So you hit level 80 and ready to tank it up in endgame. But first you must prepare. And since I am a good boy, I don’t swipe my credit card and instead do the in game grind.
Your first thought is to go for a few heroic runs to get some starter epics and emblem gear. But then you realise Blizzard essentially removed regular heroics by adding heroic plus, so you scrap that option.
To bypass that you instead go into Wintergrasp as a burden to your team for a couple of days while gathering honor for your PvP set.
Said and done. Your gearscore is now 3800 and heroic plus pugs start considering to invite you.
After loads of persuading that you in fact can pull your weight, you enter the dungeon. Just to realise everyone and their grandmother only do skip runs and skip the bosses you need in order to gear up. You make it to the last boss, just to have the subpar death knight in your group steal your tank loot.
You hearthstone out, telling yourself tanking is not worth it in this state and log back to your main. 0/10 would not do it again.
You forgot the option to farm gold for boes/gdkps or just get your friends/guild to boost you for free.
Blizzard did a really impressive job in finding a way to downgrade the expansion with heroic+. Heroic+ removes the most important part of early pve gearing and is only active thanks to increasing the original badge rewards by 150%. It is hard to find anyone running heroic+ dungeons simply for fun, which was the case for regular heroics, when they were active.
In my case above isn’t an option, unfortunately. My guild disbanded a while ago due to being beaten by the roster boss for too long. And on my server a full boe tanking set worth its name is about 20k gold, maybe even more. I’m not willing to invest that in order to maybe get accepted into pugs on an alt.
And the prices in GDKP are so ridiculous no one that is not buying gold or play with gold buyers can afford it. An ex. guildie recently bought an ulduar ring for 50k, for example. If you farm that amount of gold from dailies, mining or whatever activity you wouldn’t spend it like that.
Yeah, HC+ kinda ruined gearing of fresh 80s.
It will be pain, but since you are a tank, you can try to get HC normal groups. There is tons of ppl struggling with that, but mostly DPS. Get a healer and you are good to go.
Everyone is a victim of this to a certain degree. Fresh tanks are in the worst position though. If you’re a fresh dps’er in heroic plus, the difference is just that the run is gonna take a bit longer. And for a healer it just means that you can’t save stupid, and that you need to take more mana breaks (slowing the run down). But as a tank you can’t proceed if you can’t stand your ground. If a group is generous enough to invite you, you’re most likely gonna end up floored in a global or two, no matter your personal skill level. The barrier to entry is just waay higher for tanks.
Thats why I told you to run HC normal, and then you will be good to go into HC+.
Believe it or not, tons of fresh 80s just wanna get those juicy emblems.
If I read correctly, it’s your alt. Why don’t you just buy Raid tanking gear from the Auction House? It’s damn cheap atm, so cheap that you shouldn’t have a problem buying all available pieces with gold from your main. Northern barrier which is a decent 232 ilvl Ulduar shield costs no more than 3000 g. That alone would be a huge boost and still only a tiny portion of your total gold.
And no, you don’t need any RMT card-swiping. Gold from your dailies is more than enough for that.
I got my Ele Shaman alt to 4000 gearscore in a literall hour after dinging 80. Could have been shorter but getting all the gear, enchants, gems and stuff takes so long I’ve used only gold from dailies (I never get myself involved in RMT).
I don’t know what kind of gold farms you know about Bafago, but 3k gold for 1 item is far from cheap, atleast for me.
I just calculated what it would cost me to buy a tank set from the AH right now. My prediction in my above post was almost correct, it was just above 19k gold, and that is excluding any trinkets since I didn’t find any sensible tanking ones. That is about 90% of my total gold.
I get the gut feeling that people who think 19k gold is cheap might not buy gold themselfes, but absolutely participate in GDKP’s with people that buy gold and have their share that way.
I’ve made 40k since the start of ulduar just form doing dailies (including hc+) and selling the mats that drop. Paying 20k to make an alt raid-ready is perfectly reasonable price.
buying the crafted belt and bets should set u back to about 1,5k-2k per, and they will last u a long time. u can get 2 decent engi trinks with a lot of stam for about 4k gold too
edit: u can also use 2 pvp items pretty easily if u are an early tank, the resillience adds to reaching uncrit cap and they have a lot of stam, easy to farm as well
Or you know, be a 3300-3500gs tank, start your own H+ group, invite dps/healers of the same 3500gs, and slowly clear the dungeons on your own pace and without skipping? I did that on my paladin tank and it worked out nicely. It’s only 30% more monster damage in most dungeons, you won’t have any problems surviving single packs. And most bosses can be killed with dos doing 2000 dps, as long as everyone does mechanics. Something like CoS is a free dungeon if a healer has keybind on dispel. My very first H+ was with 3300 group, we struggled at first, but it was mostly due to not knowing how affixes work. I guess the only boss which might not be doable with low GS is Anub’arak, that one has really hard 2nd and 3rd add phases.
What I assume you probably joined groups with 4900gs people rushing daily heroic, they just do skip run, since they don’t need loot in there.
And 3800 is more than enough to join naxx10 (which drops 213), just do some raiding
500g a day is from Daily quests alone. Add turning Cooking Awards into Northern Spices and occassional Stormjewel drop, and we might be at 700-800 g a day. Still, just for doing dailies, nothing else. Add weekly quests in Wintergrasp which you can finish all in one go (no more than 30 minute business) which is 125 g and more than 20k honor which can be turned into Scarlet Rubys which still go for around 100g a piece. Add turning Conquests (which are useless for your main at this point) into Scarlet Rubys and you are in the gold heavens.
19k is a bit exaggerated since Naxx/OS/EoE pieces cost around 500g. Ulduar pieces vary in price, but we are still around 1500g a piece. Northrrn Barrier for 3000g is one of the most edpensive pieces.
My only problem with that reasoning is the following:
It would take a casual like myself with only a few hours to play every other day way too long to get that kind of money. By the time I get the money together for the complete set it’s probably obsolete again. Cause with the amount of time I’ve to play the next patch will be there before the set is.
Nobody claims that. But we all know blizzard isn’t going to do anything, and people are gonna buy gold no matter what we do, and won’t get banned for it. Of course the guy who pays goldcap for flare hasn’t self farmed that, but i’m not going to feel bad about the 40k cut.
Pff started tanking H+ with a gs of 2800. Made my own groups and used brain to ensure smooth runs. Got to 4k in 2 weeks. I dont know what groups are ppl getting in to, have geared 3 alts from questing gear to to 4k+ in a short time 2-3 weeks on average. Warr, rogue, priest. all in pugs no guild no swiping. Just dont be karen and use proper attitude, do your best for the role. Use gems/enchants. Never gotten kicked for low gs
I’ve geared up three tanks from freshly dinging 80 to being Ulduar ready within a week now, it’s more than achievable, without too much headache.
Buying the BoEs from the AH, you can get 232 boots and belt, a 232 shield, a 225 ring and a 225 cloak. Once that’s done, you can get 213 Valor BoE bracers, 200 JC neck, JC other ring, BS head (with meta socket) as well as a weapon (Titansteel Bonecrusher/Destroyer). And then use boe blues to fill the remaining slots (which at this point, are shoulders, chest and legs). Having engineering and jewelcrafting sorts your early stamina trinkets. None of this costs that much gold. You don’t need to buy it or run GDKPs to get it. If you earned a few Emblems of Heroism whilst levelling you can buy your libram/sigil/idol (or if warrior buy the engineering gun, very good).
Doing the daily heroic + for the 5 badges is a steady grind but if you add in VoA runs, and find some other freshly dinged people to run your 2 man 10 man Flame Leviathan and 4 man 25 man Flame Leviathan on the first reset, you’ll get what you need in no time. Doing other heroic + dungeons is a slog without help yes, but you’ll just have to accept that for now and stick to the daily. Realistically if you followed the above guide, there isn’t an awful lot you really need/want from them anyway.
Your first buy with Emblems of Conquest can be the tier 8 chest, and your first Valor buys can be the tier 7 shoulders and legs. If you can’t get dungeons then a Naxx/OS/Malygos can yield some decent Valor badges. All that leaves is the bracers, with both the 10 and 25 man Flame Leviathan have a chance to drop, which you should be doing weekly if you don’t plan to clear Ulduar properly.
Obviously most the items I’ve talked about here are plate, so if it’s a druid tank, have a look around for some alternatives.
I’ve used only gold from dailies (I never get myself involved in RMT).