How do you gear your characters?

How do you guys gear your toons?

I should start by saying that I will be multiboxing 3 accounts. I will be leveling with a friend (who will play 1 account as a pally tank). We will only be doing dungeons (with RAF)

I'm want to get into multiboxing but the problem I have right now is deciding which classes.

For Heirloom gear I have 1 set of each of plate (str set)/leather (agi set)/cloth as well as a staff/two handed druid made/two handed axe/a one handed sword.

If i was to make use of my heirloom gear I could dual box either a combination of

Druid/rogue
+
Ret pally/Warrior/DK
+
Healer (can use the cloth for any)

But I've heard that melee is much harder to dual box and using multiples of the same class is even easier still. This will not be an option if I go with heirlooms


So with that being said is it better for me to make use of my heirlooms (and if so what combination of classes would you suggest) or should I just choose whatever classes and gearing them as I go?

You should always choose which classes you really want to play in the end, regardless of heirlooms, race, faction, starting zone, or other factors which become irrelevant very quickly. Gear drops everywhere and you'll get it anyway especially if you're doing dungeons.

Personally I have 5 sets of cloth heirlooms, including the guild ones - helm, cloak, and pants. The stats are so inflated that it doesn't make a huge difference, and the rest of the pieces can be filled with gear appropriate for the class. I have some misc. pieces - plate, leather, caster leather, 5x 2 handed swords, and some trinkets I use occasionally but the heirlooms are really for the experience gain and max stats (it's like wearing the top tier epic at every level).

Gear is largely unimportant when boxing.
Five toons in a group, have the firepower that the gear doesn't mean a lot.

If you have the heirlooms, I'd use them.
But it is more important to play classes you enjoy, both the mechanics you'll use leveling and the end result/style of play.
Leveling can seem like a long time, but it's maybe 10% of the game; end level, whether heroics/raids or pvp is the other 90%... and you might as well have something you enjoy when you get there.

You might get to a point, where a given boss is unkillable at your gear level.
But the lower level instances generally are a lot easier to do.

Instances (and quests) are balanced for the 'Lowest Common Denominator'.
Meaning, a group of five random idiots should be able to accomplish the goal.
The game is geared towards and dumbed down to the point where unskilled players can win too.
Everyone can eventually do everything, or close enough.

While you have different challenges, because you're everyone...
You also don't have to deal with an idiot who stand in the puddle of poison, as it kills him.
You don't have to deal with a Healer, whose only move is Holy Nova spam until he runs out of mana, long before the battle ends.
You don't have to deal with a Rogue who only does one move, Fan of Knives.
I've played with single players who do just those two moves.

Playing the entire group intelligently, is generally more than enough to overcome the lack of independent actions.
Not being stupid, or having stupid players with you... that's a huge advantage.




Melee isn't harder than ranged.
It is a different mechanic.
Have CTM enabled, and press (or spam) your IWT Keybind.
Use a slave independent movement keybind to break the movement, if they decide to run off once the mob dies and you're still spamming the IWT.

With ranged, your mechanic is not IWT, it is facing.
You need to run the lead toon through the group, to change their facing.
If you're driving the tank, and you need your toons to turn or do some kind of movement... that's much harder with casters than with melee who are relatively bunched up.

Casters need to watch for spell reflect mechanics, which can easily kill them in the few places where you have that.
Quite frequently a mob can spell lock one of your schools, and in the case of a castsequence macro... that can lock you out of everything for the duration, because the next spell is not available while the school is locked out.
Casters can have mobs who are resistant to their type of damage.

Melee deal with point-blank attacks.
And possibly boss cleave attacks.
Different things to worry about, but not harder... just different.

At level 80 my toons still have the gear they start with. From 80 on I start gearing them up with quest rewards. Heirlooms are nice but unless every party member has the same you will be throttled on the toons that have less, assuming you do RaF.

You need to pick a class thats fun to you. If you pick based on what heirlooms you have, you may end up starting over if you find you dont like melee, or boomkins, or whatever.

Raise 3 druids to 20 boxing, 3 palis to 20, etc, then pick your favorite?

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've played the games many, many times before generally focusing on just leveling 1 character at a time (I have dual boxed before but that was a priest/lock with the priest just following casting renew/pws/swp)

The main reason me and a friend are playing this time round is just to do 5 man instances. He's decided to jump on board so he'll be dual boxing and i'll be triboxing and the challenge is too see how far we can go (with MoP 5 man heroics being the highest we'll likely go)

I'm not very interested in raiding this time round (spent far too much time on it in the past and not too interested this time round), as for PVP we'll likely jump in some bg's but nothing too serious.

As for the class combination, what would you guys say the difficulty is between having multiples of the same class (ie 3 elemental shamans) as opposed to multiclass combinations (ie a resto shaman, feral druid and DK)?

I want a good balance between being able to min/max in order to do harder content (heroics) and simplicity.

With multiclass, you obviously have to figure out how to play more classes. You'll need to know how to gear them, how to macro them, things like that. I don't personally find it a big deal, but then, I've always done multiclass.

As far as min/max, it's pretty irrelevant at this point in the game. It might matter for PVP, but for 5-man PVE in a standard group, as long as you don't suffer narcolepsy and randomly pass out during MoP encounters there's nothing you can take down with a single class that you can't with multiple or vice versa. the only point where that is NOT the case that I've seen is Cata dungeons - in which case ranged had a significantly easier time of things than melee did - but that still doesn't rule out multiclass and may be irrelevant since you're not running the entire group on your own, which gives more leeway to control your toons.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by redmosez

[..snip..]
(I have dual boxed before but that was a priest/lock with the priest just following casting renew/pws/swp)
[..snip..]

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This is actually how I first started as well. Except I had Warrior/Priest.

I gear my guys by having all trade skills, as soon as the mages hit level 90 I was able to craft ilevel 450 stuff for them, at minimal cost.

It appears that prepared gears his guys from rated battle grounds.

I loot the RNG that the instances drop and fill the holes with tailoring.

So when folk are gearing their fresh 90s are they using the PvP craftable gear for PvE content until they pick up upgrades in dungeons? Is there much of a stat loss on PvP vs. PvE gear?

They said PvP gear would be lower iLV for the same period in time.
Meaning 5.1 PvE is higher item level than 5.1 PvP, whether you're comparing Justice to Honor or Valor to Conquest.

But the PvP (PvP Power & PvP Defense) stats are free, on the PvP gear.
Meaning, PvP gear is closer to PvE gear than it has been before.
And with the base resilience everyone has, PvE gear is also stronger than previous in PvP.

I'd imagine crafted PvP gear would be decent... not quite as good as PvE gear of the same iLV, but fairly close.