While I’ve been leveling this character I’ve been attempting to read guides on what to do when I hit 80 but it seems like the guides on wowhead and icy-veins are written assuming you already have a somewhat decent understanding of the gearing process in wrath, so for someone like me that has -ZERO- idea about the process its all gibberish to me.
Could someone give some advice for a complete wrath newbie on where to start once I hit 80? My end goal would be to see ICC, I’m an enhancement shaman and I have leatherworking for what it matters.
Gold can get you pretty far both from the AH and gdkp, assuming you don’t have a lot of that you probably will just have to grind up the difficulty ladder in 5 mans. It isn’t as bad as it sounds though. In combo with the drops you can also earn currency along the way at certain points that can get you really powerful pieces of gear.
Step 2: Enter heroic dungeons until you have 232 ToC set from vendor in Dalaran or outside trial of the crusader entrance. (Optional - pvp to about 35k honor for furious set to replace the weak gear you got while leveling, this will be replaced by 232 ToC set)
Step 3: Continue running heroics to buy rings, trinkets ect, you may have to use a pvp weapon for awhile this is understandable, it will be replaced at some point.
Step 4: Consider spending gold to buy crafted items of higher ilvl, now that you’re fully geared from heroics or enter Gamma dungeons to move up in ilvl.
Would it be cheaper to buy crafted gear straight up or craft it myself? I dont mind either realistically but wanna knoe which one wont impact my wallet as much.
Some items will be 5000 gold or so now which is a good deal others will be 20k+ if you’re already leveling the profession and will be able to learn the recipe to do it yourself, then making it yourself will be cheaper but more time consuming. Many of the best recipes but not all will be raid drops from kills, you may be able to join ICC rep farm groups eventually once you’re mostly geared from heroics and gamma and just kill trash at the start to eventually be able to buy from the vendor the ICC patterns.
Gamma dungeons will offer many good ulduar and ToC items through the vendor currency so if you feel pressed for gold then don’t sweat it.
Typically it’s not very expensive to level professions but it can take awhile to completely max it out, not a big deal it’s something else to focus on if you’re feeling burned out from running heroics.
Run Heroics but not Heroic FOS or POS as too many low gs level folks get in those through group finder and make the runs fail. Once you get your gs up (use taco tool) past 4k then run regular heroic FOS and POS for great drops and it will cover both daily runs (heroic and titan) for frost/triumph badges.
I would just get the 232 ilevel pvp set and just cue for daily gamna dungeons until you have replaced your pvp epics with normal epics from badges and drops.
I got to 242 in a week on my shaman, if you’re on a high pop server the boes from dungeons sell for like 20-50g per epic, get as many as you can find for you spec.
From 78-80 do the intro to icecrown until you save the argent camp from attack for a decent trinket, then go to storm peaks until you unlock hodir.
You can start pre 80 but every 3 hours of the day WG goes on which is an easy 8k+ honor for 15 minutes. Do that, buy the wrathful cloak, neck and ring from your city. Dont bother with deadly armor as its replaced from regular heroic gear, but you can get it last if you have excess honor.
Once you can queue for regular heroics just do those. If youre lucky you may find a tank thats starting the icc dungeon quests in fos and be able to run all 3 with a smooth group. Otherwise they’ll be rough if you get them. Queue for regular toc and heroic toc dungeon, it gives really good catchup gear and you can spam normal. I wouldn’t bother queueing gamms until you’re like 225 ilvl.
I wouldn’t bother with 238 set unless you’re trying to spoof your gearscore. It performs at 200-213. But they’re really cheap, and 213 performance is better than blues I guess. I’d go for 264 pvp offpieces though, which perform at around 240, more than you need for gammas. It also spoofs gearscore as a side effect without being useless. You can get all of these pretty quickly (about 2 hours aggregate playtime) from wintergrasp and related quests.
For trinkets, the appropriate 245 battlemasters are the most efficient thing you can get until you can get into gammas (low amount of honor), and they’ll quickly get replaced by 225’s and whatever scourgestone trinkets you’re saving for (DC, solace, runestone, reign, flare, comet etc)
Go to wowhead and do an item search. Filter for 225 minimum ilvl, and bind on equip. Lots of 225 and 232, even some specific 245’s are going for very cheap on the AH. Alot of them are a couple hundred gold each. If one you like is too expensive just put it off till later.
Join ICC rep runs early in the week to get ashen band. The rep runs will die out as the week progresses, and people get saved to their respective ICC runs that kill bosses. Even the friendly 251 ring performs at 255, they’re all very well allocated statwise.
From a respectable gs baseline (spoofed or unspoofed) you can gear to non-spoofed 5.5k from RDF gammas alone if you want. Even when you’re still like 4.5k gs, before you can reliably do RDF without getting kicked left and right, you will be able to complete your daily gamma quests. Just queue for forge of souls, in and out 8 mins. There are also still TOGCs scattered here and there, not that reliable though. Join some 25s with appropriate number of hardmodes. Start out with the runs going 3 hardmodes, and move up in quality (the 3 hardmode runs will naturally be progressing themselves up in quality as well week by week)