The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Climbing the Mountain
by Vonya
Today, my friends, we are going to discuss two things - Wishlists, and Gear Progression.
A “Wishlist” is a single set of gear that you “wish” you had.
The best wishlists are attainable wishlists, since it gives you a goal, something to work for.
Most high-end players have some kind of wishlist. Some idea of where they want to go, knowledge that TrinketX drops in InstanceY. You can formalize a wishlist using a tool like WowDigger.com, you can have a semi-formal listing on your guild boards, or you can just have a half-formed idea of what gear you’re looking for.
They’re all wishlists.
And there is an inherent downfall to all wishlists.
They are fluid.
TrinketX is great, and there was much rejoicing when you got it. But oooh, what’s that? TrinketZ is VERY shiny.
Your wishlist just changed.
And maybe TrinketZ drops off of SuperGodBoss_04. You couldn’t take down SuperGodBoss_04 without the help of TrinketX.
THIS, my friends, is Gear Progression.
Gear Progression
Gear Progression is a series of wishlists, and the Burning Crusade changed the face of Gear Progression forever.
Back in Azeroth, you could be reasonably certain that something that dropped out of Maraudon would be replaced pretty quickly in BRD.
Here in Outland, you may be wearing the robe that drops in Ramparts up through level 70.
Gear Progression is KEY, folks.
The instant you hit that portal, you should be prepared with a Gear Progression list. We call the process of advancing through the Gear Progression list “Climbing the Mountain.”
In theory, the end of everyone’s Gear Progression is super-awesome-endgame-raids.
That doesn’t get you off the hook. You have to do some homework. You can’t saunter into Kara with accidental gear - stuff that you just stumbled upon while doing quests or maybe instancing.
You have to PLAN. I entered Kara with some really crappy AH green bracers because I didn’t plan. Did you know that there is no quest/instance reward bracers between Zangarmarsh and Karazhan for a holy priest?
I didn’t. But oh, I knew by the time I hit Kara.
Why Plan?
Personally, I like having goals. I like setting up a target and doing my best to achieve that goal. I like knowing where I’m heading. So I get a personal thrill out of Climbing the Mountain.
Professionally, you need to have some kind of plan if you want to have the best gear, if you want to not be laughed at by passing strangers who snicker at the gear you’re wearing, and if you don’t want to have to drop a hefty penny on gear from the AH that’s not as good as the gear you MISSED from doing questing.
How To Plan?
Obviously, you can’t do your planning in-game. It’s fun to do a quest line and find out you’ve got a reward at the end of it. It’s also fun to know as you’re doing the quest that you’ll get a nice upgrade from it.
If you want to plan, you’ve got to move outside the game. For a long time, I advocated the use of Kaliban’s Class Gear Lists. They are superb for the most casual Gear Progression lists, and I will never make fun of someone for using only that tool. Most of the work is done for you there, and if you’re short on time or don’t want to get too involved in your gear lists, then go there and use it.
It does, however, have a fatal flaw…it misses stuff. There are a few key pieces of gear missing from every single class there. EVERY class can get most of their gear replaced by doing the first quests through the portal. Most of the classes on Kaliban don’t list all the gear reward upgrades you’ll get. It does tend to get all of the instance gear right, though.
For the more involved player, I highly recommend using a tool like Wowhead. Vomitous new ads aside, it’s still the best item database available for this purpose.
1) First thing to do is go to Database -> Items -> Armor -> Cloth.
2) That’s waaaay too much stuff for you to work through. On the upper right hand side there’s a little golden link that says “Create a Filter”. Click that, and you’re in fat-city.
There are a few gotchas in the interface. Personally, I think they gimped up the usability by labeling the fields confusingly.
3) I would leave most of the fields blank, choose “New in the Burning Crusade” from the big dropdown.
4) That still doesn’t narrow it down enough, so click the “Add Another Filter” link.
5) In the new filter box, PICK YOUR FAVORITE STAT. My advice following will be for a healy priest, but you can pick whatever stat you like. For a healy priest, choose “Healing Done By Spells” and go ahead and keep the greaterthan 0. For shadow priests, I would search on “Damage Done By Spells” and be prepared to filter out frost/fire damage from my results.
6) NOW, use the box on the right to filter by slot. This should give you around 20 or so items between the level of 58 and 70, all the way up through raid loot that I will probably never see.
7) WRITE DOWN THE RESULTS. Copy/paste, I don’t care how you do it. Get the name of the item, note if it is an instance drop or a quest result, write down the name of the instance/boss or the name of the quest. FOR EVERY ITEM.
8 ) MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL, you need to use a system to “grade” the loot. When I did this yesterday for my hunter, I used agi/int/AP/sta for my key. Every single piece of gear that I noted had XX/XX/XX/XX on it. I also noted down bonuses like sockets, hit rating, and MP5. FOR EVERY PIECE OF GEAR.
For a priest, I would HIGHLY recommend +heal/MP5/int/sta/spi and note down things like crit, sockets. For a shadow priest, I’d probably change that +heal to +damage, and probably keep all the other stats the same.
This allows me at a GLANCE to find out what the important information about each item is. I need to compare stats on what I’ve got and what I might possibly get, and I can do that with XX/XX/XX/XX. Extras can also be compared. Does it come from an instance? A quest? If it’s a quest, I have the name of the item and the quest, so I can look it up and find the details when I get that far. The quest-givers and prereqs can come when I’m ready to start the quest, for now, I just want to know the gear that I can get along the way.
9) Change the slot and do this for every single slot on your character. Yes, it’s a lot of work. Do it one slot at a time to keep from going crazy. Feel free to reject obviously useless gear, but do not EVER reject something with specials. As a healy priest, your main concern may appear to be +heal and MP5, but don’t throw away an item with a good chunk of stamina on it but lesser main stats until you get a DIRECT UPGRADE.
No, sidegrades don’t count. Yes, you’re going to run out of bank space. I don’t care.
You will need to shuffle your stats around. A piece of gear with really great MP5 compared to a piece with far less MP5 but a lot of +heal will come your way. Which do you choose?
There is no easy answer. There’s not. As you level through outlands, you’ll hit this situation again and again and again and again. KEEP THAT GEAR. As you progress, your weak stats will shift in comparison to your strong stats, and you may need to shift out of gear depending on the situation.
This is less important as you level up, but it becomes key once you start doing the nice instances. I have three bags full of alternate HEALING gear in my bank. I can swap into a different set of shoulders if the opportunity arises and I find I need my set bonus from them.
And for the love of all that is holy, don’t throw away your trinkets.
If you’re looking at a trinket that is a direct upgrade, then okay. I’ll let you. But trinkets are so varied in their effects and uses, you never know when one is going to become useful, even after you’ve decided it’s stupid. Remember, one of the best healing trinkets in the game is from old-world dragons. I personally have disenchanted two copies of a trinket that I am now frantically trying to get again.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES.
10) If you’re feeling masochistic, do this ALL OVER AGAIN but with a different stat. For a healy priest, I would recommend doing it again with MP5 instead of +heal. You’re going to get a lot of repeat gear, but you might find a few pieces that weren’t in the first set.
But that’s a lot of WORK!
Yes. Yes it is.
Do you HAVE to do this to become a good priest. Heck, no.
Does it help? Immeasurably.
It gives you goals. It tells you why you should keep running Blood Furnace until that belt drops. It tells you why you need to keep running instances to get Sha’atar rep. It tells you that if a particular instance drop just refuses to happen, you can get something nearly as good by doing questX.
It tells you where your next wand upgrade comes from.
It keeps you from missing some of the best gear. Obviously you won’t need everything on it. But knowing that it’s there, having multiple sets to swap into depending on the situation…these things are key.
If you are not yet level 60, go ahead and start working on your Outland Gear Progression list. Maybe stop when you run into Kara gear and Heroics…you can build that list when you hit 70.
If you’re between 60 and 70, don’t forget to look at the gear you’ve already passed - some of the Hellfire gear is the best in the game for casuals.
If you’re already 70, remake your list to include Heroic Badge rewards, Heroic instance drops, raid drops, regular instance drops…you’ve hit the level cap, but you’re nowhere near the gear cap.
September 13th, 2007
I’d stress looking at quest rewards the most. Espically when choosing Aldor/Scryer. Quest rewards you don’t get do overs, you either get it or you don’t. Theres no well I can go run Botanica a million times for that awesome item that I didn’t think I’d need but now I do! type deal.
I wish I could give a priest example but all my priest friends are smart and don’t do things like this.
Hit raiting is huge for Rogues. I believe there are 6 bracers in game with hit raiting on them currently minus old school content. And 2 of them currently come from Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, and http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28171 comes from a quest and so many rogue friends of mine vendored them not knowing what they just gave up.
Its something to take notice, trinkets, bracers and a couple other slots are poorly itemized by blizzard, if you think you don’t need said item anymore do a little research before you sell it for 80 silver to a vendor.
September 13th, 2007
Great advice, I have a massive spreadsheet that I put together for my mage. I found I didn’t need to do it until I was 70 and the main reason for doing it was because it was hard to pick between Gear A and B
A
50 spell damage
36 crit
25 int
15 stam
B
60 spell damage
15 crit
30 int
20 stam
Well heck, those pieces are hard to choose from. all the stats are different. So I went out and did the math and gave everything a relative number. (That relative number changes as you get into different things like raiding. Stams number when up in Kara…I just needed more of it) Once I was able to assign numbers to them the spreadsheet took care of the rest. Lots of work…..at first, but when something fell I knew right away if I wanted it or not….and I knew the percentage upgrade it was. I worked on creating a spreadsheet that would pull the gear and stats in automatically but then realized that I hate coding when I’m not getting paid for it.
In wowhead my search was spelldamage > 1, cloth, and itemvalue between 100 and 200. When all my gear became epic and I wanted to recheck I upped the item value.
For +hit I had a value that changed based on a dropdown box for the level of enemy you were fighting. For lvl 70 enemies + hit was worth zero (mages have a talent that caps +hit for same level mobs…+3%) for raid boss that value was higher than + damage.
And that meant 2 sets of gear.
Of course don’t forget to use your common sense too. Numbers and math cant replace gut feelings and stacking over a cap is worthless.
P.S. keep these articles coming….
and my priest is now 44….yippy….that’s why I always write from a mage perspective but read a priest blog.
September 13th, 2007
Great article. Excellent advice.
I’ve used google spreadsheets for a while now to track gear. It’s helps to see how different weights on different stats affects the ranking of gear. I think thottbot added a way to do stat weights a while back which is nice, but wowhead is still more user friendly. I did a lot of my original research with alla as they have a way to do item comparisons once you register.
Here is the published google spreadsheet I’m currently using.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-L2Md-ZZ1JC6R8sEscP5cA
September 13th, 2007
Oh god. You have no idea. x__x I sold a trinket I got from Zangarmarsh at like 63 because “Oh, I’ve got better and when would I ever need it?” –;; Well, I kind of need it now. I really regret getting rid of it, as there’s no way I can get it back since it is a quest reward, but just. GAH!
I have so many sets of gear. I have resist gear, stam gear, MP5 gear, shadow damage gear, non-shadow damage gear (for when I might want to lolsmite stuff), PvP gear… I’ve got over three bags full of gear now (two of which are on me at all times), because I’ve got a frillion different trinkets for dps and healing, rings out the wazoo, necklaces, hats, cloaks… just. WTB more bag space, pst.
Also having a gear wishlist is really nice because it gives you a goal to aspire to. At least, it does me. ^^
September 13th, 2007
Look at lootzor.com, you can find all the equipment you need based on the stats that are most important to you.
September 13th, 2007
Darnit. I’m halfway done with tomorrow’s big post, and here are the key and core concepts up a day too early. Curses, foiled (a Grin). So… small and relatively secondary extracts to supplement. Actually, one.
Around 66 or so I got smart and wish I’d done so earlier. I made a list - not of gear - but of where I wanted to be stat-wise. How much health did I think I’d need? What was my floor for mana regen — and in the regen/spirit discussion what was going to be my tradeoff value floor (and rate)?
That, then, gave me my basis for searches - and changes of searches based on “ooh, wow, look at what DROPPED!!!”
no, two extracts. About that dumping of gear… emphasize, exclamation point, double underline. It is ESPECIALLY tempting if you are an enchanter. I DE’d gear that now I find myself looking for longingly. Or kicking myself knowing I’ll never have as good again. And if you’re a respec puppy like myself, triple-underline anything that’s got a requirement to wear - if you’re engineering, or if you decide after being shadow (tailor) to switch to heal (and primal mooncloth). Yes, it will be expensive to change back anyway. But the cost in gold and time of making (and in some cases finding the patterns for) those really special pieces… Which goes back to the earlier extract and our hostess’s point: save it. If you realize you need two different gearings depending on what you might be doing, plan for both. Trust me, gloating is a LOT more fun than crying about it.
September 13th, 2007
Obi,
September 13th, 2007
Obi, glad you linked that. Its very similar to my mage one and its going to save me a chunk of time.
September 13th, 2007
I guess today was “talk about gear day” lol!
I love your post. You go into the importance of a wish list, and intelligent ways to mine data to figure out what and where your next drops are coming from… and how to compare them when you are faced with a choice.
Very nice, very smart, very wise.
Sadly, I did a gear post too, but I just made a wish list for young druids… If i’d a been smart like you, I’d have just told em where to go
September 13th, 2007
Have i told this story before? I’d say “stop me if i have…”, but of course you can’t stop me! Hahaha!
I used a feral/restoration build back before the expansion so i could be a kitty when solo and heal in our ZG raids and other instances. When TBC came around, i took about 4 steps into outland and got my ass handed to me by a boar, so i figured i ought to respec to something with a little more Oomph. Deciding i still wanted to be able to heal, i chose balance/restoration and introduced those boars to my Roots. Ah, good times!
For the next 10 levels, i chose Balance-oriented gear whenever it came up in quests. I ignored feral gear, thinking i would never go back as fun as this was, running around as an owl and moonfiring stuff.
I was wrong. Some time after i hit level 70, i realized that what was holding us back from having instance runs was more often a lack of a tank rather than a healer. We actually had more healers than necessary and too few tanks. What is an owl to do? Well, i convinced myself i was being such a martyr and switched over to a full feral build.
It wasn’t immediate. I started picking up viable feral gear when the opportunity arose kept the idea to respec in the back of my mind. One day, i realized the time had come. We had yet another instance run that wasn’t going to go anywhere because a tank wasn’t available, so i checked in at the AH, bought a few greens to fill out my set, and headed off to the druid trainer.
The rest is history, but the important point is that for 10 levels worth of quests, i ignored all the good feral gear. I didn’t get Manimal’s Cinch (although my Naaru belt of dodging or whatever the crap it is is a fine belt, i think) or Those Pants. I didn’t get Bladefist’s Breadth. Too bad, i couldn’t go back to get them!
It’s fortunate that i’ve been able to fill out those slots with perfectly reasonable items since then. I made the decision to go feral in time to get Umberhowl’s Collar (very nice tanking bracers), at least, and with the buff they gave to the heavy clefthoof set, i do not miss Those Pants at all.
You priests, now, you have no excuse. Whether you are primarily holy/disc or shadow, you’re collecting gear for both roles. If you throw away good quest-obtained gear for either side, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
September 13th, 2007
blink - no excuse? Um, Melnayo? time after time the choice is Healing or Healing/damage at roughly a 2:1 ratio. Sometimes we can get both, and you’re right. But it’s the same issue as you have (and prot vs flurry warriors have, and, well, just about every class with clear dual-role capabilities have).
otoh, throwing it AWAY when I’ve got it… sigh. back to the wet noodles.
September 13th, 2007
Yeah, i don’t mean choosing one over the other, i mean deciding not to gather -any- for one role because you don’t expect to be doing it.
September 13th, 2007
Ah. It’s been a day for me misunderstanding people - my apologies.
September 14th, 2007
If your shadow then you should only need 2 sets of gear, dps and pvp, assuming you pvp. It sucks for us Holy people who PvP. I have Holy Set, DPS/Quest Set, PvP set, and the all important Holy Pug variation set. (Holy Pug lets me use 2 agro trinkets! :D)
September 14th, 2007
[...] Thursday post contains great advice for developing a gear wishlist for Outland. While her advice is aimed at priests (mainly healers) the principles apply across the [...]
September 14th, 2007
@Everyone
I smell a post for next week on stats and gear sets, yes I do.
…smells kinda like toasted ravioli.
Or maybe that’s just my lunch.