My priest turned 80 the other day. I didn't blog about it because I was busy enjoying the benefits of being 80, namely running heroics. This makes my 5th level 80 character, after my hunter, paladin, death knight and warlock.
Though discipline healing remains my greatest and newest love, I didn't jump straight into healing heroics because I wasn't sure I could handle it with the gear I had. As you all know, when you hit 80 you're equipped with gear up to ilvl 187. It's true that I was 100% equipped with blue dungeon gear but I am of firm opinion that one shouldn't step in heroics without at least ilvl 200 items on average. I don't consider myself sufficiently skilled as a healer to simply jump into these much harder dungeons.
For this reason my plans for the near future are to heal one normal dungeon daily and run at least one heroic every day. It's amazing how quickly you can get good gear by running just a few heroics. I've had a couple of runs where I needed (and won) 2 items in each.
Amongst the nice upgrades I am especially happy with this trinket called Spark of Life which is awesome for healing and not bad for dps either. It has a ton of haste and also helps with mana regen. I will also mention Wand of Ahn'kahet which is another big upgrade for me. Oh and just after 1 day at level 80 I bought Helm of Clouded Sight with emblems and I promptly gemmed and enchanted it.
But wait, there's more! I also won two rings and an amulet which are all ilvl 200 and have some very nice stats on them.
Now you might see a pattern here. I'm concentrating on items with healing stats, dps-ing be damned. Stuff with int, spirit, haste and spell power. Not so much crit rating and I won't even think about hit rating. I'm not doing terribly as shadow, pulling about 2K dps.
Yep, things are looking peachy.
One more thing before I sign off. I've noticed that having crappy gear gets you quicker in a group as dps (using the dungeon finder). This has been happening consistently ever since I hit 80 and the same thing occurred for my death knight who tried a few heroics with crappy gear. The queue timer says something like 10-15 minutes but very often I'm in after only 5 minutes. The perks of sucking, I guess.
Patch 1.0.5 commentary
12 years ago
9 comments:
I wonder if that's true about getting in faster with crap gear? I have a shoddy feral offspec I could wear and check that theory out!
I wonder if it's also a perk of being a shadow priest running DPS. Pallys are apparently a dime a dozen (judging by those hanging around Dal), and I suspect the LFD tool tries to avoid putting multiples of the same class in an instance if it can help it. The exception to that is the lower level dungeons, where my Pally has often had to share blessing duties with another Pally tank and/or healer.
I know that the dungeon finder checks the gear somehow but I would sure like to understand how.
Does it consider only the equipped gear? Then it would be easy to check.
Does it look in your bags as well? What if that gear is for a different spec or even something that you won a roll for but won't use due to bad itemization?
I suspect it won't be that easy to cheat the finder.
Although... here's something I just remembered. Once when I was dps-ing a heroic on my paladin I noticed that, when everybody zoned in at the beginning, the tank had only 20K health or something like that. When I checked his gear he had really crappy stuff on, including grays if I'm not mistaken. I whispered the healer asking for his opinion but before he could give me an answer, the tank equipped his real stuff and his health (and everything else) jumped to normal. I guess the guy was trying to confuse the system or something.
Gratz on hitting 80 on your priest. I pushed through late Sunday night and hit 80 on my druid. I'm doing 3.6k in heroics. Just crazy.
Gratz again
Thanks Dave. Gratz to you too. How in hell's bells are you pulling 3.6K as a fresh 80? Unless you've suddenly geared yourself up with >ilvl 200 gear I don't see how.
Oh, wait, maybe druids are overpowered. Nerf them I say!
Moon is OP... but it's severely tied to RNG and the buff's you get. Also, AOE has a lot to do with that. Moon is an AOE powerhouse.
I've had moonkin druids in heroics that were doing more dps than my pally so I guess that they might be a bit OP despite the extra gear they might have.
Just like to say that I have a semi-fresh 80 priest (I LOVE LOVE LOVE Disc healing, haven't been holy since about level 64). I jumped RIGHT into heroics at 80 and didn't have a lick of trouble. Most people running heroics at this point are over-geared chars just running for badges and so the groups are significantly more powerful than the lower level groups. You'll probably be fine, even if it's coasting on the back of an extremely geared tank at first.
@Jeremy I was thinking the same, namely that even though I'm not extremely well geared for heroics, tanks and dps typically have very good gear so they shouldn't give me a lot of trouble. I'll definitely give it a try when I renew my subscription.
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