I believe they are for the NEW new 80's. The people new to the game, not alts.

I appreciate these posts, as I'm sure many others do. Fact is, many of us haven't had to focus on gearing from 80 for quite some time. The end of an expac doldrums are encouraging many to level alts, which makes these articles both timely and informative.

Also, it kinda goes without saying, but wow.com isn't written just for you.

Also, getting geared is MUCH MUCH different now then before. If people have only focused on 1 80 that dinged before 3.2, and just got another 80 up, he might be confused on what to do.

I wish people would carry my alts through ICC to get em geared up. :( The alliance pugs on the server I moved him to seem to have terrible Gearscoreitis. (Never see that on the horde realms I play on.)

WTS: Free Bloodlus.. err Heroism to any ICC raider needing a resto shammy!!

Actually, in many ways I agree with this post - gearing is pretty straightforward right now and some of the article's advice is bizarre at this point in the Xpac. For example:

"There's more to gearing at level 80 than emblem gear. Questing, instance drops, reputation gear, BoEs from the auction house and crafted pieces all play a role in your evolving gear set."

Now, yes, instance drops are good and there's a few cases where crafted or quest gear can be worth it, but if you have friends or a guild that runs randoms most nights your best strategy if you want to gear up as fast as possible is to run heroics, ideally the ICC 5 mans. I just hit 80 on my hunter very late Thursday (2am Friday actually). She was in quest gear, blues and greens and a couple of heirlooms. By Tuesday night I'd run enough heroics to have 4 pc T9, gotten a couple of blue drops and a couple of 232 epics from the ICC 5s, including a very good bow off Arthas in reg HoR.

The thing is, by focusing on heroics, I get the instance drops anyway PLUS the badges. I went from doing about 1200-1500 dps in green and blue gear to doing 3000dps. In 5 days. Now, yes, I played a lot over the weekend, but you could easily do that amount of heroics over a couple of weeks which is still very fast.

Do the weekly raid and get those frost and triumphs and make sure one of the heroica you do daily is a random so you get those 2 Frost.

What I wouldn't do is to worry about crafted gear or rep gear at this point - the rep gear is blue and not as good as what you'll get as drops or from badges and the crafted gear is either pricey (for the ToC and better patterns) or, again, not as good as what you can get from drops/badges.