ferret's weekly progression thread

So, I hit 54 last night, and with 20 quests to turn in should be 56 in no time. With my Dad coming to town next week and my massive once every 4 year birthday celebration next week I will get no time to play. But that's neither here nor there (which still makes no sense to me).

Anyway, I know the 60's are a dread, but I have been looking at end game content which is why I bought the game in the first place. Some of the guys at work were explaining S1 gear and raid gear differences, and how you can't just ding 70 and hit Arena/high end Raids, which sucks. I guess Blizzard makes gear a signifigant factor of the game (personally I think it should be smaller) so you have to work after 70 to gear up. I personally think it should play a smaller role (which would make skill a bigger one) but I know from an mmo perspective why they do it this way.

- So my question is, how much work does a player have to put in at 70 (assuming he did none before 70) to get decent gear at 70? I know that top gear is pretty much out of the question but gear that is viable and will give me a decent spec at arena and raids (I realize this is 2 sets).

- From what I've been told, even the most skilled players have no chance with inferior gear to a person with the best gear. Is this true?

- Also, how long can I expect to be in 60's? Some have said it takes as long as going from 1-60 but others have said that has been lessened with the last patch.

- So my question is, how much work does a player have to put in at 70 (assuming he did none before 70) to get decent gear at 70? I know that top gear is pretty much out of the question but gear that is viable and will give me a decent spec at arena and raids (I realize this is 2 sets).

- From what I've been told, even the most skilled players have no chance with inferior gear to a person with the best gear. Is this true?

- Also, how long can I expect to be in 60's? Some have said it takes as long as going from 1-60 but others have said that has been lessened with the last patch.
1: You don't have to really do anything, or even be any good, to get gear in this game. Go to AV whenever you're not doing anything and just run around and do nothing, or just AFK somewhere that isn't the cave, checking in every now and then in case you need to go get in combat for a second. I'd usually just minimize and browse forums or play my guitar and hit the mouse every now and then because I didn't have a script.

Start doing that a lot and you'll be able to get full season 1 gear and full epic rings boots belt etc within a few months. That's a great place to start off.

Find some friends and make a 5v5 team at 70. You don't even have to move the rating up that much to start getting gear. Even if you keep it around 1600 you'll start getting a piece of season 3 every month.


2: Very true, depending on how inferior the person is and what class he is playing of course. If you're fighting someone who is blind and doesn't have any arms, you'll probably beat him...but if you are fighting a warrior with a stormherald and full season 3 minus the shoulders and he can find his MS button whenever it's up, and you're in greens and blues with no resilience, you won't even hurt him. Resilience is the key with the gear dependence...anyone with arena gear will have decent resilience, so that alone puts them at a huge advantage against someone with no resilience and low hp using a lousy weapon

3: Depends on how much you play of course, but it doesn't take as long as 1-60 unless you REALLY take your time. You can do a level a day if you play pretty hardcore (probably a lot more than that if you play REALLY hardcore)...it took me probably a week and a half of pretty hardcore playtime...but some people do it a lot faster than me--I'm fairly slow.

- From what I've been told, even the most skilled players have no chance with inferior gear to a person with the best gear. Is this true?

Not exactly, but gear makes a huge difference.

- So my question is, how much work does a player have to put in at 70 (assuming he did none before 70) to get decent gear at 70?

PvE:
There are a number of good blues available as you quest up, here is a link with some of them sorted out Armor - Items - World of Warcraft (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=3;minrl=60;cr=1 26:21:37;crs=-2323:1:1;crv=0:1:1) (poking around in wowhead will help you a lot in figuring out how to approach gearing, btw).

5 man dungeons also have reasonable blues, and you'll have to run them a few times (depends on which reputation they're tied to) to get to revered. You want to get revered with Keepers of Time, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, and Sha'tar. This will let you buy keys for heroic mode for all the 5 man instances, which will let you get Badges of Justice. These let you buy some very nice epics. After 2.4, you only need honored to get the keys, so focusing on the easier reputations (Cenarion, Lower City) might be advisable.

Once you have some ok gear you may be able to find a guild that runs the 10 man instances Karazhan and Zul'Aman. This is ideal because nice PvE drops, and you also get lots of badges to buy epics with.

Final route is crafting. There are lots of good crafted items available at 70, and while you can't get a whole set of them you can get some very good items pretty easily. Here's another filtered list from wowhead Armor - Items - World of Warcraft (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=3:4;minrl=60;cr =86:21:37;crs=11:1:1;crv= 0:1:1)

PvP:
You get PvP gear by getting honor and marks mainly. It is a bitch of a grind. The best approach as a solo player is to do AV over and over and over for honor, only doing other battlegrounds as you need marks. Depending on battlegroup it may be worthwhile to do the other battlegrounds on their designated weekend (this is indicated by representatives of that battleground being in the major cities under banners, there is a schedule here http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/events/calendar/). AV worked best for me, I'd play in windowed mode with a movie on my computer and just kind of run around.

You can also get some gear by doing the Haala PvP, and this might be something to try as you level in Nagrand. It's basically a outdoor PvP area, and you get marks for killing people. If you see that the other faction controls Haala, you can swing by to get some marks.

There is a shit ton of gear available, and you'll figure it out more as you go.

Funny thing about gear, it took me almost a year to get my mage to t6 gear. I leveled a druid recently, and after 7 days played time I have a few pieces of t4 and a buncha epics

go figure

5 man dungeons also have reasonable blues, and you'll have to run them a few times (depends on which reputation they're tied to) to get to revered. You want to get revered with Keepers of Time, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, and Sha'tar. This will let you buy keys for heroic mode for all the 5 man instances, which will let you get Badges of Justice. These let you buy some very nice epics. After 2.4, you only need honored to get the keys, so focusing on the easier reputations (Cenarion, Lower City) might be advisable.


actually heroic keys are at honored already. in 2.4 they are bringing back the blue pvp gear on the rep vendors at honored, i would grab the 5 pieces and work up your honor for the pvp bracers/belt/boots. i think the blue pvp set is ~100g total for all 5 pieces, a decent price imo

Someone offered to make me a set of felscale armor at the cost of materials, is this a good set or should I not even bother?

Felscale Armor - Item Sets - World of Warcraft (http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=611)

why does it feel like im on the worldofwarcraft.com forums

Honestly nothing really matters until 70. Especially being a dps class, you can get by on quest rewards then do a bunch of 5 mans at 70, then replace every piece in kara within 3 weeks.

why does it feel like im on the worldofwarcraft.com forums

I could demand a class nerf and we'd be right at home.

So, I hit 54 last night, and with 20 quests to turn in should be 56 in no time. With my Dad coming to town next week and my massive once every 4 year birthday celebration next week I will get no time to play. But that's neither here nor there (which still makes no sense to me).

Anyway, I know the 60's are a dread, but I have been looking at end game content which is why I bought the game in the first place. Some of the guys at work were explaining S1 gear and raid gear differences, and how you can't just ding 70 and hit Arena/high end Raids, which sucks. I guess Blizzard makes gear a signifigant factor of the game (personally I think it should be smaller) so you have to work after 70 to gear up. I personally think it should play a smaller role (which would make skill a bigger one) but I know from an mmo perspective why they do it this way.

- So my question is, how much work does a player have to put in at 70 (assuming he did none before 70) to get decent gear at 70? I know that top gear is pretty much out of the question but gear that is viable and will give me a decent spec at arena and raids (I realize this is 2 sets).

- From what I've been told, even the most skilled players have no chance with inferior gear to a person with the best gear. Is this true?

- Also, how long can I expect to be in 60's? Some have said it takes as long as going from 1-60 but others have said that has been lessened with the last patch.

When you hit 70 that's when the real grinding comes in. Why? There's no more levels to gain just faction and picking up gear. So it feels like you've accomplished nothing when you've cleared an instance and you didn't get any upgrades.

Gear does make a difference and in general if someone is decked out in the biggest gear they'll be hitting you so hard or able to tank your damage that you'll just run out of hp unless you're a rogue and have a perfect stunlock.

Took me maybe a week to go from 60-70? Mostly did 60-68 grinding it out with a steady group in hellfire ramparts and that other hellfire instance.

And try not to do quests and save them till you hit 70. If you do the quests at 70 you should be able to pick up enough gold to buy your flyer mount.

Mostly did 60-68 grinding it out with a steady group in hellfire ramparts and that other hellfire instance.

I couldn't imagine doing Ramps and BF repeatedly from 60 - 68...

It's not a matter of saving the quests. Its a matter of not wasting gold on professions and pointless leveling gear. Especially in the Outlands.

I couldn't imagine doing Ramps and BF repeatedly from 60 - 68...

The way I see it was getting to 70 and running the heroics and Karazhan is a better way to waste my time. I was able to get maybe 25% of a level per clear which took maybe 30-45 minutes at that time. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing the same during the 70-80 rush if I decide to play the xpac.

Fully rested you'll get about 25%-30% of a level per instance run. I'm considering only levelling 60-70 by instances on alts from now on and just burning through the quests at 70 for the cash. Would be particularly easy as a tank/healer class.

Still it seems mildly tedious, and I found those dungeons will take longer than 30 - 40 minutes unless you have 4 68 - 70s with you. And who would willingly want to do that without any kind of compensation?

Unless you have a ready made team of people that are on when you are on your fastest way is to log in, join LFG for 3 instances and then start questing or grinding mobs until the team has 5 people. I do this on my alts that are sub level 60 as well, in outlands it works better because the travel times to instances isn't more then a few minutes.

I hit the outlands yesterday, I was pretty psyched about it. Then I got a mage to port me to Shatt, and my account wasn't updated for bc (n00b moment)!

Anyway I'll take that advice and do the quest/lfg thing. Being a Hunter I wouldn't hold my breath for instances.

I did burn about 20g getting my 1st aid to 340 but now that I have it I dunno how I could have lived without it; as a hunter its easy to heal while my pet tanks, heal him, and go on.

I'm considering alchemy when I hit 70 as I think it would be nice to have healing potions on top of bandages. I hear its expensive to start though.

I did scholo with 5 other ppl the other day and we got worked. Then we got a 70 mage to help us and still got worked. Reminds me why I'm leary of groups (although this was no ones fault).

Blood Furnace always seemed to me to be good XP/hr. I wouldn't leave all the Hellfire and Zangarmarsh quests for 70 though. I think some of them would be gray and wouldn't yield any significant cash.

Ignore all this instance running shit that people are suggesting. You'll hit 70 much faster solo quest grinding with the occasional instance to finish off a few random quests. Like somebody said, gear doesn't really matter until 70 so I wouldn't spend any money picking anything up until then. There are plenty of quest rewards to keep you going. Also, you're going to notice a huge hp/mana pool jump as you climb the 60's, the expansion gear really pours it on.

As far as time goes, you can go 60-70 in 3-4 days played if you don't fuck around and dilly dally through instances with shitty groups. Like I said, stick to solo quest grinding as often as possible. There is a huge xp wall now but it's really nothing to get upset about, just quest through the zones and you'll get roughly 2 levels for doing the majority of the quests.

Gearing up really depends on your situation. If you can manage to get into a guild that is clearing ssc/tk as an initiate or some low rank it's much easier. Most likely they'll still run kara/gruul groups weekly to gear up lowbies/alts, just slip in where you can and you'll be epiced out in no time.

Profession wise be wary about what you pick, some are much more expensive than others to powerlevel. While you'll most likely have a fair amount of gold when you get to 70, a lot of that is going to be spent on flying mount/gems/enchants/etc. So, unless you can the spare gold to dump into grinding a profession from stratch, you might want to stick with gathering herb/mining/etc.

However, it's worth looking into craftable gear as there are a lot of huge upgrades that are fairly easily obtainable. So you might want to look into leatherworking/tailoring/bsing as another way to gear your toon up for higher end content.

Obviously, the goal would be to get into 10 man raids and heroics, they provide epic upgrades as well as badges that can be used to purchase even better upgrades and tier gear.

It's important to note one thing before you consider all this: a player is only good as they know how to play. I've seen priests for instance in full epics that couldn't keep a tank alive to save their life, they just weren't good at spell rotation/healing overall. What I mean mainly is that you can make up for some lacking of gear with general skill. For example, a rogue in full epics that is slacking and not paying attention could potentially get out dps'd by another rogue in mediocre gear.

If you want to get into raids/heroics/high end content learn your class, learn your encounters, know what to do in which situations and how to do it. Know your rotations and how to max your dps/tanking/healing, and don't pick some obscure hybrid spec that is overall worthless.

Ignore all this instance running shit that people are suggesting. You'll hit 70 much faster solo quest grinding with the occasional instance to finish off a few random quests.

I think everyone else's POV on this is not to get so much as level faster as so much saving all the Outlands quests for 70 to make gold for their epic flyer.