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.

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…