It’s because items have multiple purposes. Some are made for a single quest only, and some have other uses and just hjappen to be on one given quest.
So, can someone give me the rundown for 80 paladins? My friend just hit 80 and I’ve been able to give some random general DPS tips (hit from the back) and a few things I’ve noticed about Paladins (use Consecrate on trash), but other than a few things here and there I honestly know shit about paladins and their stats. Since he went over the hit cap, he’s been stacking crit and I’m not sure whether that works.
Here’s his armory:
He DOES have some tanking gear, but that’s mostly by proxy of his DPS going up even with tanking gear after replacing some Northrend greens, he knows it’s not ideal it was just better than the alternative.
Rotations for his build, glyphs and/or better builds would also be appreciated.
Interesting you should ask. I’ve recently resurrected my 80 Paladin and I’ve been gearing him up as Ret. Just this morning I was reading Elitist Jerks’ guide to Retribution. Despite their name, they give amazingly helpful information.
To sum up, Ret Pallies don’t have a rotation, as such. The cooldowns on their main DPS abilities don’t permit any standard rotation shorter than several minutes long. What they have instead is a slight mix of First Come First Serve (just smash whatever’s up at the time) and priority list (what they call clash) if multiple abilities are available at once:
Depending on your point of view, this can either be easier or harder than a rotation. I personally find it more fun and active.
Regarding talents and glyphs, the EJ site has plenty of info, but you can see my boy after I respecced him to their recommendations, with a few personal preferences in the leftover talents. The only thing I haven’t done as of writing this post is swap Glyph of Exorcism for Glyph of Consecration, but I intend to do that in just a few minutes here.
Hit 68! Downloading WotLK now!
Awesome. Honestly, I think the solo experience in Wrath is miles ahead of Outland; the quests make you feel like you’re part of a plot to a much greater degree. Have fun!
(On my own front, I did some healing for a ToC-10 run and wound up dying in every fight except for Faction Champs, oddly enough. My problem seems to be not so much standing in fire as standing too close to big bad things that do AoE effects; I don’t start out standing next to them but as a result of trying to run closer to the tank I’m healing I just don’t notice who I’m standing next to. Also, I ran straight into the path of one of Icehowl’s charges, sigh. For Faction Champs I think I just stood in one place and clicked away at my healbot window. I think the hunter’s doggie was gnawing on me most of the time but honestly I’m not at all sure.)
at 69 now. Finally got the gear score addon. I was 940 ish leaving Outlands, am now up to 1300 ish in Northrend (I know I am still a few thousand off the pace).
Gear score is really not something to even worry about until you’re level 80 and running heroic dungeons and/or raids. The stuff you get from quest rewards before then is more than adequate for the things you’ll do before then. My mage is almost to lvl 79 and just broke 2000 yesterday.
Speaking of level 80 … I got my lvl 80 friends to group with my mage so I could finish the Hour of the Worg quest in Grizzly Hills, and we also brought along a level 78 DK from the guild. I’m having a bit of trouble convincing these guys that I don’t want to be “carried” on quests like this, and in normal dungeons - I just need some partners since they’re not soloable. The DK and I killed the third “sub-boss” on that quest, then looked around and wondered where the other two in our group had gone to; we went upstairs to where the Shade of Arugal was, and found that the two level 80s had already almost killed him. So I whined at them, “C’mon, guys! Leave me something to do!”
BTW what should I be doing as far as gearig my Dk blood tank for Heroics. I Just made 80, and while I don’t have a cookie-cutter build there’s not that much variability you can actually get with a Blood Tank, so you know most of what I have. I picked up Rune Tap + Improved for a vastly huger Emergency Buttion, and it comes in handy all the time, and it’s going to be how I will play in . I’m not expecting to get into raiding with this char before Cataclysm, so we’ll go with it for now.
It’s Dekkyr on Greymane (wowarmory’s not loading for me for some reason, so I can’t get you a link)
I know I need trinkets; tanking trinkets are hard to come by and my old stuff was really weak, so I dumped them for DPS trinkets.
One of the best tanking trinkets you can get pre-raiding is the Black Heart, from normal ToC5. You can also get some really good introductory tanking gear from there (both normal and heroic). If you’ve got friends who will run you through this and the normal-level ICC5 instances, you should be able to pick up a pretty good tank set fairly quickly. Just use your DPS spec until you get enough pieces that you can start tanking. Right now, your Defense is way too low to be tanking heroics (you need 535, and you have 485.) You can help out some of that with enchants (there’s one for chest and one for cloak).
Good luck! 
Got my Alliance paladin, Valamarth, to level 80 on Windrunner. He was my first character ever – created him when I first installed the WoW 10-day trial off of a CD that came with my PC Gamer magazine.
Got him to level 70 via the Burning Crusade, but then pretty much let him stagnate even after WotLK was released. I wasn’t enjoying playing him – pallies at the time were pretty much just “start the combat and read a magazine while your toon slowly grinds the mob down”. But the last few patches changed that, and I enjoy playing paladins again (which is why my BDL main toon is a paladin as well).
He still has almost all of Sholizar Basin’s quests to do, plus of course the zones after that. We’ll see how enthusiastic I am about doing all those quests for the fourth time now. But at least the money’s good, and now I can start running heroics (and enduring the jibes of the rest of my PUG for my crappy DPS) and getting that better gear.
So, this makes 4 level 80 toons - 3 Alliance, 1 Horde. I can’t manage to do that many daily heroics for Frost badges! Have to keep rotating through them.
DPS spec? What’s that? 
No, I’ve been levelling as a tank, and it’s pretty easy really. Different DK builds don’t play like the diff between Fury and Prot and Arms. That’s why I have a bunch of low-level tanking gear now, though.
Huh, first time I’ve ever seen a world server down. Nooooes!
Edit: The internet is trying to tell me something. I was trying to get to blizzard.com to see if they had a status update sort of blog, but I did some cat-like typing, including the enter key, and it took me to /b/. I’ve never actually been to /b/ on this computer, I have no idea how fat finger typing lead to that.
Your going to laugh, but I picked up The Black Heart on my very first ToC run. Heh. Now I’ll just run this another dozen times to get the other plate drops.
Hell of a weekend…my Pally, who’s nearly a year and a half old, had been sitting at 264 Jewelcrafting for most of that time. Mostly it was because I didn’t play him much for a while, but even when I was actively developing him I had a real hard time with JC because the materials needed are just so steep. Finally, having dug him out of mothballs after 6 months, I pulled all the gems out of storage that I had and raided the AH for everything else. A couple hundred gold and some hours of hardcore mining in Outland later, I’m sitting at 407 JC with a couple hundred crappy little gems to sell back on the AH. 
I can finally take Jewelcrafting dailies! I feel all grown up now.
How do you like it? I’m considering going for Jewlcrafting/Engineering in Cataclysm. No matter what my class is, that will be a very useful combination, and I have alts to feed my hunger for gems and ore.
Grats to all on the gear/leveling/what-have-you.
I had a completely wasted Friday evening (my one time to raid during the week). I was asked to join a ToC10 raid for the weekly quest, and it took 90 minutes to fill out the group (people kept dropping just as we were ready to go). Then, when we FINALLY got in, we wiped on the very first fight (Gormok) three times (DPS was not getting the snobolds, and people just stood in the fire). Of course everyone quit at that point. What a waste of time! So for I think the third week in a row I didn’t get any raiding done :-(.
On the brighter side, I spent some time questing with my holy pally and hit 58 and took him through the portal. Last night I kept queuing for random instances because I kept getting in immediately, and I ended up running Ramparts five times in a row, levelling half way through 60. I also got my flying skill and mount, and power-levelled my LW about 30 points to 290 – still not high enough to use the knothide leather I’m getting now.
I also want to complain about the Need/Greed rules that won’t let my roll Need on anything that’s not plate. Yesterday some nice caster mail dropped (which no on in the group wanted) which would have been an upgrade for me, but the Need button was greyed out. So I rolled greed, and lost. I explained to the winner that it was an upgrade and asked if I could have it, but he had selected Disenchant so it had already been sharded 
I haven’t had a chance to put it into use yet. Unless I want to shell out even more cash, it’ll take a bit of time to accumulate the daily tokens I need for the Dragon’s Eyes and stuff to boost my stats. (Nice thing about JC and BS is that they’re equally good for all specs, not just melee, so it’ll be a nice boost to my Holy spec too.)
But JC gems generally sell pretty well, and I’m always seeing people looking for JCs in trade, so I expect that I should get a decent return eventually.
I’m just a little peeved that I’ve really only started to hit endgame at the end of the expansion, so I feel like I’m seriously late to the party and have to play catch-up like mad when everyone else has had a year and a half to go through all their daily stuff. My goal right now is to position myself along with everyone else so that when Cataclysm hits, I’ll be right up front with the rest of the 80s. Maybe I’ll finally find a spot in a raiding guild; right now I’m trying vainly to gear myself up (on BOTH 80s) through heroics, when most raiding guilds expect you to have already kitted yourself out through TOGC and ICC. At least when Cataclysm hits everyone will be heading to the same raids with roughly the same gear, since I expect entry-level 85 gear will be about as good as tier 9-10.
Does my upgrade to WotLK include any playing time? Can I expect a month or two without theirtaking my subscription fee? This just occurred to me. Not that I will complain if it turns out not.
Wanderers, I’m pretty sure no. Grats on the new levels, though. You’ll like Northrend.
Funny thing is, in many ways the situation has never been better for a fresh dinged level 80. Smart guilds(yes, I know, precious few of those in WoW these days) try to recruit good players, not well geared characters. In the old days a character new at max level had a few months of slogging through the low tier raids(MC, BWL) before you could even consider bringing them to the top tier raid(Naxx, the original was really hard) regardless of player skill.
A character wearing ICC-heroic and badge gear should in theory be well geared enough to go to at least ICC10, and have more than enough gear to go to ToC25.
Convincing people that you as a player is good enough is a different matter of course. 