Gear Priority For Tanks In Mogu'shan Vaults

Yep, another tanking gear post.

As we trudge through Mogu'shan Vaults, one of the things we need to keep in mind is that we're going to be short some gear that doesn't drop in the vaults at all. For example, there is only one tanking trinket and ring that drops from the raid, and there are in fact, no tanking cloaks, helms, or legs that drop from the raid at all.

With the addition of the Charms of Good Fortune, I don't imagine that getting all the drops will be difficult by the time we get access to Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring; but we won't be able to replace the dungeon blues from Mogu'shan Vaults alone. However, we will have 3,000 valor at the end of this week and about 5,000 valor by the time the new raids launch, and I think we can be smart about where those points go to maximize our gearing strategy. Let's take a look then, at what we do get from the raid.

Item	Source	Slot	Type
Chestguard of Eternal Vigilance	Boss Drop	Chest	Armor
Sollerets of Spirit Splitting	Gara'jal the Spiritbinder	Feet	Armor
Shoulderguards of the Unflanked	Boss Drop	Shoulder	Armor
Star-Stealer Waistguard	Boss Drop	Waist	Armor
Bracers of Six Oxen	Feng the Accursed	Wrist	Armor
Beads of the Mogu'shi	Boss Drop	Neck	Amulet
Band of Bursting Novas	Elegon	Finger	Ring
Vial of Dragon's Blood	Egeon	Trinket	Trinket
Elegion, the Fanged Crescent	Elegon	One-Hand	Weapon
Steelskin, Qiang's impervious Shield	Boss Drop	Shield	Shield

That leaves us with a few gaps and here is where we can fill them out.

Item	Source	Slot	Valor
Gloves of the Overwhelming Swarm	August Celestials	Hands	1750
Yi's Least Favorite Helm	Shado-Pan	Head	2250
Kovok's Riven Legguards	Klaxxi	Legs	2250
Yi's Cloak of Courage	Shado-Pan	Back	1250
Alani's Inflexible Ring	Golden Lotus	Finger	1250
Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage	Shado-Pan	Trinket	1750

That's a net sum of 10,500 valor points which is 10.5 weeks of capping valor, which is six weeks into the opening of the next two raids. Assuming you don't get lucky with drops from Sha or, like me; are willing to swap in some DPS pieces as long as they don't have Crit on them. Hit, Expertise and Haste are all great for Paladins right now.

I'll go into the why of it a little bit more in another post, but Theck has covered it plenty over at Sacred Duty. But briefly - with the way Active Mitigation works, keeping Bastion of Glory stacks up through Shield of the Righteous is our highest priority and the best way to do it is to hard-cap Hit and at least soft-cap Expertise for Holy Power generation, and any Haste you can get will reduce the cooldown of Crusader Strike and Judgment letting you get HP that much faster.

Anyway, if you are willing to use Haste items and reforge the crit away, your options broaden a bit, but please be fair to the plate DPS in your raid, and let them get their main-specs geared out before you roll on that gear. Yes, Haste is very good for us but any good raid will prioritize DPS over Tanks on actual DPS gear.

Item	Source	Slot	Type
Starcrusher Gauntlets	Elegon	Hands	Armor
Nullification Greathelm	Feng the Accursed	Head	Armor
Jang-xi's Devastating Legplates	Boss Drop	Legs	Armor
Cloak of Peacock Featehrs	Feng the Accursed	Back	Cloak

So, there you go. Hopefully it helps you plan out your Valor purchases and be in the best gear you can get before Heart of Fear comes out in November. If I've missed anything, please let me know! I deliberately didn't go into the crafted gear and such as it's ridiculously expensive right now.

Personally, I've been very lucky and got the tier tanking legs and the PvP gloves from Sha so that's two less items I have to purchase. I picked up the ring first as I was still using 450 item in that slot, and I'll probably grab the helm second (next week) and the trinket third leaving me with the hands and cloak to upgrade when Heart of Fear launches. I think I'll be okay to wait on those items till then.

Good luck on those Good Fortune rolls! :-)

Mists of Pandaria pre-raid Plate Tank gear

So. Um.

My Warcraft life is in such an upheaval that as soon as I settle into a role and set my expectations, I get a, "Well, actually....", and wind up changing my role.

So far, I started Dragon Soul as Protection, swapped to Retribution (1) when we got a second tank in, swapped to Holy (2) when we needed a 3rd reliable healer for Heroic Zon'ozz, swapped back to Retribution (3) until we hit 6/8 heroics, switched up to Tanking (4) again for Heroic Spine, back to Retribution (5) for a couple of months, and now, back to Protection (6) for Mists. I count SIX spec changes in one tier. Holy crap. But this is a really good change, I'm excited about it, and I'm hoping that I'm up to the challenge and that the change sticks. We'll see how it goes in a few weeks but I'm hopeful. Assuming my laptop behaves.

Anyway, because of said change, I wound up making another list, and so here it is. This one is for all the plate tanking gear that you can get pre-raid.

One big difference from the DPS gear list is the lack of Justice gear - not to worry, there is a complete set of BoE tanking gear that you can craft with what look like relatively cheap materials, if you have access to a Blacksmith. There is also an especially good Valor trinket that I plan to pick up pre-raid for sure.

WEAPON AND SHIELD

All the benefits of easily gearing up to 450 iLevel with crafted gear comes back to bite us when we look at weapons and shield. No bones about it, we're kind of screwed.

For the weapon, we're dungeon farming for this one sword that you'll share with every single SMF Warrior and DW Frost DK. Good luck. It's either that, or using the one-hander reward from the Arena of Annihilation Scenario. It's one full tier behind the Dungeon gear. Ugly.

If lady-luck spurns you and you don't mind having a sword with Crit and Mastery, here is the solitary crafted one-handers that you could potentially sub-in out of sheer desperation. Have fun paying a few thousand gold for it, assuming you're on a high population server with some options. Low population servers are likely to see this thing go for tens of thousands for the first few weeks.

The shield situation isn't much better - but at least there is a decent crafted shield that is pretty cheap to make. Otherwise you're left farming for this dungeon drop from Heroic Shado-Pan Monastery.

Basically, make friends with a Blacksmith. Like, really good friends. In case you're wondering, yes, I have a  Blacksmith. And I can be your friend. For a price. A very high price*.

ARMOR

Here is the list for the rest of the armor. I've highlighted the crafted set a bit so it's obvious:

And here it is as an open Google Doc for you to copy and change as you wish, and the broken down lists on WoWHead:

• Justice
• Quest Rewards
• Crafted
• Valor

Okay, I'll hit up Mail, Leather and Cloth next, as soon as I get through some stuff in the next day or two.

* - the price is materials.

Mists of Pandaria pre-raid Retribution DPS gear

As the expansion gets closer, I'm swimming in one of my favorite things to do - running filter after filter on WoWHead to generate interesting lists of gear I might want, and while the Raid gear is the best stuff that I'm drooling over, it'll take me some time to collect it all, and besides, I need other gear just to get started raiding. So I thought I'd make a list of potential stuff I want, where to get it, how to get it, etc.

Show me the shinies!

This list should apply to any Strength using class. It just shows the PvE gear, I didn't include any of the PvP stuff, as, well, I'm not a fan of using PvP gear in PvE, and it's easy to build those lists anyway.

There we go. Good? Good.

Okay, maybe not, here is the full list as an open Google Doc (just copy it to your Google Drive or to a local spreadsheet if you want to modify it), and here are the different lists at WoWHead:

• Justice
• Quests
• Crafted
• Valor

The WoWHead filters aren't complicated enough to let me do complex And/Or query-strings, though I imagine that would probably churn for a while on the server.

I didn't include the Heroic Dungeon gear as that gear will come on its own pace and is subject to RNG, but there is no doubt about this gear - you can get every item here with some effort. I know those crafted chest and hand pieces are calling my name, as are the quest rewards. That's some easy picking right there.

But where are my weapons?

The best I could do was this list.

Unfortunately,  it looks like we're stuck with Heroic dungeons to grind out the weapon - thankfully there are quite a few options. In case one has the absolute worst luck with drops, there is a craftable sword with the same iLevel as the Heroic Dungeon gear and it looks fairly cheap to make, but that depending on how common Spirit of Harmony winds up being (remember it's, ugh, BoP.)

And for Retribution, I'm still not sure what our stat priority is going to be - either Mastery or Haste - but we can split the difference and settle on this kind-of badass looking mace: Mograine's Immaculate Might as being best for us pre-raid.

I'm no brawny plate-wearer (or Dude, Where's My Dress?)!

Just click the lists on WoWHead above, toggle the strength field to Agility, Intellect or Spirit, the armor type to your chosen type, and either remove or filter the Dodge/Parry into something you'd rather avoid (like Spirit, for instance) you can easily build more lists.

Just keep in mind the filters are all on an AND conditional - the OR conditionals are finicky at best, and only useful with two parameters.

Easy! Right? Erm.

Well, what's next?

I'm not going to make any BiS lists or anything till our stat balancing gets finalized, but maybe I'll give that a poke. I've been thinking about actually getting into some serious theorycrafting and building my own Retribution DPS simulator but that involves a lot of development time... but maybe.

It seems like a fun project, and as I'm getting back into C++ again, maybe I could use the project as an excuse to learn the new 2012 IDE...

Gear Gating In Mists of Pandaria

I'm worried about the gear progression path in Pandaria.

In Tier 11 and Tier 7, and presumably in Tier 4, the gear progression for PvE went something like this:

Quest Greens > Rep, Dungeon, Crafted Blues > Heroic and Badge > Raid

But in Tier 14, we have a new step in the ladder in the LFR and a change in the order, so that the gear progression, I think, turn out to look like this:

Quest Greens > Dungeon Blues > Rep, Valor, Crafting > LFR > Raid

I poked around in WoWHead to make a quick spreadsheet, so just take a look at the iLevel of gear and where it comes from:

iLevel	Source
463	Heroic Dungeons
470	Headless Horseman
483	Raid Finder
489	Reputation (and, presumably, Crafted) Gear
496	Normal Raid
509	Heroic Raid

The iLevel difference between Heroic Dungeon loot and Normal Raid loot is a whopping 30 points.That means that not only will it be useless for raiding, we absolutely have to gear up with Reputation gear. There isn't much crafted gear that I saw, so that might be an option as well, but the point being that there is reputation gear for almost every slot. Here, for example, is a table showing you the gear I would want purely from reputation alone, before stepping into a raid (click to zoom).

Almost every slot is covered except for the chest piece (I suspect these will be crafted).

Blizzard has said they want us to buy gear from Reputation vendors using Valor points instead of Gold as we have done so far. That means, despite all the juggling and changing how we get gear and stuff, we're essentially going to be buying Valor gear from a different vendor that also requires a Reputation.

Not only will we need to grind rep with these guys, we'll also need to farm the Valor which will have a hard weekly cap.

This is essentially a double gear-gate. Ugh.
 
One note of comfort is that all the gear only requires (at least right now) a Revered level of reputation instead of Exalted as I was expecting which softens the reputation grind, but that does nothing about the Valor cap.

Unless we run LFR. And that's where my problem lies.

In the absence of any useable gear from Heroic dungeons, it will take me weeks to buy even a few items of gear from the reputation vendor. I might even be okay with that, as a means of slowing down content consumption. But.

Someone might get lucky in LFR and be ready to go in half the time. I'm not bemoaning the luck factor here, RNG is RNG, but it's pretty obvious that gearing through LFR is going to be significantly faster than gearing up through the natural gear progression path alone.

With no viable gear from Heroics, we're left only with LFR as a source of dropped gear pre-raid.

Let' s leave aside the fact that hard-core progression guilds will run LFR for their tier. There's no question there, that's absolutely going to happen, as it did in Tier 13. For these guys, the kills are about speed, but for me the experience is important, not the speed.

When LFR launched with Tier 13, it didn't bother me much. I had a mix of normal and heroic Firelands gear and the iLevel 384 gear didn't appeal to me all that much. Besides, I wanted to see and down the bosses on normal mode before I took up the neutered version of the bosses, and that's exactly what I did. We got Madness down I think in the third or fourth week and that was the first time I went in to do LFR, mostly to get the 4-piece Tier bonus. That worked because we were coming into Dragon Soul after having accumulated the gear from Firelands and as a raiding guild, were geared enough to go straight into normal Dragon Soul without a problem.

In the current tier, as seen above, we won't have that, and if we go into the raids without grinding out the valor/reputation gear for weeks or without running LFR, the first few weeks without LFR tier are going to be brutally difficult.

Considering the fact that Reputation gear is only half a tier behind the Normal gear loot, I would imagine that normal modes are tuned to LFR gear.

That leaves me in a hard spot because I want to see the bosses for the first time in their full glory, not their neutered versions. Of course, the answer is to wait and get gear the way I want, through Valor and Reputation but it feels like a round-about and boring way to gear up compared to what we had before.

I will be disenchanting every single item that drops off of Heroic bosses, killing them solely in the pursuit of Valor points and reputation. That sucks.

Gear from Heroics was always good in the beginning of the first tier. Getting gear from bosses felt natural and organic. I remember in Wrath running Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle praying for the epic tanking sword to drop the night before we were to start raiding and how elated I was when it did.

Now, I'll have a spreadsheet that tells me exactly when I'll get what based on the rate of Valor coming into my pockets.

I know what I enjoyed more. Bah-humbug.

Exploits in LFR & Valor Gear

So. I'm looking at the Paragon (and every other top-tier guild, it looks like) exploit that let them loot the same boss multiple times, and I am left wondering why they had to exploit when they could, very easily have farmed the bosses in a much easier way.

So, you have 25 main characters you're going into Heroics with next week, You want them geared as much as possible but you don't want to exploit. Here's what you do. Form a raid in the following way:

2. Conqueror token
2. Protector token
2. Vanquisher token

Preferably, all of a different armor type (cloth/leather/plate/mail). You also bring along19 alts who you don't care about gearing at all. You form a raid and you run LFR. Everyone passes on everything, the main take whatever they want, hopefully getting at least a 2-set bonus each. At the end of the raid, swap out 6 alts, for 6 mains.

Reset. Rinse. Repeat. 4 or 5 times, and you're done. I'm sure it will only take Paragon maybe an hour or two to clear LFR, so you're talking about maybe 9 or 10 hours invested total. Yes, you're left at a bit of the random loot mercy, but this is not a bad way to gear up mains with no risk of violating ToS at all. It's fair, you're not breaking any rules, and everyone only gets 1 shot at the loot from each boss. It just so happens that you're stacking the rest of the raid with people who'll pass over and over.

Anyway.

Speaking of gear up quickly, somehow, I completely missed the fact that there are two BoE items available at the Vendor.


My poor Merricat who is already Valor capped will have to rorego that Trinket she was pining for and buy the boots for Innana while I'll run a dungeon or two tonight with my druid so he can buy Innana her bracers if I can't find someone with the pattern.

Innana gets all the good stuff the first two weeks of the patch! I must love her best among all my children.

I made my first Valor purchase in the Relic this week, next week it will be the Amulet, along with the boots and bracers, and then I'll have to evaluate where I am in terms of gear and decide what needs upgrading first. The Trinket looks pretty damned good.


The boots are quite good, almost comparable to the Mirrored Boots, with a Fractured Amberjewel in the Yellow slot. The bracers, on the other hand, are not so thrilling. The lack of Mastery and the single socket make the crafted bracers far more appealing. Now I just need to find someone on my server who has the pattern. I might just grind a few dungeons out on my Druid alt to get the bracers in the meantime anyway... but we'll see.

I don't really look at the drops as anything that's attainable until it actually drops and my position in the Suicide Kings list grants me the item. After who knows how many kills of Baleroc, I saw the tanking helm drop once, while Maara was on top of the list. Yeah, I don't really depend on loot drops anymore as a viable thing.

The lack of Mastery on a lot of the new items is a bit annoying as I have to reforge/regem a lot to stay at block-cap but my overall mitigation has been increasing quite a bit. Raid buffed, I can get up to ~40% pure mitigation, even more if I have Windwalk procs rolling. That's 40% of incoming damage Missing, Dodged or Parried.

I can't wait to get some heroic gear.