Project Lore

Choosing gear used to be so simple. When you roll a new character, you start out with the crappiest of the crap. At first, it’s just a matter of picking whatever has the highest armor rating. Couldn’t be easier. Then you add in stats to consider. Would you rather have agility or intelligence? Is your character more suited to armor of the bear or of the tiger? Are you mainly PvE or PvP? The choice becomes slightly more difficult, but usually is still pretty clear-cut as long as you have a certain spec in mind. My main character is a rogue, so I almost always went for the agility, with stamina as my second-favored stat (<3 “of the monkey” armor). Then come item enhancements. Being a leatherworker, for me the choice was between using an armor kit or getting a guildmate to enchant my gear with increased stats. Again, I usually went for the agility whenever possible. But then I hit the high-50s, and things got more complicated. Blue armor was no longer always better than green armor. The stat bonuses started getting better. Many items offer bonuses to more than just one or two stats. And now there are sockets to consider, along with bonuses for actually filling the sockets. Or, bonuses for having multiple items in a set. And in addition to just stat bonuses, there also are pluses to attack power, crit rating, resilience rating, dodge rating, resistances etc. Too many choices! Of course, one helpful trick is to equip back and forth between the gear you’re choosing from, and see how the stats that matter to you change. Or, if it’s a bind on equip item, you can use an add-on specific to your spec (I use GearDPS) to see how the gear will work for you. Sometimes you have to choose between one great stat and another great stat. A straight-up plus to agility isn’t always my best choice anymore, not when so many other enhancements may increase both agility and a combo of other needed stats. How does one cope, especially when making the shift to questing in Outland, then Northrend, where much, much better equipment is given as quest rewards (and it drops pretty frequently, too)? In the early 60s, I often found myself carrying around gear that, as it was, wasn’t quite as good as what I had equipped. But if I was able to get it enchanted, it would be a little bit better. Then I would find an even better item before I had the chance to enchant the second one. Or I would hold on to gear that I thought was awesome, but that I wasn't high enough level to equip yet. But once I reached the right level to equip it, my gear already had surpassed that mark. Now that I'm in Northrend, it’s getting even more complicated. So, I became more stingy with my gear. For BoP gear that's a quest reward and already obsolete, I'll just choose whichever item sells for the highest amount (yay, Auctioneer addon). For me, I can't justify equipping BoE gear if I’m going to find something better in a half-level anyways. Instead, auction it! Or give it to a guildy to disenchant.  Do those few extra tenths-of-a-chance to crit really make a difference when I can level quickly without it? Is it even worth keeping spare sets of gear for different uses when you’re leveling up so quickly that it becomes obsolete before you can use it? At least until I hit 80, my guess is no. So how do you go about choosing whether to use gear that may be replaced quickly? Do you go ahead and equip it and make use of it while you can? Do you just go for the money? Or is there a happy medium?

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