Posts with tag gearingabearat85

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we want the damn fire kitty staff.

Hail, bears. This week, we're going to finish off our look at bear gear in the post-4.2 world. Our first installment, covering the helm through boot slots, went up last week. Today, we're going to look at rings, trinkets, weapons, and relics.

As a note on the PVE versus PVP discussion that broke out in the comments last week, I have to admit that I'm still not very fond of PVP gear. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I'm not fond of an overdependence on PVP gear. The more arena and battleground pieces you add to your set, the more that you're likely to encounter threat generation issues.

Even haste (garbage stat that it is) does more for us than resilience, which does precisely nothing in PVE content. So I'm hesitant to endorse widespread use of PVP gear in PVE. If you have the opportunity to use a few suitable pieces, go for it; just check its ilevel to see the gear to which it's roughly comparable. Be aware that its use comes at the cost of stat allocation that could've gone to something useful.

As before, if your bear is completely new to level 85, our first set of bear gear guides may be more immediately useful to you.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, it's not like we're doing dailies for our health.

Mmmm. Fresh meat gear, nicely charred by all that flame-broiling action in the Firelands these days. High time to update our gear lists!

Stat priority for bears in patch 4.2 remains armor, stamina, agility, mastery, crit, expertise, hit, and haste. Rather than rehash territory we've already covered in our first set of bear gear guides for Cataclysm, the lowest piece I'm going to list in each slot is the best available piece from 5-mans, reputation, or the new Molten Front vendors. If you're starting from absolutely nothing and need some ilevel 333/346 gear to tide you over, I would recommend the previous bear guides. Otherwise, your goal should be to get to at least the lowest piece in each slot on this list.

As always, I'm bypassing PVP gear because so much itemization is wasted on resilience. However, if you want to use it and you've got a better piece than would otherwise be available from PVE, knock yourself out. This week, we'll cover the helm through boot slots, and next week, we'll tackle rings, trinkets, weapons, and relics.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we prepare to get hit in the face. A lot.

All right, folks -- time to gear your tanks! As with our previous series on gearing a restoration druid at level 85, we'll be going slot by slot to show you the best available options and where you can get them. I've listed recommend enchants previously in Feral Druid Tanking 101, but I've listed them here as well for convenience.

I received some criticism over the restoration gear posts that they were a bit too thorough, and it was (I think) a correct assessment. I'd been aiming for an Emmerald-like opus, but it wound up being an unwieldy mess in blog format. Here, we'll generally avoid gear below ilevel 333. Why? Because you don't want it. I'm sure it's very nice and it has a great personality, but trust me, I've been down that road. It is the way of pain. I've listed the normal versions of some heroic drops here as a courtesy to anyone who's still leveling up, but items are otherwise ranked according to the desirability of their heroic versions.

This week, we'll do the helm through ring slots. Weapons, trinkets, and relics require a bit more discussion, so we'll tackle those next week.