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.

OK OK OK. There’s more 2.4 goodness than we can summarize, so we’re not going to try. A few quick notes, though:

All our addons updated nicely and worked without incident, except Omen2. The thing makes our screen flash and sirens to blare and we didn’t see how to turn that off, so we disabled it. We still like WoWMatrix, it worked really well and updated all our addons perfectly.

But that Omen2 crapola has got to go.

ZOMG! The AV claxon that sounds when we get aggro/targeted? That’s from Perl. We realized that since we’ve switched to ag_UnitFrames, the claxon is gone. We’ll be trying PitBull soon, as we’re just not satisfied with ag_UnitFrames. The lack of a pet-happiness indicator is a total no-go in our book.

The new Horde starting point in AV is more conducive to Horde playing Defense, there’s no question. We used to pass them at Belinda, now we’re almost meeting them at Iceblood Graveyard. Yikes. We went 0-2 due to running out of time, not due to the Horde Offense taking out Vann. The Horde Defense was too thick for Alliance O to get past Frostwolf. We’ll see how this progresses.

We got our Vengeful Gladiator’s Chain Armor and a Vindicator’s Band of Triumph, huzzah! Resilience is now 274, do you approve? Almost 11K unbuffed health while in our raid-spec. You know what really tickles our oysters, though? We have +413 to Ignore Armor. Perhaps we shouldn’t care so much about that stat, but we love it. Welcome to Squishy-Beatdown City, population Us.

Our six-person 3v3 team split into two groups, and we’re now working with a Frost Mage and Feral Druid full-time. No more splitting matches, and everybody seems to be happy with more time to work together.

We didn’t get to run the new 5-person instance as we had to work late. However, we did do some of the new daily quests in Hellfire, and we have a question:

Just WTF happened to hunter-pets?!! Hobbes died and died and died again! The beatings he took we’re brutal to say the least. Holy bat-dung, this had better be us just playing like a complete and total noob. We used the crystal thingie to make the elves “dimished”, or whatever they became, but still each one could remove half of Hobbes health before we killed it.

This… shall not stand.

Oh. And if you make your little fel-ball into a big-fel-ball, do NOT mount up and fly back to the quest-giver. The big-fel-ball hates that, and you’ll have to start all over.

And finally, Battlechickn, our purple Tallstrider, has been released back into the wild. Goodbye Battlechickn, we hardly knew ye.

To replace him, we picked up one of them new-fangled green Ravagers to play with. We had an orange one and hated it, but perhaps greenie will be more to our liking. Is he taller than the oranges ones from the Netherwing mine? We think so.

It finally arrived! We shall write a review after we’ve accumulated some experience with the thing. Initial impressions?

1. Cool Box

2. Love the thumb-button

3. Mac drivers FTW!

4. We used our iMac’s built-in camera for the pic, then used Photoshop to flip it horizontally. /pat self on back

5. And you can buy one here and help support the BRK Porsche 911 Fund:

The BRK Porsche 911 Fund is not associated with any worthwhile charity, like the Twin Towers Orphan Fund. The BRK Porsche 911 Fund is neither tax-deductible, a 401-3-c entity, run by competent management, associated with any Wall Street firm, nor meant to encourage you, the reader, to think otherwise. Any similarity between the BRK Porsche 911 Fund and anything close to reality is purely coincidental and accidental. Do not taunt the BRK Porsche 911 Fund.

In this screenshot, we are raid-spec’d but PvP-geared. We’re doing SSC tonight and don’t feel like blowing another 100g just to do some Alterac Valleys.

We accumulated enough honor for the season one ring, amulet, or PvP trinket. We hemmed and hawed, but broken down and purchased our Medallion of the Alliance. What was our reasoning? Deathcoil and Psychic Scream. We rarely get hurricaned, or whatever it is druids do. We avoid most crowd-control abilities with The Beast Within.

But Deathcoil and Psychic Scream, those two yucky spells are what we dread the most, specifically for their duration. Deathcoil in an arena will send us to the other side of the place, removing us from combat for approximately 27 years. It’s not good; none of our teammates survive for long while we’re out of combat. To eliminate that scenario, we took the less-powerful but we hope more-useful item.

And we decided to change out the gem in our shoulders for a Steady Talasite.

Is this going to make us invincible? Nah. Are we now committed to the 300 Resilience Plateau? You betcha.

Note: This is not a letter to BRK.

“I just need to get this off my chest, it’s been bothering me. I’m fairly new to WoW, but I seem to be able to hold my own for sure. Yesterday, a group of us guildies, two of which I’d never met before, got together to go help finish up a quest in Arathi for a newer guy. I’m a 43 Hunter, still a baby yes, but I feel confident in my abilities. A 70, who I’d never met before, joined us to help out. So we’re standing there, figuring out coordinates and game plan and the 70 pipes up all the sudden stating how I’m wearing all the wrong clothes. Hmmm….don’t remember asking.

“It just irritates me. Go ahead, inspect, but I don’t think it’s polite to pipe up and start going all ‘I know everything’ when you first meet a person. Am I wrong ladies? How does she/he know if I just happen to pick clothes because I like how they look, it’s no one’s business but my own what I choose to wear. I wasn’t getting killed off and everyone having to wait for me all the time because my gear stinks. I wasn’t getting anyone else killed due to pathetic playing or lack of power. My clothing choice was affecting no one.

“I just recently started being able to wear mail and I’ve been playing around with what seems to work. I understand that them being a 70 means they’ve got more experience in the game, but I’m not really that hard core, I like to take my time, wear what I like and do things for fun. Besides, how does the 70 know that I don’t have a 70 myself, not in that guild or on that realm.

“I just needed to rant about that, I felt that he/she was being very rude and ‘know it all’. Thanks for listening to my complaining gals, you guys are the very best and if I want advice from anyone, I’ll be asking you guys!

“Okay…what should a hunter be wearing? What am I doing so wrong? Here’s what I wearing now.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=B________&n=M_______

“Any input from you guys would be appreciated and welcomed. My husband gave me the rings, so they have sentimental value. c:”

We saw this post on WoWLadies and it made us sit up and pay attention. The writer’s gear-issues were adroitly handled by the denizens, as usual. Dump the Strength and Spirit gear, concentrate on Agility and Stamina, etc.

But there are two things that bothered us. First, nobody bothered to do a talent-spec analysis. Let’s gander at her points:

Thirty-four talent points in the BM tree. Good for going BM, but we need to talk about the distribution, don’t we

Aspect of the Hawk AND Endurance Training is a big No.

Improved Pathfinding is another honkin’ No.

Skipping Improved Mend Pet is a No of the worst order.

Animal Handler in non-raiding situations is also a No.

Skipping Bestial Discipline is a criminal No.

No Frenzy? Can’t get much more No than that.

How should these point be placed? Something like this would be much better for leveling:

The big problems are thusly corrected. The next point completes Unleashed Fury, then the next five complete Serpent’s Swiftness. Bingo bango bungo, you’ve got a helacious DPS-machine built.

Is Ferocious Inspiration critical for leveling? Nah, we could’ve chosen Spirit Bond or Catlike Reflexes and been happy. But this is a much more lethal 34-point killing-machine build than the other, snd that’s what being a hunter is all about.

But the second problem is even more critical than the first.

“My clothing choice was affecting no one.”

Oh it most certainly was affecting someone. It was affecting the wearer’s ability to do her job, it was affecting the rest of her party as they had to carry her weight, and it was affecting her guild, whose reputation was just affected by her choices.

“Dude, I ran this 43 hunter in Pax Vobiscum through some quests, what a mess. How can they let her remain ignorant? Why aren’t they helping her? What’s wrong with Pax Vobiscum?”

And don’t think this doesn’t happen, either.

But the final person it affected was the 70 who felt compelled to help her out, even if he was gruff and clumsy in his delivery.

Is everybody ready to accept criticism? Nope. Are they required to listen to critiques of their gear? No way. Does everybody who offers advice have a bleeping clue what they’re talking about? Ha! No they do not.

But if someone walks up to you and tries to offer some guidance, think about their motives.

“Dude! Ur gear sux!” is indicative of someone not looking to help, but to laugh at your expense. Feel free to /ignore them.

“Did you know that hunter’s don’t get any benefits from Strength? Just because it’s mail, doesn’t mean you should wear it,” is the sign of someone trying to help you.

But why are they trying to help you? Because they feel superior to you and want to rub your nose in your ignorance and laugh? Not usually.

They want to help you because they know what it’s like to get started and not understand the mechanics of the game. WoW can be difficult, as the game does not give you clues as to how to maximize and most efficiently build your toon. One must do research OUT of the game to get the most fun IN the game.

When we see you with +Str on your helm, we know you haven’t done the necessary research. But we assume that you don’t know that you have to do research! That’s why we will do blind tells to people and question them about the gear selections.

“Why do you have a +Str helm?”

“Because it’s the only mail helm I can find.”

“Did you know that a lot of easy-to-get leather helms are better for you at level 43 than most all mail helms?”

“Really?” And the learning begins.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the legions of WoW Helpers out there, even if they do offer you unrequested advice. Now if he’s a total jerk, please feel free to condemn the messenger.

Just don’t automatically throw his message out with him.

For the conclusion of our ranged-weapon review, we bring out the crossbows. You ready to play with the heavy stuff?

Well lookie-lookie with what we start, the Nerubian Slavemaker. Never seen it? We haven’t, on our own person or anybody else’s. Where does it come from? Old-school Naxxramas, the final bossman himself, Kel’Thuzad. The biggest, baddest instance of the pre-Burning Crusade, we seem to remember that only 2% of WoW subscibers ever entered the palace, (although we cannot confirm that number). This was a shame as it was also considered the best instance Blizz ever made.

This was a weapon to dream about, it was. Our Core Marksman was uber schiznit back then, but it paled in significance to the ultimate 40-man ranged weapon loot. If you ever got one of these things, you have a guild of 50 or so hard-core raiders to thank.

Now we all move to Outland, level to 70, start building out Shattrath factions rep, and eventually become King of the Ogres. Go build rep with Ogri’la, and you can work your way towards the first epic crossbow outside of Naxxramas, the Crystalline Crossbow.

Holy cow, that’s a long wait for a new crossbow, isn’t it. And it’s not even on-par with the epic bows and guns that drop in the regular 5-person instances; those weapons are level 115, this xbow is level 110.

If one just looks at the stats, though, it is a perfect weapon for starting Karazhan. It’s got +Hit, something very few hunters have enough of at the beginning of their raiding career. It’s packing pure Agility, which means RAP, Crit, and armor for both hunter and pet, and the Stamina is always welcome. BM Hunters can appreciate the 2.8 attack speed as it’s not too slow. If you’ve been unlucky in love and loot and haven’t gotten a level 115 bow or gun, this crossbow is a perfectly fine weapon to show up for your first attempt at Attumen.

You do show up for Kara, you control your aggro, you trap like a pro, you Misdirect when necessary, and you take very little damage. Good work, foshizzle, and your raid takes down Attumen. ZOMG, lo’ and behold, a hunter weapon drops! The Steelhawk Crossbow is an upgrade every hunter is going to want. It’s got +Hit, something most of your level 115 bow and guns lack. It’s also very pretty, and kind of a status-symbol of becomming a Kara-raiding hunter. Welcome to 10-man progression and keep up the good work.

You don’t raid. Your schedule keeps you out of Kara, you don’t have time to commit to four hours of WoW, your spouse wants to level her druid with your alt, whatever the reason. So you do battlegrounds when you can and have accumulated a nice chunk of honor points.

Congratulations, take your 27,000 honor and purchase a Gladiator’s Heavy Crossbow. Nice and slow for those big crits, this is a pure-PvP weapon. And it looks so good! You 0/41/20 and 11/41/9 hunters are going to develop intimate feelings for this sweet piece of hardware, that’s certain.

PvP is your bread and butter. Not only do you do battlegrounds, but you found a good partner for arenas and have done a lot of them. Can you accumulate 3,261 arena points? If so, you can go drool over your own, personal Merciless Gladiator’s Crossbow of the Phoenix. If you’re an arena player like we are, just going for fun and stories, this will do you fine, of course. But if you’re actually good at arenas and can jack your personal rating into the 1800s, you can skip this guy. We’ll show you why in a minute.

Instances! you bellow. Doesn’t anybody in SSC or TK or anywhere drop a stinking crossbow? Well, yes, there’s one. Legionkiller is Black Temple loot. Very interesting to look at, but the stats just don’t jump out and give you their undivided attention, do they.

Very high DPS, but the attack speed is a one-size-fits-none. A little too slow for BM, a little too fast for MM, it has no sockets, no Ignore Armor, no nothing fun to show the guildies. It’s level 141 loot and does over 90 DPS, but totally frillless. It’s as if the Blizz programmers suddenly realized that they forgot to put in a crossbow since Attumen, but they were late for lunch and didn’t want to take the time to build a proper Black Temple-grade weapon. Type, type, type, OK there’s a crossbow, we’re off to Bennigan’s. Sad, really.

Does patch 2.4 hold anything in store in the crossbow world? Oh yeah, yes it do. Check this monster out, the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes. The programmers got back from lunch to get this one right, that’s certain.

Lookie at the stats on this gorgeous creature! The perfect BM speed, Hit, Crit, and Attack Power. It’s Badge of Justice gear, as of this writing it’ll cost 150 of the buggers. Can you farm that many badges without going batty? Unfortunately, we cannot. Running daily heroics and clearing Kara every week, we just can’t muster the effort for it. We’d rather watch a movie with Mrs BRK than spend four hours beating Opera and Prince anymore.

Alright, we told you not to blow your arena points on the Merciless crossbow and here’s why, the Vengeful Gladiator’s Heavy Crossbow. For 3,750 arena points and a personal 1850 arena-rating, you can have the ultimate crossbow in the game. If you were unable to get a decent raiding bow or gun, this thing does enough damage that you could raid with it if you chose, but it is a PvP weapon at its heart, obviously.

OK, we’ve done your ranged weapons. We’ve enjoyed this project so much, we’re going to keep going with melee weapons! Stay tuned for ‘em!

AC knows how to do Leo the Blind now. We have killed him before, but there was a lot of luck involved. This time, after four days of wipes and massive repair bills, our awesome guild grabbed Leo by his blindfold, slapped him around, spat on his boots, called him childish names, and took him down with only one raider dead at the end and almost a full minute left on the enrage timer.

Just as Shade of Aran was our biggest stumbling block in Karazhan, our SSC-c0ckb10ck is thusly conquered.

So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.

And we even got the privilege of blowing all our DKP for our beautiful new gloves. Shiny, pretty, oooo! Yes, we got to visit that other gear vendor in Aldor Rise finally.

See that +19 Hit? It totally wacked out our gear. After putting these mittens on, our +Hit was 157. That’s way too much; anything over 142 is a mathematical waste. We needed to drop that significantly while maintaining our socket bonuses and keeping our meta gem functional. A carefully regemming was needed.

(Note that we’re comparing our new T5 gloves against our Gauntlets of the Dragonslayer that have two +8 Agility gems in them.)

We had three Glinting Noble Topaz in yellow sockets in our helm, shoulders, and chest. These gems were taken out and replaced with three Wicked Noble Topaz. Our +Hit is now “down” to 145, which is still above the Hit Cap but we cannot lower it any more. We’re not going to have missed-shot DPS-loss, that much is for certain.

So in addition to the RatingBuster stats you see in the picture, we dropped +12 Hit and +12 Agi, (the three Glintings) for +12 Crit and +24 RAP, (the three Wickeds).

What are we really after? That two-piece Tier Five set bonus, foshizzle. “Causes your pet to be healed for 15% of the damage you deal”. /boggle We don’t think Hobbes will ever need a Mend Pet again.

Dragonhawk boss on Tuesday, Leo the Blind on Wednesday. /cheer!

Holy crud, we need to farm some cash. We’re down to 3500 gold and have spent 700 gold on gems, enchant mats and tips, and talent point respecs in the past 10 days!

So who “won” the poll? First place is the Steady Talasite. This is a pure “defense” gem and we’re not really keen about it. We win by killing things, we lose when we fail to kill things. We just cannot make ourselves equip one of these.

In second place was the Wicked Noble Topaz. Now we’re quite familiar with this beauty, even though we’ve never used one. For our PvE exploits, we prefer +4 Hit/+4 Agility gems instead. Does this pure “offense” yellow gem seem appropriate? At first glance, it’s what we were going to choose. But then we looked at the 28% of you who admonished us to up our defense and paused…

Is there a balance - oh there’s our favorite word! - between pure offense and pure defense?

Sure is, and it’s our third place winner. The Jagged Talasite. A little bit of offense, little bit of defense. OK, we’ll take one and see your reactions.

And only eight gold on the Auction House? /grabby hands!

Same as we did for guns, we’re taking a peek at the top-end bows in the game. Let’s jump right in!

The Marksman’s Bow is the horde equivalent of the Veteran’s Musket. Absolutely worth grinding that Hellfire Peninsula reputation to obtain? Sure, unless you have a chance to run Karazhan. The first boss there drops a crossbow that will match or surpass this bow easily. In our opinion, Shattered Halls is in the bottom of fun instances. Two to four runs to the first boss in Kara instead of grinding Thrallmar rep for this? Take it every time if you can.

The Wraithtide Longbow is famous for being one of the best non-raiding ranged weapons one can obtain. This drops from heroic Steamvaults, one of the easier heroic instances in the game. It’s gun-contemporaries are the Don Santos and the Gyro-Balance Khorium Destroyer, but both of those are expensive, (Auction House and engineering, respectively). This bad boy is a simple loot item! Unfortunately, it has no +Hit like the Marksman’s Bow or the aforementioned Steelhawk Crossbow. If you raid, you’ll want one of those two instead of this puppy, just for the +Hit.

Known to all hunters by the word Sunfury, the Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix drops from Prince Malchezzar, the top-most - some say Final, others disagree - boss in Karazhan. A hunter with one of these gets a little more respect in most parts due to the effort needed to win one; it’s the closest thing to an Epic Hunter Quest reward we have anymore. Is it “better” than the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle? For Trolls, probably, for Dwarves, probably not. For everybody else, we say it depends on your playstyle and spec.

Can your guild clear Zul’Aman? If so, you’ll have a chance to get an Ancient Amani Longbow. This is a Nice Weapon, with Ignore Armor and a lot of it. It may be heavily Trollish on design, but this is one of the very few bows over which we’d fight our guild hunters.

Have you noticed that all but two of these bows have the same 3.00 attack speed? As a BM hunter, that’s just too slow for our tastes. We’ll always choose a faster gun over a slow bow, but the AAL tempts us a lot. If only we could get our guild interested in clearing ZA… and there were more raiding days… and we only needed three hours of sleep…

Your 25-person guild clears Serpentshrine Cavern and you get your pick of the loot! We know what you want, the Serpent Spine Longbow. Of course we’d pass on it if we were guaranteed the Steam Pistol, but it’s still a meaty ranged weapon every hunter would take. Slow. Again too slow for us, but so are they all.

Do you have 3750 arena points lying around? Check the sofa. Found em? Go grab your Vengeful Gladiator’s Longbow, foshizzle. Of course, you need an 1850 rating to buy the silly thing. We will never own it, that’s for sure. Don’t know about you, but a ranged weapon whose only real purpose is PvP doesn’t really turn us on, anyway.

Mount Hyjal coughs up a hunter weapon, sort of, in the form of the Bristleblitz Striker. But look closely at the stats. Which class is in desperate need of both stamina and crit? Hunters? Um… Warriors? Rogues? No… Enhancement Shammys? Ret Paladins? /boggle. Just a freaky weapon, actually. High DPS is great, mismatched stamina/crit is kinda weird; it’s a PvP weapon without Resilience.

Black Temple has something for hunters as well. Can you knock off Illidan? Piece of cake, right? If so, remember to watch for this piece of hardware, the Black Bow of the Betrayer. Does this bow win the Best Looking Ranged Weapon contest? It just might at that. Is that mana-drain proc different? Totally. Is gaining 8 mana per successful ranged attack the bomb-diggity? Well it isn’t chopped liver, sarsaparilla. Would we turn it down? Nevah! Do we wish it had two red sockets, Ignore Armor, and didn’t have the mana-stuff? Yeah, we honestly do.

Now the Golden Bow of Quel’Thalas is coming in patch 2.4. As such we cannot really talk about it because it could change any second.

But that Legendary Netherstrand Longbow bow is ridiculous! That thing is beyond crazy! Has its own ammo, increases physical damage taken by 5% and can be stacked 5x, and critical strike bonus damage by 50%?? That’s way above and beyond the call of duty. What you hear is the sound of ever squishy in the game going on strike. Could the days of a 6000-damage Aimed Shot crit be approaching?

No. This weapon can only be used against Quel’Thelas Kael’ Thas (spell-check error, we swear). That’s a neck-punch, right there. That’s a no-reach-around and no-kiss.

/sob

You can play with our emotions, but you’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!

/puts William Wallace back on the shelf