After finding the boomkin to be a terrible 2nd character to gear, I ended up switching to my hunter, whom I’ve found much better over to solo play and handle. It hasn’t been easy up to this point as I had to start really looking into the Beastmaster game play. The rotation definitely has become more complex to output reasonable DPS and there is a bit of sloppiness, especially when it comes to AoE.
However, I managed to get my final two pieces of heroic gear to allow my hunter the minimum ilvl requirement to enter LFR. I have to admit that playing a ranged DPS is far easier than a melee when it comes to LFR. There are aspects where having distance makes things far simpler such as the last two bosses in Vaults. I imagine that certain heroics too would become easier compared to playing my paladin.
Right now, I feel I can start coasting on my hunter, emphasizing doing dailies while picking up valor points and accumulating coins for the weekly quest. I’m hoping that by the time patch 5.2 is released my hunter will have enough gear to enter the LFR.
Up until now, I will say that the gearing experience on my hunter was pretty frustrating. With regards to my paladin, I had Brewfest and Hallow’s Eve to get a few items that boosted his ilvl. In my hunter’s case, I relied entirely on crafting, some AH and doing a few key heroics.
Probably, the most frustrating aspect of gearing was doing heroics. I did run into one bad apple group, but the difficult part was just not getting drops initially. Actually, one Heroic gave me the pants (from the Brewery) but after that I encountered a dry spell for 5 separate runs. I did get lucky in downing the Sha of Anger and receiving my tier legs using the bonus roll. So that compensated quite a bit for the horrible drops initially.
I think if I were to gear other alts like my Death Knight or Shaman, I might approach things the same way. The good thing now is that I’ve managed to complete a few heroics. I think I’ll focus on ones that I like as opposed to doing randoms. I will miss out on some Valor Points, but the thing I’ll miss out on even more are the headaches from certain encounters.