by ALEX ZIEBART

We’re getting to the point in Wrath where more than just the hardcorestof the hardcore are raiding. Not everyone is there (and not everyone is interested), but the time will come. On the way there, you’re going to have to visit an old friend: The hit cap.

In Wrath of the Lich King, the hit cap has moved from the original 16% to 17% hit. Why? Prior to this expansion, there was a baseline 1% chance to miss with spells that you could not remove. No matter how much hit rating you had, you were stuck with a 1% chance to miss. In Wrath, that’s gone. It can be overcome.

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by DANIEL WHITCOMB

We’ll have 3 sections today. The Good are stats that are excellent choices for DPS, Tanks, or both. The So-So are stats which still do us some good, but are pretty situational or conditional in their usefulness. The Outcasts are those stats that you should avoid — Well, I’d say avoid like the plague, but we’re Death Knights. We like the plague around here. So I’ll just say you should avoid them. 

The Good:

Strength and Attack Power: Strength is the number one stat for most types of Death Knight DPS, and is hardly a slouch for tanking either. 1 strength converts to 2 attack power, and that attack power scales into spell power for the purpose of a Death Knight’s spells, which include diseases and non-weapon attacks such as Death Coil. In addition, 4 strength converts into 1 parry rating. 

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by DAVID BOWERS

The Mage is the foremost master of magic in the Warcraftuniverse. Although all the other classes excluding the Warrior and the Rogue use magic of one sort or another with equally wonderful effects, the Mage is the class that’s named after the stuff.

But what is magic? What does it feel like to harness it? Does the mage have to do a strange ritual or utter incomprehensible words in an ancient language in order to cast her spells? Other fantasy settings often have one or more of these elements together, but as far as I can tell,Warcraft lacks them.

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by CHRISTIAN BELT

Frostfire Bolt is an interesting little spell. When you first hit level 75, visit your Mage trainer and learn it, you may think to yourself, “So…it does frost and fire damage? It’s like a Fireball and a Frostbolt combined! You take some ice, and you combine it with some fire, and you come up with…slush? I’m not sure how something like that is effective, but whatever. Now I don’t have to respec to fight fire or ice-immune mobs, I guess? Let me see if I can find a place on my action bar for this. There we go. Right between Amplify Magic and my tea-bagging macro.”

You would not be totally wrong in thinking this way. Well, maybe for having a tea-bagging macro, but that’s wrong for a whole slew of other reasons. At level 75, when you first obtain the spell, that’s really about all it is: a damage spell to use when running into a mob that’s immune to your usual nuke. Frostfire Bolt doesn’t really hit its stride until you’ve hit level 80, talented specifically to get the most of the spell, and started to get some of that sweet Naxxramas gear.

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by MATTHEW ROSSI

Fury is for killing and killing and killing while the world runs red in ruin around you. 

Sorry, but while I am a tank and I love tanking, I’ve discovered two facts in the past week. I can tank pretty much any five man or group quest in my tanking gear as fury and holy heck I enjoy chopping things heads off.My warrior raided throughout vanilla WoW as a DPS build, switching between fury 2h slam and Arms, and it’s been nice to get back to that as a Titan’s Grip build. I often don’t even tell people I’m fury when they ask me to tank, I just show up in the tanking gear and use a 2h weapon and a shield. What it lacks in AoE tanking capacity (no shockwave, no damage shield) it gains in pretty solid single target threat, thunderclap still hits multiple targets, and with the right talents you can even get some solid threat from Bloodthirst. This week we’ll be talking about a fury build that allows for some tanking versatility: it’s not a raiding DPS build but is oriented towards letting you grind and tank or offtank when needed. If there’s room, we’ll then discuss a pure DPS build for five mans and leveling if you have absolutely no desire to tank or offtank.

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by ZACH YONZON

The good thing about slow leveling is that we can actually look at blue upgrades for our Warlocks. Taking the time to level means we can actually go out of my way to look for items that I can use all the way to 80 instead of getting to 80 in a head-spinning two days in my Level 70 gear. If you’re one of those who still haven’t hit 80 yet, here’s a short guide to good blue upgrades while leveling up. You’ll encounter a lot of blue cloth gear while leveling, so I’ve compiled gear according to key statistics, particularly Haste and Crit, which will be two of the more interesting features we’ll look for in our gear. Today we’ll take a look at Haste, one of the best raiding stats for us in the game.

HASTE
There are a good selection of Haste items from quests — most of them group quests — throughout Northrend. It’s easy enough to find spell power gear, but if we’re looking to benefit from Haste, we’ll need to stack it. Blizzard has made a lot of green or uncommon spell haste gear available through quests, and you’ll come across those without even trying. Likewise, there are superior level (blue) items that should satisfy our hunger for haste. Some will be easier to get than others. Here’s a sampling of what we can look forward to.

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by DANIEL WHITCOMB

This guide will focus mostly on normal dungeon drops, although where a quest reward, reputation reward, or relatively easy to craft crafted item is a good option for the slot, we’ll highlight it as well. By the end of this guide, the Hunter that didn’t quite finish their Karazhan runs during Burning Crusade should hopefully have an idea of where to get a good outlay of gear to prepare them for heroics, and eventually for Naxxramas itself.

Good luck on the drops, and good luck winning the rolls over those enhancement shamans!

Ranged Weapon

For this slot, you may just want to stick to the Zombie Sweeper Shotgun. Yes, technically this isn’t a dungeon drop, but I’m recommending it anyway. There’s just no pre-Heroic drop that really compares. It’s not too horribly fast, it has a good bit of hit rating, and the highest non-heroic non-engineered DPS you’ll see on a projectile weapon in Wrath. If you’re too impatient to wait for revered with the Argent Crusade though, try going after the Projectile Activator off of Loken in the Halls of Lighting, or the Trophy Gatherer off of Urtok Palehoof in Utgarde Pinnacle. Both are pretty solid weapons that should serve you well until you hit revered with the Crusade.

Melee Weapon

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by MATTHEW ROSSI

One of the ways to gear up as you level and prepare for endgame in Wrath of the Lich King is by making use of the reputation gained via questing for various factions in Northrend. In addition to the main Alliance or Horde factions the Alliance Vanguard andHorde Expedition, there are a variety of other groups you can meet and ally with as you explore Northrend, often through daily quests, and these factions offer gear, head enchants and other items of interest to you as an up and coming shaman. Today, we’ll go over what each group has to offer and which ones you might want to prioritize depending on your spec and interest.

One group to mention in particular is the Sons of Hodir: unlike other factions, they don’t have a Tabard which you can wear in level 80 dungeons and heroics to gain reputation with them. However, they do have quite a few dailies to unlock as well as a long series of quests which will get you started, and in addition to the usual gearing reasons to unlock and progress in this reputation they also provide shoulder enchants that equal or exceed the best outland ones, so they’re a group you’ll eventually want to work on.

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by DANIEL WHITCOMB

Today, we’ll be discussing some of the best quest upgrades for a Death Knight in the first few zones of Northrend, but before we do that, I’d like to mention one more gear-related thing from our tanking column last week: The Cobalt “set.” 

It’s not technically a set in that it doesn’t have a name or set bonuses, but it’s 8 pieces of crafted armor, made by Blacksmiths at 375 skill and equippable at level 70, that provides tons of strength, stamina, and defense. It won’t get you to the level 70 Defense cap of 490, but it will come pretty close, close enough that if you can pick up a piece of defense jewelry or a trinket or two, you’ll be set for tanking up until the mid 70s or so.

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