leveling-gear
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Cataclysm's best leveling improvement: no more clown suits
One of the many nice things that Cataclysm is doing for the low-level quester is finally getting rid of the level 1 to 60 "clown suit." Every 10-level range has its own specific set of matching quest rewards, giving you a unique look every handful of zones. And they don't look half bad! In fact, some of the sets look pretty darn cool. Speaking from experience, leveling from 1 to 60 in the beta was a lot more exciting, not just due to the new quests and mechanics, but also because I couldn't wait to see what my new gear would look like when I hit a new leveling milestone. Check out the full picture with all of Cataclysm's low-level armor sets, courtesy of reader Frez, after the break.
We've got spirit, yes we do!
It's pretty routine to run across complaints in World of Warcraft communities about poor DPS showing up to PuGs. When I say poor DPS, I don't mean the unfortunate soul who just dinged 80 and is running around in greens far below their class' hit cap. You would reasonably expect someone's damage to be fairly lackluster under those circumstances even if the person concerned is a great player. By "poor DPS," I mean someone at 80 who shows up to your Naxx PuG in full epics rocking 25-man raid buffs who manages to stay alive on each boss fight with a Bloodlust/Heroism...and doesn't manage to break 4-figure DPS. I've seen it before, saw it again recently, and am fatalistic about its eventual reappearance.Questionable gemming and enchant choices tend to abound with these players, as you'd expect, and the cry of "He gemmed for Spirit!" tends to follow them around. Fair enough; it does happen, but as someone who's been leveling a platoon of alts through a sea of /headdesk pre-60 itemization, I've wondered whether the abundance of Spirit on pre-60 gear leaves newer or inexperienced players with a false impression regarding its eventual importance in the endgame. And it's easy to see how they could arrive at that conclusion; the stat is everywhere!
Heirloom items are for leveling
You've read already about Heirloom items, which were implemented in the latest beta build and are bind-to-account. You can equip them, and then when you get a replacement, send them to any alt you have on the server; the stats on the items scale with level. They're bought with heroic/raid badges, as far as I can tell. So what are these items for? My interpretation is that they're largely to help your alts level, and to give you something to do with badges if you have too many on your mains. Although the stats do scale down when you equip them on lower-level characters, they're still quite powerful items, on par blues. And here's one thing that's reinforcing that impression: I've found four Heirloom shoulders so far that give +10% experience from killing monsters. This is a great idea. You know that anyone who has these shoulders has at least one character at level 80, so why not let them level 5% faster? (5% is based on an estimate of half of one's experience being from quests and half from mobs.)
