What’s this about?
In leveling 2 characters of my own to 70, and helping others to gear up theirs, I have picked up one or two things about investing time and effort in your character to make it raid-ready. Although not everyone will agree with me; if you don’t have the time to run instances day-in-day out, and you don’t have insane amounts of cash, or time to gather materials – this guide might be of help to you.
Why should I invest time in my characters gear for raids?
Raiding is all about teamwork. And for that team to be able to beat content without being over-geared, everyone in that team has to pull their own weight as much as they possibly can. One of these bags you have to carry is having gear with the right stats at an appropriate level. If you invest time and effort into your gear, and invest in wiping and learning new content, beating it will be much more satisfactory than actually looting the purple items.
Where were we…
You’re level 70 (or perhaps level 80) and you feel the need to optimize your gear for end-game raiding content. You’ve done some quests and instances here and there, but nothing constructive, as you just wanted the XP to level. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you’re a DPS class, or have specced DPS for the purpose of leveling, the fastest way you can level, is through quests. And questing fortunately is not always gear-dependent; you do not need that fancy Rare blue item from instance X, or that expensive craftable item.
Where to start?
Gearing up is all about “Tweaking” the stats that are important to your class and role that you will be filling on raids. If gearing up would be about getting the best possible gear in the game, Blizzard would have removed all other gear and made your character stats constant, but it’s not like that.
The key to tweaking your gear in as little time as possible, your best bet is to stay offline for a moment and search the web as to where you might be able to get upgrades. Websites like Wowarmory, Thotbott and Wowhead all have special search-pages where you can find upgrades for a certain slot.
… wait a minute, those websites also say I need to farm instance/heroic XYX!
Yes, but they’re wrong. The thing you should know about those websites is that they compare items by the ItemLevel. Theoretically, the higher the iLvl, the better the item, because higher stat numbers are included into that item. This however isn’t always the case, and if you really want to be raid ready as soon as possible, just forget about the iLvls, and concentrate on the stats you need.
So what am I searching for?
You have to search Specifically for Quest Rewards, and the specific slot. Start with the slot that you think has the poorest stats of all.
Let me make it easy for you, the two hardest slots to fill for any class are; wrist, waist and trinket. After those come shoulders, head and hands, and only after that comes the other slots.
Example?
Say you’re the proud owner of a Astralaan Belt of the Invoker and you never found a replacement up until you leveled to 70. You shouldn’t be ashamed of owning it, it’s really not that bad of an item. But you can tweak that slot.
Search your replacement with this link. If you want it for another slot, locate the slot in the menu, and make sure you add and apply the filter that says “Rewarded by a quest? Yes!”.
Click on Level to sort by iLvl, just in case you get some really bad items in between the good ones.
Go through the list Manually, and Ignore everything that has an instance mentioned. Naxxramas? Ignore. Mana-Tombs? Ignore. If you want to be even more wise, just ignore all Blue/Rare items. Even though the best item will probably be A’dal’s Gift or Akama’s Sash – they’re not the easiest items to obtain as they involve long quest-chains and instances (in these cases Botanica, Mechanar and Arcatraz).
Decide what you’re looking for the most part, are you into Spelldamage and Stamina, do you want Spellcrit, do you want Intellect, do you want more spirit for mana regen?
One of the options is a very special item called Grom’tor’s Bloodied Bandage. If you click on it, you’ll see it’s a reward from a quest. Click the Quest and you’ll see in which chain it lies. Click on the 1st quest in the chain (Grom’tor, Son of Oronok) and check in the comments if you need to do a prequest, and there are (startpoint is The Hand of Gul’Dan). Do you have time for that lengthy questchain? If no is the answer to that question, go back to your searchpage.
How about Chief Engineer’s Belt? Trace it back, and you’ll notice a questchain that is easily done in under 30 minutes (You’re Hired!) which happens to reward you with another tough slot to fill: Junior Technician 3rd Grade Goggles.
Am I really prepared for raiding with a crappy Green questitem?
I’m sorry, but the colour of your gear has nothing to do with the level of content you are prepared for. It’s not like you’ll be raiding Sunwell anytime soon, but this item will be your next direct upgrade, and with that crappy green item you support your team the Best way you can without having to gamble and waste time on special instance drops.
Any other hints?
If you’re a dps class, look into stats like Hit and Spellhit rating, they can help you optimize your dps when AP, crit or spellpower fail to do their jobs. If you’re a tank, Defense before you go anywhere dangerous, but I’m not going to bore you with the details – as they’re widely spread amongst many blogs already.
So should I replace item X for item Y, which one is better?
I’ll go into that in the next part of the guide I plan to write.
