How to Rest on Your Laurels

OG Cardwyn is finished, gear-wise, for Classic Era. That's not exactly a surprise to anyone who knows that this particular toon was there to see Kel'Thuzad die*, and she had enough DKP at the end of Vanilla Classic to splurge and get the full T3 set.**

Okay, so she didn't get the Wraith Blade, which was BiS if you weren't in line to get the Atiesh legendary staff, but that's not a big deal. I think our raid team had more Atiesh staves created (2) at the end of Vanilla Classic than Wraith Blade drops (1), and that's saying a lot about the quality of our raid drops.

The traditional World of Warcraft reason why someone would want to play a toon, to get gear and/or complete a raid, is not really there. And if I were the sort to stand around and show off my stuff, I'd not be hanging out in Darnassus, the least active Alliance city, like I traditionally do. 

But I do spend a decent amount of my time in Classic Era logged in to her.

***

OG Cardwyn, the Evil Twin, does have her uses. Okay, 90% of the time those uses involve her being used as a DPS mule...

The Good Twin could have handled this fight
too, but due to the punier damage and smaller
mana pool would it have been more of a challenge.

...but I don't mind. While it's nice to see enemies melt a lot faster than on the Good Twin, the main reason to bring OG Cardwyn to a fight is because her mana pool is large enough that I don't have to drink to recover mana nearly as much.

***

Honestly, I prefer to simply do things on the Good Twin simply because I like Frost Mages better than Fire Mages. I could change the Evil Twin to being a Frost Mage, but... Eh, I don't mind having two mages with two separate specializations. If I ever wanted to join an AQ40 or Naxxramas raid, the Evil Twin is available for use. And given that I figure the best geared I can get the Good Twin while still remaining as a Frost Mage is the gear out of AQ40***, I'm kind of fine with how things are as-is. 

Is there anything I might want, or want to do in Classic Era, Mage-wise? Trying for Atiesh, maybe?

Eh, no thanks. 

There are three four reasons for that lack of interest in the original caster legendary staff:

• To get in line for Atiesh, I would have to join a raid team actively raiding Naxxramas and likely raid twice a week at minimum to get in line for Atiesh. I really don't have the time I can presently dedicate to raiding at that level, hardcore or not, so it'd be silly to sign up and then have to constantly put myself on the bench.
  
  
• If I want to get Atiesh, I have to prove myself to any prospective raid team. Just because I have the gear doesn't mean that I'm "good enough" to get to the front of the line for Atiesh. After all, I was Fourth out of Six Mages, DPS-wise, and of the three Atiesh staves that our raid team eventually built our top Mage was actually the last of the three people to receive their Atiesh, that coming after the Dark Portal opened.**** If I wanted to justify receiving an Atiesh, I would have to do more than just show up and do my job; I'd have to get sweaty, and I'm not doing that.
  
  
• This is admittedly personal, but I think that Atiesh looks as ugly as hell; until I examined it more closely I thought it was a walking stick with a sulfur ball stuck on the end of it. 
  
  
  

  

  Kind of like this, but without James Burke.
  A screencap from Connections Episode 2,
  "Death in the Morning", at roughly 28:03.

  
  I now know that's it's a carving of a raven on top, but it still looks ugly to me. 
  
  
• I really just don't want it and everything it represents. I'm one of those people who zig when everybody zags, and I look at Atiesh and instead of looking at the staff as an achievement I think of all of the politics that have to be played to actually get one. For my money, I'd rather keep my hands clean and pass on all of that crap.*****

***

So, I've got a toon that doesn't really "need" anything. But I do login as her and just hang out; watching the chat channels, buffing baby Night Elf characters as they run by, and helping out my friends as-needed. And that's fine; I don't have to be doing anything when I login, and I've found that I derive a lot of joy from merely being present in the game. 

*Just how many times had he died canonically? Three? Four? I'm thinking three, unless he makes a reappearance in WoW after the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

**For reference, the full Tier 3 sets for Vanilla Classic are different than that in subsequent raid tiers in that the full set is nine pieces, including the ring that you can get as a drop. The so-called 'full set bonus' is for eight pieces; while OG Cardwyn does have all nine pieces, she isn't wearing the belt as the belt that came out of AQ40 is better for Fire Mages.

***For the most part, the three piece Bloodvine set are the best Chest, Legs, and Boots until a Mage reaches AQ40 and gains access to the (so-called) Tier 2.5 gear, the Enigma Set. Typically, that's also when a Mage will switch from Frost specialization to Fire due to the inherent bonuses with stacking several Fire Mages together. That being said, I know of some guild raid teams who let people bring their Frost Mages into AQ40 and Naxxramas. That latter one does puzzle me quite a bit, given that Frost is definitely at a disadvantage there in the same way that a Fire Mage has real damage problems in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. But hey, those guilds are sticking to their "bring the class/spec you want" credo.

**** Yes, a Warlock and a Resto Druid were ahead of all of the Mages. Typically a person tagged to receive Atiesh is not merely the highest DPS or healer, but performs services to the guild above and beyond the average raider. In the case of the first two Atiesh staves, they went to a co-Guild Leader and the Guild Officer who ran all of the non-progression raids for the guild.

*****You are talking to someone who had an Onyxia Head in OG Card's bank that I'd completely forgotten about. I rediscovered it in Era while I was moving items around to free up some bank space, and when I mentioned the head to my Questing Buddy, she told me "I'm not surprised."

EtA: Corrected a few sentences.

#Blaugust2024

On The Runway

The comments began almost as soon as Cardwyn set foot in Alterac Valley.

I figured that I might as well stick my nose in there, since my other two L70s that I intend to play in Wrath Classic were already fairly well geared, and Cardwyn 2.0 wasn't quite to L70 yet. After all, I discovered that OG Cardwyn's Tier 3 set had far more spellpower than a Mage in Outland quest gear reaching max level, so why not use it in Alterac Valley? 

I made sure I had all of her T3
gear on for this screencap. Check
out the 631 SP...

...compared to Neve's. Alas that
this isn't a perfect match, as I'd
apparently deleted her bracers already.

If nothing else, the biggest drawback is that Resilience, the thing that keeps Mages from being ultra squishy in Battlegrounds, is only found on PvP gear, so I'd have to deal with that no matter what gear I chose to take into Alterac Valley.

TL/DR; I was gonna die a lot.

Here's the proof that yes, OG Cardwyn
was in Alterac Valley. This screencap was
originally for some of the guild names, but...

What I wasn't prepared for, however, were the comments.

That first Alterac Valley match I followed the crowd and then piled into one of the first towers with a group to try to capture it.* I'd restored my mana, put up my shield again, and was watching just outside the tower for the counterattack that I knew the Horde had to be getting ready for, when I saw someone /say out loud:

"HOLY SHITBALLS, A FULL NAXX SET!"

I was kind of shocked and surprised by that; so much so that I forgot to take a screencap. After all, quite a few progression raiding teams did make it to the end to kill Kel'Thuzad in WoW Classic; far more than ever did in Vanilla. 

"Oh," I replied, remembering my manners, "thanks! This was my old main, hence the set."

"Yeah, but that's awesome!"

It was then that I realized that I had a skewed viewpoint of how WoW Classic ended. Because I was on a progression raiding team that did complete Naxx, I was still in elite company despite appearances --and YouTube videos-- because a lot of people never got to the end of Naxxramas even in Classic. 

"Well," I added, "it was surprisingly good all the way through to L70, much better than quest greens."

"Makes sense."

I figured that was just a one-off comment by a person who'd never had a chance to get into Naxx, until the next Alterac Valley match.

"Wow, nice gear!" a Warrior said.

And the next.

"Nice set," a Priest told me.

And so on and so forth.

A few people were curious as to what my main in TBC Classic was, and once they found out it was an Enhancement Shaman they just wanted to "talk shop" about all things Shamans. That was fine with me, since it meant they weren't drooling over my T3 set.

I told him I didn't know, but probably so.
The big thing for Shamans in Wrath is
one-click four totem throwdown.

Still, I should have known that this would probably happen, but I guess it was going to happen no matter where I took OG Cardwyn, since she was going to need gear regardless.

"What about your... Oh.
Well, you are an adult, so if you
like it, I guess that's fine..."

::sigh:: "You make a very valid point.
Having watched my own children become
adults, however, I have to acknowledge that
they have their own choices of clothing
that are frequently sexier than I am used to.
So it would only make sense that you, Card,
would have similar opinions."

As well as Deuce.

Oh. Crap.

*If you're not used to Alterac Valley, the ultimate goal is to win by either a) killing the enemy General or b) wearing the other side down by eliminating upwards of 600 reinforcements (player kills). You can essentially kill two birds with one stone by capturing a tower or bunker: each tower has an elite mini-boss associated with it in the end room where the enemy general is, and each tower/bunker is worth about 60-80 reinforcements. So if you capture a tower, you kill off the mini-boss AND you eliminate a bunch of reinforcements. Since there are four towers/bunkers to a side, there's plenty of ground to cover in a 40 v 40 match if you want to capture and/or defend the fortifications.

Close to the Vest My Ass

 I, uh, made an oopsie last night.

No, I didn't pull aggro*, and we were finally able to down Sapphiron. And I landed the T3 robe as well. (Cost me about all my DKP, though.)

But it was after, when a raid friend and I were chatting back and forth and the talk turned to BC that I slipped up. I'd mentioned that I was thinking about cloning Card so that a version of her could remain on a Vanilla Classic server forever, which my friend was thinking of doing too, but then my friend asked me about mains in BC. 

I admitted that I didn't know for sure what I might do, and that I might even end up switching to Horde as a main, which shocked him. I had to explain that my first two toons I leveled [to completion] in Wrath were Blood Elves, and I do know that I'm likely to create a BC Classic version of them. Whether they'll be just an alt or whether I'll make them my mains remains to be seen, however.

Oh well. If word gets around that Card is "going to the dark side", I'll have earned that.

***

Given that I got the Mage T3 robe, my current robe, the one I've dubbed the Spider-mage robe, isn't going to be on me for that much longer. Still, I really love the look and feel of it:

Azshara was empty the night I was
playing around with the look. I'm not one
to do this sort of thing while there's a crowd.

The official name of the robe is the Crystal Webbed Robe that drops off of Maexxna, and according to sixtyupgrades.com it's the second best Mage robe in Classic at the moment. ** However, the personality of this robe is something that you'd think Spider-woman or Spider-Gwen (both from the Marvel Universe) would wear. 

It just has that awesome look like something
that Ashley Eckstein would design.

 

It was while I was screwing around in Azshara with the look of the robe that I discovered that, much like the superheroes I could see wearing it, the Spider-mage robe has a dual identity.

I was wearing an orange shirt underneath the robe, but since orange looks perfect with the aesthetic I never paid it any mind. However, if you look closely at the chest of the first pic you can see where there are a few cross stitching marks where some lacing is. That got me curious, so I took off the orange shirt, and when I did I blurted out "holy shit!"

Uh.... Card?
When did you grow up so fast?

Card turned into a vixen.

Complete with backless look...

...and matching side boob and
spiderweb / fishnet pantyhose
on the arms.

Even in my dreams I wasn't expecting this.

Now, I'll freely admit that Card looks awesome in both looks, but the Spider-vixen look was truly shocking. And I'm not going to say that Blizz shouldn't have designed it this way, but as was pointed out by another friend who I showed this... transformation... to, Blizz does have a history of presenting female gear very differently than male gear. To her (and me), it was the overall lack of choice on a lot of the gear that annoyed her.***

At least with the Crystal Webbed Robe I had the choice to put an orange shirt on and turn Card into a budding superhero, rather than a femme fatale out of Azeroth After Dark.****

And yes, I'm going to keep the Spider-mage robe in my pack, just so I can put it on from time to time to hang around Stormwind or something. Maybe I should make a "vixen" look too, but I don't think I'm ready for that side of Card yet.

*Thanks to an Ignite I got to the top of the aggro stack on Thaddius, even though I'd stopped casting, and the Mage Lead was calling for a drop of Ignite. Luckily the main tank was able to taunt off me, but I didn't touch my cast bar at all until at least one other tank got past me on threat. That was an anxious 10 seconds there, let me tell you, and that was right after we'd been given a lecture about managing threat by the Raid Lead. I wish I could take credit for the aggro, but I had little to do with it. I wasn't even up high until aggro on the MT got shaky and suddenly it was one person, then a second, and then me atop the aggro stack. But we didn't wipe and we only lost one or two people on Thad total.

**The T3 Mage robe is currently best in slot.

***At least this isn't TERA or some other Korean MMO, where this look would be considered tame.

****Knowing Rule 34, Azeroth After Dark is likely a thing. But I'm stating here for the record that I'm not gonna search for it. Nope nope nope.... Okay, whew. It isn't a thing after all. Actually, I'm quite surprised.

EtA: Fixed a clarity mistake and "shirt", not "robe".

Getting Rid of the Blur

The past 3-4 weeks have been a bit of a blur.

Learning to play a Fire Mage, running raids I've never (or almost never) seen before, and trying to get geared enough to be useful have been akin to my head spinning around on a turntable like a Dee-lite video.

Groove is in the Heart,
featuring homeboy Bootsy Collins.

However, the longer my raiding has gone on, the more I've wondered just how much of my output is decided by gear and how much by skill. 

Okay, let's be real for a second: you have to know what the hell you're doing if you want to be useful in any group format in WoW. I don't mean that you have to know the entire rotation like the back of your hand, but you have to realize that --for instance-- if you're attacking a mob that has fairly low health, spamming Fireball isn't your best option. For one, it takes forever (3.5 seconds) to cast, and 3.5 seconds is a looong time for a cast on a trash mob. At that point, you're much better off spamming Scorch (1.5 second cast) to at least get some damage on a mob before they're cut down. So, that's the sort of basic understanding about your class that I'm aiming for here: once you get these basics down, you're 75% of the way there to maximizing your DPS output from skill. 

Yes, you can practice and improve your output from there, but I think at this point you get more bang for the buck by improving your gear. 

And using Cardwyn as an example, boy did my gear need improvement.

***

In order to understand the impact on gear, let me show you where Card stood when she was convinced to join the AQ40 raid:

From sixtyupgrades.com.
I can thank the Mage Lead for showing me the site.

Um, yeah. I wasn't kidding when I said I wasn't ready for Blackwing Lair, much less AQ40.

The nice thing about Sixty Upgrades is that with a click you can see the impact of an upgrade on your gear. For example, clicking on the Star of Mystara (which I held onto because of the plus to hit) gives you this:

Yikes. The Star of Mystara doesn't
even the Top 6.

The table is easy to understand. The left column is the name of the piece, the middle is the impact the gear on the Fire Spec, and the right column is where the gear can be found. If you hover over the middle column, it gives you the details in the bonuses (Spell Power, Int, Hit, etc.) 

What I did was target gear that were (relatively) quick upgrades that had a big impact. Like that silly looking turban from Upper Blackrock Spire, that you'll never ever ever see Card wearing with "Show Helm" active. Or that Robe of the Archmage that I had in my bank, which (ironically enough) has better spell power than even the T2 Netherwind Robe. Or the Fire Wand I had (also in my bank) that gives a better boost than the wand I'd been using. 

Combine all this with a few lucky rolls and drops in MC and BWL and my gear looked a bit more, well, raid worthy.

The net result was that my output went up by a decent amount over the next few weeks, something like 18-20% per week.

That was just gear, mind you, because I don't think I've gotten that much better at handling "Fiery Cardwyn" over the past few weeks than my first week or so running with the spec.

***

I suppose you could say that both gear and skill have their upper limitations; gear has a hard upper limit while skill doesn't. But skill produces diminishing returns the higher up in skill you go. The effort it takes to go from 0 - 75% is less time than to go from 75% to 90%, because you have to work longer and harder to raise your skill to that sort of level. 

Gear is just a time grind without any performance pressure: you put in the time and the drops will come. Skill is a time grind as well, but one with no set ending: you're kind of limited by your physical skillset, and the older you get the greater the limitations.

But for me, gear had the biggest impact on my performance in raids. I'm still bringing up the rear in the Mage Crew, but the gap has lessened considerably. I can now focus on skill without worrying about being such a liability compared to before, and because I've gotten a bunch of easy upgrades I can now focus on specific ones that I can target in Molten Core that have a big bang-for-the-buck to them. 

Overall, things are much less chaotic and overwhelming. For which I'm eternally grateful.

One Little Add-on That Changed WoW Forever

I was speaking with Shintar* recently when she pointed out that I worry too much about gear.

/raises hand 

Yes, that's me. I'm guilty.

But in that moment I realized something. I began playing WoW during Wrath, and if there was one hallmark of Wrath --outside of the destruction that raiding in Wrath caused to many guilds-- it was the omnipresent Gear Score.

Does anybody else remember the Trade Chat entries for ICC pugs to be something like "LFR ICC 10-man. GS 5000+ pst"? That magical 5000 Gear Score became a barrier to people getting into ICC and other raids, because it boiled down your gear, your skill, and your class to a mere number that people could point to and determine your raid worthiness.  I seem to recall that 5000+ meant at least a full T9 set, and probably at least one or two T10 pieces, which really meant you were capable of grinding 5-man dailies over a period of a couple of months. 

Skill? No.

Talent Spec? No.

Knowledge of the fights? No.

But you've got that gear, man.....

Blizzard indirectly encouraged the GS domination by having their own internal method of determining your "fitness" for entering the ICC 5-man instances via the LFG tool. Once you got past a certain point, and I think it was around the 3000+ GS, you could get into the Frozen Halls instances. I remember quite clearly when The Forge of Souls popped up for me, and I promptly freaked out. I was kind of expecting something more tame, such as Ajol-Nerub, but nope. 

"WTF is this?" I remembered whispering Soul back then.

"It means that you've high enough gear score to get into the endgame instances," he replied. "Congrats!"

I wasn't that thrilled, as it was a whole new set of strats to learn, and I knew I was starting at the bottom once more.

And the flaws of LFG had already begun to rear their ugly head, as one of the players I'd ported in with promptly dropped group, and this was on an instance with endgame implications and gear designed to get you ICC ready.

That sort of behavior sticks with you, and you wonder what you did wrong.

***

I guess I'd completely buried those experiences in Wrath somewhere deep inside my psyche, but I can still see a direct correlation between those experiences pugging via LFG and my behavior today, both the good and the bad. Every time you'd get The Old Kingdom as an instance, there would be at least one person who would drop as they couldn't be bothered to deal with a "long" instance when all they wanted was their daily badges. And every time I saw that behavior, I'd resolve that I'd never be "that guy" who put themselves over the group. 

But it also does explain my obsession with making sure my gear is "good enough", because I was once on the receiving end of being judged purely based on what I carried with me into a fight, not how well I performed in the fight. 

It's kind of bizarre when you think about it, because this is simply the same "judging" behavior from middle school and high school, picked up and transferred wholesale into an MMO. But with numbers to back it up.

***

Maybe I ought to re-evaluate Wrath some day, without the rose colored glasses that I have for my first exposure to MMOs. I'm not so sure I'll like what I see, but I believe being honest with yourself is one way to take a critical eye toward the assumptions you make whenever you play.

But trying to make me stop worrying about gear? Well, that's a topic for another time.

*Owner of several blogs, most notably Going Commando (SWTOR Blog), Priest With a Cause (WoW Classic Blog), and Neverwinter Thoughts (Neverwinter Blog). And yes, I can trust her to get at the root of a problem. She knows me way too well.

Backup Gear, I Needz You

This post's title might be a bit confusing unless you know two things:

• I finally got into an Uldaman run last night.
• I was on Az, which means exclusively melee combat.

I'd been trying to get into Uldaman the past several days, but I'd made the executive decision each time to switch toons and try for Deadmines after 15 minutes of trying in Trade Chat and LookingForGroup*, so I suppose you could say I wasn't trying wholeheartedly. But when I saw the "looking for DPS for Uld" pop up in LookingForGroup, I pounced. I almost immediately got an invite, and I quickly abandoned my goofing around in the middle of nowhere (Stranglethorn Vale) and Hearthed back to Theramore** and caught the boat to the Wetlands.

 A short flight to Loch Modan and run to The Badlands later, I was at the entrance to Uldaman.

My memories of this place are a bit hazy, as I didn't venture inside when I leveled Quintalan and then Neve on the Horde side, and I think Tomakan got in one LFG run when he was leveling. It was only when I was exploring on Q at L80, trying to get all of the achievements for the Loremaster achievement in Late Wrath before the Cataclysm changes dropped that most of my memories from the place came from. Of course, Q steamrolled through everything, so I never got to know the details of Uldaman the way I got to know, say, Halls of Stone. Still, I knew that it was a precursor of the Titan oriented instances/raids in Wrath and onward, so I knew there were going to be Troggs, Earthen, and those Myzrael-like people/statues/whatever around.

Oh, and there were going to be walking statues, too. It's kind of the Titans' thing, I suppose.

I didn't really think much of those statues, until we started fighting them.

You see, with creatures made of rock there are no bleed effects, so several of a Rogue's best abilities are useless against them. Because of that, my DPS went down quite a bit when we would have to take them out.

However, there was a second impact to those walking statues that I only noticed when we were approaching Archaedas: the yellow warning symbol appeared on my screen for my weapons.

"What the..." I began as I pulled up my character screen. I knew I had fully repaired gear before I joined the group.

But there it was: my main dagger had only 5 left, and my off-hand dagger had 16 left.

"How did.... OH." I looked at the recently dispatched walking statue and realized these stone creatures were grinding my weapons to dust.

I quickly switched my off-hand and primary daggers, and told the rest of the group that my off-hand might break before the end of the instance. "I'm definitely going to have to repair when we get out of here."

As we ran down the passageway toward Archaedas' room, I was kicking myself. I could have rolled Need on a dagger that had dropped in a random mob, but as it wasn't as good as the two daggers I had I decided to just roll Greed on it. But now, I saw that random drop for what it was: an insurance policy. I should have known that with Classic things such as this were a lot more realistic, and you can't get much more realistic than what happens when you use an edged weapon to attack a thing made of stone.

We managed to down Archaedas, and wonder of wonders, my (now) off-hand dagger survived with ONE point left.

But I did learn an important lesson last night: always carry a backup weapon, just in case.




*On Myzrael, at least, the LFG channel has fallen by the wayside while most everybody has moved to LookingForGroup. I still keep it up and running, however, just in case.

**Hey, don't judge me. It works for being able to quickly get to instances on both continents, courtesy of the boat ride and its proximity to Ratchet, which is a short flight away to a ship to Booty Bay.

The Great Divide

There are days when I really wish that screen caps were working for me in WoW again.

You see, in a recent Arathi Basin run, I was the only non-Pandaren in the group.

You read that right.

The Alliance had fifteen players:  one Night Elf, fourteen Pandaren.

The Horde was nearly as bad:  one Blood Elf (a monk), one Tauren (a Druid), thirteen Pandaren.

Orcs?  Humans?  What are those?

You know how some people were excited because the Pandaren capable of being on either faction meant that you couldn't rely upon silhouettes any more?  In this scenario, you don't even bother looking at silhouettes; you just rely upon your add-ons.  Due to the scenery, I felt like I was in some bizarre recreation of the Spanish Civil War, but with pandas.  The only thing that was missing was a few Messerschmitts flying overhead.  (Note to Gnomes and/or Goblins:  make yourselves useful and build some Spitfires and ME-109s!)

***

Leveling via BGs is often something that goes in fits and spurts.

Unlike leveling via instances or questing, gear acquisition becomes a bit of a problem.  Sure, you can use heirlooms to make up the bulk of your gear, but what if a) you don't have heirlooms for the class you're creating, or b) you can't afford or don't want to move heirlooms over across servers?  Here are a few options:

• You can go do some questing to get a few pieces here and there, but the Old World's quests discourage cherry picking.  In the pre-Cata days, you could do a quest here and a quest there, grab what reward you wanted, and then go on your merry way.  Now, with the linear quest lines in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, you can't do that without running a lot of quests to get to the one you really want. Forcing you to quest through the majority of a zone kind of defeats the purpose of leveling via BGs.  
• You can run the occasional instance, but you're at the mercy of whatever gear drops.*  Instances, however, will level you very very fast, especially at low levels.  If you're not careful, you'll end up leveling via instances instead of via BGs.
• If you've the cash, you can look through the auction house and rummage through the available gear.  That has the advantage of speed, because you can quickly hunt through the AH in between BGs, but it's not very cost effective.  But hey, if you play the AH already or are sitting on a pile of gold, why worry?
• If you don't mind being out in the world a lot between BGs, you can also craft your gear.  The speed of BGs proccing these days --anywhere from 1-6 minutes-- means that you're either going to have to set aside some crafting time for your toon or you're going to just have to live with getting one or two items at a time in between BGs.  For the gathering professions, however, you can also level fairly quickly, so you have to be careful that you don't outlevel the gear you're hoping to craft.
• Visiting the Silverwing Sentinels/Warsong Supply Officer and their Defilers/League of Arathor equivalents is a good way of supplementing gear at low levels.  Once you gain access to Alterac Valley, another vendor opens up for use.  While this isn't perfect --you have to travel a lot-- it will fill in gaps.

Finding gear for leveling via BGs can often become a huge subgame, because gear can create such a huge disparity in a BG.  At least a Rogue can hide if the time isn't right to strike, but what if your Mage or Lock is the undergeared one?  Well, I know from experience that it's not fun being the target.

***

The net result of all this is that I've often found my toons undergeared in BGs, particularly when I'm up against toons with a full set of heirloom gear supplemented with the highest available crafted items.  I may play BGs, but other people live them.  It isn't until you get up to L78 and you run into the people with Cata greens that you see a disparity on the same level as in the lower three tiers of BGs between the haves and the have nots.  When you're a toon with about half white gear going up against the heirloom equipped, all of the skill in the world isn't going to keep you from being one-shot.  When my Rogue finally got enough Honor to buy and equip the heirloom dagger, my DPS and kills took a big jump.  I didn't change my play style, I just added a really nice piece of gear, and that bit of min-maxing was all the difference.

Lara at the now sadly defunct Root and Branch blog had written a story encapsulating this disparity, entitled Don't Fret Your Pretty Little Head.  Although she wrote from the perspective of instances, it also applied directly to BGs.  I often wondered which was worse, the nerd rage of dungeon puggers or the nerd rage of the BG puggers, and I think that the prize has to go to BG puggers, because they can bitch and moan and whine and be anti-social without repercussion.  If someone is an ass in an instance, you've at least got a shot at getting rid of them via vote kick.  In a BG, you're stuck with them unless they go AFK, and believe me they know it.  They're the ones always saying that the faction you're on sucks, that you suck, that you don't know how to play your class, that your mother had sexual relations with a turnip, etc.

But you know what?  Gear matters, often more than skill.  Sure, gear can cover up deficiencies in skill, but gear can also help you dominate beyond what skill can't provide.  Skill isn't going to give you an extra 200 health in the L15-19 BGs, and being one shot is still being one shot.  Additionally, how you acquire skill is more difficult than acquiring gear:  you actually go out and play the game, take your lumps and learn how things work.

And you get told that you're an idiot.  Frequently.

Who'd want to put up with that abuse when there's a nice, easy alternative in place?

For those who have the honor and/or gold, that is.

*I ran Shadowfang Keep to get the mats for the Rogue weapon, but discovered that the dagger I got from the Silverwing Sentinels was actually better.  Go figure.

**The speed of BGs proccing these days --anywhere from 1-6 minutes-- means that you're either going to have to set aside some crafting time for your toon or you're going to just have to live

iLevels and Deception

For most people out there, this particular rant doesn't apply to them.  They leveled, they ran normals, then got enough gear for heroics.  (Hell, who am I kidding?  They're way past that now, deep into raid progression.)

The average WoW player probably grumped at bit about iLevels and the restrictions for the heroics, or they had heroic pugs where at least one puggee griped about an undergeared party member.

I, obviously, didn't follow the normal progression.

Due to time restrictions, I leveled, skipped instances entirely, and concentrated on battlegrounds.  After running BGs for about a month or two (and crafting gear), I've gotten enough PvP gear on Tom and Neve to be able to jump straight into heroics, almost completely bypassing the Cata normals.  If I work on my PvP gear for another couple of weeks, it's entirely possible I could queue for Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub without having set foot in a single Cata heroic.

And I'm here to say that isn't right.

The point of the iLevel restrictions for heroics and the 4.1 instances are to make sure that the players have a fighting chance in those instances.  Whether you get the gear by crafting, running normals, or the auction house, once you get into one of these instances the gear shouldn't be what holds you back.  But PvP gear, by it's very nature, will do just that.

I've said before that to run a BG you don't need PvP gear, and I stick to that assessment.  Regular BGs have a hodgepodge of people with all sorts of quality gear --from Cata greens to full Gladiator sets-- and anybody can join in.  However, if you want to run Heroics --and, more importantly, tank or heal in them-- the reverse won't be true.

The emphasis on Resilience (and gemming for spell penetration) hurts PvP gear when you run PvE content.  Sure, you can compensate with skill, and iL PvP gear that is far higher than your PvE gear will be better overall, but if your gear has similar iL, PvP gear will be inferior to PvE gear in PvE content.

And that doesn't address the overall problem of bypassing most of the content to get to the latest PvE stuff.

I'd like to see Blizz fix this issue by dividing the iL into PvP and PvE tracks, much like how the gearscore app has evolved over time.  PvP gear won't count toward your PvE iLevel, and vice versa.  Or at least have a requirement like Magister's Terrace, where to unlock the Heroic mode you have to have run the normal instance to completion at least once.  For the Zandalari Heroics, I'd suggest that having run at least half of the Cata Heroics would suffice, although by the time you get enough PvE gear to get into the Z-H's, you'll probably already have the Cataclysm Dungeon Hero achievement.

As for me, I'm not planning on using my PvP gear to sneak into Heroics.  I know better; just because you've got the gear doesn't mean you can slide by.    I also don't want to misrepresent my guilds this way, either.*  I've discovered that normal Tol'vir has both a small queue wait and a short run time, so I've been spending some PvE time there, but when I get around to it, I'll expand my PvE immersion.  But not until I feel that my PvE gear has gotten good enough will I walk into a Heroic.



*I believe that when you affiliate yourself with a guild, you represent that guild when you're out in Azeroth.  It's just like in the real world, where you wear a shirt with a university or sports team or company on it, people will judge the name behind that moniker by your actions.  It's not fair, but it happens.  In Azeroth, if you behave like an ass, people will judge your guild and your server accordingly.


EtA: My last comment about Zandalari Heroics disappeared into the interwebs, so I had to go fix it.

If You Can't Beat 'Em...

...join 'em.

I now have two toons loaded to the gills with Heirlooms.

However, I have one big issue:  just who the hell approved the design for [Mystical Pauldrons of Elements], anyway?  They make Tomakan look like he's got antennae sprouting out of his back.  He's a Paladin, not a TV repair guy.