Pre-Naxx 1: A Gear Guide For The Starting Rogue (AKA The Better Late Than Never Post)

Posted by on Jul 17, 2009 in Guides |

Ding! Congratulations, you’re level 80. Now you want better gear so you can do heroic instances and 10-man raids. Here’s a gear guide to help you get there. We’ll start with the best blues you can get from quest rewards. These will be enough to get you through most if not all of the heroic 5-man dungeons. From there, we can move on to epic gear so you can become Naxx 10 ready.

What I like about quest rewards is that they’re guaranteed loot. The catch here is that most of them come from either group or dungeon quests.

HeadTirion’s Headwrap
Headguard of Retaliation
NeckThe Severed Noose of Westwind
ShoulderCharred Leather Shoulderguards
Shoulderpads of Fleshwerks
BackBloodbane Cloak
ChestExotic Leather Tunic
Hardened Tongue Tunic
WristNjorndar Furywraps
HandRough Climber’s Grips
Handwraps of Preserved History
WaistStrange Voodoo Belt
LegsTattooed Deerskin Leggings
FeetRhino Hide Kneeboots
The Darkspeaker’s Treads
FingerBand of Motivation
Ring of Foul Mojo
Frog-Toe Band
Jagged Ice Band
Signet of Bridenbrad
TrinketFezzik’s Pocketwatch

  

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The Weekend That Was

Posted by on May 21, 2009 in Commentary |

If you went to my Twitter page recently (and you should, just to show me some love, LOL), you’ll know that I was looking forward to heading to Ulduar over the weekend. It’s not that I haven’t been there. I have, thanks to a 25-man PUG whose raid leader was nice enough to bring me along even though I was a bit undergeared for it. The eagerness was more on going through the instance with my guildmates. It’s always a lot more fun to raid with people you actually know. I have to admit that I was also looking forward to leading the raid again, so I reviewed boss strats and what-not. To make a long story short, we ended up not going through it because we didn’t have enough people.

Things evened themselves out later on. First, I was finally able to pick up this title. We’ve been trying to get that title ever since we jumped realms so it’s good to finally get it. The embarassing thing was that I was the only one who died during Malygos’ third phase. He dropped the shield, which made a certain paladin very happy.

The last thing is even sweeter. This is going to be very indulgent, by the way, but remembering how well it turned out still makes me smile. I was able to join a Naxx 25 PUG and, to make a long story short, Sapphiron and KT dropped their respective daggers. Before you start calling me a greedy bastard, no one rolled on Sapph’s drop and I just plain won the weapon from KT. You’ll probably call me a greedy bastard anyway, but there it is.

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Naxxramas Weekend Raid 1

Posted by on Mar 5, 2009 in Commentary |

The weekend was spent raiding. Our guild has been trying to get a 10-man Naxx run together for a month now and after three weeks of failed attempts—that’s two weekends of attendance issues and a week of latency problems—we finally succeeded. We raided Naxxramas after nearly a month of inactivity.

We started on Saturday at around 1PM. Our main tank was unavailable due to work reasons so our off-tank became our MT and my death knight filled in for the off-tank post. Considering that my experience is with DPS and not tanking, I knew I was in over my head. But hey, if I didn’t do it, there’d be no raid. My rogue Sin was going to have to sit this one out for now.

It’s a good thing that I’m familiar with how to tank most of the bosses in Naxx. Of course, knowing what to do is different from actually doing it, but the execution went off well. We had a little trouble with Maexxna but that was it. The Heigan dance was done with a single attempt and there were five of us who remained standing in the end. By the end of Saturday, we were able to clear the Arachnid Quarter and most of the Plague Quarter.

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Finally Getting To Level 80

Posted by on Dec 2, 2008 in Commentary |

Well, the leveling took longer than usual. Two weeks after I got WotLK, I finally managed to get my rogue up to 80. It’s a week longer than I anticipated, which made me think about the time it took to get from level 1 to 70 (about a month). My /played showed that I needed 7-9 hours to get from one level to the next (70-71, for example), which is roughly the same rate that I got from the previous expansion (going from 60-61). While it’s a nice parallel, I still wish I leveled faster.

Every WoW player will tell you that maxing your level is actually only the beginning. When you get to that point, it’s time to get your character geared. The entry level dungeon is Naxxramas, so just like TBC’s Karazhan, it’s time to get pre-Naxx gear. The problem with that is I can’t find any pre-Naxx gear list of rogues yet, so I’ll have to wait for that. For now, I’m going to try to follow WoW Insider’s rep reward list and go from there.

The last thing I want to mention is that I’ll be linking my armory page to the site permanently. My intent is to get feedback regarding my gear, talents and other things related to being a rogue. WotLK is so new I’m having a hard time getting the information I need, so anything that will help improve my DPS output will be great.

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