At least a few upgrades

Last week I was finally able to purchase the third t12 item, and I decided to craft the 365 weapons rather than waiting for either a price drop, or a totally lucky drop in Firelands. It feels good to have some upgrades.

It took me a long time to get the third t12 item, and I worked hard for it – was it casual? Yup. But you can get stuffed if you think it didn’t take a very long time. I’m not the best geared in my guild at all, but considering that I have never had a raid upgrade in Firelands, and have barely stepped in there, being around position 12 to 14 on the guild list is a small achievement.

Today I read news that the t13 items will not be available for purchase with Valor, but other gear will be. Initially I was totally disenfranchised by this. I think this is OK as long as the gear is almost the same as the tier gear. A tad less powerful is fine (eg. missing a Tier set bonus), but if the items are no more powerful than the 5 man rewards, then I will not be grinding Valor at all – and cannot see a reason to do the 5 mans beyond the basic gear-ups.

That will have a drastic affect on the tank population, and the amount of players we’ll see – so much so that I doubt it is even plausible for the Valor gear not to be almost as good. Not granting t13 rewards makes having those items more special, and I like that. If you are a raider and you got lucky enough to get them, then kudos. Just don’t penalise my role in the raid because I’ve geared a few items using Valor. That would be stupid.

So what does this all mean? It means I’m watching closing the announcements for gear as part of 4.3. Very closely.

Farming the AH for raid gear

Here is a quick summary of the upgrades I’ve got for Mortigen, my Frost Death Knight in the last 2-3 weeks. Note that all so far are via the AH or Hyjal quests – and I’m now running with 4x items that are either Best in Slot, or well placed to be BiS in combination with other gear.

Why do I raise this? Well my gearing plan now is to make a huge boat load of gold on the AH and buy my way to decent raid gear. I can’t raid regularly at the moment, but I’ll be damned if I’ll not be taken later in the raids when my schedule gets better due to poor gear (meaning still wearing ilevel 359 items in most places). So now starts a sell-up of all the mats I’ve stockpiled over the expansion, to be converted into trade goods and items which will sell. In raw value I think I have at least 10k worth of mats banked, which I hope to convert into well over 30-40k. We’ll see.

• Cloak: The Hyjal reward is BiS and healthy. A darn good start, and such a great bump.
• Wrist: purchased valor based wrist, so another upgrade to wrist slot is far lower priority now. yes, it was a bit of a waste to buy this so early, as the prices are going to drop significantly in the next month…but I wanted it.
• Trinket 1: I just purchased an Apparatus of Khaz’goroth (AoK), which makes most of the other Dps trinkets a much smaller upgrade (ie. from Ragnaros). See ranking table from the EJ guys.
• Trinket 2: The Crushing Weight is is still apparently darn good, and given how much Expertise is dumps, I agree.

Trinkets for Dual Wield Frost DKs are a funny thing. The License to Slay ranks very high on that table, but then its main stat offering (Hit Rating) is something that I have a stack of due to the main hand weapons also having Hit. I’ll have to consider grabbing a License at some point, but well after the other gear slots are up to spec.

The AoK is very nice, although it is said that it is far worse for a DK using Unholy, as they do not get enough Critical Strikes fast enough to actually acquire 5 stacks of the power. That makes sense, and means that I’ll probably stay Frost unless a fantastic 2 handed weapon somehow gets within my grasp. I can’t see it happening any time soon. I did some preliminary testing to see if I’d wasted a lot of gold, but it had a slight dps increase on a dummy, so I hope that will translate to a more powerful increase when I’m raid buffed and killing things “for real”.

I also can’t see myself getting any of the Heroic versions of the trinkets either (or any other gear come to think of it), although I might get lucky and get a Firestone to upgrade an item I have much later at some point. I think I’d upgrade the AoK, as the Heroic version is really nice too. People are challenging the item as the potential affect cannot be fully utilised all the time, but the Str buff alone is very healthy and if macro’ed in to a strike then you’ll always use it when its off cooldown.

Yes, now I’m much poorer than a few weeks ago (spent approx 34k so far), but if my enchants sell then i could be picking up another BoE upgrade within a week or two.

I might even sell the Orb of Deception and Haunted Memento that I’ve had for ages too; the sale value of both has not changed hardly at all, despite being somewhat rare.

Moar Upgrades Booyaa

OK, I might be becoming a greedy little loot monger. Last night I finally achieved Exalted status with the Wildhammer Clan in Twilight Highlands, and purchased the tanking boots. So damn excited to be getting rid of old ilevel 333 boots in place of a nice set of 359’s which have gob-tonnes of Parry and Mastery.

It’s like the guy who designed these not only played a Death Knight tank, but also has a girlfriend and a mistress who tank as well. Like a good set of Doc Martens, these puppies are solid.

Gryphon Rider’s Boots, come get some.

When I have some downtime next, I’ll be crushing my enemies beneath these cold plate boots.

The only slight downfall in my cunning plan (ahem) is that I totally suck at understanding the priority system for Death Knight tank rotation. Keeping that bloodshield up is something that I know is meant to be done, but I find crazy hard at the moment. Could be I’m too quick to burn a blood rune on a strike where it should be used on a cool-down, and perhaps that means I’m getting the shield smashed through too quickly. Either that or I’m supposed to burn the runs in a different order that what I’m using. The target dummies and I have a date in the near future, just a pity that they don’t hit back. I’ve read the theory, but I need more practice.

Also managed to get to Journeyman in Archaeology. Grindy-mc-grind-grind with a side serve of ….. dunno …. grind.

In case the title of the post does not give it away, I’m excited about the game at the moment.

Happy grinding.