f13.net

So I'm like 62 now.  I daresay that on this, my fourth foray into WoW, I will finally hit max level.  Okay, so at some point in the future I turn in some quest, and wham, I'm 70.  Time to get gear.  Can someone explain just what the hell you do at this point?  Because nothing I've read or heard makes it sound anything less than totally opaque.

"So tier season 6349Q can be bought for gold if you're above Cuddly reputation with Grognerflok, while PVP blue raid tier set LB69J can be bought for honor points and Marks of Spiffyness, at least until the next patch when they sell it for gold and arena set 49P comes out, but lol that's too much of a grind!  I'll probably just run Zamboozle on Heroic!"

What?

Ret pally.  Not doing anything above 5 man instances.  Perfectly willing to PVP for gear if nobody wants ret pallies in their instance group.  Killed plenty of peeps out in the world on my old server, never done a single battleground ever.

Who the hell do I talk to at level 70 to get moar better weapans?

OK, here we go: You'll have a set of gear (mostly greens) purely from finishing up the questlines/doing tradeskills/playing the AH when you hit 70.

Some gear (pretty much all blues) drops from the normal 5-man instances.

Most TBC groups (Cenerion Expedition et al) have a faction quartermaster that will sell you get for gold, limited by your faction with them (exalted for the best gear, natch). There's a number of 'new' factions with daily quests (Ogri'la, Skyguard, etc) which work in a similar manner but have repeatable quest for faction, cash, etc. instead of instance running.

Heroic instances (tougher, L70-only versions of all of the TBC instances) drop gear but also the bosses drop "Badges of Justice". These are essentially an alternate currency which lets you buy purple gear from specific vendors.

You can also buy PvP gear with honour points & BG tokens (yet another alternate currency).

Arena combat also has gear on vendors, limited by your arena team & personal team rating (which isn't a straight grind unlike honour points - win ten games against low-ranked opponents and lose one against a higher-ranked team and you'll probably lose rating).

For Ret, you will probably be best served with the season1 arena gear, which is all available from the PvP vendors for honor.

What it will entail is spending a lot of time in the battlegrounds (Alterac valley for most of your honor points, all the others for whatever type of marks you need).

Ret does a ton of DPS, and I have done 5 mans where a ret pally put on a shield and tanked just fine, so as long as you learn what  "tha tricks" are, you should be able to do 5 mans pretty easily, and I am sure there is some good ret gear floating around in there, but most DPS plate wearers end up using arena/pvp gear for PvE because it has all the important stats on it and is easier to obtain than the RNG loot from instances.

From reading your other posts, I assume you will be mostly doing all of the 5 man instances with your friends.  Do those on normal until you all feel like you have good sets of blue items.  At that point you may be ready to do 5-man heroics, but it will be difficult.  That is doing those same instances, but harder.  You'll get badges.

The badges are currency for epic items that are on par with 10-man gear from Karazhan.  Some better, some worse.  The upcoming patch will be adding even more choices for badge buying too.

In the future, you'll be able to buy PvP items from the faction vendors with gold.  You'll need a certain level of faction with them, so you might have to do some faction grinding.  It depends on where you are at after you finish doing the normal quests for them.

If you go the PvP route, that's been explained I think.

I tend to do all of this except replace heroics with 10-man Karazhan.  I get 2 badges per boss there and lots of epic lewtz.  Our guild is the right size for this and run it every week.  We even have two teams doing it each week now.  I shun 25 man instances.  I've tried it and do not like it. (Mags, and Gruuls)  If I weren't in this guild, I'd be doing heroics either with the guild or PUGs.

I mix PvP in where I can outside of raiding Karazhan.  I have a mix of lewt from Kara, badge purchases, and PvP.  I get my cash doing dailies.  Most of my dailies are from the bombing runs because they are fun and fast. (I do have an epic flying mount which makes all the difference.)

When I'm bored with this, I hop onto one of my alts and either try to build up their gear or level.  I've slowly been using some of my alts for PvP too.  I like to see the game play from all the different perspectives.

I do this with a consistent 1-2.5 hours per weeknight and 1-10 hours on the weekends (depends on season, which is cabin-fever-catass right now.)

In general there's PvP gear and there's PvE gear.  There's plenty of overlap but it helps to know which you'll be doing the most.

You mention 5 person instances. There's heroic and non heroic. Non heroic has blue gear that's no where near as good as the PVP gear you get from buying stuff with honor and arena points. Heroic 5 person instances have some nice stuff and you can buy nicer stuff with the badges you get as loot in the heroics, but ret paladins aren't much wanted in heroic groups since people usually want as much CC as possible and ranged DPS is easier on the healers.

The PvP blues next patch are decent. You'll have to be honored/revered with various factions though to buy them. Honored is easy. Revered is a bit of a rep grind. YMMV.

I've never seen a ret pally in any of my groups, but I've heard that they can do good things for groups with solid melee dps.

As was said earlier, just start running Alterac Valley and gather honor and marks. Doing it at your level now I would gather together some healing gear so you could be at least somewhat useful. Do this until you have around 60,000 honor and 100 marks (won't take as long as you might think). Ding 70 and purchase your epic weapon, helm, gauntlets, and rings. Run the other hellhole BG's for the marks and then go back to AV to get the honor for the rest of your gear.

Alternatively, you can level Blacksmithing to 365 and make Thunder, a very nice Ret paladin mace which for a few primal nethers you can upgrade to Deep Thunder, which is an awesome PVP mace.

Trinkets(other than the PVP trinket):

Try to get Hourglass of The Unraveller from Black Morass - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28034

If you have gold to burn either of these Darkmoon decks are nice:

Darkmoon Card: Crusade - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31856

Darkmoon Card: Wrath - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31857

 

When you describe it like that, it sure sounds fun!

I wish they'd remove the stupid mark requirements. I really don't give a crap about WSG or EOTS unless it's part of PVP daily or the BG weekend.  I'd do EOTS and AB more (WSG I really don't care for), but they're honestly too long and the honor can be pretty terrible if you lose or lose badly.

As is, it's a relatively slow grind when you're not someone that can sit down and grind AV 4+ hours a day.

Also, getting in heroic groups as an offspec is an exercise in futility.

Meh, my guild runs heroics with MS warrior / dps feral druid / elemental shaman [with another feral druid tanking, and a resto shaman or holy priest healing] a lot... but we overgear most of the heroics we do, and for the ones we don't (hi2u durnholde), we get at least one or two CC classes. I agree, getting a spot in a pug as a non-tank warrior / druid or non-healer shaman is a pain. Shadow priests are very welcome though, and ret pallies definitely pull their weight since the last patch. As a shaman healer, I lurve moonkin and their spell crit aura, I imagine holy pallies would love it even more.

About marks, I agree with Rasix. The new mark turn-in quest in 2.4 is stupid too -- they should've made it a 'vendor' you 'sell' marks to in exchange for honor [make EOTS or WSG marks worth more for all I care], but tying it to one of each mark is stupid. I personally can't stand WSG and pugging EOTS on alliance side is the equivalent of taking a vinegar shower and rolling around in a pit full of fire ants. I imagine it is similar for horde doing AV in battlegroups with 4-hour AV queues.

The mark concept itself is ok, but don't make people do BGs they hate kthx.


-- Z.

Hmm, wrong.  Current badge rewards are scc/tk level, the old karazhan level rewards are still there but it would be silly to waste badges on those.  Next patch theres going to be BT level badge rewards.  Basically what this means is you can get gear as good as the current top raid dungeon by doing 5 mans when the higher tier dungeon comes out.

Heh.

Agree about the marks, but honestly if you didn't need AB, EOTS, and WSG marks for gear NOBODY Alliance side would run them. Blizzard has to do something to lead the sheep to slaughter get them to play.

For the heroic stuff, you won't be able to just jump right into it, you'll need to have a decent level of gear before you're useful there.  I mostly play critical classes so far (tank and priest) though, so that's considerably reduced if you're not the tank or healer, but still important.  That means you'll need to either do some pvp or regular 5-mans before you jump into heroics.

On another note that has been mentioned in other threads...don't stay in Outland too long if you haven't finished every Azeroth quest you can get your hands on that still gives exp.  The more of those you do the less grind for money you have when you hit 70, because the more Outland quests you'll still have left to do when you do hit 70.

Also, for gear research, there is little better than Atlas + AtlasLoot, especially with Atlasloot's relatively new wishlist feature.  You can look up exactly what drops where, what you can get through pvp rewards, factions, badges, and so on, and add it to your wishlist so you know where you need to go to get what you want.  Another addon called RatingBuster is great for showing you at a glance what the practical effects of that item are going to be, as it takes the stats on the item and gives you information about how they will affect your stats when you replace one of yours.  It takes into account the removal of your current item when it does this, thus showing exactly how much of an upgrade the item will be.  It can be very helpful in deciding whether you want to roll on a particular piece of gear or not, since you won't have to try to do all the calculations in your head about how much you're actually going to gain.

Sadly, having done all these methods of obtaining gear, I really at this point, can't see the point in bothering with anything other than the pvp gear. As an example, for a hunter, all the range weapons available on the faction vendors are capped around 61-63 dps. For a little bit more work, you can get a 82 dps crossbow from pvp? I ask you, what is the point of the faction vendors in this case? Other than the Ogri'la crossbow, the only other weapons are from faction vendors that require quite a few trips through instances to build up. The same holds true for druids. Cenarion expedition has a nice feral 2h hammer, but it's pretty well made completely redundant by the pvp 2h. You could argue that the 100 armor on the cenarion weapon makes it better for tanking I guess. I busted my ass factioning up with aldor to get my rogue the 1h sword from their vendor but the pvp weapon is 10 more dps and dps is really all that matters with weapons.

Just wait till the next expansion comes along and you can get better gear from levelling 71-80 than anyone got in two years of raiding and pvp at 70.

This shouldn't even be in green.

Anyway, thanks all for the info.  Much clearer now.

I also agree on the marks, but I don't understand the rest of your statement.  Are you saying all alliance would then run AV? 

My server must be an anamoly because basically all alliance assumes AV a loss and waste of time except the need the marks for an item.  I run EOTS constantly and ignore most of the others, especially AV.  EOTS is quick and typically a win for us (my battlegroup anyway.)  I'm talking from a PUG perspective too.  In premades, EOTS is the BG of choice because a 4 cap with flag caps is like a 4-5 minutes win. 

AB is at least 10 minutes even if you dominate.  I enjoy those games, but I am always pissed that certain classes have a clear advantage to getting in and capturing a flag over all others.  You can sit there and dominate the enemy at a flag, killing them over and over, but if you just can't cap that flag, it doesn't matter.  I like the EOTS approach of using your presence there as a factor of win/lose, not whether you can sit there for 30 seconds "using" a flag without being hit/harmed.

WSG instances can last for fricking EVER!  They can be absolutely some of the best PvP fun evar, or they can be the most boring back and forth contest evar.  WSG is a total crapshoot.

To make up for my lack of AV marks, I'm going to use Arena points for those items.  I'd much rather see them use purely honor for armor/weapons/trinkets/etc.  They can use the marks for getting the consumables.  That's what I've been burning my EOTS marks for once I get near 100, which is nearly constantly now.  That has been actually really nice.  I constantly have mana and heal potions available to me now.

Koyasha highlighted a good point - you'll probably have quests left over when you hit 70.  It's worthwhile both for entertainment (some of the quests are quirky/fun) and they all give nice gold.

Another thing I haven't seen mentioned is getting gear crafted.  I tend to prefer the farm & craft method, because it lets me play exactly as much as I want.  It's pretty much a solo activity though, unless you make agreements with your pals to farm up the mats communally.

One thing that you'll have to do for all this that you don't have to do with simple questing is to go check out wowhead or thottbot or something, and find out what you want.  There is an ocean of gear out there, and knowing what you're looking for helps.

On my BG (Whirlwind) Alliance wins AV around 60-70% of the time. EOTS is a crapshoot but probably 60-40 Horde. Horde dominate AB and WSG. Alliance win because Horde turtling at IB and Galv generally doesn't work. We tend to play pretty good defense and a few times on a Horde turtle we've just pushed back their offense, take SHGY and IBGY and bleed them dry of reinforcements as they come up from FW.

WSG and AB are just trainwrecks. You have Alliance noobs hanging on to the flags as if they're badass or something while Horde just cut us to pieces. AB is only slightly better, as Horde take their triangle and bash our faces in while Alliance run around willy nilly. Also as a rule Horde are much better geared in WSG and AB in our battlegroup - I've seen Horde with titles and 5-5 Vengeful gear running around killing everything in sight, meanwhile we have noobs in greens.

You'll like the next patch if you're a loladin. Ret pally gear is being reworked to be more effective.

If it doesn't start getting less boring than Zangarmarsh, I won't make 70 after all.

Thought you said you were in the high 60's now? Wtf you doing in Zangarmarsh? Grinding? At least everywhere in Zangarmarsh is a straight line run from every other place, unlike BEM, Netherstorm or SMV. If you are still at the 61-63 range and you are finding the marsh boring, it could likely be the ramped up exp requirements. If so, ya you will unlikely make it past 66. Zangarmarsh is just a repeat of the same zone design formula they use everywhere in BC so I doubt it's specific to it.

Go to Terrokar or Nagrand, they are more fun.

Did you save the little mushroom people yet?


Have you no heart?  :sad:

I also found Zangarmarsh to be very tedious.  Terrorkar and Nagrand were more fun.  I cannot put my finger on exactly why I thought that to be the case.

Finished Zangarmarsh, going to move into Terrokar next.  Zangarmarsh just felt really disconnected from anything.  I went from fighting the BURNING MOTHERFUCKING LEGION in Hellfire, to investigating fungal rot in mushroom men on behalf of some eco-hippy elves who are more concerned with hugging trees than with the fact that DEMONS FROM HELL ARE INVADING THE FUCKING WORLD.

You know, I get this same disconnect from other regions of outworld and even some in Azeroth.  There are zones that are completely devastated by wars of the past.  We are still fighting those same beings that caused said devastation.  Yet, you go into zones that seem to be untouched by the wars and you have silly bickering between ogres, elves, whatever.  Or, as said above, the fungal giants are getting sick!  We must help them even though they attack me everytime I come close!  I should look through their poo.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

Nevermind the fact that once you do all these seeming stupid tasks, nothing changes.  I guess I can accept that shattering of my disbelief, I'm used to it in MMO's.  But this going from one extreme of all out war to petty issues within the general populace just feels strange.

Nagrand is just fucking epic.

In case you're considering a respec at 70 I'll offend some paladins of various builds with the following generalizations.

Prot paladin-you're wanted for PVE if your gear is tankly enough. No one wants you in PVP.

Ret paladin-you do ok in PVP if you have a really high damage 2hander. No one wants you in PVE.

Heal paladin-you're wanted in both PVP and PVE and you can do both in the same outfit using the same talent build.

Exactly why I'm a Healadin.  I disagree somewhat on Ret. Paladin not wanted for PvE at all.  They can serve a decent multi-purpose role, just not the best at any one thing.

Also, in the PvE tank role, you are still limited.  If you come up against anything that saps mana, you're doomed.  Also, positioning is more critical since they have to use consecration a lot.  You do have a benefit Druid-Tanks don't have.  You can become uncrushable.  That's a must have in the higher level raids.

With the Ret tree changes, this isn't QUITE as true as it once was.  There's some utility in having at least one Ret Spec Paladin in a PvE group, especially if you have other paladins.

For raiding they are considered "passable" mostly because they can do OK damage, but more for keeping other judgements up. They are still not very wanted in 5 man instances though.

More to the pity of those who disregard them.  In 5 mans (bar for heroic perhaps) they are still quite effective.  I've never regretted having a Ret paladin in a 5 man if they knew what they were doing.

In a similar vein to the original post:  I just re-upped, and this time I'd like to get the speedy-crow-form for my main.  Cash is the biggest issue.  I've already done all of the non-instance quest from the BC zones.  Which seems to imply that I'll need to do some cash grinding.

It's been awhile since I was subbed and I don't know what "daily quests" are (other then it's a quest you can do once per day), although I seem to recall reading that they are good for cash.  Cany anyone recommend a decent (not too grindy) source of cash?

Druid is an alchemist (transformation speicalist), if that helps.

Assuming equal gear, a Ret paladin in the proper raid melee group provides more overall damage to the raid than a rogue in that group, taking all contributions into account. Taking more than one gimps the raid though.

5-man heroic instances you're correct Ret pallies like other non-healing hybrids aren't welcome because of lack of CC.

There are lots of ways to make cash that don't involve grinding, though grinding helps if you are starting from a low point. 

With a transmute spec alchy, you can work your Sporeggar rep to Revered (I think) and get the recipe for transmute earth to water.  Earth is dirt cheap (3g ish on my server) , but water sells in the 20 range.  You can also do the same with a discovered recipe for earth to life.  If you proc either one of those transmutes, it's bonus time.

You can also do daily quests for about 100-150g per day (at 70) if you do them all.  Check out wowwiki for info on those.  If you have any quests left over from leveling, that's gravy.

Fishing for Essence of Water at the pools in Azshara made me rich pre-expansion, so if the value is holding up it's probably even easier now that nobody plays in Azshara. Need 300 fishing +100 lure +rod bonus +enchant to make it worthwhile. Once you learn where all the pools spawn, as a druid with water form you can easily do clockwise circuits and fish them all out. Easy to get there from TBC zones (port to Moonglade and fly to Azshara). A few fishing trips per day, 2-10 EoW per trip plus other sellables you fish up.

On dailies: Unfortunately the most profitable series of dailies is locked behind a 5000 gold entry cost - the Netherwing series.  The other dailies you'll be able to do are Skettis (2 quests, good to do), and Ogri'la (after you kill the Sons of Gruul, 5 man bosses you will need assistance with).  These, plus the cooking quest if you have cooking, a bg daily if you feel like it, and a dungeon or heroic daily will put you above 100 gold a day.  If you can supplement that with the tradeskill methods others have been mentioning, you'll be well on your way to unlocking Netherwing within a few weeks.  Most important thing of course is to spend nothing you don't absolutely need to, and be diligent in doing your dailies every day.

The Netherwing series, for the record, is profitable not because of higher cash rewards from the quests but because the mobs you need to kill - and you tend to need to kill a LOT of them every day - drop considerable quantities of grey cash loot you can sell for an additional 10-30 gold each day.

I know a few people that just kill the Flayers in the mine for that stuff. Skinners mostly. No shortage of skins in that place :).

Thanks much for all the suggestions.  My druid is also a 375 chef (and fisherman), so I'll look into the cooking daily also (and new fishing daily?  thought I saw something about a fishing daily coming).

Looks like only way to get sporeggar rep up higher then I'm currently at is through pug instances (kind of all by myself on this server).  Guess I'll also try my hand at PvP dailies, although I get frustrated trying to play against folks in deep grape when I'm in green/blue.

Unfortunately I recently found out that to get sent to the Netherwing outpost and do their quests, you need epic mount training. It's too bad because the netherwing dailies are a very sweet source of cash. By the time I got exalted on my main I had enough extra cash to buy epic mount training for an alt. Most of my cash was from the Netherwing dailies though an amazing amount was also generated by skinning stuff in the mines while doing the quests in there.

Note however that skinning alone doesn't generate that good cash, you need leatherworking to make the good money for your skins.

Terrokar >>>> Zangarmarsh.  70 here I come, eventually.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but this thread alone convinced me I have no reason whatsoever to resub. The only way to play is to play moar. :oh_i_see:

Depends. There's a treadmill, that's for sure. If all your interested in is the destination then yeah it's all work, but you don't have to play 12 hours a day to make progress.

Which reminds me, its AV weekend. Time to get some gear.

What you should be reading is that there are several different paths a person can take depending on what they like.  If all you are worried about is lvl 70 and the best gear you can get, then yeah, you're gonna have to catass.

I'd suggest that goal in an MMO is warped to begin with.  I'm not sure why one would expect the game to be any different.

There is a repeatable quest at friendly to kill naga.  It's sorta grindy, but it's better than running pugs.  It's called "Now that we're friends..." and the repeatable followup is called "Now that we're still friends..."

750 rep per run through too. I used it to get revered on my alchemist.

So weird, I just ran through there yesterday looking for that quest and it wasn't offered (i.e. I didn't see a yellow ! over any of the little fungus heads).  maybe it's because it's hidden because my level is too high.   I'll go look again, because I do want that recipe.

I did some of that and got bored.  So, I went to the good ole AH and bought a ton of those flowers you gather in Underbog.  You turn in 5 at a time for something like 750 or more rep.  I bought a stack of like 100 for 200 gold or something.  I think I got lucky, but I'd spend 300 gold to get revered.  You more than make it up with the transmutes you can do and that level of gold is chump change if you are doing daily quests, etc.

You can make primal waters from earth.  Earth is everywhere and easily collected while mining.  You have a good chance of making two waters if you are transmute specce'd.  So, you'll make anywhere from 15 - 30 gold per transmute/day.  Hell, on my server waters go for 30+ gold, so I make more than most (from the sounds of it.)  Once I get a primal earth I can make it into a 30 g sell or possibly a 60 g sell.

Yeah, get that transmute now.

*Edit:  I didn't need anywhere near 100 flowers.  I'm using the left-overs for alts.  It will probably cover 2 alts.

Nice, I didn't realize those flowers were sellable.  Thanks!

Nagrand is epic ignoring the awful Nesingway grind quests, but the rewards for doing all of them are pretty good. Blade's Edge is...ehhh. Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley are awesome provided you have a flying mount and not so fun if you don't.

If you miss the Hellfire Peninsula fighting THE MOTHERFUCKING BURNING LEGION, you'll enjoy Shadowmoon Valley.

There is some of that in Netherstorm too.

And if you are into molesting blood elves, you get a lot of that there as well.

I loved all the quests where I got to kick elves right in the crotch as an alliance.

They're adding loot that's a bit worse than tier 6 (Black Temple/Hyjal) quality loot on the badge vendor. You can get badges from heroic bosses and raid bosses, as well as a few new methods in the next patch. This is your best route to getting high quality loot without raiding, although it'll take some time to earn enough badges.

Where the hippies are in bubbles.

So I can go do battlegrounds and get the season 1 set, by paying honor and the marks you get for doing each particular one?  Because I guess the season 1 and 2 ret pally sets are getting buffed/adjusted with 2.4, and season 1 seems like a good first objective for post-70 gear.

I don't really care if I get curbstomped in PVP for a while as a fresh 70.  It's only WoW PVP, it's not like it hurts.  And at least I won't be getting owned by people 30 levels higher than me, so it's still less painful than just plain old "whoops ganked while questing" PVP on my old server.

You can BG now for honor points, and you can also join or start a newb arena team and let the arena points begin to trickle in.

Some season 4 gear has appeared on test though so you might not want to spend any of your new points until you know if season 4 is going to start with the patch. If it does there will be new and better toys to buy, and the old toys will cost less.

Yeah, if you have any points right now from either BG's or Arena's, save them unless you absolutely need an upgrade.

2.4 will change things quite a bit.

Continue PvP'ing though.  It takes quite some time to build up what you will need.

However, just because you are lvl 70 doesn't mean you won't get stomped like a lvl 60.  The difference between a lvl 70 fresh off their last "DING" will get royally creamed by a fully PvP gear equiped lvl 70.  There are all kinds of varying levels in between those extremes, but just be ready to increase your humility levels by quite a bit.

You will suck for a long time.

Save them for 2.4?  I'm hearing rumors of a Memorial Day release for that patch, which is quite a ways off.

These are your non-raid gear paths:

- Questing: If you did every outdoor group quest in Outland, you'd have a reasonably decent set of blue gear that is just a cut below the 5 person dungeon level. It would have some holes in it, and its actually harder to get groups to do outdoor group quests than it is to do dungeons, mostly, but it is an option.

- PVP: either you can arena and get really nice gear really slowly (unless you win a lot, but you won't, with starter gear), or you can do BGs and get not-as-nice gear much faster. This is, other than being a blacksmith, your absolute best path to a good 2h weapon, which is pretty essential for a ret paladin.

- 5 man content: There are plenty of retnooby blue drops in the various level 70 5 mans. In addition, running these will get you reputation boosts with the 5 dungeon factions (Cenarion Expedition, Honor Hold/Thrallmar, Keepers of Time, Sha'tar, Lower City.) In 2.4, a full 5 piece set of basic PVP gear for most specs (it has resilience and a lot of stamina, not so hot on the damage stats) is being added to these factions. None of it requires anything higher than revered and a lot of it is available at honored.

- Rep grind/dailies: A lot of gear is scattered around on various reputation vendors, some of which are very easily grindable, some of which require somewhat more complicated prereqs and dailies, etc. Browse through the reputation section of wowhead.com and see if there is anything that strikes your fancy, then target those factions.


Oh and if you do plan to run a lot of dungeons, make friends with a shaman. Windfury totem turns ret paladins from 'meh' on the damage meter all the way up to 'very effective.' I'd go so far as to say that only warriors see a comparable gain in DPS from just that one totem (and you'll love to have strength of earth in the mix too.)

Unfortunately this won't work - essences (of all types) are pretty valueless post-expansion.

Ya my auctioneer says they are down to 1.85 - 2.50 now. Last expansion's top end ingredients are mostly this expansion's junk. They added essences to elementals in place  of mote drops a few months after the expansion was released and from what I understand most ppl just throw them away when they find them now. I got caught with a lot of essences banked due to not thinking it out in advance but next expansion that isn't gonna happen. I plan to dump all excess primals a week or two before the next expansion releases.

Depends on how fast he accumulates points, if season 4 starts with 2.4, and how long it is till 2.4 hits. It could easily be less than Memorial Day. If he's the I want it now type and the possibility of have gotten better gear for the same amount of points if he'd waited a bit doesn't bother him then there's no reason to wait. I just wanted to mention the possibility.

I recall that the first 2-3 months after TBC, those pre-TBC high end mats were selling for more, actually, because nobody had time to farm them and the new mats were still in short supply.  The new mats were going for far more.  So, while I wouldn't stockpile them, I would not dump them on the market before the expansion either.  Just sell them a little at a time over a month or two.

Yes, sorry.  I was talking from my own point of view, which is a slow gainer of points and honor.  It takes me a long time to build up what I need, so for me to wait a month or two more isn't a big deal.

I got my weekly points yesterday and was 10 ponits short of the lowest Tier 3 piece I could obtain.  It has taken me 4 weeks to get to that point.  I really only look to arena points getting me a few really nice pieces here and there over the long haul.  So, I'm going to make those points count big time!  The rest will be picked up with honor and marks.  I don't mind blowing those since they come in at a fairly good pace.

Primals will likely maintain more value than essences just because there's a wide range of recipes that use them that should remain useful at least partway into the next expansion. It will likely be very dependent on which primals you're talking about though. It is hard to say what will happen - Blizzard may abandon them entirely for new recipes, like they did with essences, or they may hang around in a couple recipes like large brilliant shards in the +150 hp enchant.

Ya maybe I'll try that instead. or sell half before/half after.

On a side note, Phred fails at quoting.

Bah

Rise from ye restless grave!

Ok, so I got epic flight, I worked through the druid epic flight form to the last quest... and realized that I didn't read enough/well/at all when I started out because I need to do heroic sekketh halls (spelling may be off, but you get the idea) to get the druid epic flight form.  Dammit!

I dropped out of wow for a long time, now I'm back a couple months with one other person and we both are pretty casual, and pretty much geared the same way (maybe I'm alittle better geared, but not much), no real desire to join a guild (we both get enough politics/drama at work).  Which leaves me with trying to tag along with a pug on a day when the heroic daily is sekketh halls (is the daily ever sekketh halls?).

So my question is - how much off the minimum set of equipment am I from being able to run heroic sekketh halls?  Here is me - Thorn (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Thunderlord&n=Thorn)

I'm feral, so theoretically I'd be tanking (or off tanking).  In bear form (with braxxus staff and bogstok cloak, aka "my tanking gear") I have 10.3K HP and 17.2K armor (360 defense, 22% dodge, 112 resilience).

My gut says that this is too anemic to run heroic sekketh halls.  Is my gut right?

The Halls are not too bad.  The worst thing in there are the Guards, and there's only 2-3 pairs of them.  If you have CC in your group, it's doable.  The Raven Guards can't be CC'd, but the rest of the pulls can.

You wont be able to tank the Anzu fight though.  You'll need to be casting doing your quest thing during your personal epic fight.  You'll need an additional tank and healer in your group.

It is the Heroic daily sometimes.

The Raven Guards are arguably harder then the bosses in heroic. First time we ran that instance in heroic, got to the first guard pull and wondered why our tank instantly died  :ye_gods:

You might be able to offtank, as a main tank, you would get melted by the Guard Pulls.

As a feral druid Tank, you should be looking at around 12khp with mark of the wild, 20 to 22k armor, 30% dodge, and 415 defense or 103 resilience to be uncritable ( vs level 73 mobs / bosses with 3/3 Survival of the Fittest).  More Defense is preferable to More Resilience, because if you are uncritable, you arent making use of the reduction to crit damage from resilience, where as defense also adds small amounts of passive dodge for druids.

Prob good to look into buying the Heavy Clefthoof Leather set (for the huge amount of Defense on it) or another set of your reputation PvP gear, and socketing them for pure stam + agility.

Exactly what I was looking for (numbers/gear to aim for), thanks much for helping a slacker who doesn't know where else to research.

Another note.  People hate Sethekk Halls, but they like a chance at the raven mount.  You may not have to wait for a day when it's the daily, because you can probably attract enough pug interest on LFG by noting that you're a druid with the thingy to summon the guy that can drop the mount.

Good to know, thanks!

I probably should post this in a "why I'm a moron" thread, but it fits here as well.

I ran my rogue around like a moron to get his leatherworking high enough to make the heavy clefthide armor so that my alchemist druid could use it... but the heavy clefthide set requires you to be a leather worker - and clearly states as much in the item... that I didn't notice until I had mailed it to my druid (because the notice turns red at that point).

Yeah.  Not a lot of agility on the heavy clefthide armor (although it is a gem set).

/cry

You dont need Leatherworking to use the Heavy Clefthoof set, only to take advantage of the 3 piece set bonus.

All 3 pieces have at least 1 blue and 1 yellow socket, + a dodge rating socket bonus, so Socket them up for Stam and Agility  (Solid Gems for Blue slots, Glinting (hit and agi) or Enduring (defense and stam) Gems for Yellow depending on your needs), and you have a 3 piece set that will grant you a substantial amount of Health / dodge / defense (your 3 key stats as a feral tank) and could carry you fairly decently into most heriocs / t4 content.

Of course with season 2 pvp gear hitting the Honor vendors in the near future, you might be almost further ahead to just PvP grind the battlegrounds and pick those up :/

Also, here is a decently accurate list of some nice gear to look for Pre-raid scene for feral tanking.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17794-feral_druid_preraid_tank_gear_guide/

I see it now, thanks very much (was pretty bummed early this morning when I thought I was screwed for tanking gear).  I'd never seen a set where the set bonus was restricted.  Bright red wording alarms and confuses!

Thanks also for the link.

there is actually quite a number of crafted sets in BC (and even regular WoW) where the set bonus was only applicable to someone with the Crafting Tradeskill that makes the gear.  If memory serves, nearly all the crafted sets from the Zandalar Faction Zul'gurub stuff was like that.  Same with the

I used that script calculation to determine whether I'm uncritable, and my crit ranking with the pvp gear is -0.390, meaning I'm uncritable.

So my question now is do I continue to add defense/stamina stuff, or go for attack/hit rating stuff.  My thinking is that if I'm already uncritable I'm not getting any more benefit from defense - is that right?

If you are uncrit/uncrushable, you want to start adding pieces that upgrade your damage/hit.  The more damage, the more threat.

So yeah.

A feral druid will never be uncrushable (barring potential full tier 6 and epic gems i think). If you are uncritable, go for +hit / stam / agility / Strength (if you need more threat) where you can.

However, keep in mind that most of your uncritability is currently coming from the large amount of resilience you have (im going by what was in your Armory profile earlier, i don't know if you are now using the Clefthoof gear).

- Resilience provides 3 general benefits (all mainly geared for PvP):
  Reduced chance to be crit (good, you are now uncrittable by mobs)
  Reduced damage from crits (useless, since mobs can not crit you anyway)
  Reduced damage from dots (somewhat useful, but not great, since most PvE Dots are either dispellable, or don't do huge amounts of damage anyway)

- Defense on the other hand provides 3 abilities that are in general more useful to Ferals
  Reduces your chance to be Critically hit (shooting for uncritable)
  Reduces your chance to be hit (meaning the mob misses you more often as well)
  Increases your chance to dodge

Unfortunately, there isn't nearly as much Leather with the Defense stat on it as there is plate (especially, ironicly, on the t4 set), so generally druids will end up falling slightly short of uncritable through pure defense, and pick up the remainder with Resilience.

Regardless, for PvE, it is always better to get as much defense as possible (without needing to go to crappy gear to get it) and then go for resilience.

The end number you are looking for is 2.6% combined anti Crit from whatever combination of Defense and Resilience works for you (assuming 3/3 survival of the fittest)

-------------------------------

Here is a fairly good link (another Elitist Jerks thread) with a load of theory crafing and related stuff for most of your feral needs.
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16902-feral_druid_megathread/

Agility is the money stat for ferals is my understanding.

Crit, AP(cat), Dodge.


What's not to love?

Agility also affects armor.

I thought they changed feral so that strength was the primary attribute for AP? (including cat).  Still effects all those other things though, even if I'm right - crit, armor, dodge.

Kitty AP is the same as a rogue I believe, 1AP for str, and 1AP per agi.

Stuff with a good amount of each will net you more AP since adding more of a single stat point costs more than adding small amounts of 2 in the item budget.

Cat DPS is:

2 AP per Str
1 AP per Agi

It used to be with the feral talent Heart of the Wild, Cat's would get 20% bonus on their Str. This caused all kinds of itemization issues since essentially there were two kinds of melee DPS leather, for only two classes. Relatively recently, this talent was changed to give a 10% Bonus to AP instead of the 20% to Str. The net result is a Feral druid doesn't really give a poop where her AP comes from, and can use 'rogue' leather far more liberally then before. Of course raw Str will still net them more AP then anything else.

The focus on agility is that druids get way more out of it per point then other classes. X amount of agility equals more Crit and Dodge for a druid then other classes. So Agility becomes more valuable then flat crit/dodge rating for ferals. Ferals in general favor the base stats more then the 'rating' stats.


The offset to a Ferals often ridiculously high AP, is the fact they receive no weapon scaling nor weapon buffs. No windfury on a melee dps class? That's just cruel  :cry:

STR is still a superior stat for feral over raw ATP because of Blessing of Kings. If you raid. Or hang with a protection paladin.

Also, it's a reason to stick close to that enhancement shaman, since both Grace of Air and the Strength of Earth totems increase your ATP and GoA also helps you a LOT in bear form. Also, your feral crit buff helps them quite a bit. Synergy!

Best synergy for the feralz and the raid through said group is survival hunter+enhance shaman+Feral in whatever form+2 BM hunters. Of course, not a whole lot of guilds run with 2 enhance shaman or 3 hunters anymore, and your hunters need to be willing to chug mana pots on long fights, but the amount of +dmg and +crit stacking in that makeup is pretty insane. Not quite as much as a traditional "whack it with your weaponz" melee class gets from Windfury, but it is pretty staggering.

You can't dismiss the amusement factor of firing off heroism and watching a bear tank the size of a pickup jetting across the screen when they do their feral charge thing.

Less amusing is yelling at dimbulb combat rogues to take their friggin' poisons off their mainhand if I'm dropping WF totems. I don't do this for my health. I'd much rather have GoA up. So make use of the damned thing already! If it weren't for being stuck in main tank groups...I'd take the bloody thing off my hotbar. Maybe horde is more switched on about this, but a lot of alliance surely isn't.