Noob QuestionFollow

pretty much just run instances all day long for gear after you hit 35 or so.

Depending on how you are leveling, concentrate the most on - of the bear - items or once you have enough stam - of the tiger. Basically you are looking for strength / crit rating (or agi) for 2h'ers strength/crit/hit rating for DW'ing and heavy stam focus and defense for prot... although this is not to say you should not look at stam when you are leveling with a 2h'er or dw'ing as this lets you live longer, take on tougher/more mobs and less downtime.

Straight up gear you'll just have to search for in the advanced fields, but def. start farming sm at 35, hit up razor fen downs for a great plate chest piece, and ST is also great.

With warriors being the most gear dependent class [and probably most wanted for lower level content because of shortage of tanks], most of your gear should be coming from instances. Once you get a really great gear set, don't worry about it for 5-6 levels, after that, start farming another instance (or more). Once you hit 52 or so and not opposed to grinding, start doing pvp (AV is the best as you can go in the caves and kill the gnolls for exp and money) to be able to get a few pieces of the HWL [level 60 epic pvp set] gear. Mine lasted me until 67 through outlands where after that I started doing more instance running for rep and quickly changed those pieces out.

a lot of tank gear can be (at minimum) quested for (sha'tari armguards), and better tank gear can be crafted (felsteel set), farmed for rep (ogrila aegis) or rep items (badges of justice from running heroic dungeons can buy you stuff like the gnomer autoblocker 6000), or found from dungeon drops (jadeskull breastplate).

good dps gear can be found in BG's (veteran's set, grand marshal's gear) and arena (merciless gladiator gear). i just got into arena yesterday, and it's a fairly easy way to nasty epics... even at my crappy just-started-arena rating of 1464, it would take 6 weeks to get enough points for epic shoulders.

what froman is talking about is when you're going to be close to 70.

right now just go fury with a 2h weapon (and pick up imp. slam) never ever ever buy vendor gear, even the greens they have are much more expensive than at the AH [and usually slightly worse]

There really is no point of going full prot until you hit 68 or so.

Edited, Oct 5th 2007 12:39pm by russki

take all those points you didnt put into parry, and put them back in. also, take all those points you didn't put into cruelty, and put them back in. booming voice sounds like a good idea, but you need the points for better talents. also, rend really loses its effectiveness once you hit the 20's, so avoid that. imp heroic strike you can take or leave, but i think those points can be put to better use elsewhere also (like imp tclap!).

vendors hardly sell anything good... the last time i saw someone using anything from a vendor was a halaani claymore, but that is actually fairly decent statwise for its level.

don't spec full prot at your level, just go arms or arms/fury hybrid with a 2h, and learn how to tank with revenge/tclap/sunder as your only threat-generating tools, and learn how your group should play in instances. when you hit 70 and dungeons become increasingly difficult, prot spec becomes almost necessary and makes things TONS easier. i respec'd to prot for a few days and i could not believe how much easier tanking was with defiance, shield slam, devastate etc. i got a guildie mage to hit 1 million total damage in reg shadow labs with blessing of salvation ^^ throwing out that much threat was great! though now i'm respec'd to 31/30 for arena and bg's...

you don't, you ALWAYS bring a sword n board (or axe n board, even dagger n board, though most of the time you'll be getting hit hard and often enough to generate enough rage that you won't need the extra rage from the dagger's faster attack speed... i sometimes switch to my dps dagger when tanking some solo mobs) into ANY instance, EVEN IF you aren't the main tank, because all you have to do to OFF tank is slap the sword n board on. it can give you another 50% armor over what you already have and include block value into your damage mitigation.

tanking with a 2h = more damage taken more quickly = healer oom faster = dead tank = dead healer = dead group. i know that this is different from what you're used to with a FFXI warrior/monk using a Gaxe to tank, or war/nin dual wielding etc. but then again, in FFXI you're tanking one target at a time, in WoW you'll be expected to tank FOUR at a time (or more in a crappy group). in WoW, cc (crowd control) is used more often to help you tank, whereas in FFXI if you had the BLM or bard sleep something that's pretty much the extent of cc.

the beautiful thing about being a warrior is you really can tank in any spec, as long as you revenge/tclap/sunder and have a group that controls and paces its dps. so don't be afraid to take your 2h fury build into an instance and throw your tanking gear on and let the tanking commence.

Edited, Oct 5th 2007 4:15pm by fromanthebarbarian

Well this game is a bit different than FFXI.

First of all, you wont be finding any equipment at say level 40 and use that until endgame. Which is different in FFXI, where they have sniper and woodsman ring.

Also there isn't really an "ouch" level where you have to farm for equipment for months and months like FFXI. Such as Samurai being level 30-40, Monks 30 or so and so on. You don't really HAVE to farm at say level 30 - 40 like FFXI.

In WoW, many good gear comes from quests. Some of the quests you can do yourself, but some of the better equipments are harder and you may need some help.

As the other posts said, a lot of good gear comes from instances at your level. Especially the bind on pickup ones. If you don't want to run the same instance over and over you can always look to the auction house and see whats for sale.

When you start thinking that "Man it took me forever to kill that one mob" (as fury or arms), or "Wow I'm taking way too much damage from something of that level mob" then you might want to look at your current equipment and check the AH for those around your level to see what the differences are.

People tell you that being Prot at your level isn't productive is because you're trying to level. Protection is basically taking less damage but killing slower. So Arms or Fury is the way to go for leveling. Once you get to higher levels feel free to go to Prot then, but now you don't need it.

Generally you will want to dual wield one handed weapons or have a 2 handed weapon to level. When you want to tank, all you need is a one handed weapon and a shield and you should do fine. Switch to defensive stance and take the beating like a man/woman.

Unlike FFXI there is no "you NEED <so and so> equipment" or you're gimped (atleast in the early levels). Ofcourse there are equipments that you "should" get for the benefit of yourself. Such as Whirlwind Axe and other neat stuff.

Once you hit 40 -60 or so, you can start looking for things that can be crafted by Blacksmiths. Nice weapons and armors start to pop there. You can either farm/buy the materials yourself or pay a blacksmith to use his/her materials to make it for you. If you don't want to go broke, don't become a blacksmith at your level. Sure you might not be losing money, but you wont be gaining money either.

go to the auction house and replace all of your white items with "of the bear" or "of the monkey" or even "of the tiger" items. bear = +stam/+str, monkey = +stam/+agi and tiger = +str and +agi. If you can find gear with all three stats (truesilver gauntlets i think have all 3?, but that's at 40) that would be even better. Your first stat should be stamina for longer survivability and at lower levels, if you have good stamina gear, you aren't going to need a seperate tanking gear set. Your second stat is strength for your AP (1 str = 2 ap) for the amount of damage you can do. Your last skill is agility for crit.

^ this is for you current level, once you hit 70 and you are raiding you will want to focus more on str/crit gear (and hit gear also if you are dpsing). You should also start developing a protection gear set once you hit about 60 which will consist of as much defense as possible without gimping your other stats (mainly stamina). You aren't going to want items that just give +40 defense, you'd be better off going for something like 30 defense and 15 stamina. "of the champion" items.

Right now I can def. say run SFK, there is a quest reward for a GREAT ring and a few really nice mail pieces of armor drop there. At 32 get your whirlwind axe (since you are an orc, TRY to aim for axes as your weapons, but only if it has comperable stats, i.e. don't get an axe that does 20 dps over a sword that does 30 just because it's an axe)

another recommendation would be for you to download atlas loot mod. this has all the instances maps and what level you should be when running them. You can also see what gear drops from which bosses and kind of plan things out. So... say you hit 34, you can now run SM library, open atlas loot, see which bosses in that wing drop what you need and find a group! If that instance drops nothing for you then don't do it.