizzle.

BigRedKitty is hereby on strike.

We had to miss tonight’s SSC raid due to work, so as we predicted, the Hunter-loot flowed like water. Hydross dropped the Ranger General’s Chestguard, Leo dropped three Hero tokens, and Fathom Lord dropped a Hero token.

Ring of Lethality from Hydross? We’re the only raiding-hunter in AC who doesn’t have it.

Zero drops in The Eye and one drop in SSC that we had to dump all our DKP to get. Heck, we can’t even get a group for MrT; we haven’t run it once!

So until we get some d@mn loot-love, we’re not writing another bloody thing. No blog posts, no emails, nada.

Starting now.