Of farming, shards, badges and marks etc.

[Velassra]

Mostly repeating what others have already stated, but:

1) do 20-25 dailies and save up gold for the better AH epics (they're pretty cheap at the moment). The daily normal dungeon is good also (gold + emblem).

2) Create an arena team and loose 10 matches per week. You dont have to zone in, just que up and hit the "leave" button once it pops

3) Do WG whenever possible. Nice trinkets (111 SP), and good gear for practically no effort.

4) Do a round of the easier heroic bosses. The first couple of bosses in Gundrak on each side (Ssladran and Moorabi), the first boss in Drak'theron Keep (or however it's spelled), a couple of bosses in Nexus should be doable also. Don't be afraid to try Stratholme also, you may not succeed at first, but once you get the rythm down it's doable. If you do those, that's an easy 6-7 emblems per day.

5) If you don't have any professions yet, level up mining on your tank. The profession bonus is +sta and you make a ton of money off it while levelling up (vanilla and BC ores/metal sell really well). Don't waste money on professions that don't make you any money in a reasonable timeframe (which is all, except gathering professions), the exception being enchanting because you'll need someone to disenchant.

"2) Create an arena team and loose 10 matches per week. You dont have to zone in, just que up and hit the "leave" button once it pops"

No shit? That gives you points? I despise Arena, but I'm not against hitting a button for points. (Reminds me of a rat hitting a lever for a little treat...)
Anyway, some helpful info for m too. I have a single boxed 80, but my first team is just approaching 79. Regular instances have been kicking my ass so don't feel bad. Some of the videos out there make it look too easy.

[Fuzzyboy]

"2) Create an arena team and loose 10 matches per week. You dont have to zone in, just que up and hit the "leave" button once it pops"

No shit? That gives you points? I despise Arena, but I'm not against hitting a button for points. (Reminds me of a rat hitting a lever for a little treat...)
Anyway, some helpful info for m too. I have a single boxed 80, but my first team is just approaching 79. Regular instances have been kicking my ass so don't feel bad. Some of the videos out there make it look too easy.

Yeah - like 340-something per week, it's pretty neat :-) It used to be that you had to zone in and get killed in order to get your 10 losses, but for some reason they changed it. I think I read somewhere it was related to que-dodging, but whatever, it works great for gearing up also.

[Meshuggenah]

Farm the argent dailys.

When you have enough gold, buy crusader orbs and crafting cooldowns for your tank. Ask in trade chat and tip someone 50G to craft you the 245 chest/bracers and 226 belt/feet.

Once your tank is reasonably well geared, focus on your healer with the same items. It shouldn't take you long to farm enough gold for these pieces (crusader orbs go for ~250G on my server now). These 4 pieces of gear will make a huge difference and are better than anything you will get outside of a raid environment.

Some tips.. Ignore armor type when gearing your shamans. Most mail is bad because it wastes a lot of itemization on MP5. Wear cloth or leather if necessary. www.wowhead.com/?item=Sash of Ancient Power for example, is much better than any leather or cloth belt that level. Infact, it's better than most 232 or 245 belts for a shaman. Get hit capped, then focus on spell power and haste.

Also, if you're running a 4 shaman group, do not gear your "Healer" as resto. Use Ele pieces, gem and enchant for DPS, not for resto. The only reason to properly gear for resto is if you plan on raid healing with that character. In a heroic, all that matters is spellpower and a well geared tank. You will never have mana problems. The time/effort you spend acquiring the resto gear will have been wasted, especially if you spend triumphs on it. This way, you can simply respec your healer as another Ele DPS when you want to try DPSing VoA/Ony. When you're capped out of heroics (meaning you have full tier9, all the relevent drops and conquest off-pieces) you won't even need a resto shaman at all. I 4x DPS heroics now because my tank simply doesn't need a healer when most heroic boss fights last less than 20 seconds. In fights where I do need heals, Ele gear is fine.

[lordmythic]

great questions OP! My team just dinged 80 this weekend and are my first to cap as well. Guildies helped me with some crafted epics and I went to the ah so now at least my tank is at 538 def. I have the same questions as you. Thx all for answering.

[Seldum]

Great Hints and Tips. Somehow Wow often assumes you know everything, and im glad im not the only one not really knowing what ill do when my team hits lvl 80....

Therefore thanks for all the info.

[Fizzler]

Most folks forget to mention that Gundrak Heroic has 3 very easy bosses. Right after you kill the boss that turns into a Rhino or big ass cow what ever that is a door opens up in the room that takes you to the big Murlock looking boss. 3 easy pulls to get to him and a very simple tank and spank kill.

Hall of Lightning is super easy for me but does take a while for a full clear.

If you have a paladin tank run regular Hall of Lightning for the tank trinket on the last boss that helps. Once I was able to get 15-25 tokens I purchased my totems, librams which made life much easier.

AV honor and WG tokens helped fill in a few gaps. Focus on getting your tank and healer geared up first.

[TheBigBB]

Heroics, for the most, part aren't particularly tough if you do them right, even with spotty gear, but you sometimes need to blow your cooldowns, and be prepared to do some serious healing. You also should read up on and think up solutions to bosses which require moving around. Just for reference, my guys in mostly epics have to blow every cooldown and heal nonstop through many parts of the bosses in Heroic ToC.

I recommend having your tank played like you'd play a normal character using a different row from the DPS; same with the healer. My right hand moves the mouse and hits healing keys on the numpad while the left hand hits DPS and movement keys with the index/middle/ring finger, and the thumb hits tanking keys across the Z-M row. Most people don't do it my way, but I figure I'd suggest it to you, since the only heroic I don't do now is the occulus.

[heffner]

What I did was do 20-25 dailies each day for a while. It takes about 1 to 1.5 hours. Might be faster now with the tournament dailies (i.e., more quests in the same zone, Icecrown). This should get you an epic or two per day (500g to 1.5k gold) from the AH. My first purchases were the crafted epic weapons and armor (Titansteel, Spellweave, Revenant's). Some of the [cheaper] dropped BOE epics might not be as common now since Nax and Ulduar are likely not being run as often as in the past (esp Naxx). However, they are likely to be pretty cheap if you do manage to find them.

The tournament daily emblems also offer some decent gear as do the rep vendors. Rep is easy to get from dailies and later from running heroics.

After I got a few epic pieces I then started running the heroics for the epic drops and emblems. Started with Gundrak, Drak, COS and VH. I still wiped a lot as I learned the bosses and how to play my team. Don't let those videos fool you, we can't all be like Hachoo and Niley!!

I still mostly do these same instances when I do heroics for badges (which is not that often for me and my gear is currently sufferring because of it).

Later I did TOC heroic and normal until my head exploded as most of the drops were upgrades.

TOC normal is probably not the best to start with.

I always make a ranked list of gear for all of my toons. I suggest doing this [or finding some on the net] if you haven't already. Setting these goals helps organize your thoughts and direction in the game (assuming this is part of why you play, which it may not be).

I did not level up professions until much later when I was bored and there was a lull in the game (pre 3.2 for me). This worked for me, but going back to level gathering professions wasn't all that fun - but not horrible. Also, doing professions on all my toons at the same time was beneficial as they feed into each other. Especially things like enchanting where you can just DE your crafted gear for mats to help level up.

As for Tier armor. I will try to explain it.

It all started back in Vanilla WoW where every class had a set of armor available to them from the most difficult encounters at that time. This set consisted of five to eight pieces of armor and was generally the best in slot items for your class. When you obtain and wear 2/3 or more pieces of the tier armor set you also get bonuses to your class, things that increase DPS etc. Dungeon set 1 was the very first set that was available as drops in instances like Scholomance and Stratholme (which used to be 10 man raid zones, later reduced to 5 man), although technically this differs from the Tier sets. Tier set 1 was from the first big raid instance in Vanilla wow, Molten Core. Tier 2 and 3 were also from pre-BC raid zones (Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair and Blackwing Lair). Tier sets 4 to 6 were from Burning Crusade raid zones. There was also a dungeon set in BC from 5-man instances. Tier sets 7+ are from WoTLK. In WoTLK things got even more complicated by having even more sets depending whether the drops were from the 10 or 25 man versions of the zones (e.g., Tier 7.1 and 7.5).

Blizzard simply kept to this formula and each big patch and expansion offered a new set of class armor (and even for the different talent specs within a class, so three different armor sets for some classes). The way you obtain the actual pieces has changed over the years. It started with the exact armor piece dropping from the boss [or trash], but now the boss drops a token for a specific armor type (e.g., plate chest for all plate wearers instead of a plate chest specific for a paladin) that a player can turn in for their armor piece. In addition, bosses drop emblems which are also turned in for Tier (and non-Tier) armor pieces. Everyone gets an emblem from a boss kill, so everyone in the raid benefits.

The Tier sets are essentially the end gear that people tend to aim for and usually requires raiding. WoTLK has introduced a lot of high end non-Tier set gear and Tier sets; and alternate ways of actually obtaining the best gear without raiding. However, you cannot get the complete Tier set without actually raiding, as BOP drops are required for many of the pieces.

Currently you can collect the Conquest and Triumph emblems from 5-man heroic instances (Triumph drops only in the heroic daily dungeon). Conquest emblems purchase some of the Tier 8.5 armor pieces, while Triumph emblems purchase Tier 9 armor pieces. You cannot get all pieces using emblems, some you can only get from raiding as token drops. However, you can purchase non-set items by turning in emblems that are also quite good but you forego the 4 piece bonus of the set. For reference, people who are raiding Ulduar will get Conquest emblems while those who raid the Coliseum will get Triumph emblems.

So, as a non-raider you can get some Tier 8.5 (iLevel 226) and Tier 9 (iLevel 232) pieces as well as some nice non-set armor pieces to fill in the gaps from collecting and turning in emblems. In addition, the raiders have access to Tier 9.25 (iLevel 245) and Tier 9.5 (iLevel 258) armor sets as all items in these sets require drops from the raid zone.

Patch 3.2 also introduced (I think it was in 3.2?) dropped recipes in the raid zones to craft some high end pieces. Many best in slot (BIS) items are these crafted pieces. I believe all the crafted pieces are BOE and go for 5k to 10k on the AH.

Patch 3.3 will change things again. Emblems of Triumph will drop from all 5-man heroic bosses (not just the daily dungeon) and will introduce emblems of Frost for the next Tier sets. Emblems of Frost will drop from the 5-man heroic daily as well the new raiding zones.

Hope this information is correct as I don't currently raid. Please feel free to correct me if I posted incorrect information.

This is a good read if you want more info: http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor_set

[Shodokan]

A BIG tip is to go CLEAR storm peaks and icecrown of quests. Use the money to gear up your tank. You should pull in about 15k gold doing these two zones because of the 5 characters.

15k gold should get you all the required pieces to gear your tank, and start on your journey.

You could also use say 5k of that to pay for a spot in an ulduar 25 on your tank to get gear. (this is what i use to do on my single toons right when TOC came out)

From t9 you get 212 hit... so you need about 60 hit from elsewhere... the sash of ancient power + 1 more hit item will put you at cap. (you need 289)

The ultimate goal for PVE is as follows once you hit hitcap

SP>Haste>Crit


So lets say your team is in 5 piece t9... you will want to make sure that you get haste/sp/crit on the rest of your gear. If you can get gear to take out 1 piece of hit gear i would do so (chest) and replace it with merlin's robes. Bracers will be bejeweled...

You should break 4k dps at this point with ease.