Patch 4.3 has done some good things for casual players in making gearing up for the final death wing battle a lot simpler compared with the previous patches. However, there is a major caveat: if you don’t meet a certain item level, you won’t be able to get into the new Heroics. So what happens if you didn’t raid, don’t have a great guild or have problems with the older Cataclysm heroics? This blog will detail a few simple (albeit potentially expensive) methods for hitting ilvl 353 or so to enter the new Heroics.
Let’s say you have an 85 ready to go but you only have quested up until now. Perhaps, you just hit 85 and want to gear up fast without having to enter old Heroics. If you’ve managed to save your money, check the local auction house. One of the first items you might consider for your toon is a 378 bracer. Considering that the 378 bracers have effectively been degraded since you can purchase them with Justice Points, these may range in price between 700-1400+ gold depending on your server. As far as I can tell, the new Heroics do not drop 378 bracers, so you might try picking these up to start.
Next be on the look out for affordable epics. 359 gear aren’t as sexy anymore, but still provide enough of a reasonable upgrade. If you have any crafters, you might consider making the 359’s instead by purchasing chaos orbs and materials. For myself, I ended up doing a mixture of farming my own mats and buying stuff from my auction house.
What may be a little tougher to procure but definitely worth it if you have the mats or money are 365 weapons. You won’t see many 353 or 359 weapons anymore since people are now hitting the newer content. However, the 365 crafted gear are reasonable options. You’ll probably end up hating yourself after spending a huge chunk of change either directly purchasing an overpriced weapon or gathering/buying mats. I guarantee you that in the long run, it’s better this way.
If you lack a plethora of toons that can help compliment each other in terms of crafting gear and farming mats, another option is to grind honor. Tol Barad is probably one of your best choices for getting quick/easy honor. Of course, this all depends on your server as one faction may outweigh the other. If both sides are even though, you might find this method along with grinding battlegrounds to be a reasonable selection. Of course, once you get enough honor, you can convert them to justice points to pick up a few pieces of gear.
While you’re at doing PVP, I heavily suggest picking up the newer PVP gear. These basically are the same as the previous models except that the stats have been improved to reflect the new season for PVP. But the real key is that they are of ilvl 377. While I advise avoiding wearing all PVP gear to a dungeon, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to sneak a few pieces through. Just make sure you know what you’re doing so that the party doesn’t blame you in case of a wipe.
Also, hopefully you’ve done the introduction to the Molten Front quest line. If you managed to pull through the first day of dailies and the starting quest chain, you potentially can receive between 1-2 epic items of ilvl 365, including one cloak. Hopefully, you started far before the first day. But if you managed to get far enough in, stick with it so you can unlock as many venders as you can.
One of the most important aspects to doing the Molten Front dailies as much as possible is that your reputation with the Guardians of Mount Hyjal will continue to increase. If you’ve managed to complete the entire Mount Hyjal quest line, you will notice that your reputation ends at revered, which may get you a single piece of ilvl 346 gear. Pushing your reputation to exalted is important as you might be able to get an epic ilvl 359 piece of gear.
Similarly, I suggest doing as many other dailies as possible. Uldum is an exception though because the reputation gains are pretty tiny and will definitely take you forever to improve without doing any instances. Also, Deepholme might not necessarily be the best spot since being exalted with them only provides the second best shoulder enchants in the game. At this point, you’re better off focusing your dailies with the Molten Front, Tol Barad and Twilight Highlands.
Lastly, if you have tons of gold floating around, there definitely will be a few top epic items around the ilvl 397 range that you can pick up. But these are certainly not for the faint of heart because the price ranges will be quite ridiculous.
The good thing is that once you are able to hit the minimum ilvl requirement, you can pop yourself into an instance. Even if nothing drops for you in that instance, the instance will generally have two quests, one of which will probably provide you with an ilvl 378 upgrade. So even if you run through the first three without scoring on any gear drops, you will get something from the quests.
Using this methodology, I was able to push my hunter and death knight recently into the new heroics. Just for my death knight alone, it took me about two days of straight grinding to nearly upgrade most of his gear. While killing bosses, I was able to obtain supplemental justice points to pick up items that normally wouldn’t drop in these instances or would rarely drop. At the time of writing this, I am working on my third toon in terms of gearing him up, which is an enhancement shaman.
Now, is this the absolute best way to get geared? Probably not. You might be better off running normal mode level 85 instances for justice points, picking up any ilvl 333 gear and max that out then making the occasional ilvl 378 purchase. But that might take a fair amount of time too if you just grind justice points from normal mode. But if you hit ilvl 333, you can progress to Cataclysm Heroics and follow that up with the ZA/ZG instances. Again, this guide is mostly aimed at people who wanted to avoid the older Heroics for gearing up. But try both methods and see how you like them.