Ding! LF4m Heroics!
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iTZKooPA on Monday, January 19, 2009 - 40 Comments Tags: dungeons, gear check, gearing up, grinding, heroics, instancing, loot
iTZKooPA on Monday, January 19, 2009 - 40 Comments Tags: dungeons, gear check, gearing up, grinding, heroics, instancing, loot  Yes, I dinged while working on Sons of Hodir |
Wrath of the Lich King's PvE content may be easy compared to The Burning Crusade, but there remains a line of progression. For instance, hitting level 80 does not mean you should immediately jump into one of the many heroic dungeons. With my long weekend, I figured I could get a bunch of heroics under my belt seeing as I have finally hit level 80 (DING!). My old warrior buddy set me straight in only the way he can, through ridicule and yelling.
I still have a lot of gear from Season 2, Karazhan and high level crafted items equipped and haven't seen many alternatives. This is why I was thinking about banging out a dozen or so heroics with my free day. After the text-lashing, I checked in with WoWHead to see just how much my gear could be upgraded through non-heroics. Turns out to be a crapload. Nearly every dungeon from Gundrak on has some sort of an upgrade, incremental and not so incremental. The only thing that they lack is a pair of quick daggers for my Mutilate build. Guess I will be sticking with old trusty for awhile longer.
Rather than diving into the ranks of heroic runners, I have taken the advice of my friend (although I will never admit it to him) and segued to the non-heroic instances for the moment. By the end of the day I will have run over a dozen non-heroic dungeons, and hopefully, bumped by gear into the next level. But damn if I don't want a new off-hand dagger.
Doing non-heroics before jumping to heroics may seem like an obvious notion to many of you, but I have run across countless people in the non-heroics who are barely geared for them, let alone the more difficult flavor of the dungeon. Even many of my guild mates tried to make the leap from level 79 to heroics. The better geared members were able to roll with the punches, but just as many had to be replaced during the instance. From our anecdotal evidence, anyone decked out in SSC gear or better, with some Wrath gear mixed in there, was more than ready for heroics.
Nice, just found a group for Halls of Lightning, off to shiv some baddies from Nordic lore. This will be my first run at Loken, hopefully he is kind enough to drop his hood. For those still leveling, do all the heroic runners a favor, check out which dungeons have gear you need and hit them up first. My tank is sick of out DPSing other party members in heroics...
How many of you had the patience to gear up before attempting your first heroics? For those that just dove right in, what was your gear like and how did you do?
Reader Comments (40)
its to fast to get H ready and raiding ready.. i hope they give us something more chalanging
I only had 1 day of gametime left after hitting 80 so I knocked out 4 heroics that day heh
"My old warrior buddy set me straight in only the way he can, through ridicule and yelling."
That's what we do....besides staring at bosses crotches.
I just say I'm looking for dungeons and take whatever is thrown my way, Heroic or not, makes no difference to me.
Thank god someone else said it too. Hitting level 80 does not give u a free pass to heroics, as a tank i should not be out dpsing everyone. Im tired of seeing people with lvl 70 gear in queue for Pinnacle. I was in a heroic the other day, when (no joke) someone said, "sorry if my dps is low, i just hit 80 an hour ago." WTH!? Im sick of wiping cuz our dps cant kill anything quick enough, and our healer's got more greens than a columbian drug mule.
In my opinion, to do heroics, first you need to do some normal dungeons so you get a feel for what you are up against. You need to know what that guy does when he's normal and then add to all the stuff that he has, a bit more, let's say half (in the worse case).
Oh, good luck to Loken, he's a real PAIN. More people die at that guy every day than at any other boss. He has more kills that Malygos.
I've tanked heroic violet hold and reg naxx arachnid quarter
there's 2 more possible upgrades i can get from reg instances: 1 from first boss in UP, the other from last boss in oculus
540 defense here i come!
Being a BS ret pally, I made the epic helm and boots before starting my first heroic. I also tried to knock out some icecrown quests to see if any of the gear was an upgrade for me. I'll admit I didn't really do any regular lvl 80 dungeons (and have only done CoS since) before jumping into heroics. Still, I had all blues plus the two crafted epics before my first heroic, and soon after had my crafted epic 2h mace. I've done 2 wings of Naxx with another guild, and am currently 16 badges from getting the T7 chestpiece.
Yeah my gear isn't amazing, but most of the time it's plenty enough for a well-geared group to accept me.
A well geared tank and healer can carry a freshly dinged 80 without much problem. I agree that it isn't fair to your group if you're PUGing heroics as soon as you ding, but if your own guild refuses to help you, then they just don't care about gearing you.
lol @ " our healer’s got more greens than a columbian drug mule." XD
Well, I did a 5-man normal twice in a row in Northrend while I was leveling my warlock. Can't remember if I got any gear out of it though. I remember that the character was too low level being L71 to get the quests for the instance, so no rewards from those atleast.
I hit L80 with the warlock about 15min before 10-man Naxx Arachnid guild run. The first boss was a tough one because we were still figuring out the tactics and most had a lot of low level gear but the rest of the raid was easy enough. That first guild raid in Northrend took quite a long time to pull through but it was a challenge and lots of fun. I got two drops from it with lucky rolls.
To be honest, the quest rewards in Northrend had replaced much of my Kara gear, so I suppose there was some gearing up done. I knew that going for hit bonus was the way to go and had selected my gear and gems accordingly.
The game is very easy and if you go through all the gearing up process, there is not much challenge left anymore. But that is of course the whole idea. You can choose how much you gear up when going towards harder instances. The more you will gear up, the easier it will be to pull it through.
PS. I prefer raids over heroics anyway. So far, I have done more raids than 5-man heroic runs. I suppose the biggest reason for that might be that I do not, and will not, grind for badges.
I try to at least have mostly blues before I attempt any heroic dungeon, and I'll start with the easier ones like Heroic Utgarde Keep and Heroic Nexus and work my way up. I don't actually mind running normal dungeons. Any dungeon run is fine by me. Running normals also give me a chance to remember all the dungeons since I just usually run them once when I'm levelling. Managed to get about 3 or 4 epics and I just have 1 green trinket left.
half green / half blue here, all northrend gear, i'm a healer and i'm still refusing to do heroics even though i do get plenty invites untill i get some gear ups from gundrak, dtk and oculus. After that i'll be doing heroic uk & nexus working my way up.
Heck i got invited 30 mins after i dinged 80 to heal a 10 man naxx run. Would any of you like a healer with no gear doing that? Naturally i refused. But just to prove a point. Healers usually don't have to wait to gear up. They are welcome to heal as soon as they can enter an instance raid. heck my first utguard keep run was way before i dinged 70. Can't remember what level exactely but i was still questing in outland since the big spider things outside valliance keep killed me the first time i tried to go there.
LF4m???
LFM..... L4M.... Some extra letterage in there!
LF4m stands for Looking for four more!!!!!
haha
i ran 4 heroics as soon as i hit 80. it was great although i
did have a hefty repair bill
Well im a tank so when i leveled all i could do was "instance" (well i did quest to obviously but i mean im a tank so i had to tank) meaning i had alot of really good northerend blues by the time i dinged 80 and when i did i went start for heroics. Trust me it was a good idea once you hit that 80 and you at least think you have decent gear go for it. Im already on to raiding with one or two epics i made and one or two i got from heroics (plus a gun an friend made me). My advice is to hit them as soon as you can and get into thouse raids defently before new content.
i like raiding AQ40 its cool to have the bug mount people think i"m dumb...
If you need some new daggers for you mutilate rogue, get 2 Librarian Paper Cutters (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37856) .. and put Mongoose or Berserking (although i'd probably wait til they reduce the cost of mats for it)
on my server LPC's go for about 75-80 gold. Definitely worth it for mutilate rogues, as faster weps = more crits for Focused attacks (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=51636) and more procs of mongoose and poisons.
*LPC's are the best daggers pre naxx.
Man, about 3 hours after i dinged 80 i got rushed into our first 10 man. i kept telling ppl i have done very little non heroc runs, let alone get my LW up, grind my pvp gear, or get some heroic drops. but in my kara gear t4 gear BG merc gear and a few quest rewards i got pushed into my forst guild 10 man. needless to say i got yelled at. why? becase i was undergeared. fun huh?
I know most people say looking at Wowhead and Tthottbott is cheating, but I would rather be informed about the game then running around Northrend like a chicken with my head cut off. I reviewed which quests gave me blue gear that would help my rogue and I went for those when I leveled. Some of those quests involved going into the non-heroic dungeons, which was great, it was like killing two birds with one stone... cause if I didn't get something from the boss, at least I completed the quest that gave me a nice upgrade. So by the time I reached 80, I was partially ready for Heroics, cause I still had to deal with the change in difficulty level with the bosses... but then it is still a learning experience, and if anything, doing enough heroics gives you some nice gear if you decide to do Naxx.
I think many are able to make that transition there are plenty of upgrades out there on the way up after you hit about 75 you should start replacing much of your gear. I had replaced all but a sunwell neck piece by the time I hit 80. I definatly wouldn't recommend HOL for your first heroic, nexus seems to be one of the easier entry heroics to start gearing you up for the rest.
I never hit the level cap before burning crusade so all this heroic stuff is kinda new to me. I managed to get a boost from some friends of a friend so my first heoric was ok. So i thought that if those were ok then surely i could manage a pug group. Big Mistake. Signed up for a PUG group to the Nexus and said straight off that it had been ages since i had done the nexus so could someone explain what the bosses do beforehand. I had read up but wanted someone to just tell me what to do. Anyway we spent the whole time in silence and then straight into the Treeshaper dude where i died straight away on his big ice pointy things. Anyway we got past that but could not get past the next boss.
Anyway the whole experience has put me off pug heroics for life. Now me and my guild are going to OUtlands to grind through the heorics there as practice for the heorics in Northrend.
oh i know how that tank feels out dpsing the specced dps in
instances, if your doing under 1k dps in a 80 heroic, your not geared
As a healer, I was fortunate to have a great guild to help me gear up. Through some heroics and some normal instances, I was ready to take on regular heroics in a couple of days with a poorly geared tank. Now I sit at about 2k healing power and understand most, if not all, of the fights now in the dungeons.
I will say, it is a pain to try to heal someone who has not geared up at all or being in a group that has low dps because everyone just hit 80. It's hard on the healer to keep a tank alive for 10 minutes while people are trying to kill the boss in a heroic. I agree with your choice. You should definitely gear up a little bit prior to running heroics.