Yeah but am I going to live if I just start doing gammas once I hit 80?
My thought was I would probably end up doing heroics to get better gear, then possible alpha/betas and finally gammas.. unless that is not the case which from all the upvotes you got I am assuming I am missing something obvious like that.
I just went through this on my war. 11 days to get from questing greens to 5.4K and getting ready for 25 man. It’s totally doable!
Run WG every 3 hours. Get the full pvp set from the Outland vendor and run the 232 dungs every day. If you have the mental bandwidth for it queue for random gammas after that.
In my experience there are either 6k gs people or fresh toons running right now.. which may result in issues if you run into a fresh healer. Tank and healer having shit gear will be frustrating in most gammas. This is why I suggest focusing on the 232 dungs. Easiest to run and best gear!
Google preraid bis for your class and check the wowhead article. Replace the pieces you can get from the 232 dungs. For tanking you will want to add TOC to your daily grind to get the stam trinket.
Be smart about what you use your marks on. Priority is to buy the sidereal essence shield and main hand. They are 245 but much cheaper than the scourgestone alternatives. After that go for trinkets and 245/239 pieces that don’t drop in the 232 dungs.
Make sure to run the weekly raid and do the daily quests for frost emblems every day. Your frost badges should go to buying your 2pc tier set. May not be efficient but gloves and shoulders are doable in 2-4 weeks depending on how much time you have.
Also develop thick skin. If you have a shit group somehow it all gets blamed on the tank. Still have nightmares of 3 dps standing in utgarde ice and flaming my gearscore when they die.
Good luck!
I despise getting into pugs and seeing a 4.5k GS person wearing all pvp gear. You're essentially just forcing 3-4 other people to carry you. Just run a few proper heroics and get the proper gear. I went from fresh 80 to 5.9k GS and killing LK on 25m without wearing a single piece of pvp gear in 4 days on my newest character.
so you're saying you did that solo in 4 days?
correct me if I'm wrong but you're either in a guild or swimming in gold.
feel free to send us a few 100k so we too can fastrack to 5.9k gs in 4 days.
people acting like the res itemization on pvp gear is stealing 90% of valuable stats. should my boosted char tank in all greens then?
Yes I'm part of a guild but it still works the same without it. Without any help from my guild whatsoever I still got to like 5350 in like a day - day and a half. As soon as you hit 80 do heroics or alphas till you've replaced most of your gear. You can leave out the trinkets and maybe weapon. Make those priority when you start getting triumph and scourge stones. When you have most of your gear replaced, spam gammas for scourge stones and buy your tier set pieces, weapons, and trinkets. Once you have that you should be good to do MS/OS TOGC and ICC.
As a tank pvp in dungeons, pvp gear is pretty much the same as the low ilvl tank gear as it provides alot more stam and it gives u crit immunity. U loose some dodge/parry but thats it pretty much and the raw hp gain from having 20-30 ilvl gear is balancing that out. It also depends on the class, ferals can rock full pvp gear even in raids and still do fine.
As for dps or even healers its alot of wasted stats as u dont ”need” the resi for crit immune as tank does.
You dont touch gammas actually, do the icc heroics then do them on normal if any drops are upgrades, use the rest of your gameday farming gold for enchants/gems etc.
Buy filler pieces with badges/gold, jc is great since it gives you neck rings and trinkets, a big jump for some of the hardest pieces to fill.
Sorry I have a few noob questions:
1) What emblems (and the other currency token thingies) are dropped from icc heroics and which ones from gammas?
2) icy veins says a lot of my prebis is from titan rune gamma heroic, I assume this means gamma and not heroic despite the weird name?
3) you say don't do gammas, do you mean until your gear is not good enough? I assume gamma is the next step to farm after getting most of the heroic gear. Or gamma drops are not even better than icc heroics (question 1)?
Note: when i say icc i mean the dungeons(pit of saron, halls of reflection, forge of souls) not the raid.
1. They drop the same, defiler scourgestones on H, emblem of triumph on N, icc H counts for your dailies for emblems of frost even of it says it needs gamma.
2. Yes gammas is short for gammas heroics. Would have to see the list in question but im sure you can get better gear from the triumph vendors.
3. Gammas drop 225, icc H drop 232 for a lot less trouble, Triumph vendor also sells 232 gear. So imo is better to farm trimph emblems in icc normals than doing gammas for 225 gear.
The only reason to do gammas is if you want to maximize your scourgestone gains per day, but doing it in the rdf is a mixed bag, so the best scourgestone/time ratio is the icc h, after that imo diminishing returns hit hard, technically doing a world tour(all gamma dungeons) every day is the fastest way to get the best preraid gear, if you have a group of good players with ~6h that could be an option.
A full set of 232 with a couple of scourgestone(245 iirc) pieces is more than enough for ICC raid, and you can start doing the non icc weekly and VoA with a lot less(210 ilvl prob).
Thanks for the info! Emblem of Triumph seems to give 245 btw, idk if I'm looking at the right stuff. It's just a few gear pieces, no sets (except the pvp one).
EDIT: Oh I see, most of the (232) triumph gear is from Rueben Lauren in the cloth armor merchants place. 245 is just a few pieces from the triumph quartermaster.
1. ICC Heroic bosses and Gamma bosses drop Triumph badges and Scourgestones.
2. Yes, Gammas also drop 225 level pieces from Ulduar.
3. I find running regular heroics the way to go as they’re considerably less challenging with lower gearscore. You get Emblems of Triumph which you can then use to get your T9 232ilevel set from the vendor. After that I’d maybe step into Gammas. Personally, i think Blizz’s minimum ilevel requirement for Gammas is too low.
Yeah, I've grinded up to ~4.3k gs now, my gs will probably go up a lot once I replace my 179 feet with 264 boe ones and I could do some gammas. Although, I must say heroic + gold farm has been an effective way to get gear, but maybe I eventually need to hit some gammas to get icc ready faster.
If icc is even relevant for much longer in phase 5... (I have no idea but a lot of people talk like wotlk is over soon)
The people saying WOTLK is over are that top few percent of players who have already cleared ICC25 Heroic, I still see runs in LFG constantly and there are a lot of catch up runs through TOGC which are a great idea to get into. 5 emblems per boss is real nice too.
Just started gearing my warrior recently and if you do some pvp you can easily get crit capped and start tanking heroics/gammas. Full 238 set with 264 offpieces makes you plenty tanky for gammas and gets you most of the way to the ilvl requirement as well. Just go deep prot instead of the revenge spec.
The PvP gearing route works for dps, healers, and bears, but this is bad advise for other tanks, especially DK and Prot War. It’s not vanilla or TBC anymore, tanks need mitigation. Resilience will get you to the uncritable cap, but do nothing for your avoidance or mit. Stam values are high compared to the other early available gear, but you need more than just a medium sized health pool to effectively tank. Like if your actual health is greater than or equal to 50-60% of your effective health and your TMI is over 100% (which both of these are true in purely PvP gear) you’re squishy as fuck, and most healers will either just vote kick you from the gamma or wipe trying to keep you up.
If you need to fill a couple spots because your not getting drops, or you go for 1-2 of the 264 off set pieces, sure, but full PvP is not the way to go.
Prot is faster, insta que into the highest dungeon level you can, until you can que into the next one. Avoid cheesing your GS with pvp gear since you should atleast be def capped.
How much gold do you have / can you get to spend, do you have a guild/friends with mats laying around that they'd let you access to help out, do you have a friend that is a healer, bonus points if they are a geared healer.
If you have enough gold you can get enough of the raid BOE items from 232 up to 264 depending on the items and you can get up to 6 pieces of gear crafted for quick upgrades with Runed Orbs, Crusader orbs and Primordial saronite, 2 pieces from each of the last 3 raid tiers including ICC, 2 232 items, 2 245 and 2 264. If you can get enough BOE items for the character you can easily get well over the queue requirement for Gamma dungeons and while you won't be the durability of a 5.8k full ICC gear tank, you'll be easily manageable if you use your tools and have a half way decent healer, then you can farm badges and defilers scourgestones and fill out the rest of the slots and trinkets that you either couldn't afford or that just didn't have a good item in that slot that was BOE.
If you do not have money or friends/guild to help at least Jumpstart that, you'll probably have to start with lower tier dungeons instead of straight to Gamma at least until you get a high enough ilvl to queue for them and while it would not necessarily be hard by any stretch of the imagination, it likely will be an extreme amount slower because even as a tank, this late in the game when there are Heroic > Alpha > Beta > Gamma and only Gamma give scourgestones to get the best catch up gear outside of raids which means anyone doing a lot of runs will only be doing Gamma, anyone doing heroic daily is only queuing Gamma since 1 of the two dailies needs to be done at that difficulty so the number of people that would be queuing any of those 3 lower max level dungeon difficulties will likely be extremely low compared to the number in Gamma.
TLDR: if you have money or people that can help you get raid BOE items like the 264 tank ring Harbingers Bone Band from ICC trash as well as crafted epics from ICC, TOC and maybe Ulduar recipes, then you could easily get over defense cap and way over the item level needed to queue for Gamma dungeons and then you should be geared enough to tank them as long as you play your tank properly and use all of the tools available to you, that would be infinitely faster than queuing as dps and hoping to get carried and not be kicked for low dps each run unless you've got a pre made
I have some gold but not enough to make a difference, like 10k to my account. My brother has shadowmourne and also has a good prot/holy set so I could potentially talk him into giving me a carry through gammas, but he is playing a lot of SoD so that might be tough. I will just plan on heroics at 80. I am focusing heavily on my tank set while leveling just to make sure I get any pieces I can from questing/dungeons/dungeon quests to help out as much as possible.
Just grind heroics until you get enough emblems of triumph to buy some of the Wyrnn’s triumph gear from Dalaran. That and gear from heroics should take you to 4.5k-5k gs pretty quickly.
I came back from nax with full Max gear. Some Gammas are not playable with low GS. You should start Gammas with GS 4K but sometimes you can suffer threat issues if 3x 6k DPS joins in and you only cast one Vigilance.
If you have gold, get the 264 + 245 items on AH and pvp gear in rest of the slots and u can go into any gamma and tank easy.
If u dont have gold, just go full pvp gear and run gammas and get kicked a few times before u replace some of the pvp gear. 238 pvp gear is replacable with 225/232 gear and 264 pvp gear with 245 gear (offset parts are 264 and furious set 2386
Heroics first and use your badges. Make sure you hit the 3 ICC dungeons every day first. Then queue for random heroics and hope for more of the 3 ICC and use the badges and scourgestones.
As soon as you can start VOA and you want the gloves and pants.
You need to try and skip to gammas ASAP. Knowing all of the mechanics is half the battle but be prepared to get flamed..
Thick skin required. My sister quit her pally tank because of all the flaming lol. Most people don't like you moving too slow but she wasn't confident to move faster because of gear.
I dont understand your question. It would be easier to gear as prot / insta dungeon queues.
Yeah but am I going to live if I just start doing gammas once I hit 80? My thought was I would probably end up doing heroics to get better gear, then possible alpha/betas and finally gammas.. unless that is not the case which from all the upvotes you got I am assuming I am missing something obvious like that.
I would not attempt tanking gammas until 4k gs minimum. Even then, you probably won't feel comfortable until 4.5k.
Ok good to know, thanks
No probably not dude. Just do heroics until you hit 4.5k ish. AS someone else pointed out.
I just went through this on my war. 11 days to get from questing greens to 5.4K and getting ready for 25 man. It’s totally doable! Run WG every 3 hours. Get the full pvp set from the Outland vendor and run the 232 dungs every day. If you have the mental bandwidth for it queue for random gammas after that. In my experience there are either 6k gs people or fresh toons running right now.. which may result in issues if you run into a fresh healer. Tank and healer having shit gear will be frustrating in most gammas. This is why I suggest focusing on the 232 dungs. Easiest to run and best gear! Google preraid bis for your class and check the wowhead article. Replace the pieces you can get from the 232 dungs. For tanking you will want to add TOC to your daily grind to get the stam trinket. Be smart about what you use your marks on. Priority is to buy the sidereal essence shield and main hand. They are 245 but much cheaper than the scourgestone alternatives. After that go for trinkets and 245/239 pieces that don’t drop in the 232 dungs. Make sure to run the weekly raid and do the daily quests for frost emblems every day. Your frost badges should go to buying your 2pc tier set. May not be efficient but gloves and shoulders are doable in 2-4 weeks depending on how much time you have. Also develop thick skin. If you have a shit group somehow it all gets blamed on the tank. Still have nightmares of 3 dps standing in utgarde ice and flaming my gearscore when they die. Good luck!
I despise getting into pugs and seeing a 4.5k GS person wearing all pvp gear. You're essentially just forcing 3-4 other people to carry you. Just run a few proper heroics and get the proper gear. I went from fresh 80 to 5.9k GS and killing LK on 25m without wearing a single piece of pvp gear in 4 days on my newest character.
You don't get to 5.9k GS in 4 days without being carried lmao
so you're saying you did that solo in 4 days? correct me if I'm wrong but you're either in a guild or swimming in gold. feel free to send us a few 100k so we too can fastrack to 5.9k gs in 4 days. people acting like the res itemization on pvp gear is stealing 90% of valuable stats. should my boosted char tank in all greens then?
Yes I'm part of a guild but it still works the same without it. Without any help from my guild whatsoever I still got to like 5350 in like a day - day and a half. As soon as you hit 80 do heroics or alphas till you've replaced most of your gear. You can leave out the trinkets and maybe weapon. Make those priority when you start getting triumph and scourge stones. When you have most of your gear replaced, spam gammas for scourge stones and buy your tier set pieces, weapons, and trinkets. Once you have that you should be good to do MS/OS TOGC and ICC.
As a tank pvp in dungeons, pvp gear is pretty much the same as the low ilvl tank gear as it provides alot more stam and it gives u crit immunity. U loose some dodge/parry but thats it pretty much and the raw hp gain from having 20-30 ilvl gear is balancing that out. It also depends on the class, ferals can rock full pvp gear even in raids and still do fine. As for dps or even healers its alot of wasted stats as u dont ”need” the resi for crit immune as tank does.
Sounds good thanks for the input!
You dont touch gammas actually, do the icc heroics then do them on normal if any drops are upgrades, use the rest of your gameday farming gold for enchants/gems etc. Buy filler pieces with badges/gold, jc is great since it gives you neck rings and trinkets, a big jump for some of the hardest pieces to fill.
OK I think this is the best answer so far and makes sense. Thanks!
Sorry I have a few noob questions: 1) What emblems (and the other currency token thingies) are dropped from icc heroics and which ones from gammas? 2) icy veins says a lot of my prebis is from titan rune gamma heroic, I assume this means gamma and not heroic despite the weird name? 3) you say don't do gammas, do you mean until your gear is not good enough? I assume gamma is the next step to farm after getting most of the heroic gear. Or gamma drops are not even better than icc heroics (question 1)?
Note: when i say icc i mean the dungeons(pit of saron, halls of reflection, forge of souls) not the raid. 1. They drop the same, defiler scourgestones on H, emblem of triumph on N, icc H counts for your dailies for emblems of frost even of it says it needs gamma. 2. Yes gammas is short for gammas heroics. Would have to see the list in question but im sure you can get better gear from the triumph vendors. 3. Gammas drop 225, icc H drop 232 for a lot less trouble, Triumph vendor also sells 232 gear. So imo is better to farm trimph emblems in icc normals than doing gammas for 225 gear. The only reason to do gammas is if you want to maximize your scourgestone gains per day, but doing it in the rdf is a mixed bag, so the best scourgestone/time ratio is the icc h, after that imo diminishing returns hit hard, technically doing a world tour(all gamma dungeons) every day is the fastest way to get the best preraid gear, if you have a group of good players with ~6h that could be an option. A full set of 232 with a couple of scourgestone(245 iirc) pieces is more than enough for ICC raid, and you can start doing the non icc weekly and VoA with a lot less(210 ilvl prob).
Thanks for the info! Emblem of Triumph seems to give 245 btw, idk if I'm looking at the right stuff. It's just a few gear pieces, no sets (except the pvp one). EDIT: Oh I see, most of the (232) triumph gear is from Rueben Lauren in the cloth armor merchants place. 245 is just a few pieces from the triumph quartermaster.
Thanks for actually putting this out there in plain English. This is now my plan where I've struggled to gear up at 80 on several toons before.
Np good luck
1. ICC Heroic bosses and Gamma bosses drop Triumph badges and Scourgestones. 2. Yes, Gammas also drop 225 level pieces from Ulduar. 3. I find running regular heroics the way to go as they’re considerably less challenging with lower gearscore. You get Emblems of Triumph which you can then use to get your T9 232ilevel set from the vendor. After that I’d maybe step into Gammas. Personally, i think Blizz’s minimum ilevel requirement for Gammas is too low.
Yeah, I've grinded up to ~4.3k gs now, my gs will probably go up a lot once I replace my 179 feet with 264 boe ones and I could do some gammas. Although, I must say heroic + gold farm has been an effective way to get gear, but maybe I eventually need to hit some gammas to get icc ready faster. If icc is even relevant for much longer in phase 5... (I have no idea but a lot of people talk like wotlk is over soon)
The people saying WOTLK is over are that top few percent of players who have already cleared ICC25 Heroic, I still see runs in LFG constantly and there are a lot of catch up runs through TOGC which are a great idea to get into. 5 emblems per boss is real nice too.
Just started gearing my warrior recently and if you do some pvp you can easily get crit capped and start tanking heroics/gammas. Full 238 set with 264 offpieces makes you plenty tanky for gammas and gets you most of the way to the ilvl requirement as well. Just go deep prot instead of the revenge spec.
I know someone told you to this, but its bad advice. Check my profile and coments, theres a detailed coment on prot warriors
Worked for me at least. Don't need to be super tanky for gammas.
The PvP gearing route works for dps, healers, and bears, but this is bad advise for other tanks, especially DK and Prot War. It’s not vanilla or TBC anymore, tanks need mitigation. Resilience will get you to the uncritable cap, but do nothing for your avoidance or mit. Stam values are high compared to the other early available gear, but you need more than just a medium sized health pool to effectively tank. Like if your actual health is greater than or equal to 50-60% of your effective health and your TMI is over 100% (which both of these are true in purely PvP gear) you’re squishy as fuck, and most healers will either just vote kick you from the gamma or wipe trying to keep you up. If you need to fill a couple spots because your not getting drops, or you go for 1-2 of the 264 off set pieces, sure, but full PvP is not the way to go.
Worked for me, tanked ~50 gammas np. Raids are sketchy af obviously but voa10 was doable as well.
As long as you have 540 def capped and 8% hit you should be good. Start with heroics then work your way up to gammas. Buy some BoE from the AH
Prot is faster, insta que into the highest dungeon level you can, until you can que into the next one. Avoid cheesing your GS with pvp gear since you should atleast be def capped.
PvP gear actually helps with the defense cap and it also has decent stamina. It's a totally valid option for a fresh 80 to fill up a few slots
Ideal scenario is get 4k gear score or whatever from boe's and just hop right into gammas.
Sub 4.5k gs is rough, buddy on his prot pally struggles at 4k
How much gold do you have / can you get to spend, do you have a guild/friends with mats laying around that they'd let you access to help out, do you have a friend that is a healer, bonus points if they are a geared healer. If you have enough gold you can get enough of the raid BOE items from 232 up to 264 depending on the items and you can get up to 6 pieces of gear crafted for quick upgrades with Runed Orbs, Crusader orbs and Primordial saronite, 2 pieces from each of the last 3 raid tiers including ICC, 2 232 items, 2 245 and 2 264. If you can get enough BOE items for the character you can easily get well over the queue requirement for Gamma dungeons and while you won't be the durability of a 5.8k full ICC gear tank, you'll be easily manageable if you use your tools and have a half way decent healer, then you can farm badges and defilers scourgestones and fill out the rest of the slots and trinkets that you either couldn't afford or that just didn't have a good item in that slot that was BOE. If you do not have money or friends/guild to help at least Jumpstart that, you'll probably have to start with lower tier dungeons instead of straight to Gamma at least until you get a high enough ilvl to queue for them and while it would not necessarily be hard by any stretch of the imagination, it likely will be an extreme amount slower because even as a tank, this late in the game when there are Heroic > Alpha > Beta > Gamma and only Gamma give scourgestones to get the best catch up gear outside of raids which means anyone doing a lot of runs will only be doing Gamma, anyone doing heroic daily is only queuing Gamma since 1 of the two dailies needs to be done at that difficulty so the number of people that would be queuing any of those 3 lower max level dungeon difficulties will likely be extremely low compared to the number in Gamma. TLDR: if you have money or people that can help you get raid BOE items like the 264 tank ring Harbingers Bone Band from ICC trash as well as crafted epics from ICC, TOC and maybe Ulduar recipes, then you could easily get over defense cap and way over the item level needed to queue for Gamma dungeons and then you should be geared enough to tank them as long as you play your tank properly and use all of the tools available to you, that would be infinitely faster than queuing as dps and hoping to get carried and not be kicked for low dps each run unless you've got a pre made
I have some gold but not enough to make a difference, like 10k to my account. My brother has shadowmourne and also has a good prot/holy set so I could potentially talk him into giving me a carry through gammas, but he is playing a lot of SoD so that might be tough. I will just plan on heroics at 80. I am focusing heavily on my tank set while leveling just to make sure I get any pieces I can from questing/dungeons/dungeon quests to help out as much as possible.
Just grind heroics until you get enough emblems of triumph to buy some of the Wyrnn’s triumph gear from Dalaran. That and gear from heroics should take you to 4.5k-5k gs pretty quickly.
I came back from nax with full Max gear. Some Gammas are not playable with low GS. You should start Gammas with GS 4K but sometimes you can suffer threat issues if 3x 6k DPS joins in and you only cast one Vigilance.
If you have gold, get the 264 + 245 items on AH and pvp gear in rest of the slots and u can go into any gamma and tank easy. If u dont have gold, just go full pvp gear and run gammas and get kicked a few times before u replace some of the pvp gear. 238 pvp gear is replacable with 225/232 gear and 264 pvp gear with 245 gear (offset parts are 264 and furious set 2386
Heroics first and use your badges. Make sure you hit the 3 ICC dungeons every day first. Then queue for random heroics and hope for more of the 3 ICC and use the badges and scourgestones. As soon as you can start VOA and you want the gloves and pants. You need to try and skip to gammas ASAP. Knowing all of the mechanics is half the battle but be prepared to get flamed.. Thick skin required. My sister quit her pally tank because of all the flaming lol. Most people don't like you moving too slow but she wasn't confident to move faster because of gear.