By special **Quasimodem **request…
The Wowhead Gear Research How-To
Here is a link to the full gallery of images. Each image will also be linked in its respective step.
1.) Go to http://www.wowhead.com. This is the page you will see. (Feel free to laugh at how many of the bookmarks on my bar are WoW related.)
2.) Mouse over the drop-down above the search box that’s labeled Database. You will see a list of categories under a heading called Browse.
3.) Mouse over the **Items **section under the Browse heading. You will see another menu pop open to the right.
4.) Let’s pretend we’re going to find Wolkie a shiny new chest piece. Keep expanding the menus: from the Items section, mouseover Armor, then Plate, then Chest. You’ll see that there’s no arrow over Chest; there’s nothing to expand. So go ahead and click it!
5.) You’re now taken to a page with every single Chest piece of the Plate armor class. This is obviously way more information than you need. If you look at the top, there’s a list that shows the section of the database you’re browing. It says Database > Items > Armor > Plate > Chest. (You could change any of these sections by mousing over one of those and selecting something else, but we’re not going to do that right now.) Opposite that directory listing, on the right side of the screen, there’s a link that says Create a Filter. Click that.
6.) Now you have a filter with a bunch of options you can apply to narrow down your search! There are a lot of options you don’t need to use most of the time, but they’re still nice to have once in a while. The two things that are going to be the most useful for finding upgrades are Required level and Quality. Required level is the minimum level your character needs to be to wear the item; Quality is a measure of how good the item is compared to other items of its level. Since Wolkie is currently 38, let’s search for a Rare (blue) chest in the 35-45 range.
7.) Once you enter in the information and hit the **Apply Filter **button, this is what you’ll see (note where the information was entered). There are two chest pieces that match the criteria we’ve selected. You can see the stats for each individual item by mousing over them, just like you would in the game. Now let’s look at them side-by-side: click the check boxes next to each one, and click the **Compare **button.
8.) Here’s the comparison page. Each item’s stats are listed side-by-side, with the highest one for each category highlighted in green. There is a summary at the bottom called **Gains **that gives you a general idea of what the benefits of each piece of armor are.
9.) To add another item to the comparison, click on + Item. Start typing a name of an item to add to the comparison (I’m using the chest that my character currently wears). One of the neat things about Wowhead is that its search boxes try to predict what you’re looking for, and will offer a drop-down of potential items as you type. The selection will narrow down as you type more. You can either type the full item name and hit enter, or type the partial item name and click on the one you want.
10.) Now we have a three-way item comparison. When you’re looking at more than two items, it can be helpful to set one item as your focus, to which the other items are then compared. At the top of each item’s box, there’s an icon that looks like an eye. When you mouseover the eye, you will see a box that says Set focus. Click the eye to set your focus to this item.
11.) Now we’re comparing all other items directly to the one that has focus. You will see that the eye icon is white instead of gray. (Clicking it again will remove the focus, or you can click another eye to make that item the focus.) This is a pretty skewed comparison, since I’m putting one of the best items in the game up against some armor designed for someone 40 levels lower than me. The numbers won’t always be big and red. 
12.) Now that you’ve looked at the items side-by-side, let’s look at them individually.
a.) Click on Carapace of Tuten’kash. On its page, you can see its stats without mousing over it. You can see a screenshot of what it looks like. (On female toons, it’s that stupid metal bikini. I had this chest when I was 40, and I always wore a tabard over it. :D) Perhaps most important is the Dropped by tab at the bottom of the screen. There, you can see that this chest has a 29% chance to drop from Tuten’kash, a level 37 Elite boss in the Razorfen Downs instance.
b.) By comparison, if you look at the page for Truesilver Breastplate, you see that it has a Created by tab that tells you it’s made by Blacksmithing. The **Reagents **section tells you what is needed to make it–mousing over each reagent gives the name of it, and the icon tells you how many you need. The **Skill **section tells you that a smith has to have a BS skill level of 245 or higher to make the chest. (The color coded numbers matches the color of the recipe in their Blacksmithing window–it tells you how likely they are to gain a skill ponit by making the recipe at that level. A 245 BS would get a point, 265 probably would, 275 might, and a 285+ BS would never get a point from making it.)
So, there you have it: a way to search for items that are useful around your level, and how to find where to get them (either what monster to kill or what materials to collect and what profession to have make it). I hope that was helpful–let me know if anything wasn’t clear!
