How to Gear up for Raiding in "World of Warcraft"

So you've finally finished the long grind to Level 70 of World of Warcraft, and you want to start doing the endgame raids. Figuring out where to begin can be overwhelming, but this article will put you on the path to gearing up your character. If you're willing to spend some gold and expend some effort, you'll be raiding Karazhan (and the areas beyond) in no time.

Instructions

1. Decide what spec you want to be. This is a bigger change for some classes than others. Decide whether you want to tank, heal or DPS. Use sites like Wowwiki and Wow Heroes to streamline your talent distributions for raiding. (See the links in Resources.) For example, most of a raiding hunter's points can be in the Beast Mastery tree, but some talents like pathfinding are useless for raid DPS.

2. Install Atlasloot on your computer. This will make finding gear much easier, since it's all listed in one place, under an easy-to-navigate interface. This is particularly useful when you can't find a gear list for your class, or it's unclear where a certain piece of gear comes from.

3. Spend the gold to level up a useful profession for your class. Most of the high-level crafted items are Bind on Pickup, so if you want to have it, you'll have to be able to make it. Engineering is an excellent profession for hunters, rogues and feral DPS druids, while tailoring is great for mages and priests. (If you're planning on playing a holy or discipline priest, the Primal Mooncloth set is Tier 5-equivalent. This set is also useful for Restoration Druids.) It will take a bit of time to collect the mats to create most of these pieces of gear--as well as gold to max out the profession--but it's an easy way to get some top-level gear for your character if you'll put the time into it.

4. Find out what reputation rewards are upgrades for you, and what will bring up your stats to your guild's minimum requirements. Atlasloot is extremely useful for this, but if you don't have it and are leery of add-ons, simply browsing Wowwiki under different reputation factions will give you the same answers. The Shattered Sun Offensive, Lower City and the Sha'tar are all factions that give good rewards for a variety of classes. Once you know what gear you want, start grinding reputation through quests, instance runs, dailies and donations.

5. Get groups together to run the high-level five-man instances. Steamvaults, Shattered Halls, The Caverns of Time and the Tempest Keep are just a few of the many Outlands instances you could farm for gear. (Remember, you need a flying mount to get to any of the Tempest Keep dungeons.) Continue to run them until you get all of the useful blue or high-quality green gear upgrades out of them.

6. After you've geared up a bit, and your group can handle it, move up to heroics. These are harder versions of Outlands instances tuned for five well-geared level 70s. Many of the bosses drop epics, and some of these are better than what you can get while running the early raids. For example, there is an awesome healing trinket that drops off Kael'thas in heroic Magister's Terrace, as well as a great hunter chest piece. Again, simply browse Atlasloot or Wowwiki to find out where you should be looking.

7. Consider PvP gear. If your character is DPS-based, take a look at the arena season gear, or purchasable reputation faction PvP gear. This will take some honor grinding, but you can get some good upgrades with PvP gear. Resilience is mostly useless in raiding, but the other stats are usually for high damage as well, so it can benefit your DPS character. There are some good healing upgrades as well (the season-two healing mace is particularly nice), but it's often easier to get healing and tanking gear in PvE content rather than PvP. Just compare the stats and figure out what's best for your character.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember that a lot of guilds have favored specs for raiding. Protection warriors, fire mages, restoration shaman, beastmaster hunters and holy priests are all specs that most people want, and they'll probably expect your character to be. So frost mages, retribution paladins or DPS warriors might have a hard time finding a spot if they're not willing to re-spec.

• You can pug Karazhan, but if your own guild isn't fielding runs, you might want to find another guild or a guild that has empty raiding slots that you can fill. Raiding requires other people (sometimes nine other people, and sometimes twenty four other people!), so make sure you have some way of finding other people to run with.

• These are only suggestions for getting your gear ready for Karazhan. The rest of the gear you'll need to progress to Gruul's Lair will probably drop in Karazhan.

• Know your stats well, and what you should be focusing on. This will help you find the best gear for your class and spec.

• Many guilds have minimum stats, so be prepared to wait until you reach them before they'll let you raid.

Resources

• Wow Heroes
• Wowwikki
• Atlasloot