BigRedKitty: These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things

Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

BRK loathes professions. Obviously, someone has to be enchanters and leatherworkers, but why in the blue blazes does it have to be you? Please excuse our massive generalization, but these things just don't bring in the gold like farming raw materials does.

But you're enamored with engineering, aren't you. You're addicted to alchemy, love leatherworking, enraptured with enchanting and nobody better belittle your blacksmithing. It's a great part of the game! you squeel. Well, fine, have your fun. Just remember that our Epic Flying Mount Loan interest rates are mighty competitive, alright Mr. Trump?

Um. But you know... as long as you're going to be buying our materials from the auction house, perhaps you might like to know that we are available for hire. If you can manufacture some of the stuff we love, we'd be more than happy to work a little of the ol' barter system, capice? What do we mean? Well, tell us specifically what profession you're going to level and we can give you a little hint as to what we hunters like. Well, adore. OK, we'd trade our college fund for some of our favorite manufactured things. You need materials, well BRK is your farmer. What would we like? Well we're thrilled you asked!

Alchemy

So you're going to bewitch my senses, brew fame, bottle glory, etc. OK then, we've got a special request for you.

Super Mana Potion? Nah. Superior Health Potion? Please. Flask of Relentless Assault? Oh that's pretty nice, yes, but we'll pass for now. Elixir of Major Agility? Very interesting, precious, but not quite the thing we're looking for.

A Fel Mana Potion, precious. Now you have our attention, now we smell what you're cooking. 3200 mana over 24 seconds and none of the "-25 spell damage and -50 healing for 30 minutes" repercussions that other classes suffer from this baby. Well, not 'none', but very little. Wyvern Sting, Serpent Sting and Volley get a little slapdown due to the stuff, but so what. Survivalists use Wyvern for the crowd control, not the damage, we've already told you to quit using Serpent Sting, and Volley... do we even have to talk about Volley?

Fel Mana Potions might as well have 'Designed Exclusively for Hunters Because We Love Them' written on the bottles. If you want to argue against the BRK "no manufacturing" manta by teasing us with a stack of these things, we'll gladly back down.

Leatherworking

How many of you have been running an instance or a raid and heard drums in the background? No, that's not your hangover; it's your friendly leatherworker getting jiggy with his fun new toys.

There are five drum versions they can craft but our favorite is the Drums of Speed. This spiffy instrument increases the attack speed of nearby party members by 15% for 30 seconds. BRK is a huge fan of increased attack speed because proc-able items proc more frequently the more frequently they are used.

If you're slamming Rapid Fire when Improved Aspect of the Hawk procs, and then your leatherworker breaks out the Drums of Speed, jeebuz your attack speed is going to approach Rambo-mode. Just hang on and scream at the computer as your ammo rips anything and everything to itty bitty pieces. Each Drum is good for thirty charges so the dang thing is good for many boss fights and many exhaustive primal roars.

Enchanting

We all know what enchanters are good for: crying about tips. Now BRK promotes the theory of Tip Everybody; we are from New York after all. Our tank, our healer and every craftsman we employ gets a nice wad of cash in some form or another. But enchanters have it tough. They hang out inside major cites giving away enchants for months while they level their profession and then BAM we're supposed to be dropping 200 gold on materials and also give them a 20 gold tip for "a button push". This change in the enchanter-dynamic can be tough to swallow, but we try to advertise your predicament, fellas.

But if you really want to make some cash, start flashing in our smug faces the one consumable we hunters would quickly snap up if enough of us knew you even had these things: Superior Mana Oil. Slap one of these on your melee weapon and you get 14 mana every 5 seconds for 30 minutes. Combine this with a Fel Mana Potion and a shadow priest or a totem-slinging shaman and your mana-regeneration becomes kind of "priestly". The materials for the oil are not expensive and just about every enchanter should be able to make the stuff. Are you a dual-wielding hunter? You can put a Superior Mana Oil on both of your melee weapons, natch.

And for future reference, if the +20 agility enchant to one-handed weapons comes out in the next patch, those two Stellari we have in the bank may just have some future use. +40 agility and +28 mana every 5 seconds for 30 minutes is deliciously appealing.

Engineering

Engineering stinks. Ridiculously expensive to level, no mechanical mount, no aerial bombardments, no surface-to-air missiles, basically very few fun toys -- the Chickenator is a huge exception, of course -- and not many things to sell to make a profit. But they do make one thing that hunters need all the time and that's scopes.

The current King of All Scopes is the Stabilized Eternium Scope. If you are lucky enough to have an engineer in your guild who can make one of these -- and BRK is, thank Elune -- then you can get one for the price of materials. But if you want on made by Mr. Anonymous Engineer, be prepared to pay out the wazoo. Every little junky adamantite frame, every fel iron bolt, every mechanical dragonling he's had to make just to level his engineering skill is going to be assessed and that cost is going to be passed on to you, Mr. Desperate Hunter.

Now this is a great scope -- we've had two of them crafted -- and we love the bonus to crit it gives. But this isn't our favorite scope, nope not at all.

If we break out our Back In Time machine, we can travel to the pre-BC days when Molten Core was the schiznit. Back then engineers would make little mechanical sacrifices to the engineering gods hoping for a special schematic to drop: the Biznicks 247x128 Accurascope. All this little jobber does is increase your hit rating by 30. Level 70 hunters need +15.77 hit rating to increase their +Hit by 1%, so this nifty device is almost a +2% to Hit all by itself.

Without getting into the mathematics, the counter-arguments and the finger-pointing, +Hit can be just as important -- if not more so -- than +Crit. If your gear doesn't keep up in the +Hit department, and you can find an old, curmudgeonly engineer who has the wherewithal to make a Biznicks, and you can get your mitts on two Lava Cores, then you'll amaze and astound any hunter who attends your Ranged Weapon Show-n-Tell.

You want some swagger? Grab a Biznicks; it's as close to a Pimp My Ride as we hunters can get.

Daniel Howell continues his quest to install a scope the size of Ironforge installed on his gun as the hunter-pet duo extraordinaire known to lore as BigRedKitty. More of his theorycrafting and slanderous belittling of the lesser classes can be found at bigredkitty.blogspot.com.

[Fan art by Moony]