Download the YouTube-sized (81MB) movie here, and the full-sized (120MB) movie here.

There are eight pieces in the Leatherworking Switftarrow set, and now we’ve made our first two. The bracers are an upgrade from our Bindings of Lightning Reflexes, another leatherworking pattern, and the helm finally upgrades our Tier 4 helm. Finally. FINALLY!

The extra 420 mana? Priceless, we mean that.

If you’re curious, that +114 Attack Power enchant on our bracers is our Emboss recipe as a Leatherworker, the Fur Lining - Attack Power.

And the addon is RatingBuster for WotLK beta, foshizzle!

Edit: New belt, too now.

This is replacing our War Feathered Loop. Nice? Nice. Now we had a better gem in our WFL, so the RatingBuster numbers aren’t going to look right. Don’t fret.

The patterns are “bought”, just not with gold. You go to the Leatherworking Pattern Trader outside the Leatherworking/Skinner market in Dalaran. He’ll trade you these patterns, and others, for raw leather contributions.

And notice how the Ranged Attack Power calculation may not make sense to you Burning Crusade-locked folks? That’s because you don’t have Careful Aim. /oh yeaaaah…

/login

Whisper from Betahunter1: “BRK DID U GET A SPIRIT BEAST YET!?! LOL!!”

/sigh

Whisper from BRK: “Nope, not yet.”

/fly to Spirit Beast Spawn Point 1

Hmm. Nope, not here again.

Betahunter2: “Yo! BRK! Did you get a Spirit Beast yet?”

/sigh

BRK: “Nope, not yet.”

/fly to Spirit Beast Spawn Point 2

Annnd no.

Betahunter3: “Hey BRK, love the site. When are you doing a Spirit Beast movie?”

/sigh

BRK: “As soon as we find him. He’s a rare spawn and isn’t playing nicely.”

OK, let’s get a Turtle and do that movie.

/fly to Borean Tundra, nab a turtle, fly back to Sholazar

Betahunter4: “BRK, I see you’re in Sholazar. Looking for the Spirit Beast?”

/sigh

BRK: “We just checked, and we’ll check again soon. No Spirit Beast yet.”

Shell Shield is easy enough to demonstrate, but how to show Intervene…

Betahunter1: “BRK! I SEE IT! I SEE THE SPIRIT BEAST! LOL!!”

BRK: “Which spot!”

Betahunter1: “IN ZULDRAK!!”

/sigh

BRK: “I’m sorry, but the Spirit Beast only spawns in Sholazar. I don’t know what it is you found, but it’s probably one of the new cats and not a Spirit Beast.”

Betahunter1: “OH, UR RIGHT MAN. LOL!.”

What were we doing? Oh yeah, Turtle Movie. We’ll have to do a macro for Intervene…

BetaMage1: “Hey, are you the real BRK?”

BRK: “I’m not imaginary, if that’s what you mean :)”

BetaMage1: “No, do you write the hunter blog?”

BRK: “Yes, I have a little blog about hunters.”

BetaMage1: “Cool! I send all my guildies there.”

BRK: “You’re gonna make me blush, thanks.”

BetaMage1: “Say, when are you going to do a Spirit Beast movie?”

/sigh

BRK: “Working on it now, just waiting for the {bleeping} thing to spawn.”

Intervene. They need to know that it self-casts on the pet, not the hunter…

Betahunter5: “BRK, what do you think of Scattershot moved to SV?”

BRK: “I think the bigger question is, ‘What happens to SV hunters who lose Readiness?’ Readiness is for trapping, not Chimera Shot. The whole dynamics of the MM and SV trees are whacked, and while MM seems to really suffer, what are those SV hunters going to say about losing their on-demand trapping? Not much good, I’ll bet.”

Betahunter5: “Does Readiness really not affect Bestial Wrath?”

BRK: “I’ve never tried to make a BM/Readiness build as I’m not level 80 yet, but I’m definitely going to try it out before ruling out the possibility that these two spells don’t play nicely. If they don’t, we’ll be submitting a bug report ASAP.”

Betahunter5: “When are you doing a Spirit Beast movie, anyway?”

/sigh

Please feel free to download the YouTube-sized (75MB) movie here, and the full-sized (419MB) movie here.

The contrast between the long, drawn-out humiliation and the short, direct put-down is delicious. Thank you, GameDame. /applaud

The original title of this post was going to be:

“What We’re Thinkin’ Is…”

That the new Aimed Shot may not save our bacon in arenas, but it certainly won’t hurt.

That Readiness in the Marksman Tree will make a lot of 50/21/0 BM hunters giddy.

That Surefooted got nerf-hammered. Proper.

That if it weren’t for Chimera Shot, there’d be no glory in the Marksman tree at all. It might be high-DPS, but we might as well equip an epic slingshot now, for all the excitement that tree is packing.

That there’s more fun to be had in the top four BM talents than the talents in the other two trees combined.

That this stupid Spirit Beast no-spawing cr@p is really pissing us off.

That we’ll hit level 78 before leaving Sholazar Basin, and still have three or four zones we haven’t touched.

That the economy on a beta server is so out of whack, it’s best not trying to worry about it and just have fun. We blew 2500 gold on a belt socket engineering thingy and another 1000 gold on a gem. Why the h3ll not, right?

That we sold two Riding Crops on real-WoW at full-price and don’t know how we did it.

That the new Emboss feature of Leatherworking is cool for one use, but then a tremendous letdown as we can’t do anything else with it.

That we’re going to sell millions of armor kits! And we know where to farm the mats! BUWAHAHA! /heehee!

That we may chose to level from 70-72 doing nothing but Gorilladin-farming for leather, skipping questing altogether. /ponder

That buying a Mammoth is getting to be a lot like shopping for a new car; we’ll only be able to hold out for so long.

That Brad from Warcraft Millionaire is doing his customers right by promising them free upgrades to the WotLK Warcraft Millionaire Edition when it comes out, two weeks after WotLK goes live. Buy it now, get the upgrade when it’s ready? D@mn right. /nod

That Blizz should give all hunter three free talent respec’s so we can learn just what the {bleep} they’ve done to us. If you’re not playing with the talent calculators right now, you need to be.

That there are some very talented hunter PvP players out there who have gone to extraordinary efforts to document our class’s weakness in PvP. We look forward to their analysis of the new hunter trees, using the same diligence they did previously. Keep up the good work fellas; don’t slack off now.

That the Beast Mastery talent is as much for “show” as it is for “go”. But what’s wrong with a little “show”?

That people don’t understand that allowing the denizens of Ironforge and Stormwind to see 500 gnomes running through the streets is really half the fun of a Gnaked Gnome Race. Tram is Go.

That there is very little that can stop 500 Gnaked Gnomes from taking the boat from Booty Bay to Kalimdor and raiding Ogrimmar, should that decision be reached by committee. /Dr.Evil-finger

That OutOfHairExtensions will probably roll a human female warrior to perform her duties as The Finish Line.

That Sholazar Basin is really Un’goro without Devilsaurs, and they are sorely missed.

That Borean Tundrean is the Desolace of WotLK and that’s certainly not a compliment.

That Ice Crown is a close second.

That if we had a floating city, we’d take it somewhere warmer, with nice beaches and a tiki hut.

That not being able to fly in Dalaran really means, “not being able to take off anywhere one wishes”. Landing is no problem, wherever one wants.

That whomever is in charge of the floating Scourge cities probably got their training from Exxon. /incoming necropolis!

That Blizz removed the ability for bear cubs to be tamed as hunter pets, and that it didn’t come a moment too soon.

That getting an epic tabard for discovering every place in Northrend is not all that epic. /yawn

That, since getting our new gun in the beta, the thought of going back to our xbow on real-WoW makes us physically ill. /boom-boom!

That Rake had better get some serious dev-love, or it’ll be worse than not getting a new cat-spell at all.

That a Ferocity pet with a Focus dump is a mean SOB, regardless of pet-class.

That we’re filled with a sad nostalgia now that Gorilladin can eat bread.

That when they meet Pitch, Humar-owners are going to whine like little children being forced to watch 60 Minutes while eating spinach ice-cream.

Well we’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

…

A Gorilladin’s uncle. /nods

Again, no peekie if no want to get spoiled.
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Spoiler screenshot. Do not click through unless you wish to be spoiled.
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Finally.

Yes, it may only be a beta, but who cares.

It’s Hemet’s Trophy Gun and it’s ours until the beta ends. This is the first real piece of gear we’ve upgraded. Nice, nice weapon. If pressed, we’d say that it’s a little too “skully” for our taste, but just hearing gunshots again… /sniff

The GLDC understand, oh yes we bet she does.

So what does a Tier 5-bedecked hunter look like in WotLK beta? Here ya go. Get ready to say bye-bye to your crit.

You may ask, “Hey BRK, did you put a scope on that beta-gun?” Well yes we did. It cost 2400 gold.

No, you do not have to spend 2k for a scope for your first gun-upgrade to not have your hunter-license pulled.

But it sure was fun.

We made 77 in two days. Not even trying until The Bubble of Desperation.

The Bubble of Desperation? That’s the 20th one. The one where you quit questing and just blindly and voraciously kill sh!t. If it moves, it dies. Red, yellow, it doesn’t matter. Kill everything, don’t stop, get that last 5% of the XP you need to level as quickly and as furiously as possible. Rambo-mode.

So why don’t we do the Bubble of Desperation for twenty bubbles?

1. It’s tiring. Questing provides little naps. Doing professions are breaks.

2. You don’t build reputation. Factions give some nice rewards.

3. It feels like cheating. Blizz put the quests in there for a reason. They’re forcing us to walk everywhere because they want us to see the scenery, skipping the quests is like skipping all the “real” content.

4. It becomes a math-game. If it take two million XP to level and each mob rewards us with 2k XP, we know we need to kill 1000 mobs to level. Simple, countable, but hardly a rich and rewarding gaming experience.

754… 753… 752… /groan

So what would happen if you re-tuned your brain to not give a hill of beans about that list? What if your purpose in playing the game allowed you to ignore the rules of, “Why We Quest”?

Imagine that you wanted to tame, oh, let’s say a rare spawning Spirit Beast. Your raison d’etre is to get this pet, who cares about anything else. And let’s say you know of only two places the Spirit Beast spawns. What would you do?

You’d run back and forth, between the two spawn points, and kill everything as you went, until you found the Spirit Beast.

Well, that’s what we did, (except for the “finding” part). And we leveled without hardly trying at all.

Oh we did a few quests so we could get the flight point with Hemet Nessingwary. And then we did a few quests just to break the monotony of grinding. But we mostly made 77 in Sholazar Basin just by exercising our Gorilladin as we ran between the Spirit Beast’s two known spawning points.

So do we “appreciate” the scenery now that can fly again? Did walking for seven levels have any redeeming qualities whatsoever?

H3ll no. Squared.

Some people /scoffed at Gorilla and a level 74 hunter playing with level 62 fel orcs. Fair enough.

How about some stuff his own size, then.

WotLK Spoiler Alert! It’s filmed in Sholazar Basin. If you don’t want to see Wrath yet, don’t watch.

Download the YouTube-sized movie (30MB) here, and the full-sized movie (181MB) here.