Cata paradox

Has it occured to you that, paradoxally, it's easier to gear up properly as a green tank in Cata compared with 'faceroll' WotLK?

I'm sitting on 358 gear (including upgrading my 359 crafted shield to the 353 troll-drop), and there are zero raid-drops won by me there (RNG is a different story).

Given time you can get 359 proper tanking gear in every slot barring the helmet without leaving the tier 1 heroics as long as you can support a flamboyant shopping spree in gold (grabbing BoE at the AH).

It's a bit like sitting on (almost) full Naxx 25 gear but never having seen Naxx just prior to the release of Ulduar. If I'm correct that would have been supremely impossible during (early:ish) WotLK.

Oh, well, random ramblings I guess, even if it concerns gear

With WoTLK you could get a pretty good set of iLvl 200 gear without raiding. Yes, that wasn't as good as a set of iLvl 213 Naxx 25 gear, but it was equivalent to a set of iLvl 200 Naxx 10 gear.

I think this is a side effect of the 10/25 alignment. Given that the vast majority of players are now in 10-man raids, it's not all that much different from WoTLK.

I don't do raids other than a rare PUG BH. Here's my gear (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/k ... l/advanced)

WoW Heroes (http://www.wow-heroes.com/) says I'm able to step right into 25 Mans.

The last items on my shopping list are the VP Ring and the side-grade 353 Neck.

Knievel wrote:I don't do raids other than a rare PUG BH. Here's my gear (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/k ... l/advanced)

WoW Heroes (http://www.wow-heroes.com/) says I'm able to step right into 25 Mans.

The last items on my shopping list are the VP Ring and the side-grade 353 Neck.

You could have stepped right into 25 mans with a set of iLvl 346 (average) gear. They are no different than 10 mans.

Also, I've found that, as I'm converting my recommendations from MDR to CTC, the "best" pieces are more often the non-raiding pieces. Usually Blizzard itemizes raid gear better than non-raid gear, so even at a given iLvl raiding yields side-grade improvements. But for people pushing the block cap this just isn't holding true.

I have tanked exactly one Cata heroic (been healing so far) and have an equipped ilevel of 353. That's without spending any VP on tank gear, or any exorbitant amount on BoEs (I crafted engy goggles and shield for orbs and a few kGold in mats). I was a bit stunned when I realised that.

A few of the pieces are dps pieces with mastery, gemmed and reforged appropriately (dps belt from Hyjal rep, agi ring from Earthen Ring rep, TB mastery trinket), but 152k HP self-buffed, and I think just over 88% CTC. It certainly feels like I got that gear "by accident" over the past few months while doing other things.

I think it functions as sort of a stop-gap for players.

Let's say that <Uber Guild of Uber> is 12/13 normal modes, and then both of their tanks quit. One; because of his very serious case of gonoherpasyphalitis. The other; because his dead grandmother won't quit haunting him from beyond the grave while he's raiding. Regardless, they're tankless.

In a vanilla world, the <Uber Guild of Uber> would be at a huge disadvantage now. They'd have to spend a lot of time either looking for a successful tank that is simply unhappy with his guild, or they'd have to pick up a noob and gear him up to their level. There's no telling which would take longer, or how the two options would overlap in miserable ways. But if said noob can pick up raid worthy gear without ever actually being in a raid, they may be able to pick up from where they left off.

I know all this is contradictory to "gear should equal skill," but from a utilitarian (dare I say videogame) standpoint, it makes sense.

Mcduffie wrote:
I know all this is contradictory to "gear should equal skill," but from a utilitarian (dare I say videogame) standpoint, it makes sense.

I never said it didn't make sense

It's just that Cata was kind of supposed to be harder in terms of endgame content than WotLK, but at least the gearing aspect feels easier.

In Cata it's theoretically possible to gear almost a full tier-level beyond early end-game content from only doing the previous content. Ie, you can get full five-man heroic gear (average ilevel 346, or possibly better) and never set foot in a five-man heroic. In the same way you can get 358 gear and never set foot in a raid.

If it turns out you can get more or less a full Firelands set from never doing the Firelands raids, well, that would just feel wrong.

yappo wrote:Given time you can get 359 proper tanking gear in every slot barring the helmet without leaving the tier 1 heroics as long as you can support a flamboyant shopping spree in gold (grabbing BoE at the AH).

My Engineer disagrees.

Aerron wrote:

yappo wrote:Given time you can get 359 proper tanking gear in every slot barring the helmet without leaving the tier 1 heroics as long as you can support a flamboyant shopping spree in gold (grabbing BoE at the AH).

My Engineer disagrees.

Fair enough, even worse then

This also makes the salve of people saying "more PuG raiding in 4.2 when T11 gear can be obtained via JP" a lot harder to believe. The time difference is long enough between raiding tiers that any alt could be in full VP gear before 4.2 hits and have nothing to buy off of the JP T11 vendor.

Flex wrote:This also makes the salve of people saying "more PuG raiding in 4.2 when T11 gear can be obtained via JP" a lot harder to believe. The time difference is long enough between raiding tiers that any alt could be in full VP gear before 4.2 hits and have nothing to buy off of the JP T11 vendor.

Yep. They tend to either be capped out already or doing randoms so seldom they're not even getting anywhere close to 4k JP.

As a dps I suspect you could spend almost as much time on your 'daily random troll' as on your raid-night. This of course including horribad groups which dissolve halfway into the dungeon. The difference between the daily random and raid-night is mainly that anything short of downing the end-boss in your five-man is a total wash, but a casual guild will be perfectly happy slapping around four bosses in BWD.

yappo wrote:

Mcduffie wrote:
I know all this is contradictory to "gear should equal skill," but from a utilitarian (dare I say videogame) standpoint, it makes sense.

I never said it didn't make sense

It's just that Cata was kind of supposed to be harder in terms of endgame content than WotLK, but at least the gearing aspect feels easier.

In Cata it's theoretically possible to gear almost a full tier-level beyond early end-game content from only doing the previous content. Ie, you can get full five-man heroic gear (average ilevel 346, or possibly better) and never set foot in a five-man heroic. In the same way you can get 358 gear and never set foot in a raid.

If it turns out you can get more or less a full Firelands set from never doing the Firelands raids, well, that would just feel wrong.

Also, if you're in full 359 gear before you ever see a raid, there are two reasons:
1: You work fast, and are an excellent player waiting to get in to an excellent guild.
2: You're not that great, and have had a difficult time getting to where you need to go.

At the beginning of Cata, I was working like a dog getting my ilvl to 346. Wound up being 354 before stepping foot into a raid. I wish I could've said the same for the rest of my guild...

So yeah, I guess it is just a standard of practice now. The raids are still challenging, though.