You know the sleuths at the BRK Patch Notes Spelunkers and Code-Crackers Institute have been hard at work delving into an ASCII-text dump of the new patch. They get paid little, get zero vacation, and are injected daily with vaccines and growth hormones. Their sacrifice is done for your benefit and our profits; they should be praised loudly and often.

But we're a little busy, so we're putting that on our BRK To-Do List.

Unfortunately, the results of several mangled code-scanning attempts had to be trashed, including what we thought was a new demon-minion for Warlocks but was really just the rantings of a highly-tortured programmer venting his misery in the code-comments. But we now think we got the parsing right and are ready to proceed. All systems are Go.

Since the blue-posts have been made and the workings have been finalized, we can release our report.

Believe us, it's a doozy.

BRK's Top Ten Totally Unbelievable Facts About Patch 2.2

10. The Holy Lawn Dart of Precision has been created. Since the Paladin class deserves an upgrade to their boomerang, the Blizz wiz-kids have come through with the latest in ranged-weapon technology. Fatally inaccurate, the HLDoP has no guidance except a 1-360 roll which determines the direction of the toss. The range and altitude of the HLDoP-heave is a complex formula involving the age of the player and their +Holy Spell Damage. Once launched, nobody is immune to it, not even party members.

9. Khorium-Tipped Arrows. With all the khorium going unsold in the Auction House they had to do something with the stuff before the servers crashed. Also, bow-users have been typing "Our Arrows Stink!" for so long and so often that too many people were canceling their accounts for a month to save money for a new keyboard. The coin-counters at Blizz must be appeased.

8. The Engineering Mount! It's awesome! It's stupendous! It uses khorium by the bushel to manufacture! It's an engineer's dream come true! You can shoot from it, you can customize it, and you can rest assured it's not in the patch. Sorry, folks, engineering still stinks.

7. Skinning humanoids, including player-characters in arenas and battlegrounds, arrives with a bang. Used to create fabulous tailoring and leather-working patterns, humanoid skins come in fabulous colors and leave an oozing, bloody, soggy mess of a corpse when the skinning is complete. The Undead race celebrates heartiest as a corpse become less-fattening with the skin removed.

6. Fel Reavers become trainable hunter pets. Yes they shrink, yes they have neither Dash nor Dive, yes they retain the locomotive sound when they attack. Fel Reavers in arenas is the answer to poor-hunter showings, the comments say. Can't say we really disagree until we give them a try.

5. Mages gain the ability to retain conjured food and water for 48 hours with a tailor-manufactured Zip-Warlock Storage Bag. But if food is retained for more than 48 hours, it spoils and the entire bag has to be destroyed.

4. It has been well publicized that Raptor-pets are gaining the spell Dash. What has been kept under wraps is the fact that Gorillas are being completely revamped into the new hunter pet, Howler Monkey. These pets get the Dive ability but they must have something tall to climb and from which to leap. Their attack-scream has been described as "Ethel Merman singing Guns and Roses". We're very excited about this development.

3. Warriors are gaining a new audible emote. With every Taunt cast, your toon will automatically scream "This Is Sparta!" and flecks of spittle will splatter on the face of your opponent. Your spell-detail must be cranked in order to see it, though.

2. A new NPC in Shattrath City will appear. Maitricks will have the power to alter virtual-reality. He will accept any piece of armor from any Shaman and, for a fee, change any attribute to any other attribute. Don't like the Spirit on that piece of mail chest armor? Take it to Maitricks and he'll change it to Strength. Disgusted with the Attack Power on that piece of obviously healing-leggings? Maitricks will change that to Intellect. As expected, the fee will be a rather sizable chunk of gold but also a gun of any rarity or level.

1. Rogues will gain a new ability called Sucker. While Sap keeps an NPC out of combat by stunning him, Sucker will prevent an NPC from joining a battle by giving them an iPhone. The NPC will become totally addicted to being able to surf the Internet from his dungeon and become oblivious to the fate of his cohorts. Sucker will only wear off after the NPC's bank account is completely emptied. But after this happens, the NPC will enrage and use the iPhone as a ranged weapon, beaning the rogue who gave it to him right in the brain-bucket for 1400-2000 damage.