Who's Got Reflexes?

That would be me. Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes to be exact. That's right, you heard it here first (maybe second if you're a plurker), I've got the shoulder armor of my dreams! And by "dreams" I mean I've been workin' my arse off and trolling the Auction House looking for the pattern and the Hearts of Darkness needed to make them. Today was that day! For a price that I'm not willing to say out loud in fear being torn to shreds by people I don't know but still think I was majorly ripped off, I bought the pattern off. I had previously acquired the HoDs from an earlier transaction which I shan't mention the cost of and had already farmed all the other not-as-easy-to-obtain-as-leather-is mats and was basically just waiting for the pattern to pop into the AH.

Pop it did! Snapped it up, told friends, and I'm still twitching with excitement about it. Let's do a quick stat comparison to what I was using : Blackened Leather Spaulders (Yes I was using leather gear, but the stats were the best thing I could get without using up my random luck via drops).

SoLR:
741 armor
27 agi
19 stam
21 int
74 RAP
37 haste rating

BLS:
219 armor
20 agi
15 hit rating
70 RAP

Now, Some of you may argue that hit rating is too important to give up so willingly, but I'm also quite sure that you can see just how massive of an upgrade for any hunter this would be. Would you rather do more damage, survive longer, have a larger mana pool and shoot faster or have a better chance of hitting your target (which food buffs can more than cover anyway)? That's what I thought. Let's see the actual comparison when replacing BLS with SoLR.

+522 armor
+7 agi
+19 stam
+21 int
-15 hit rating
+4 RAP
+37 haste rating

Think about that...there is a LOT more pros to that trade off than there is cons. Plus I went from a ilvl 115 Rare to a ilvl 141 Epic, how in the hell wouldn't that be a good call? More bonus: I've got no shoulder upgrades (currently) until ~Tier 6 shoulders...unless I manage to get 2 pieces of T5 and one of them is the shoulders, but that probably won't ever happen.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only hunter on the server that uses them when not in a specific raiding situation, so I kinda stand out in the crowd. And it matches my spear quite nicely! I'll be posting some screenshots of me and my new shiny shoulder gear tomorrow when the server's done patching and junk.

...Oh, and for those of you who care/didn't know, Season 4 starts tomorrow. Good luck with that you PvPers. You won't see me in there any time soon.

Good Hunting,
Tox