Gear-Guides
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The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new level 80 tankadin
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon an entire flight of black dragons. The quiet before the storm. This is period of time where people are losing interest in their current characters and either start playing less or trying out one of their alts. As such, we've been getting a lot of requests for guides during the end of expansion lull. One of the requests we got last week was a gear guide to your up-and-coming level 80 protection paladin. Whether you're catching up an old character or rolling a new 'toon to try your hand at tanking, we'll show you where to get started.
Lichborne: Gearing for new level 80 DPS death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at death knight news, guides, tips and tricks. So you've just dinged level 80. Now what? If you're lucky, you've saved up a few Emblems of Triumph from random dungeon finder runs -- but for now, you're new, you're only halfway geared and you want to start running the dungeon finder as soon as possible so you can see the Lich King die before Cataclysm hits. How do you do that? Let's give you a few tips and a list of gear to shoot for to get you in top pre-raid shape.
Lichborne: Icecrown 5-man gear for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly look into the world of the death knight. This week, we're mostly waiting for the cold front to come in, but we got some other stuff we can talk about for sure. While we've all been waiting for Patch 3.3.3 to drop so we can decide if we're respeccing frost or not, It's become a pretty slow time in the death knight world. Debates continue on the best frost specs, whether Will of the Necropolis is worth getting now or even makes Blood the best tank spec, and so on and so forth, of course, so it's not completely quiet, but I've said my two cents on most of that before. It occurs to me, though, that I haven't really taken a good look at the Icecrown 5-mans for loot and opportunities for death knights. So for all my more casual and upcoming death knight friends, this one's for you.
Spiritual Guidance: ICC-25 gear guide for holy and discipline priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. As promised, today I will be discussing 25-man Icecrown Citadel loot in a special edition of Spiritual Guidance. Additionally, I will be giving my assessments on tier 10 set bonuses for those of you who are still deciding how to spend your badges. Finally, I'll be offering up the counter arguments that readers left for the 'who to gear first' debate from Sunday's column. We have a lot of things to discuss, so let's jump right into it!
Totem Talk: Patch 3.1 Shaman Gear Part 4
One of the interesting things about new content is the transitional period as you clear the new bosses and start gearing up. Pictured alongside today's column is an illustration of that process, as Tier 7 blends into Tier 8 and Calamity's Grasp is paired with Vulmir. Myself, I've mostly been screaming "Why won't you drop" again, as I so often do (I have terrible loot luck) at various healing rings, trinkets, necks, and shields. Having recently healed my first 25 man since I switched from resto to elemental in SSC, I've also found that I hate spirit with a passion. Why there has been no effort to make spirit more useful for shamans as casters or healers, I can't tell you, because it's on every freaking thing. Yes, it helps on mana regeneration out of combat and if you can take five seconds in combat, but otherwise it's totally useless for shamans. Doesn't increase spell power or crit or do anything, really, just sits there like a less effective version of MP5. (And at least at my current gear and comfort level for healing, I don't spend a lot of time standing around not casting healing spells unless I'm forced to by the dreaded OOM.) Every time I see a healing weapon with spirit on it I want to go back in time and stab myself. I don't know what that would accomplish, exactly, but that's how much I hate spirit. I'd really like to see a talent in either mid-level elemental or restoration (resto would be better, and if it was fairly low in the tier elemental could pick it up too) that made spirit actually useful for shamans, but I'm not holding my breath.This is why I almost always wait for a shield instead of picking up a spell offhand.And now, on to our show, looking at the items that as of now we know about in Ulduar.
Totem Talk: 3.1 Shaman Gear Part 2
So it's been a heady week for us all. I was wrong about the patch dropping this week, and have since respecced my shaman resto in order to begin tackling Ulduar - 10 as a healer. Things I have learned healing in Ulduar - 10? I am not geared enough to heal in Ulduar yet. Razorscale likes to hit me with fireballs. Perhaps someone told him about my not being geared enough. Ignis likes to put me in his slag pot. See Razorscale. XT - 002 makes me the Gravity Bomb constantly. Overall it's been an interesting couple of days. Since I've been running the instance on two different toons and on two different levels (10 and 25 man) the whole thing seems to blur together in my head, but so far I'm enjoying Ulduar. XT - 002's voice alone was worth the price of admission. Sadly the instance has been very unstable (on Norgannon at least) so the four bosses in the entrance zone (the Colossal Forge, according to the teleporter) are the only ones I've gotten to see personally. I did get to float around for three hours with Chain Heal casting endlessly at one point, that was interesting in an extremely boring way. Last week we talked about 10 and 25 man tier gear in Ulduar. This week, we'll try and cover as much of everything else as we can. There's a lot to cover (and more all the time) so we'll just have to do the best we can, starting with the new Emblem of Conquest gear.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Raiding Gear Pt. II
We got half-way through our available raid content last time we talked about raiding gear. Since the next big topic I intend to cover is stances and their current implementation, and since this column is a day late, I decided to finish up the topic before moving into one as controversial as stance penalties. This week we'll talk about armor, rings, trinkets and necklaces for both tanks and DPS in Naxxramas (or Naxxaramas, as my subconscious insists on misspelling it) and then we'll discuss Malygos and what booty he has in store for warriors if there's room.Before we get going, I wanted to point out that in the most recent PTR patch notes, the change to Sudden Death (where no more than 30 rage is used on a Sudden Death execute) has been implemented, but there is as yet no change to Deep Wounds. This doesn't mean there won't be one, but for now it's not part of the notes, so it's possible any such change won't take place in time for 3.0.8 depending on when that happens. (Basically, if the patch happens this week we're probably clear until 3.1.) To be honest, I don't like the reasoning for the change, that Deep Wounds damage is too high because it is damage unmitigated by armor, especially since (as many prot warriors reminded me in the column where I first mentioned it) it's used as a source of constant threat by a lot of tanking warriors. Since Deep Wounds puts a DoT on anyone the warrior crits, and tanks have a high crit chance with abilities like Incite, it's not hard for a warrior tank to get Deep Wounds up on a lot of mobs at once and thus keep ticking threat on them even when focusing on other mobs. Any change to Deep Wounds needs to keep this use of the talent in mind. (I went and specced prot for a heroic Utgarde run the other day just to try it out, and it's fantastic threat. It even seems to work when Thunder Clap crits.) We'll definitely be watching how this all plays out.On to gear!
Wrath of the Lich King: Warrior roundup
Wrath of the Lich King. It's here. You're ready. At least, you think you're ready. You recall the last time we all went off to a new place to kick some butt, some guy said something about not being prepared, and you don't want to be unprepared. So let's go over all the coverage we've done on the site that might be of interest to you.Talents and Skills The Most Recent Changes - What do your skills and abilities currently do? Here's the skinny. Protection - how will the spec perform in Northrend? Pretty dang well, it turns out. DPS warriors - If you like to smash things we covered how to go about doing that. Skill Mastery covered Damage Shield, Shockwave and Bloodsurge, three new warrior abilities. Leveling Builds Try out a Prot Grinding Build - 0/8/53 for soloing groups of mobs as well as tanking. This Fury/Prot build brings Titan's Grip with a touch of Improved Thunder Clap and Incite for moderate tanking viability and damage. Here's a heavy Arms build - substitute your weapon specialization of choice. Gearing guides We've looked at where to get gear for your warrior - parts one, two, three, four and five. Hopefully this will get you started in Northrend. Have fun killing things and taking their stuff!
