Hit the raid finder last night, since they are upping the gear requirements for Thunder king LFR. I’ve had absolutely terribad luck with LFR, to the point where I was pretty much just tired of running the instances but only had about 3 pieces of gear to show for it. last night I got a dagger and a helmet. Both were useful. Even thought he helmet was 20 levels higher than the blue I was wearing I only picked up 2 points of gearscore. Looks like I’m going to have to go looking for boots. It is hopeful that this turnaround lasts for a bit!
I’m still not able to do shado-pan/August Celestial dailies more than about 1 day in 3. I don’t think it’s so much the Panda dailies that are killing my desire so much as the fact that I’ve been doing dailies now since they came out in BC and I’m just plain tired of them.
Mouzone
1662
Did you get the free 476 boots from sha of anger already? You can also get 496 boots from 5.1 daily rep. At this point in the patch cycle it is only really worth doing the 5.1 faction for gear. The original 4 factions are not really worth it unless you want their profession stuff or cosmetic rewards.
Shado-Pan has pretty cool stuff.
I use the flying mount I got at their final quest as standard flying mount right now and the tiger I bought from them as my riding mount.
The green tiger looks a bit like battlecat from He-Man! :)
The Klaxxi scorpio looks cool, too.
sluggo
1664
I finally pushed my DK to 90 last week, mostly so he could expand the farm to grow harmonies for inscription. However, I’d like to get him into LFR at some point, so this is the approach I generally take with fresh 90s:
-
Sha of Anger: Kill once, get free 476 boots.
-
Neck / Ring: either craft the 450 neck and ring from JC, or buy off the AH.
-
Weapon / Trinket: Send character all my Archaeology 463 BoAs (polearm / OH / trinket), which are easy to get at 90. If nothing else, they can sit in your bags and pump up your ilevel. (For my DK, I reforged the mastery trinket to +hit).
-
Heroics: Make a list of which bosses have upgrades you need (Shift-J is your friend), and don’t waste time in dungeons that don’t have gear for you. Random heroics can still be messy, so if you get a disaster group, bail at the five-minute mark to avoid the deserter debuff and queue for specific heroics (while the 15-minute LFG timer wears off).
-
Justice Points: there are several 458s you can buy with JP, including pants, cloak, and wrist. I’ll typically run a few heroics first, see what kind of luck I have and then use my JP to fill in the biggest gaps.
-
PVP Gear: if I’m still missing some slots, 450 gear is cheap to make and cheap to buy off the AH. I generally have trouble selling PvP gear for more than 120g; I bought my DK a plate chestpiece for 70 gold.
-
Craftable Chest/Hands: All four armor types have 476s available that, if you can’t craft them yourself, can usually be bought somewhere in the 3-4k range – not dirt cheap, but an affordable way to get an epic piece if you’re having trouble filling those slots via heroics.
-
Dailies: Obviously, you can start grinding the various factions so you’ll have something to spend your VP on when you get it. I’m actually going to avoid dailies for the most part on my DK, aside from the Tillers stuff for the farm.
-
Darkmoon trinkets: this is generally a last resort for me, as they’re ridiculously expensive (trying to craft the right cards is a fool’s game). Check online to see if your class-appropriate trinket is really rated that highly before dropping 16-30k on them (prices will vary by server, obviously).
-
I’m sure I forgot something.
I was looking for craftables for my priest, but the recipes all seemed to be tied to raids or reputation. Do you know where the cloth 476 patterns come from?
Rep from August Celestials and Klaxxi.
sluggo
1667
The 476 Tailoring robe and glove recipes require Honored with Golden Lotus.
Which I’m not crazy about, but only takes a few days to get to.
sluggo
1668
Just so there’s no confusion: AFAIK, the Klaxxi sell no tailoring recipes, and the only one sold by AC is for the 28 slot bag (at exalted, /grumble).
My second character got exalted very quickly with Tillers thanks to the double faction. I think I did only one round of dailies when I was bored. The rest was just from harvesting crops (+110 faction each), and doing the Tillers quests as they unlocked. Was nice. Of course, I have very few tokens to max my cooking, but, I’m on the fence about that. On the one hand I want to max my cooking. On the other hand I’m kind of pissed that Blizzard decided to make cooking the hardest trade skill to level since vanilla. Perhaps ever.
Cooking? Seriously?
sluggo
1671
The double rep is indeed awesome for the Tillers. I think you get like ~8000 rep and a vote every day, so you’re at 12 slots within three days and exalted within five or six. It’s great.
The cooking grind hasn’t bothered me, however. 525-575 is easy, and the leveling dishes can be turned in to NPCs for VP and coins, so that’s awesome. The last 25 points definitely takes more work, but 600 doesn’t get you anything all that useful (upgrading from a +275 feast to a +300 feast, mainly), so that was something I did more for the achieve and title than anything functional.
Then again, I leveled fishing in vanilla and got Salty on three characters before achieves went account-wide, so all the current profession stuff is trivial to me. :)
sluggo
1672
Followup: only two days after hitting 90, I got my DK into LFR and even picked up a Starshatter (476 2h) Wednesday night, without much work at all. The short version:
-
when I dinged 90, I was already ~438 thanks to (a) lots of 429 greens, (b) a few ~ 440 blues from dungeons and quests; © the 463 Arch BoA polearm and trinket.
-
As soon as I hit 90, I (a) crafted the 450 JC ring/neck; (b) killed Sha for 476 free boots; © ran Arena of Annihilation for the 450 weapon.
-
Ran a half-dozen heroics with moderate luck: got 463 helm, shoulders and belt.
-
In addition, while running heroics, I ended up winning a few blues off bosses that pumped up my ilevel: tanking gloves, mail chest, agi trinket. This brought me up to 452 equipped and 458 overall.
-
To push me over, I bought 458 JP bracers, which got me to 460. Woot!
So getting into LFR was fairly trivial, as I didn’t even have to buy any PvP gear to pad stuff out. Getting to 470 and the other LFRs will be much tougher, but since this character is really a bench player for me, I’m not going to sweat it.
sluggo
1673
As a followup to that followup: how is it possible I was unaware of the 450 BoA relics until this week? Man, I would have loved to have used these to level my DK from 85-90.
In case I’m not the last person in WoW to find out about them: hidden around Pandaria are ~30 treasures, most of which provide overpowered BoA blues to quest with. (i.e. 450s you can equip at 86). The catch is that they can be tough to find, as they’re on long respawn timers, but if you can get your hands on them, they’re basically pseudo-heirlooms you can farm on a 90 and then share with alts to level 85-90 with.
I’ve been fortunate enough to farm up the 450 caster neck, caster sword and int staff, so both my priest and warlock will be using those when they eventually level 85-90, and hopefully will make that less of a grind.
It’s Tuesday! Another shot at Terrace for some phat lewtz! I finally got lucky last week and got three tier pieces, enough to complete the four-piece bonus! I’m hoping for a Sha Touched weapon this week. I mean today! w00t!
I did AQ40 for the hell of it, and it was a blast. Got 2-3 awesome looking items for transmog. I couldn’t kill C’Thun, but I think I can now with the Evocation glyph. I was taking a ton of damage in his stomach. I think it was his stomach. I refuse to look up the fight because I’m a rebel!
Syzygy
1675
Getting Starshatter is quite lucky! I ran LFR on my DK for the first time this week as well. Going into that run, between Sha runs, token re-rolls, and running the first tier of LFR twice on my monk I had rolled 21 times with no loot won. But my luck turned around this time and I received three drops on my DK across the six bosses (DPS helm, bracers, and trinket) – no weapon though.
My monk has been healing LFR the past two weeks as it demands less knowledge of the fights, but this week I think I will try to tank tier 1. Would rather have the tanking drops anyway.
Syzygy
1676
Yes, they are quite nice to have. Some of them can be equipped at 85, IIRC, and there’s a mod that you can use that will show all the spawn points. If you have the gold (generally about 2-3k on my server) the blue ilvl 450 world drop helms can also be very nice for alts, as they are eqiuppable from 84 and you can socket MoP metagems and gems in them. My monk is still using his in tank spec as I have yet to get an ilvl 463 head piece drop.
I dinged 90 on my DK about a week ago. I wasn’t putting too much pressure on him, mostly farming, running a heroic a day (bought the pvp pieces to get his ilevel up, and a green sword), and starting the dominance offensive dailies–which seem really hard to me, compared to the other rep grinds. Big gangs of wandering mobs in the quest zones can lead to some major “ouch” moments.
Yesterday I break down and buy a tanking ring to get his gear good enough for LFR. I hop in LFR…and win 3 pieces of gear right off the bat.
Really, Blizzard? My main has been LFR pretty much every week since the third week of the xpac. I think he’s scored about 8 pieces of gear, and all but 3 pieces have been duplicates or equivalents of things he already had. I suggest the automated loot system they have devised needs some tweaking.
Still have that crappy green offhand sword, though. Can’t earn or buy a better one on my server, so far.
Daagar
1678
Maybe your main isn’t a tank/healer? Blizzard is telling you to play tank :)
The alt isn’t a tank either. I just bought the tank ring for the ilevel boost to get him LFR-able.
No Sha-Touched weapons in 5.2. I wonder if the 5.2 weapons are likely to be better than the existing Sha-Touched with the +500 gem and 2/2 upgrades?
