Posts with tag level-80-gear

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons.

As I said last week, I'm looking for action screenshots of retribution and protection paladins. I've gotten a lot of good shots thus far and am always looking for more (especially you retribution paladins out there, as I got a ton of protection ones). They can be any level between 1 and 80. I'll be using these for header graphics like the one above. Please send those as well as any other comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

If you've been following the column recently, you've seen the three-part series we did on gearing up a brand new level 80 protection paladin. We're going to take the same approach now to the retribution tree and work our way through the different types of items. First up, we've got craftables and reputation items. We'll be taking a look at stuff you'll be able to grab in dungeons next week and finish up the week after with a run-through of what all you can buy with the badges you got from all of that time in the random dungeon finder.

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon an entire flight of black dragons.

The quiet before the storm. This is period of time where people are losing interest in their current characters and either start playing less or trying out one of their alts. As such, we've been getting a lot of requests for guides during the end of expansion lull. One of the requests we got last week was a gear guide to your up-and-coming level 80 protection paladin. Whether you're catching up an old character or rolling a new 'toon to try your hand at tanking, we'll show you where to get started.

Welcome to another installment of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column of choice for mages who hate warlocks, warlocks who secretly want to be mages, and everybody else who likes their mage discussion sprinkled lightly with random and inappropriate references to Lost, Flock of Seagulls, Lufia, and KFC's new "Double Down Sandwich," or as I like to call it, "population control." I mean, seriously? Who greenlit this? "I have an idea, guys. Let's offer a bacon and cheese sandwich where we remove the bun and replace it with two slabs of fried chicken! Ooh, and then, instead of offering drink sizes, let's work on a way to allow customers to hook themselves directly into our soda machines intravenously. They'll be mainlining Dr. Pepper! Because if there's anything America needs more than ever during these tough economic times, it's more ways for people to kill themselves via food!"

Lately, a lot of you have been asking for gearing advice for the new level 80 mage. It seems that a good number of people (myself included) have been making good use of this pre-Cataclysm lull to level their alts, and I'm proud to learn that many of you have chosen to level a mage as one of your alts. For many of you, the gearing landscape probably looks very alien when compared to the way it looked when you were gearing up your last character. New opportunities abound, with the promise of epic gear dangling around every bend. What path should you take?

Fear not, young magelings. This week, Arcane Brilliance has decided to draw you a roadmap. Now, a warning: Arcane Brilliance can't draw. Seriously, when Arcane Brilliance was 5, he drew a picture of a "horse" for his mother. As horse pictures go, it was apparently quite disturbing. Arcane Brilliance had to spend some time at a hospital for "special" children, and mom started drinking heavily. So, you're going to have to use your imaginations about the "map" part of the roadmap. It's mostly going to consist of words, something Arcane Brilliance can produce largely without upsetting medical professionals. Largely.

So you've hit level 80 with your mage. Your gear slots are likely filled with a random assortment of quest rewards, heirloom gear that suddenly doesn't look so good anymore, and stuff that dropped in normal Nexus ten levels ago. You'd like to start running some of the level 80 content, but your DPS still hasn't cracked a thousand. You're not geared enough for a trip to heroic Ramparts, let alone heroic Trial of the Champion. So what do you do? Where do you begin?

Have you just reached level 80?

Hoping to see endgame before Patch 3.2?

Are you wanting to raid, but not sure what gear to get?

Well then, this guide is for you!

It might be true that you can go straight from questing and leveling straight into raiding Naxxramas. Maybe even get carried on a few 10man Ulduar Normal mode runs (if this happens I'm sure you will probably be a part of the next Guildwatch post.)

When you make the transition into endgame you really can't expect to crush the damage meters. Don't feel all insulted and indignant, it really isn't your fault. When your questing and leveling you don't really focus on gear much. Not to mention making sure you have the correct pet or spec to achieve the numbers published on Elitist Jerks or some of those other Hunter sites.

Another drawback of making the mad dash to end game could meant that you might have passed up on some great items to get your endgame raiding started on the right foot. Worse yet, you might have vendored or disenchanted some of those quest and reputation rewards for easy gold. Nothing can make you feel lower than a Gnome Warlock than showing up in quest greens and blues, doing less dps than the Tank all because you didn't think ahead and get a good starting raid set.