Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

It's that magical time of year again when the thoughts of young hunters the world over turn to beer. Brewfest is a true Dwarven holiday filled with endless events like drinking beer, delivering beer, advertising beer, and fighting with beer mugs. Brewfest is, in fact, the one holiday that I participate in since I knocked off the painful What a Long Strange Trip It's Been.

With a new year of Brewfest comes new loot upgrades from the Brewfest boss, Coren Direbrew. I'm not really sure what Direbrew did to deserve our wrath, other than being Dark Iron. I mean, sure, his peeps started a big fight and tried to steal the beer, but really, who wouldn't if they weren't allowed to attend? It's not like he's the Mad Elf or anything.

Brewfest loot has never been the friendliest to hunters, with the totally awesome and upgraded Tremendous Tankard o' Terror being a silly mace that hunters cannot equip, and no two-handed drop (which is what we really want). However Brewfest does bring us a nice trinket option as well as a one-handed weapon that we could use.

Today we'll take a look at the Brewfest loot from a hunter perspective and perhaps take a wee peek at some of the nice generic rewards offered from Brewfest tickets.

The one-handed weapon curse

I remember back in the day when dual-wielding my Bone Slicing Hatchets was the pinnacle of awesome hunter gear until late in BWL. It has, however, been a long time since dual-wielding was an optimal options for hunters, and if you ask me, that's a sad thing. We got dual wielding, so let us dual wield things, darnit.

Ultimately, we tend to get more benefit from a single two-handed agility stat stick than we do from two one-handed ones. From Brewfest, we can get Direbrew's Bloodied Shanker, an ilevel 365 agility dagger that offers desirable hunter stats. It gives us 155 agility, 90 hit rating, and 111 crit rating.

Let's compare that to an ilvl 365 two-handed item, the Witch-Hunter's Harvester with 361 agility, 241 crit rating, and 241 mastery rating. This is the trend that we've seen for years not -- the two-handed weapons just have better itemization than two one-handed weapons combined. Two shankers, and you only have 310 agility to compare to the 361 of the harvester -- a massive difference.

I continue to get questions about one-handed weapons and why I don't include one-handed options on gear lists, and this is a perfect example of why. The only thing we care about on our melee weapons are the stats, and the two-handed options just give us more stats, which means they give us more DPS.

I wish it were different, too.

OMG -- a trinket!

Coren Direbrew has more to offer than just useless maces or daggers. He drops the Coren's Chilled Chromium Coaster trinket, with a proc that works off of ranged attacks as well as melee. As always hunters get excited about any new trinket option and as of this writing, the first day of Brewfest, I've already received several emails asking how the new Brewfest trinket compares to alternatives.

With a flat 340 crit rating and a 4,000 attack power proc, the coaster is clearly good for hunters but lacks any agility. Still, 4,000 attack power for 10 seconds is a lot. The internal cooldown is around 50 seconds and with proc chance, it's reported to have around a 12% uptime or a flat averaging of about 480 AP.

So how does the Brewfest trinket stack up against our other trinket options? Well ... if you don't have access to raid trinkets, Coren's Chilled Chromium Coaster could be a valid short-term trinket option if you're having a tough time getting your hands on the great pre-raid trinkets.

The problem is that Fluid Death remains an incredibly awesome trinket available for justice points, and in the secondary trinket slot, the heroic version of Tia's Grace from the Lost City is pretty ridiculously awesome for its item level. Coren's Chilled Chromium Coaster is just not able to compete with that combination of pre-raid trinkets.

And of course, if you have raid trinkets, even from the first tier of Cataclysm raids, you don't want to touch the Brewfest trinket.

Brewfest loot is not for DPS

So for all of you wondering and emailing about the Brewfest loot -- it is not good DPS loot for hunters. But that's okay, because Brewfest has some awesome other options available for participating in Brewfest dailies.

You can get a subscription to the Brew of the Month Club -- the gift that keeps giving all year round! Or get your own Brewfest Pony Keg that you can bring out at parties and before raids! Or Beer Goggles, which can briefly give you a look at what the world would look like if Gnomes could become hunters (which is how this video was made, in fact).

Top DPS Gear: Countless hours of raiding and tens of thousands of valor points and a good bit of luck to boot.

Beer: Priceless.

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Scattered Shots is dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. From leveling your hunter and choosing the best patch 4.2 gear to learning the DPS value of skill, we've got you covered. If you're stuck in one of the nine support classes, why not move up to the big league and play a hunter?

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