Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Gearing Up... WOTLK edition

As I am getting closer to 80 (yeah, I know... the flu bug hit me, whatever), I've started looking at all of my gear options. One of the big priorities is to get spell hit capped, or at least to approach it somewhat.

Without me having to write up a whole post on spell hit for mages, go check out Spicy Tuna's post on it. Basically, since I don't usually have a Boomkin with Improved Faerie Fire, nor a Shadow Priest with Misery, and my Dranei Elemental Shaman is now a Death Knight, I have to rely on my own talents and gear for a 14% miss rate (instead of 17%) with Elemental Precision. That means, that I need in the neighborhood of 368 spell hit to guarantee a spell hit against a boss.

368? Are you kidding me? That's a lot of hit! I'm currently at 197, and I've replaced very few pieces of gear since 70. Furthermore, a lot of my stuff is still gemmed for Arcane (Intellect and Mana Regen), so I could regem stuff since I'll either be staying Frost, or more likely going back to Fire with a side of Frost. But I also started looking at items that will help me upgrade quickly once the level restriction on items is no longer an issue.

I'm still a firm believe in Rawr, but I've fallen back on MaxDps.com a bit. Although with Rawr's latest patch of 3.1.4, they've put in filters to make it a bit more appealing again. There's still too many combination of gems if you ask me. I'm trying to look for the best item to upgrade to; that's the hard part. I'll plunk down whatever money I need to for the gems and enchants after that.

I'm not entirely sure MaxDPS has it right now either. They used to heavily lean on + hit, and now it seems like they're more towards haste. But it's still a good tool to start your search. As soon as you're running Naxx, you'll be replacing gear anyway.

So, with that said, there's a couple things that might be easy for you to get before you start your first raid.

Emeline's Locket
is a guaranteed item since it's a quest reward from The Admiral Revealed. Sure you have to get a group together for the quest... and it's a fairly long "chain" if you consider all of the Icecrown quests you need to do. But after my recommendation, you were already questing there anyway, right?

The next item I would look at is the Dark Runic Mantle. It's a BoE off the Dark Runic people in Heroic Halls of Stone. You can also pick it up from the AH if you just want to give up the money. There's no + hit on this one, but it's a pretty solid shoulder piece.

As a mage, the Shroud of Dedicated Research should probably be one of your easiest upgrades. It requires you to be Honored with the Kirin Tor, and I believe we start out as friendly with them anyway. Yes, there's other upgrades, but it's a decently solid item.

I have a few options for my chest piece. I figured I'd start off with the Black Duskweave Robe since I have the mats and need to level tailoring. Then I'll upgrade that to the Robes of Lightning for the + hit (it's a quest reward for running Halls of Lightning). But then I'd really like to upgrade my chest piece to the Water-Drenched Robe which is a drop from Ichoron in Heroic Violet Hold.

So, those are some of my pre-Naxx choices. I'll take a look at some more options and let you know what I come up with. There's a lot of other options, and a lot of better ones as well, but I figured that all of these (except for the Water-Drenched Robes) were pretty eash for just about anyone to get. See? I can be "casual friendly".

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