Posts with tag gearing

First off, this week's PTR news: basically, nothing new from the last time we talked about it. Arms warriors can pick up Juggernaut now. It's fun. I'm already sick of the macros I'm seeing with it, although I haven't had that much time to do more than charge and then Bladestorm a few mobs just for the laughs. As soon as I get a chance to PvP with the changes I'll tell you if the caster debuff on Overpower from Unrelenting Assault makes any difference.

I get a fair amount of email asking me what target numbers a warrior should be aiming for when he hits 80 and is ready to tank or DPS in instances. It's kind of a hard question because for some stats the best answer is always going to be "as much as you can get" - you're never going to hit a number on stamina where you should be satisfied, you'll always want more and more and more of it. However, there are reasonable suggested minimums for these things, based around what will be possible or impossible to accomplish. A lot of this depends on the folks you find yourself running with, of course. If you're just starting heroics but the healer you'll be running with has best in slot raid epics from all the 25 man content in the game, it's likely he'll trivialize the content to such a degree that you can be significantly lower than normal and still do fine. For those of us who don't have a pocket god coming along to heal our runs, however, you may have to pay attention more to your gearing.

We're now a few weeks into Season 4. And, we've known even before it started that Season 4 gear would carry some rating requirements. And while we're all hopefully enjoying the new challenges of the new season, there are some folks who are starting Season 4 relatively fresh.

They don't have much Vengeful gear, or even Merciless Gladiator's gear -- they might be starting out in some quest greens and blues, with only a smattering of PvP gear across the character. Heck, some players might be in all Vengeful and Vindicator's gear already, and still facing the same question. Where should you start with the Season 4 gear?

Rating requirements and high point costs can make the gear curve seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Don't worry -- WoW Insider is here to help.

Let's chart a basic path of gear accrual -- via PvP only -- that will help every fledgeling PvPer grow into an Arena powerhouse. We're going to follow two paths, actually. One will assume that you do have the ratings required for each piece of gear. The other will assume that you do not have the ratings. In either case, our goal here is going to be to be sure you have a plan to pick up the available gear as you gain the available points.

Miss out on some of these columns the first time around? Worry not! Here's your weekly chance to catch up on some of the best feature content coming out of WoW Insider. If you missed these earlier this week, don't make the same mistake twice.

	Guildwatch: Open your face jellyfish Your weekly look at guild drama, downed news, and recruiting from all around the realms.
	Illusionary Tactics: Orb of Deception Our new column about items that can disguise you hits on one of the most popular.
	Know Your Lore: The Scarlet Crusade When good Crusaders go bad, that's where you find the Scarlet folks.
	Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk? Seriously, do you? Because we really need some lottery numbers -- this whole "4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42" thing isn't really working out.
	The Art of War(craft): DotA-style battleground in WotLK A new battleground in Wrath might borrow a little influence from an old mod for Warcraft III.

More of our best weekly content after the jump.

Now, there's some classes (mostly pure DPS) that have a special advantage when it comes to respeccing: When they decide to change specs, they can mostly get away with using the same set of gear. They may want to regem a bit toward one stat or another, or switch weapons, but for the most part, they can change their spec and settle right into their new role with relative ease, not having to wait for certain gear to come along before they make a "final" plunge. Even if they do need to make a bigger stat change, their old gear can usually mostly suffice until they get a few more drops.

I've noticed this because I'm strongly considering switching two of my hybrids to another role full time soon, and it's been a lot more complicated, because gear enters the equation in a much larger way.

World of Warcraft has two distinctly different types of play: Player versus Environment and Player versus Player. The styles of play are dramatically different and there are few, if any, skills that cross over from one style to the other. WoW started out as a PvE game, adding in PvP content as the player base expanded. And despite the numerous PvP fanbois out there, the real game in WoW will always remain the PvE game.

There are a few reasons why I think this. First and foremost, you cannot progress in PvP without first completing a large potion of the PvE content. You start out at level 1 and progress up to level 70. You don't level up by PvPing against one another. You level up by fighting against the environment. Put simply, without the PvE there would be no PvP.

Secondly, PvP is an addition to the game. If you remove PvP from the game entirely, the game itself would not fundamentally change. However if you remove the PvE elements, the game would be nothing like it is. Everything would just exist like the Arena Tournament server. That might be fine for some people, and this is evident in the success of the Arena Tournament server. Even I enjoy spending a couple hours a week on there, but by no means would I want to just exist on a server where the only thing to do is kill one another.

For some reason on my home server, Eldre'Thalas, when folks see a tank standing around in Shattrath without anything to do, they immediately start sending tells asking if I want to go tank such-and-such an instance for them. I don't mind it when my friends or guild mates do it, but it does get a little annoying when complete strangers do it constantly.

So I've come up with a solution: spirit and intellect armor. Whenever I'm doing anything other than fighting, I'm wearing bright yellow spirit and intellect armor that I got off the AH. I spent about a hundred gold on this dastardly set. It looks awful, it smells awful, and it's a great repellent for annoying unsolicited LFG tells.

I got the idea from looking at people's gear who are apping to my guild. Some of it was just plain nuts – spirit gear on Warriors, "of stamina" gear on Priests, things like that. Of course, they might have just been logged out in that gear the same way I'm logged out in mine right now. But when you're apping to a guild and one of the requirements is to log out in PvE gear for the next week, well, too bad so sad for them.