Gearing Up the Hard Way

I would never suggest to anyone interested in obtaining Tier 10 gear (I'm talking to the little guy, not you been there, done that crowd, so hold on to your pantyhose). What was I even saying? I lost all my thoughts in an attempt to retain all my target demo audience.


Ah yes, T10 and you - the, "don't do it this way" way to gear up. I've got 3 level 80's, and Gronthe is fast approaching, now questing at 72 in Dragonblight. I had raided regularly with my Shaman up until about a month ago, I use my DK to run around the world and get as many achievments as he can, which leaves my poor Priest to wallow in the absolute emtpyness that is being a middle-child.


My Priest has been doing the weekly raid quest and daily dungeons for her 2 emblems of frost (although I admit not every week and definately not every day) for many, many months. While my shaman has full 4 sets for both specs, my priest has yet to claim her 4 pc Shadow set. That is until today. Later this evening (West Coast USA baby!) I shall log in, queue up, get my 2 frosts, then go buy some leggings and complete her 4 pc T10 set. FINALLY!!! It's taken about 8 months of very few VoA runs. Quick tangent:


I don't hate VoA per se. What I absolutely cannot stomach is the squeeling that goes on whenever we win Wintergrasp. Yeah, yeah, I know it's because we're on a timer and people want to get it done, and there's no guarantee (especially on my server where Horde rocks PvP in BG's) that we'll ever get it back, and that like me other people are on a schedule and don't have all day to play that people get very anxious about running some version of VoA...but the squeeling!!! I can't take it sometimes, really I can't, so I rarely run it. That and my guild leader got the 264 legs for his Priest the first time he rand VoA 25, I've run it a dozen times and they've never dropped, let alone won a roll for them. Screw you VoA!!!


So here I am, on the precipice of a talent respec. What? What does talents have to do with getting a 4 set T10 piece? If you're asking that you don't know what the 4 set bonus does for Shadow Priests. See it here. Basically it's a major haste boost to our Mind Flay spell, a channeled spell that slows your butt down in PvP, and does some serious damage with good amounts of spell power and made better with haste. It's so good, in fact, that most Shadow Priests re-tune their talents by taking out 5 talent points that reduce the cooldown on our major nuke by 2.5 seconds and put those points elsewhere in the tree. I'm not sure that when all of this was planned that the devs deliberatly designed it so that (mostly raiding) Shadow Priests all over the world were changing their talent trees this late into the expansion.

I would venture a guess that the devs want to avoid this happening again in the future. Surely with the 31 point talent trees, it would be extremely difficult to even attempt such a drastic re-talenting at level 85 on the third tier of raiding. The trees and their forced "31 talents in one tree" will not allow that. But it's available now, and it will be both fun and interesting for me as I move my talents into places that I only dreamed about before.

I would not suggest taking 8 months to do it, however, and point to myself as a bad example for any raider with any aspirations of greatness to follow my example. Then again, come Cataclysm it will supposedly take longer to gear up for raids to begin with, but I doubt it will be 8 months. So go, run wild, run fast, run with a reckless abandon and gear yourslef up as fast as you can. If you do it may just provide you many, many months of power compared to just a couple months for myself.

Gronthe will never get his Tier 10 Warlock gear, and for him I am sad. But that's ok, I'll get him to 80 soon enough and he'll fancy himself sporting some hideous T9 stuff and run Ulduar at least once while it's still semi-relevant for some people very late to the party. So, that's it, journal entry completed. I'm thinking of changing the tone to my blog, perhaps every post will be in the form of some poetry. Or maybe I'll write every other post in Hebrew, or Arabic, or Chinese. Just a thought.