Gear progression for a fresh 80 with no gold.

Hey all, I'm going to hit 80 tomorrow on Icecrown after grinding out dungeons as a Prot Paladin for the last three days. I've been queueing with my friend that is running Disc Priest. [Mentioned this as it may make pugging / LFD/LFR easier]. We're looking to move towards doing 2v2s soon as that's why we originally joined the server. We run a Shadow Priest / Ret Paladin comp on other servers, where you can just grab gear and go.

We both never actually experienced gearing through end-game content in WOTLK and we're very confused on what we should be doing. I'm not sure if I should keep rolling as a tank for now for dungeons & raids to get my gear, or if I should queue as a DPS so that I'm not "ninjaing" dps paladin gear. I'm not sure if I should be honor or rep farming with anyone, or what the actual progression looks like from PvE to PvP gear.

Back when we played Retail we just did our arenas every week and battlegrounds and got PvP gear that way, but here I've read that if you're not FULLY STACKED you're basically just a S*x doll in battlegrounds. So I'm not sure if we should even try to queue for those.

I've gone ahead and did the beta thing and purchased the coins for my Epic weapon, but I want to grind out the rest of my gear properly. Just have no idea how to do it, or even increase GS. Don't even really know how to make gold on here just yet.

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Unrelated, I've been considering trying Prot Pally + Shadow Priest instead of Ret. It'd be a first, but opinions?

Not sure about reps, probably ebon blade (physical dps head enchant) first, maybe sons of hodir (all shoulder enchants, but there is pvp one - not useful in pve, but your main focus seems pvp)


All reps provide some starting gear, but its low in addition to awfull grind. Professions provide decent starting gear as well.. but my favourite is doing dungeons - you will probably need to complete a few random normals first, once you manage to get 2.7-3k gs you can start farming fos/pos dungeons which drop higher gear and emblems of triupmh - you can buy t9/furyous set for them. That should bring you to about 4.5-5k gs. You can start doing raids at this point - toc10, both voa 10 and 25, icc.

IMO dungeon farming is probably your best bet. Doing battlegrounds will also get you good gear, but in my own experience I've found that if you have even one piece of PvP gear when you try to raid in a pug, you will be instantly kicked from the raid (I kid you not). Raid leaders HATE PvP gear, so if you plan on pugging raids, avoid PvP gear at all costs. Your best bet is to spam rdf normal until about 3k gs (around item level 150 or so. You may also want to find a healer to spam rdf nm with you, otherwise the queue will last a very long time) like jendah said, and then go into a fos/pos nm farm. It drops good gear and provides lots of Emblems of Triumph. You are going to want a LOT of emblems of triumph because you should definitely get 4 pieces of Turalyon T9 gear. I would get shoulders, then gloves, then chest, then legs. It'll cost you 160 emblems of triumph, but those pieces will give you the best stats for their price. You could get the helmet instead of gloves and get better stats, but it's +20 EoT. Ultimately, your choice. Afterwards, get the Libram of Defiance for 25 EoT. The instant you're able to enter heroics, do so. Never enter a normal dungeon, ever again. If you're able to enter heroics before you buy the libram or more T9 gear, still enter. You'll still get EoT, but also be getting 2x Emblems of Frost for daily random. Spam RDF hc. Save your EoF and eventually replace your T9 gear with their T10 counterpart (do NOT buy the T10 gloves, they are not BiS!!!). After you've gotten 4 T10 (which will cost 345 EoF), then buy the Libram of the Eternal Tower for 30 EoF. At this point, you should definitely be ready for raiding.

With 3k gs, you can also do ICC rep. Try looking for one where BoEs are not reserved as they could provide you with good, long-lasting 264 gear (but for the love of everything that is good, don't need on Rowan's Rifle). Don't worry about if the gear doesn't exactly match what you need, the Belt of the Lonely Noble is 10x better than your ilvl 174 belt. Same thing applies to pretty much everything else that drops. The 277 Ashen Verdict ring will be great for boosting your ilvl and gs.

I would say you're ready to start pugging raids at gs 4.8k. You could probably find a VoA 10 or an Onyxia 10 that'll let you and your friend in. Raiding will be useless, however, if you don't take the time to read up on the tactics for these and watch video tutorials. You need to know the tactics for ToC, Onyxia, ToGC, ICC, and RS. Ulduar is a great raid and drops good gear, but I've only ever seen someone put together an Ulduar raid once on Icecrown. OS is only good for the EoF weekly quest. VoA is just braindead easy - don't stand in crap and kill the boss, ez (pretty much applies for every boss). At 5.2 or so, you're ready for ToC10. 5.4 is ICC10. 5.5 is TOC25. 5.7 is ICC25, and probably TOGC25 (Don't ask me where TOGC10 is, I have no idea either). Once you're 6k, you shouldn't need to read this :)

Go blacksmith and mining. Craft yourself full Savage Saronite set.

Farm dungeons. Go tank.

1. Emblem farm, check
2. "But im DPS"... well, sure, but farming dungeons you going to see taht items drop twice and more... if the DPS dude with 2h weapon dont need it, you win. Its time that you need. Soo, in the medium run, check
3. "But im not a Tank"... sure, but you dont have money, and tank can really farm good money with pve. And you know, maybe you learn that tanking its fun! (YouTube and this forum had lots of good advice to noob tanks). Super check.
4. Money, because you sell the items to vendors or (the good ones) in AH. So use the Addon to review the prices in the AH. Check


Soo, in the long run, you need:
*1.000 Gold for the dual spec.
*And recommend you go (a) Minning and (b) Herbs for the money farm. If you dont have money, I asume thats your first PJ in this server.
*Finally, you need to be careful from the "Squish Server Time", 1 time at the year, that take 1/2 your gold. The ADMIN post it like 3 month in advance.

Nice topic.