Yesterday I started a little argument with one of our faithful readers and posters James M.  Don’t take it personally James, and I certainly appreciate your feedback, it makes me really research hard to back up my points.

The original statement I made is that most of your gear from tBC is already obsolete since WotLK will be out in a few months and you’ll be replacing almost all of your gear in a few levels anyway.  That certainly was the case in tBC, and I expected nothing different from the next expansion.

To make myself perfectly clear, I probably should restate the position a little more carefully (again, thanks to James).  It’s not that you will NEED to replace T5 gear with greens because the greens in the 71-73 zones are better, but you probably shouldn’t START trying to get geared up for the expansion if you aren’t already because the gear you will get in Northrend will be ALMOST as good anyway.  If you already have 4 out of five of your T5 set, and a guild running the right stuff to get the last bit, then go for it.  But if you have several toons at 70 that aren’t in high-end raid gear, now is certainly too late to worry about the grind of getting top end gear.

Now, Blizzard has certainly made every effort to make the gear from tBC raids more viable in WotLK than pre-BC gear was in tBC, but there is also a bigger difference between level 75 and level 70 toons and gear than there is between level 60 and 55.  The reason is that as you rise in levels, the gains from gear contribute a more significant percentage of your base skills than at lower levels.  I don’t have time in this article to go into a lot of detail on that, but every level gain is a more significant leap than the last one.  By the time you get to 75 you will be fighting mobs that will just be a LOT stronger and tougher.  Therefore, the gear has to scale faster to keep the game playable solo without having to go back and do 25 man raids from the previous patch.

Just so you all know I’m not pulling this idea out of some mental dork zone, let me give you a good example of what I mean.  The following picture is of the T5 hunter shoulders from the Rift Stalker set.  To get these shoulders you have to be able to go to Tempest Keep, a 25 man raid dungeon.  These are a 54%  drop and in a 25 man raid you can reasonably expect at least 3-5 folks to be rolling for these.  That reduces YOUR chance of getting the roll to below 10% per run, meaning you may need to make 5 full runs to have a reasonable shot at them.  Sound hard yet?

I would imagine that no more than 5% of the nearly 40,000 people who read DYS on a regular basis (or only about 2,000) have even sniffed the prospect of getting into a run on TK.  I would wager that the real number of people at DYS who have had a legitimate shot at these is in the low hundreds.  So saying that T5 will be ok until level 78 is making a HUGE assumption that there are just lots of people who have been able to build their complete T5 sets.  If you look at the guild progressions on any given server, there are normally less than 5 guilds from each faction that have even made it to TK even today.  That means it’s a pretty safe bet that only a few dozen guys on each server have completed even the T5 set, much less the T6 stuff.  It’s that rare.

(Uber Dominate Your Server congratulations to those of you who have completed full sets!  If you’re one of those guys you might pop your armory link into the comments)

Here they are:

Now, my original intent was to show that you will be able to get almost similar gear SOLO in Northrend fairly quickly and easily, so if you’re just beginning to collect T5 stuff, you probably just don’t have time and it might be a waste of time unless you already almost have all the set bits.

For one little quest in the Dragonblight zone at level 72 you can choose these green shoulders as a reward:

Ok, so no sockets, no intellect, and no hit rating, but if you CAN’T get your T5 shoulders before WotLK, these should do you just fine.  Going solo, the extra 19 stamina, 4 agility and 10 AP will almost make up for the loss of Intellect - especially for BM hunters.

Let’s look at a couple of others a little higher up the level ladder at level 73 and 74:

Besides that, these choices would also be a decent fit for a Shaman depending on spec.  If you have multiple toons, you probably have not had time to get a whole pile of epics for all of them.

Not good enough to show you what I mean yet?  Ok let’s try weapons, those are a different type of thing, so let’s stick with hunter weapons and look at some good bows from tBC compared to some simple solo quest rewards from WotLK.  I’m just going to assume you all know or can find out how difficult it is to get the epic bows I’m showing here, the greens and blues that follow each tBC bow is from WotLK level 75 or lower solo quest reward.

So I think you’re beginning to catch on to what I mean.  You can certainly go to Northrend in your T5 gear and not worry about having to completely replace everything in two or three levels, but if you’re not uber geared there’s no need to worry about it much.  In many cases, even good epic weapons will be replaced pretty quick.  Armor seems to have a bigger gap but there’s one more thing we haven’t talked about yet that may make the armor argument completely disappear.

We have not yet seen the gear drops for Northrend instances!  If they are as good as tBC instance drops, you may certainly expect to find gear that rivals T5 and T6 at level 72-73 Boss loot tables, we just don’t have a way of looking at those yet on wowhead.  I could probably have made even better cases for T5 armor vs. Northrend early instance drops if there was more information on WotLK items, but there simply is not enough to choose from as of yet.

One interesting thing about WotLK drops is that there are a lot of items that come with random enchantments.  Not that that is any different from the other two sections of the game so far, it’s just that we haven’t seen all the random enchantment drops yet so the names for all those possibilities don’t yet exist.  All of those Booger Beater Longbow (of the bandit, of the fletcher, of the whale and that sort of thing) all we have is the pre-name without all the suffixes yet.  The random chant stuff may be the best fit for many specialty builds.

So if you don’t like the armor comparisons above (I admit I wish I had more to choose from but it made the point anyway - triple stat greens are not really going to happen) just wait until you see the boss drops from the first few Northrend instances.  If a couple of level 73 greens have decent stats you can bet that the blues from Boss drops will be even sweeter.

The whole point of the original discussion with James was not to bust your hump to try to finish up tBC raids for gear (and certainly not for rep) since you will be able to find comparable gear in WotLK relatively easily and quickly, and you are certainly going to want to save the rep grind for the new factions unless you are REALLY close to hitting exhalted with someone.  It may not always be BETTER than tBC epics, but it will be close, and for leveling that’s good enough.

Besides, just like we’ve been saying all along with tBC, the really fun stuff will be the NEXT end-game content, so go quick to 80 and then start collecting your gear for the serious raids at the end of the WotLK.  If you think the T5 and T6 stuff is good, you will be beside yourself looking at T7 and T8.  When that stuff starts popping up we’ll certainly let you know.

The nice thing is that you’re not going to have to wait long for a final verdict on this topic.  Gavin and I both got our Beta keys last night, so we’re about to find out how fast we both replace all our gear during testing.  We’ll be sure to keep you posted about our progress.

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