There should be a Gear Guide =)

[dave_4890]

It would really help =)

[mortnoct]

I'll second that!

I'm confused by all of the gear, particularly at the higher levels. I have no idea what "tier 376" or what ever means, or how to get the needed items.

I tried to do a "random dungeon", but was told that I don't have the required items for any of the dungeons. And no hints as to what I need to do.

[antacus]

So..... I have been fighting this battle myself for quite a while. I just hit 80 with my first ever toon end of last week and my gear has been lack luster for a LONG time ... since about level 10

I am suprised you were told your eq is not good enough for random instance runs. As I understand you add yourself to the queue and the game figures out what you are capable of running based upon gear scores and levels. So if I were you I would hit "I" and simply find a group. That is what I did and while I was not the top DPS I held my own and simply needed items that were upgrades for me. I guess as a tank or healer you may be in a different boat ... try changing to DPS for a few runs until you have better equipment to run as a healer or tank. That is what I would do if I was in that situation.

Another thing to look at that I found is a program called "rawr", google it. Anyway it is free and seems to be pretty good for helping with equipment and talent builds. Watch some of the vids and you will get a basic idea of how to use it. So far I built an entire equipment list of items I am now hunting for and I deselected all of the 10/25 man raids so I know that by simply doing 5-man randoms I'll get the items sooner or later. At least now I know what I am looking for.

Lastly, the "376" and such stands for the items level. You will not see that unless you have a mod such as auctioneer or a gear tracker mod. The number simply means the higher the number == better equipment. 200 is more or less the low end for a level 80 player and I don't know what the max is. I do have some 232 and one 245 item. From what I have seen you can't loot items above 216 ... those items are tier gear and require EoTs or EoFs to purchase from vendors. The "gear score" is what is used for placing your toon into a random. I don't know if it is an avg of all your equipment or if it is a total score of everything added up but everything I read says that is what WoW uses to place you into an instance.

[cabby]

I don't think WoW really uses a gearscore for placing people. I've been in way too many where 4 people are all in the low to mid 100 score (low level toons in the beginning dungeons) and one person is well over 600 score.

[tomdyer]

I would definately love to see this.

I think this is a great guide, but I can not find anything in it about gearing.

I knew NOTHING about gearing until my first 80 hunter got booted OUT of a TOC by a jerk of a party leader. This was because he was ONLY doing 500 DPS.

I started looking around at gearing, but it's an uphill battle, since he had done almost NO instances.

Followed the Zygor Guide almost the whole way up to 80.

Adding some logic that would allow us to select what type of gearing would be great.

DPS, vs Resiliance.
Range vs Melee weapons.

Hunters going specifically for AGilty boosts.
Warriors (DK, PALLY, warrior) going for Strength.


Those sort of examples.

[Krayzee]

Yeah, it doesn't base it on gear score and it never will because gear score is just a pile of crap - you could have 6.1k gs as a paladin but wearing full cloth and it doesn't show skill either. I reckon Blizzard based it around their own "gear score" system that works on loads of strange unusual multiplications rather then a straight forward point input by the maker.

[fearitsself]

Actually it is based on gearscore at 80. At low lvls people with boa (bind on account heirloom gear) will have higher gearscores because they bought the gear with their 80s but before you can do any instance your lvl and so when you go through a random it puts you in a random instance at your lvl but when you are lvl 80 there are two kinds of instances the first kind is normal instance which at 80 you can do them all but the second kind is Heroics (harder versions of the normal ones) to do Heroics you need a higher gearscore a pally with a gearscore of 5k can run any of the heroics even if its cloth the game doesn't look at the type of gear it just looks at the gear lvl which is what the gearscore is based on.

[Werderx]

To get back to the reason for this thread, you can find MANY already created gear/class guides on the web that are free. For instance, go to google and type, "How to play druid WoW" or "How to play <whatever> WoW". This will bring up quite a few results giving you the bare basics of your class.

From there, get more specific. Search, "How to Pally Tank WoW" or "How to Pally DPS WoW". If you want to only get current stuff, put the patch number in your search. For Example, "How to DK DPS WoW 3.3". Be warned, from this point on, you are going to get into highly technical forums such as http://elitistjerks.com/. These forums are awesome for teaching you how to get the most out of your class, but you will have to be able to dig through the science and math to figure out what they are trying to say.

Your best bet here is to do your own research and truly understand and discover your class. Figure out why you are doing the things you are instructed using the free resources already at your fingertips.


To address the "Gear Score" rant.
Many people don't understand or forget exactly how Gear Score works. It is simply a number put behind an item to imply what exactly its max potential could be. This potential is also only implied when used in the perfect conditions. Perfect conditions being the right class with the right spec and the right complimenting gear. For example, if your hit rating is already over or at Cap, the getting the Hit Rating Trinket would be a gear score of "0", instead of whatever it might be.

Gear Score implies that you worked hard and know what you are doing by this stage of the game. Unfortunately with how easy things are in WoW, there are tons of no0bs with epics running around.

My advice is to take someones Gear Score with a grain of salt. I still look for Gear Scores when forming a PuG raid because it tells me that person's potential and a little bit about their survivability. Someone with a 3k GS, despite knowing their class and role, is still only going to have a max potential that will not be successful and might even hobble the raid. If you get too many individuals with a very low potential (meaning low gear score) but extremely knowledgeable, your raid will not get off the ground.

[nin88]

Gs???

Lol my lvl 1 rogue has a 968GS


GS means nothing till 80

[Werderx]

Lol my lvl 1 rogue has a 968GS

I call BS.

[zelphian]

I call BS.

BoA gear produces high GS.

[Werderx]

my apologies... i was thinking of wow-heroes gear score when thinking of BoA stuff.

[isvein]

If you play an rogue, you have kind of an gear guild at http://shadowpanther.net

[Werderx]

I have been looking for an alternative to Gear Score and found a pretty good one. I wasn't able to play with it much last night due to raid time, but so far i think it's going to be a step up from Gear Score.
It's called Elitist Group. It does give a number, but the number is an average of all of your gear's item level.... what it does that i like, it will inspect there enchants/gems, and tell you if they are good choices for their spec, meaning do they know what they are doing with what they have. It will also show you what they have accomplished in terms of raids, and how many times they have killed those foes. I'm pretty stoked about this one... the only thing i have found that i don't like, is that i have to manually inspect each player, and it wont put any of that useful info in my tooltip... maybe it will, and i just haven'[t found it yet.

Here's a video of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61L3CyDpOsE
Here's a download link for it:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...tistgroup.aspx