Saturday, Divergent dinged 80. I grabbed a couple pieces off the auction house and convinced Reversion to heal me through regular ToC and the three new dungeons on regular. Got some really solid drops too. After gemming and enhancements to get me to the defense cap, I decided to try a couple heroics. Reversion switched to his hunter and we got sent to Halls of Lightning.
It went well; only one wipe and that was when we got four mobs in the hall with the statues that come to life.. The shaman healer was excellent and I played it safe. Very satisfying. But while there I noticed the least effective dpser was a warrior with a gear score roughly equal to mine (a little over 3k). I was putting out 1300 dps; he was barely cracking 800. I asked if he was having trouble with a rotation. “Just need gear”, he said. And he did, true, but he could have got a lot more out of what he had.
Yeah, we’ve heard that story before, but my real point is this: I’d just run regular ToC and the Icecrown instances and the gear they dropped was better than what drops in HoL. If you’re going for badges, you need heroics, it’s true, but I ran ToC until I’d got most of the drops I wanted there. And the folks I encountered running those instances with me were generally better geared and more competent than the “bad dps” we run into in heroics all the time.
I am formulating a theory that good players gear their alts with the new high end instance, while bad players may not even know that they’d get better gear that way. Instead they ding 80 and instantly queue for heroics. So you’ll actually find few bad players in regular ToC than in H Nexus. Thoughts?
Funny story; queued Divergent to tank a random early Sunday morning before church. I get VH and start buffing people when I realize – I know that hunter. And that mage. And the dps pally too – they’re all guildmates who queued separately from me. We had a good time, even though they pulled off me from sheer dps constantly.
Even funnier story: later Sunday got into a HOK run. The druid healer, 5200 gear score first asks “Can we just do the two-bosses-and-out strategy” and then says “Oh god never mind” and drops group. I noticed one dpser had even lower gear score than mine so I’m assuming he just decided this group would be too hard to heal. Our replacement healer is a shaman with 3200 gear score (about what mine was at the time). We get through the place in close to record time, nobody dies, and we all have a blast.
I recently geared up my pally tank and it’s so so easy now. If you have friends, that is, so I don’t blame people doing random heroics instead of the new ones.
What I did was get my friends together and do a few ToC normals before 80 (pain in the ass, since I couldn’t join LFG for it). When I hit 80 I already had 2-3 epics ready to equip. Then I got myself some crafted items (245 chest and bracers) and a piece of T9 (from emblems I had saved up doing random normals). Then I did some random heroics + ICC normals with my friends, because tanking is scary and I didn’t want to be all alone with some bullies. Then, after I was mostly epic, we did the ICC heroics… I didn’t want to go in as a squishie and make the poor healers work too hard
I don’t know what the warrior meant exactly, but if I said “need more gear” I’d mean “need to run more heroics for emblems for gear”, not “I’m waiting for drops”.
Though HoL has that nice 2H from Loken my poor warrior never got when it was really good for her…
My main consideration when gearing up a character at level is determining what is the top content I want this toon to experience.
If I plan the toon to raid something higher than Naxx, I will shorten the gearing process by running ToC and the ICC instances for gear. I might even spend a few thousand to acquire a few pieces of armor.
If I plan the the toon to raid Naxx, I will use random heroics from time to time (say once or twice a week) and not buy anything significant (and only if tanking).
If I plan the toon to run the oocasional heroic, I will not buy any gear and I may (and have) disenchanted upgrades which would make me overgear the content. My wife, two friends, and I dedicate two evening a month running heroics with “fun” alts. None of the alts are wearing any epic items and we always disenchant the epics which drop. Running heroics with 4 players in greens and blues while applying CC liberally is a fun event for our small group.