Firelands raid and reputation and dailies gear

Taking inspiration from Restokin, Eao's Excursions, Wowhead and others, I'm looking at Bear gear here from the new Tier. This is from raid bosses, BoE drops from farming trash and thus the auction house, Avengers reputation from farming trash yourself, valor points from farming heroics, and Hyjal dailies rewards. Plus some crafted stuff.

I was interested on how to spend my valor points, which depends in which bits of gear are available and what raid drops I might be getting anytime soon.

Dailies
Firelands and Hyjal dailies unlock various item level 365 stuff, which is a mere 6 point upgrade over Tier 11 i359 stuff, but an upgrade nevertheless. My plan is to take everything, then replace it all with 378 gear as and when I get it. Other than whether to grind the hell out of the dailies, getting all of this stuff is a no-brainer. Plus there is also a load of tasty Moonkin and Cat gear.

Getting to the Molten Front
Matoclaw's Band

Vendor (Additional Armaments):
Ricket's Magnetic Fireball

Vendor (Filling the Moonwell):
Band of Glittering Lights
Moonwell Phial
Relic of Elune's Shadow

Vendor (Calling the Ancients):
Aviana's Grips

So I'll be unlocking the Moonwell vendor first, purely because they sell the most items.

BoE trash drops
Bored? Join a trash run for reputation and a crack at some BoE drops. Rich? Head on over to the Auction House or trade channel for the chance at some expensive BoE epics.

Scales of Life
Riplimb's Lost Collar
Ranseur of Hatred

I am 2 out of 3 for the BoE drops, thanks to lucky dice and a generous guild. Now if Riplimb's Lost Collar could get unlost, that would be handy. It is definitely worth doing some trash farming, for BoEs and the reputation items.

Avengers reputation
While running that Firelands raid trash, you can haz Honoured reputation with The Avengers of Hyjal. But no more, unless you can kill bosses. No sign of Emma Peel either, which is a shame.

Friendly: Sleek Flamewrath Cloak
Honoured: Flamebinding Girdle
Revered: Stay of Execution
Exalted: Viridian Signet of the Avengers

Riplimb's Lost Collar can stay lost once I get to honoured if I don't have it, although it has better secondary stats than the Flamebinding Girdle.

Valor points
Not killing bosses? Don't let that get you down, just grind 7 heroics into the dust for Valor points! Then die lots in the new, long and quite tricky Zul'* heroics!

Chest (2200 VP): Obsidian Arborweave Raiment
Gloves (1650 VP): Obsidian Arborweave Grips
Legs (2200 VP): Obsidian Arborweave Legguards
Neck (1250 VP): Necklace of Smoke Signals
Wrist (1250 VP): Flamebinder Bracers
Ring (1250 VP): Splintered Brimstone Seal
Relic (700 VP): Covenant of the Flame

Neither the Tier 12 head nor the shoulders can be bought with Valor Points, you need a token from Ragnaros and Staghelm respectively. The Legs and Gloves could drop from the new boss in Baradin Hold, Occu'thar. The bracers are BoE, so they could be gotten from the AH eventually (at great cost). The two piece set bonus is pure threat (and damage) increase, the 4 piece bonus is the one which might help survivability.

Crafted
Patterns for the crafted items drop from trash in Firelands.

Gloves: Clutches of Evil
Feet: Treads of the Craft

The Witch-Hunter's Harvester is also crafted from a pattern from the Firelands Dailies, but it is item level 365 and given the likely cost, might not be worth picking up. As ever your purse will be the deciding factor.

Boss drops
The least likely thing to get, at the moment for our guild, is the boss drops. Mostly because a boss has to drop dead before we get a chance at their shinies, and progress has been lackluster of late.

Head: Hood of Rampant Disdain (Lord Rhyolith (one of first 4 bosses))
Shoulder: Shoulderpads of the Forgotten Gate (Baelroc (5th boss))
Chest: Breastplate of the Incendiary Soul (Baelroc)
Wrists: Flickering Wristbands (Alysrazor (one of first 4 bosses))
Hands: Gloves of Dissolving Smoke (Shannox (one of first 4 bosses))
Legs: Cinderweb Leggings (Beth'tilac (one of first 4 bosses))
Feet: Sandals of Leaping Coals (Staghelm (penultimate boss))
Ring: Widow's Kiss (Beth'tilac)
Trinket: Spidersilk Spindle (Beth'tilac)
Trinket: Matrix Restabilizer (Ragnaros)
Neck: Choker of the Vanquished Lord (Ragnaros)
Cloak: Dreadfire Drape (Lord Rhyolith)
Weapon: Fandral's Flamescythe (Fandral)

Now here the first 4 bosses might be dying at some point, for our guild the latter ones are going to be difficult. It is nice that Ragnaros drops a trinket, but I doubt I will be seeing it, so that makes it worth getting the trash drop trinket. However I would hope Shannox, Beth'tilac and Rhyolith are within our reach, giving a good chance at legs, gloves, ring, helm and a different trinket.

What is harder to get is the items from later bosses; the chest, shoulders, feet, fire kitty staff (damn), neck and wrists. This is a good pointer for what valor gear to grab first. Shoulders are not on the valor vendor, neither are feet. Feet can be bought as a crafted epic, so keep an eye out for those, same with wrists or you can grind them. The weapon needs to come from trash. There are no relic drops either.

Thus the chest, neck, relic and ring are prime purchases for Valor, plus maybe hands or legs to get the 2 piece Tier 12 bonus. That will really come down to which drop I didn't get, hands or legs. I think I will grind up the chest first, then see where I am with the legs or gloves. Recall the 2 piece set bonus is just threat, and I don't hold out massive hope of getting 4 pieces, so I may go for relic, neck and rings cos they are cheap, once I get the chest, and hold out for drops on the legs and gloves. If you are in a more progressed guild, you may want to snag things in a different order and be ready to grab the 4 piece set bonus.

4.2 dailies rewards

With patch 4.2 comes a new set of dailies which unlock ever more areas in Mount Hyjal, and feature a "personal progression" story. Think Island of Quel'danas area unlocking, but for just the player rather than the server.

Now MMO Champion has the scoop about the loot available from the vendors in this new quest area, in this here post. What it boils down to is some item level 365 items, available for gold. Trinkets, ring and gloves are available for the feral druid. All for questing in Hyjal, helping out the Druids and a bit of grind.

Hold on a second, how much grind?

I refer to what Kaliope's Crafting Blog has to say:

Completing all 14 of the new Firelands quests was taking me about 45 minutes each day. It might go faster if you have a group to do it with you. These 14 quests will reward 25 tokens per day. So the most tokens you'll get in any one day is 25 and this is only after you reach Phase 3. It takes 5 days to unlock each vendor once you've completed all the steps leading up to them. Phase 1 takes three days, followed by Phase 2 which takes 11 days. Phase 3 takes 6 days per faction, so 12 days total. Including the 5 days to actually unlock a vendor, you're looking at 31 days to gain access to the new recipes. Add another five days for each additional vendor you want to unlock.

So that's 31 days of doing the new dailies, every daily every single day, before you are able to purchase items from 1 of the 3 vendors. Given one of the vendors has most of the feral druid goods you'll want, the other 2 vendors have 1 item of interest. I find Tol Barad dailies obnoxious, and they take me 30 minutes or less.

31 days of grinding, 3 points when the phase changes when you might see something else, otherwise days and days of a set of fixed quests, randomly available, much like Tol Barad.

The items available are 365, which is a mere 6 item levels higher than raid drops or Valor point purchases currently. Valor items will be available for Justice points in 4.2, so the items available from the vendors are a slight upgrade, and might fill a slot or two you don't have an item for. However, if you are raiding, you may already have 359 epics for rings and trinkets, and you might have the epic gloves from Dragonmaw already.  Plus if you have success in the Firelands raid, you will be getting items with a higher item level than 365 anyway.

31 days grind for an extra 6 item levels across 4 items? No thanks. I can't imagine anything less worthwhile, I think I'd rather grind heroics for Justice to buy all those left over Valor items from 4.1.

Now if you don't raid, I think the grind might be attractive. My Death Knight certainly has very shabby gear, and could only get 1 trinket from Justice (come 4.2), so an extra trinket and ring would be a good upgrade. Still, a month of solid dailies? Yuck, 4.2 certainly is putting the grind into World of Grindcraft.

The 4.1 Post

Patch 4.1 is upon us, the PTR is down and everyone is finalizing stuff. I was going to write a loot guide, but handily Wowhead have done it for me. Check out their blog post with all the new loot, Closing the Gap: A Guide to Gearing up in 4.1.

The summary is there is phat epics in the new Troll instances, Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman, at item level 353. These new items are generally not as good as raid or reputation epics, but with the right stats they sure beat the 346 items you get from the old heroics and Justice Points. I for one will be in the new instances, trying to grab what I can. You do need an average item level of 346 or higher to get into one of the new instances, which is pretty much full heroic gear or maybe some reputation epics to compensate for some 333 items, so there's no "free" loot here for a fresh level 85.

There is also a new Call To Arms feature in the Dungeon Finder, which has caused heated debate in the blogosphere, although I won't be using it, unless I fancy some top "fun".

Onto the changes to the Druid class, the feral stuff specifically. Look, peoples have already talked about this stuff:

• Fluid Druid
• Eao's excursions
• Think Tank
• The Inconspicuous Bear
• and probably more peoples

My top picks includes Skull Bash never missing (yay), Savage Defense being tweaked to hopefully work better, and Swipe being on a 3 second for some actual AOE threat (I generally always loose against DKs and Paladins).

Fun times ahead... if the combination of Blizzard, Telia and Virgin Media fix the horrendous latency and lag spike issues I've been having recently.

Cat hand-me-downs

Running a dual spec with Bear and Cat, I have been gearing up for Bear primarily. This means everything I get, the Mastery is left alone and whatever weakest secondary stat is left, gets reforged into Dodge rating. Enchants are all tanking ones - Stamina and some Agility.

When I go Cat, either for questing or to off-spec DPS in raids with far too many tanks, I tend to use the same gear with a Cat DPS spec. After all, the primary stats of Stamina and Agility are needed as a Bear or a Cat, it's just the gemming, enchants and reforging which is different.


What happens when I get an upgrade is not all clear cut. If a DPS trinket drops, I can use that in the Cat spec, if a tanking trinket drops, Bear. If an armor item drops which is item level 359, it replaces a 346 item. Now should I continue to use the 346 item in Cat spec (with appropriate enchants and reforges), or go with a tank-setup 359 item? My initial suspicion was that by reforging a stat which gives some DPS, to a tanking stat (Dodge) which gives none, you are effectively removing those stat points from the item, and thus reducing its effective item level. Still, let's try Rawr instead of cogitating about it.

Note here I am looking at DPS in Cat spec. If your main concern is average item level, or WoW Heroes score, obviously you use the higher-item level Bear gear. Laughing in a villainous manner all the way to the Heroic you just leeched into ;)

For my current Cat DPS spec in Cat gear, Rawr claims 15758 DPS points. In Bear gear in Cat DPS spec its 15680 DPS points, a drop. However, this doesn't account for the fact that most of my Bear pieces are item level upgrades over their Cat equivalent, for example I have Mask of Vines for Bear but am still using my old Shocktrooper Hood for Cat. Unfortunately the Rawr optimizer won't let me say "don't reforge or regem anything, you only get this one item with things reforged to dodge", so I cannot optimize over all Cat and Bear pieces I have, regemming only the Cat pieces.

So I tried swapping items around, putting in a tanking item in the place of a DPS item and seeing the difference. First you have to switch your spec to Druid -> Bear, otherwise Rawr will not let you reforge things to dodge (fairly sensible). Then swap the item and switch back to Druid -> Cat. Swapping the Shocktrooper Hood to a Mask of Vines gives a DPS points of 15752, which is a slight loss, despite the Mask of Vines being 346 vs 333. However, the Mask has Crit rating reforged to Dodge, and a tanking meta gem in it. How about a Sash of Musing to a Belt of Nefarious Whispers? 15720 DPS points, again a slight drop. It is looking like going up an item level band, but reforging and gemming for tanking stats, produces an overall drop in DPS.

Finally, a Relic of Arathor to Relic of Golganneth (reforge Haste to Dodge)? 15777 DPS points. Now this is a slight increase, which is intriguing, and may lead me to using the epic relic in my Cat set.

The results tend to show that my best bet is to take the upgrade for the Bear gear, then reforge, re-gem and re-enchant the replaced item to become a Cat DPS piece. If I don't already have a piece, I can use the Bear piece asis. In this way, I am using hand-me-downs from my Bear spec in my Cat spec. The Cat set is pretty solid already, and any upgrades for the Bear set will also mean an upgrade for the Cat set (unless its like a tanking trinket or something of course).


Would hand-me-downs work the other way round, taking old Cat DPS pieces and using them in a Bear spec? That's a topic for later - the increased Stamina amounts on higher item level gear make them quite desirable, without considering the extra Agility. Other bloggers have shown a Cat spec with Bear survival talents only takes a bit more damage, using mostly Cat-oriented gear, whereas dropping overall item level would likely hurt Bear survivability.

Daily dalliance with factions

Sometimes it seems the World of Warcraft is entirely random and arbitary, however last night I came to the realization that a pretty essential set of dailies fit exactly into the 25 daily quest limit.

Cooking Daily
As awarded in Orgrimmar, I am doing the cooking daily to get the recipe for Skewered Eel, having did the daily to get recipes to skill up cooking. Our guild advises raiders to have max level fishing and cooking for the feasts and our own personal buff food.

Total 1 daily quest.

Tol Barad Peninsula Dailies
The Tol Barad Peninsula is the PvE zone just above the Tol Barad warzone, and offers a set of dailies for repping up with Hellscream's Reach. This faction is good because at revered there is the Spear of Trailing Shadows and at exalted Mirror of Broken Images.

There are 6 daily quests here which are somewhat random but stay fixed during one day. The total is now 7 daily quests.

Tol Barad
If your faction controls Tol Barad, you get another set of 6 daily quests for Hellscream's Reach. 3 of these are random but appear to change for every victory, so in one day it is possible to complete the 3 fixed plus 3 sets of 3 random ones, for 12 total from the Tol Barad area. Of course your faction must win each time and you need to be lucky with the random quests.

Assuming you just visited when your faction held Tol Barad, that's another 6 daily quests. This bumps the total up to 13 daily quests.

Therazane
The Therazane faction in Deepholm offer 6 dailies below revered and 1 extra at revered. Therazane have the shoulder inscriptions at exalted so I am grinding their reputation a bit. Even though they have tabard (but no guild bank), other factions have better items so I am just doing Therazane dailies.

The 7 Therazane dailies bumps our total up to 20.

Dragonmaw Clan
This clan out in Twilight Highlands have Liar's Handwraps at exalted, but nothing at revered for ferals, so I am grinding their rep using dailies at the moment. There are 5 daily quests for these guys which are entirely fixed.

Doing the 5 Dragonmaw Clan dailies takes the total up to 25, which is usefully the daily quest cap.

Capped Daily, and Often
Now I am also after Earthern Ring reputation for Softwind Cape and Signet of the Elder Council, but I don't think there are any ER dailies.

It might be possible to get more Tol Barad dailies and drop some of the other ones. Given that our weapon options are Darkling Staff from Stonecore Heroic and Seliza's Spear from Lost City Heroic, I am prioritizing Hellscream's Reach grinding at the moment.

There are a lot of dailies to grind at this point, hitting the 25 cap and having more factions I want rep with is quite something. Still, at least the dailies I want to do fit, and there is a random element to some of the quests, so it isn't quite as boring as the Isle of Quel'Danas used to be.

Leveling to 85 in Deepholm and Twilight Highlands

Happy New Year! The last two weeks have been a busy period with my grind up to 85 and a few instance runs.

Deepholm
After hitting 82, I went off into Deepholm hoping to snag some nice quest rewards. After questing out almost the entire zone, I got a Blacksoul Polearm which is a lovely 381 polearm. I also got the Leggings of Fragmented Hope and Worldbinder Signet from quests.

This zone is very nice and the quests are pretty cool, but for the gear-obsessed it is very important as you only unlock the Therazane faction 10 quests or so from the end of the zone. This faction has a nice ring for level 85 and various shoulder enchants, so it should be on your list to grind up to exalted.

The Stonecore & The Vortex Pinnacle
After finishing Deepholm I was a fair way into level 83, so I decided to tank the level 82-84 instances of The Stonecore and The Vortex Pinnacle. As I have considered earlier, there are some nice loot items in these instances, but really I want to get a first look at them, before I have to tank them in heroic mode. Unfortunately by this point the guild had moved onto heroics, so I read up and entered the Dungeon Finder. Surprisingly both went well, The Stonecore is a lot of fun and the bosses are quite different, whereas The Vortex Pinnacle was mostly tank-and-spank fights with some small frills. Having run each one, I was level 84 and ready to hit the final zone for what I hoped were some awesome gear upgrades.

Twilight Highlands
The Warlord's quest board sends you to Twilight Highlands at level 84, and it is well worth going there. Even if the starter quests are actually in Orgrimmar and Aszhara!

Twilight Highlands is home to the Dragonmaw Clan for Horde (and Wildhammer Clan for Alliance). Luckily it takes only a few quests to unlock the Dragonmaw Clan, however apart from the quests, there was one big reason for me to quest in TH. The Torth-Slayer's Staff is an item level 333 staff, which means it will get you into heroics, and after 176 out of 384 quests it was mine.

I was expecting some other rewards, and there is the Shocktrooper Hood which I am using, but the other leather feral item is Garona's Finest Leggings. Now given that I got to honoured with Dragonmaw and bought Leggings of the Impenitent far before I could get Garona's leggings, I decided to leave Twilight Highlands once I'd hit 85 and go grind some rep elsewhere.


The Grind
Now at level 85 there is a whole load of reputation grinds to do. I have a tanking head arcanum to get, a weapon from the Tol Barad faction, exalted shoulder inscription to grind for, plus a couple of exalted items from Guardians of Hyjal and Dragonmaw. I also have to run instances on heroic to get drops, reputation and justice points. So there is plenty left to do for a grind.

Gearing through dungeons?

So my original plan was to run dungeons and get gear and XP from them, thus getting some practice in at tanking and hopefully getting some nice blues. However, it occurred to me that not every slot can be filled from the first two instances (Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides). So which ones can?

Legs
Trinket (DPS)
Relic
Ring 1
Cloak

Shoulders
Ring 2
Trinket 1

Now from a quest in Throne of the Tides, you can get a nice Chest piece. However you must do 140 quests in Vashjir first before the quest is unlocked, which is adverse to the plan of just running instances.

This means if all you did was run BRC and TotT, you would not upgrade these slots: Helm, Bracers, Waist, Feet, Gloves, Trinket 2, Weapon.

So the question is how to fill these slots? The first plan for the chest is to do Hyjal until I get Guardians of Hyjal Honoured, this unlocks the Sly Fox Jerkin which is a great piece, but can only be used at level 83, and indeed only purchased at 83. This isn't so much of an issue, because I don't plan on doing The Stonecore and The Vortex Pinnacle until 83 anyway.

For the weapon, I already have my eye on Blacksoul Polearm which is a quest reward from Deepholm, so I plan on questing in Deepholm from level 82 to get this. Actually the drop in the level 82-84 instances, the Darkling Staff, is not as good as this item, so it is well worth getting.

For a cloak, I have gotten a Cloak of Beasts from a Leatherworking guildie, again this is a level 83 item but is item level 333 so is ready for Heroics!

Then there are upgrades to be had by questing. A minor upgrade to the relic slot is had with the Inscription-crafted Runed Dragonscale, but a quest in Deepholm awards Relic of the Waywalker which is slightly better. Legs upgrades of Leggings of Fragmented Hope are had half way through Deepholm. Again a ring upgrade can be had in Deepholm. Deepholm is also the place where you unlock the Therazane reputation, by questing the entire zone, and they are needed for the shoulder inscriptions, so you will need to do Deepholm at some point.

So actually it turns out for level 80, running BRC and Throne of the Tides is not the best plan to gear up, and will leave a lot of slots empty. So I have now completed Deepholm and am at level 83. I now plan on running Vortex Pinnacle and Stonecore for some of the drops in there, which are:

Gloves of Haze (VP)
Heart of Thunder (VP)

Helm of Numberless Shadows (SC)
Leaden Despair (SC)
Pendant of the Lightless Grotto (SC)

Key to the Endless Chamber (SC) (DPS)

As it turns out, The Stonecore has a lot more items in it than Vortex Pinnacle, although I am sure most pre-heroic gearing items will come from the level 85 normal dungeons. Still, I have to be geared enough to get into those ones.

Then at level 84 I shall skip over to Twilight Highlands, which looks like it will have a lot of major blues, so I can get geared for heroics.

Almost there

Got the shoulders and necklace, just the trinket and tanking ring to get and we are in business. Oh and a load of Solid Majestic Zircons. The new shoulders look pretty mean actually, I am very pleased with them.

Wonderful Weaponary

Weapon options seem to be, from BBB:

Orca-Hunter's Harpoon from Heroic HoR first boss
Marrowstrike from Heroic ToC but only if you get Paletress
Tower of the Mouldering Corpse from Normal FoS end boss

Or Staff of Feral Furies which is grindable and I have already. Thus the only upgrades are drops from instances, one of which is even a normal one, so can be ground but not using the dungeon finder I'd warrant. The best is from Heroic HoR which can be horrendous with the wrong group, so the one from Heroic ToC looks like a good bet - queue for Heroic ToC explicitly, hope for Paletress. If failure, queue for normal FoS and hope. Only a madman queues for Heroic HoR by choice.