Tips for Pally team?

[lans83]

My Pally team finally hit 80 last night and now I'm gonna be spending alot of time grinding out BGs for the honor gear. Once a friend of mine hit 80, she'll join my group as a Pally healer and we're gonna hit up the arenas together, but in the mean time, I'm needing tips on specking for survivability here in the BGs. So far my main has been Prot and three slaves as Ret, but I'm thinking of changing up a bit. I've already gotten Dual-Spec on my main and can afford it now on my slaves, but not sure if it would be worth it really. Should I just roll 4xRets, 1xProt w/3xRets, 4xProt for the Ardent Defender talent, or roll 4xHoly and just spam the hell out of Holy Light at Drek in AV? Seems everytime I get to Drek, everyone's always waiting on a tank/healer to show up down there and Alliance looses cause of that reason alone. Right now, I'm no where near geared right to tank Drek. My whole team is still in quest reward gear ranging from Grizzly Hills to Icecrown. Gonna invest in the Saronite Resilience gear for them next time I log in for added protection. I figured once I get enough gear to survive with on my main, I can always respec main back to Prot and have slave as Holy and just have them spam heal myself while tanking and everyone else sit there and dps Drek, but right now, that's not likely to happen.

Another thing, for gear, other than running instances, random dungeon finder says I need better gearscore for ALL lvl 80 dungeons btw, anyone have any good suggestions for some cheap effective armor my Blacksmith can create for my team for their specs? Now he's at 415, but will go up once I make that saronite set, but it's all lvl 78-79 blues. Any Northrend quartermasters worth investing in that'll last me a good while?

[HPAVC]

Random dungeon finder says I need better gearscore for ALL lvl 80 dungeons

Its says 'better gear score'?

I have run two 76's through ICC 5mans normal to 80 recently and I have never had this gearscore problem.

[lans83]

I hit the DF button by mistake when I hit 80 instead of hitting the PvP one, but when I did I scrolled down to see what I could que for, and if I'm not mistaken, it said I needed better gear for those. I'll recheck on my next log in, but right now, I think the highest piece out of all my gear I have on is like 176 from a piece I crafted with Blacksmithing. Again, I'll recheck when I log back in, but how do I go about checking my overall gear score other than addin each up manually and dividing to find the average? Any addons I should grab for this? Something very lightweight on ram preferably.

edit: Just pulled up my armory page (keep forgetting about that) and the 'item level' is what I'm referring to. Highest is 180 on a chest piece I just got from a quest turnin before I hit 80. Is this what I'm supposed to be looking at? I've never gone by this till now and have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to be looking at really as far as gear improvement in raiding gear since. My guild leaders are never on when I am, hell no one really is in my guild anymore, and I have no ingame guidance aside from the smartass in /trade and what's posted here. I've been given pointers on what to upgrade from time to time as far as stats go, that I've got a good idea, but too many people now require a minimum gear score rating to even attempt anything with on my server.

[Ualaa]

For PvE content...

I would take your entire team and run dailies, religiously for a week or two.
Take the gold, and use it to gear your team.

Go for cheaper level 80 purple upgrades.
Lots of iLV 200 and 213 etc, will be a larger bang for your buck, then one or two iLV 245 pieces.

In particular, gear for the tank will make everything else a lot easier.
You could go with a Titansteel weapon on each toon, which should help with DPS quite a bit.

Not sure how much PvE gear you want to get, since you mention it will be a PvP focus.
But a weapon per toon is a good idea, for either aspect of the game.
And PvE progression (heroics for badges), can be used to purchase PvP gear too.

The dungeon finder tool, might not let you into a dungeon.
But if you want to do it, just physically travel to the dungeon and walk inside.
I'd consider the first boss (both directions) in Gundrak, as well as Drak'Tharon Keep and Utgarde Keep for starting heroics. A few bosses here or there, add up.

[Zugdud]

Hail fellow Earthen Ringer (Couldn't help but notice your sig)! Sadly we are on opposing factions but I 5-box horde side under many variations of the name Zugdar in a guild called Dissonance so be sure to wave if you bump into me in Dal or WG

I'm needing tips on specking for survivability here in the BGs

With 13k hp and 0 resilience your going to get rolled by everyone until you collect enough honor to gear up a bit. Personally, I would focusing on gearing up using 5man heroics as they are the best/fastest way (IMO) to acquire both your starter PVP and PVE gear while also doing Wintergrasp atleast once a week for the quests. I know that Alliance doesn't do very well in WG on ER, but just getting the weekly quests done is a nice helping of honor. As for the instance farming, because you are only 4 boxing I would go 1x prot, 3x ret, and pug a healer spot to make things easier. Once your gear improves a bit you can cover the healing EASILY (speaking from experience) with your 3x rets and just pug a DPS for the last spot.


Normal PoS is a great first instance to start on as you can just go in, do 3-4 trash pulls and kill garfrost farm garfrost over and over again for the ilvl213 2hander while raking in emblems at the same time

I know that's not exactally what you were asking in your post, but just throwing it out there as a possibility

/salute

[heyaz]

I wouldn't even do BGs to start. I jumped straight into instances when my group hit 80 and got them everything they need. I don't know how much your control wintergrasp, but you can pull 3000-5000 honor per hour during heroics, plus all the gold and emblems to buy gear. In BGs you'll be lucky to pull 2200 honor per hour unless you are on one of those servers with insta queue AVs for alliance where it's 10 minute wins over and over.

[asonimie]

I wouldn't even do BGs to start. I jumped straight into instances when my group hit 80 and got them everything they need. I don't know how much your control wintergrasp, but you can pull 3000-5000 honor per hour during heroics, plus all the gold and emblems to buy gear. In BGs you'll be lucky to pull 2200 honor per hour unless you are on one of those servers with insta queue AVs for alliance where it's 10 minute wins over and over.

QFT. Like all new undergeared multibox teams, this one also hinders the small battlegrounds until you're geared. Don't waste your time and frustration. A little taste of BGs to help you plan PVP macros/control/etc is fine, but plan on spending most of your time in heroics until you are 5/5 t9 or 5/5 furious.

By that time - if you have 1) done your weekly WG quests and B) held WG a reasonable amount of time(allows for shard farming in heroics), you should have 2-3 wrathful accessories and maybe a good trinket / relic.

[lans83]

Thanks for the tips guys (and/or gals?) I'll start working on my instances here this week then. Pulling a few more hours in at work this week, so it will have to be put off a another day or two, but still good advice. Zugdud, I think I've run across you in the past actually. Do you run a pally team also? If so, I might have run across you when I was in STV working on my quests for the camp by the river. All my character slots are filled already, so I can't make any Horde, so we'll only cross each other's paths in BGs/Arenas maybe. Hope to see you on the battlefield. After I'm geared better that is

[blbjtb]

you can pull 3300 - 5k honor in an hour How? you can get 60 stone keeper shards in an hour? Thats 15 bosses in an hour isnt it? Which would be 4 bosses every 15 min..... Not trying to be an ass but I feel like I have to be doing something wrong.

[asonimie]

Yes with 232+ gear on a ret / dk team I can finish heroics in 12-20 minutes. It really just depends on how much walking distance there is inside the instance.

4 heroics per hour = roughly 4-5k honor / hour.

Plus you have a ton of emblems left over to buy gems / orbs and make some money.