[Ysaurion]

Hey, I just hit 77 on Ysaurion last night and with the weekend coming up, I'm hoping to hit 80 soon. I'm still wearing all my pretty pretty t6 gear, but that won't do at all at level 80.

I'm looking for a blacksmith I can pester for crafting Saronite and Titansteel gear, specifically:

Titansteel Shield
Titansteel Treads
Temp. Saronite BP
Temp. Saronite Bracers
Daunting Handguards
Temp. Saronite Belt
Daunting Legplates

Now I'm not at 450 mining yet, so I don't have any titanium ore at this point but I have a good stock of cobalt and am finally in zones with saronite. I can supply some mats and hopefully cover what I'm missing without going broke. Of course, if any blacksmiths happen to have pieces of this gear lying around from leveling it up, I'd be happy to take it off your hands.


If anyone has a JC, I'm also looking at the Titanium Earthguard ring and neck.



... I suppose I had better start leveling my Eng. for my goggles as well. SIGH.

[Shardik]

Yssa, If you would like I can run you through like 100000000 instances and get you 232 gear this weekend. Just let me know.

[Googleme]

if you are going to be on saturday afternoon or sunday afternoon I would heal instances for you to get gears

[Ysaurion]

Hah hah, maybe I should add that.
"Will tank 4 gearz"

I noticed mobs in Halls of Stone were beginning to actually affect my health last night.


But yeah, I'd love to run instances! I'm hoping to hit 78 tonight and 80 by Sunday.

[Hecatus]

-Must level druid and catch a ride on the xp gravy train...-

[Sobeyet]

Save the titansteel for ICC gear (legs are very winnar). I'll tag along on some randoms, my crappier toons still need plenty of badges.

[Shardik]

I think I have like 19 Titansteel bars, that if you need Yssa, they are yours.

[Rohanna]

I have a blacksmith, so I can make stuff... I believe Serror has those JC patterns as well, but I think you can get some drops that are better... hit me up though if you want something.

[Len]

If it's ilvl < 232, I wouldn't bother making it. Gear is so easy to get these days. We can probably run you through ToC10 in 20m at some point to get you some gear.

[Wrathblood]

Yssa, here's some thoughts on gearing a plate tank quickly (apologies if people have already buried you in advice, feel free to ignore me if they have).

First, grab those ts bars from shardik and pick up a few more from somewhere. Down the road you'll need 20 to craft the ICC legs/boots so may as well grab them now. Also,keep an eye open for primordial saronites people are selling cheap and accumulate them as your bankroll allows (you'll need 13 or so to craft the legs and boots. Make the legs first unless you've got vastly better legs than boots when the question comes up).

Next, accumulate frost badges as quickly as possible. It probably won't be very fast but plug away at them. Get the belt or cloak first, whichever is the bigger upgrade. After those, people crap on the corroded key a lot, but your trinkets will probably suck and it will probably be the best upgrade available. You should have some icc experience by this point, so decide on tier vs non-tier, look at what's dropped for you and.buy to cover gaps.

Ok, that covers longer term planning. Shorter term, I'm going to disagree a bit with some of the earlier comments. First, get a titansteel shield wall made and enchant it with +def. Its like 300g, tops, and getting shield upgrades will be.a pita. With the current ICC buff, I'd argue the 10 man gunship shield is the EASIEST one for you to reach. So, expect to get a lot of mileage out of that 300g.

Second, hook up with the warhorses above and see how far they take you in terms of gear/badges. However, I'd also suggest crafting some of the tempered saronite pieces for two reasons. First, sure, rystorm can heal you through anything, but eventually he'll have to go to work or something and for pug healers you do want to at least be close to uncrittable. Second, ToTC and the ICC heroics have higher min gear levels to enter and replacing lower level blues/greens with crafted pieces will help.

If you end up with extra titansteel feel free to get the ts boots and helm made. They're superb compared with what you probably have but you'll also replace them fairly quickly so do what makes sense. Same goes for crafted indestructible belt. Its a placeholder, but its well itemized and not super expensive (if you don't craft the belt, you'll prob end up with the ilevel 226 badge one as a placeholder instead. Badges vs gold).

With crappy badges, pick up the 245 tanking ring first, then the t9 gloves and shoulders (cheap and good, ans you'll hang onto them for add fights/heroics because of the 2p bonus anyway). After that, go for the best upgrades and don't forget about the ilevel 226 neck and 213 cloak which are cheap and will be hard to replace.

Try to keep you gear enchanted/gemmed but do it cheap for anything you won't be keeping for a while. Anyone with a JC can probably sell you a stack of blue quality blue/green gems really cheap and then get them cut for stam or def/stam.

For enchants, get the 10k honor shoulder enchant, a titanium weapon chain, slap hvy borean armor patches everywhere you can and the cheapest possible stam enchants everywhere else. Again, with shardik and co this won't be necessary but its pretty cheap and will help a lot in pugs.

Finally, obviously run as many heroics as possible, but be sure to hit heroic AN (trinket off 2nd boss), regular TotC (trinket off lst boss) as often as you can, and the regular icc 5mans are great until you can do the heroics and even after (reg HoR has a good shield but its prob the highest percent ninjaed item in the game right now).

[Wrathblood]

Couple things. First, the ToTC trinket is off the last boss. Second, don't worry about using dps weapons or perhaps that tanking quest reward from zul'drak for ages (my warrior used the aze until he got the dps axe from heroic FoS). Your only options for drops are UP, TotC, PoS and HoR. The one from UP isn't much of an upgrade and HoR will be brutal for quite a while. So, your options will be limited unless you get lucky with regular PoS though a good group could probably get you through 10 man marrowgar surprisingly early now (great mace), though I'm a big fan of tanking with dps weapons.

[Innocence]

OMG

YSSA IS BACK!??


WIN


wb!

[Forte]

Wrathblood, on 25 June 2010 - 11:17 PM, said:

First, get a titansteel shield wall made and enchant it with +def. Its like 300g, tops, and getting shield upgrades will be.a pita. With the current ICC buff, I'd argue the 10 man gunship shield is the EASIEST one for you to reach. So, expect to get a lot of mileage out of that 300g.

http://www.wowhead.com/item=49835

Splintered Door of the Citdal, normal HoR (thusly Farm able). Sadly, it has block rating. Upside it has more armor/stam/parry than the TS Shield Wall. Downside is it has less Defense, which can be hard to scrap together when you're trying to get that initial uncritable status for heroics.

[Sobeyet]

I still don't see the point of making the shield, I've farmed reg HoR on my warrior (still using both 219 cloak/shield from there!) and with Catling's prot pally healing on my shitty paladin - both were relatively painless. A prot pally with 25k hp can comfortably tank reg HoR, Catling was doing it with pug healers before crit cap and my pally only had about 23k mana when I was healing her at cap. Can be annoying if you get horrid DPS, but that place is annoying with bad DPS even if you have a good tank/healer combo.

As far as cloaks go, you should be farming Ahune for that 232 cloak, easy to get and will last you until ICC/frost badge cloak. Cloaks are relatively stingy so I really like that they filled in the gap with a holiday boss, I would've farmed em all for alts already if I didn't have so much crap going on this week.

I'm in the camp of long-term value when it comes to gearing a non-raiding toon. The amount doesn't really matter, I'll gladly pay +20k for a shadow's edge that I'll use for the rest of the expansion, but don't see the point in spending 2-3k on gear that I can replace in a few weeks. At the rate Yssa's been leveling, she could spend the same time running instances and have all the triumph/heroic gear by next weekend. Even for something that's chump change (say 300g for the shield), she could buy 20 stam flasks that would last longer than the time she'd spend tanking with the shield and would be a greater boost in EHP.

Wrathblood, on 25 June 2010 - 11:17 PM, said:

reg HoR has a good shield but its prob the highest percent ninjaed item in the game right now

I see your shield and raise you a Banner of Victory + NES.

[Innocence]

I don't remember it being hard to reach crit cap on my paladin once she hit level 80

i can't remember if i had to buy very many BOE's though....

Either way I don't remember it being all that bad

and I didn't use any of the ilvl 200 epics either

[Ysaurion]

I cry every time I replace a piece of my 70 gear. This upgrading is harder than I thought.


Thanks for the advice Wrath! It's been a maze of searching through Maintankadin and trying to determine what I need to look at, especially since now there's a million similarly named pieces of gear as far as tier pieces and emblems.

Well I'm 79 and a few bubbles. Hopefully it won't be long now. Are there any kinda easy heroics with decent gear for me to cut my teeth on? (om nom nom)

[Sobeyet]

Ysaurion, on 28 June 2010 - 12:27 PM, said:

Are there any kinda easy heroics with decent gear for me to cut my teeth on? (om nom nom)

I'd actually start with regular ToC 5-man. The last guy drops The Black Heart http://www.wowhead.com/item=47216 which is a must-have for starting out, and the place is full of ilvl 200 stuff that's better than most of the gear from most heroics - http://www.wowhead.c...ops:mode=normal (legs, boots, gloves, belt) Plus it's regular, so you can just keep queuing for it.

Also, ask some guildies and blow through the 3 ICC 5-mans. You probably won't be able to queue for it, but if you form a full group you can just run into the instance. Chances are you'll get some upgrades along the way and 6 frost badges to start.

Do Ahune for the tank cloak if it's still available. If not do regular HoR once you can, cloak/shield is pretty solid.

Aside from that just use the random dungeon tool, you get 2 extra badges each run for using it.

[Innocence]

Sobe is so helpful

*pats sobe*

[Shardik]

Yssa, if/when you hit 80, let me know and I will gladly help you get anything you need. I will be your sugar daddy for gear, we can start our own show and call it "Pimp that paladin!" I am sure MTV will want to buy the rights and we both will become millionaires. But seriously, anything I can do to help let me know...even if that includes running you through HoR (*shudder*).

[Wrathblood]

Ah, didn't realize Ahune was up (that's what I get for being so out of touch). Yeah, if he drops an ilevel232 tanking cloak, I'd jump on that as fast as possible with the ilevel213 badge one as a fallback if you're unlucky.

As for the shield, I guess it depends on your perspective. Shields are enormously important for a block-tank, and when it comes to running heroics its arguably your single most important piece of gear. The one from regular HoR is clearly better than the titansteel shield wall and since its a non-heroic you can run it repeatedly, plus the regular ICC instances drop badges even though they aren't heroics. On the downside, it (like the Banner and the Scorpion) gets ninja'ed ALL THE DAMN TIME. My warrior has run regular HoR 20+ times and its been ninjaed all 4 times its dropped. There's an added minus of running regular HoR as a tank. Queues. If you queue for a random heroic as a tank, you can expect to get in instantly most of the time and certainly never have to wait for longer than a minute or two. With regular HoR, expect a 10-15 minute wait and for someone used to instant queues, its really annoying.

Something to consider when you hit 80 and get a little gear is getting Shardik et al to group with you and then head straight for the regular ICCs and run them in order. As Sobe said, you'll pick up some free frost badges and they drop ilevel219 gear even on regular which will likely all be upgrades and the group will be strong enough to carry you through even if you're severely undergeared (which you likely will be). Then when you get them done, run regular HoR repeatedly with that group until the shield drops. The runs will be quick and easy even if you're using some terrible quest shield, and the risk of someone ninjaing the shield from you drops to zero. If the shield just doesn't drop or Shardik ninja's it from you (Bears are underrated at blocking, you know) and you're looking at running random heroics with an ilevel 175 green shield, go get the Titansteel shield wall made.

As for gear from heroics, most "regular" heroics, other than the ones people have already mentioned, won't drop anything you'll use for any length of time because it'll be worse than the gear you can get with badges. TotC and the regular and heroic ICC 5 mans drop 95% of the stuff you want. Other than that, what you really want is badges, and tons of them, and the best way to get them is to run lots of random heroics with the LFD tool.