Getting ready to enter Sunwell and not quite sure you’ve got the best gear available for it? No fear, here is a pretty good setup to start with. Of course there is some room for adjustments depending on how lucky you’ve been with drops, but you should have most of this gear before stepping into Sunwell or you will have a hard time beating the encounters.

While arcane blast talent spec is high damage for BT and Hyjal farming, I would recommend going deep fire in Sunwell, because you will run out of mana with arcane. Some of the item choices reflect that fire spec.

BEST GEAR PRE SUNWELL

www.chardev.org/?template=41722

Head: [Cowl of the Tempest]
Neck: [Hellfire-Encased Pendant]
Shoulder: [Mantle of the Tempest]
Back: [Cloak of the Illidari Council]
Chest: [Robes of the Tempest]
Wrists: [Cuffs of Devastation]
Hands: [Gloves of the Tempest]
Waist: [Anetheron's Noose]
Legs: [Leggings of Channeled Elements]
Feet: [Slippers of the Seacaller]
Finger: [Ring of Captured Storms]
Finger: [Ring of Ancient Knowledge]
Trinket: [The Skull of Gul'dan]
Trinket: [Hex Shrunken Head]
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by Matthew Rossi

Karazhan is fast becoming the newUBRS. The ten man cap on the raid and the fact that the gear from Kara was necessary to begin thinking about 25 man raids (now, the badges from Kara are - Karazhan is the rough equivalent of five heroic dailies in a two to three hour run once you’ve gotten the place on farm status) makes it the gateway through which both serious endgame raiders had to progress and a dandy place for smaller guilds to clean out, and were it not for the raid timer I’m sure we’d see guilds running Kara repeatedly in a week, and the only thing that stops daily Kara PuG’s is that same timer. Now you’ve reached level 70, and you want to tank or DPS in Karazhan.

Well, first things first: I’m going to have to disappoint you a little. If you’re a DPS warrior, there’s not a lot of DPS plate in Karazhan. There are some nice weapons, yes, and you’re going to want the badges to buy gear with, but you’re not going to find much in terms of plate in here for your DPS needs aside from some boots and the Tier 4 DPS options, which in many cases you will replace as soon as you have the badges or the Gruul/Mag runs to do so. Still, the weapons are nice. For a tank, Karazhan has more goodies in store. But first, you have to get into the instance.

The minimum tanking requirements for Karazhan (literally, for stepping in the door and tanking Attumen) are 490 defense, 12k health and armor. It would be nice to have at least 400 shield block value and you should be uncrushable with shield block up. This is achievable with drops from the 70 five man instances, heroics, and reputation rewards. I’m not going to list a lot of badge gear here because, frankly, if you have 100 badges to spend on a breastplate you probably are already tanking in Karazhan. Likewise, while I will list the tanking drops inKarazhan, I won’t do that until after I’ve listed the options outside it first. Those drops will be considered as upgrades you’ll probably need before tanking Prince Malchezaar.

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by Matthew Rossi

I am a tank first and foremost. I tank on my human warrior, I tank on my tauren warrior, I even tank on my paladin and baby druid. Tanking is what I do in game nowadays. I even tried tanking on my shaman yesterday and achieved passable results. (I successfully tanked Captain Galvanger and Drek’Thar. Good healing on that one, boy.) But nobody can tank all the time without going bloody insane, and so I make sure that my tauren is an off-tank, that he gets as many chances to DPS as is possible without making raiding impossible. In the process, I’m learning the strengths and weaknesses of a non-prot tanking warrior in Burning Crusade at tanking raid content - yes, Virginia, an arms warrior can tank Nalorakk in just the gear that drops in Karazhan. If his healers are insanely awesome, thank you so much Vito, Tear and Veks. I’m sorry I didn’t respec for that fight, but a man needs to hit things from time to time.

I geared my tauren for pure DPS all the way back in pre-Burning Crusade content. I ran LBRS and UBRS constantly for gear upgrades, PvP’d for the epics, collected an assortment of dps rings and trinkets. I was fortunate to be playing horde side with a talented and well-practiced undead warrior who primarily wanted to tank, and so I could work on being DPS in my own unusual idiom… I’ve always preferred two handed weapons over dual wielding, even though I don’t dispute the incredible damage potential of the DW builds. It comes down to two things: can you still do significant damage with a two hander, and what looks cooler?

To me, the answers were always yes, and a big honking sword or axe smashing down in a tauren’s gigantic armored hands. I’m glad to say it still holds true, especially when that great honking sword or axe is Jin’rokh, Now that my human has progressed beyond Kara it’s still fun to come on runs in DPS gear, spec arms and crush things into paste. We don’t always have the luxury of coming to Karazhan massively outgearing the instance, however.

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by V’Ming Chew

‘Grats on your new 70 Warlock! You’ve just turned experience into gold (at least until WotLK lands) and unlocked the wonderful world of BC raiding and Arena PvP. What do you do now? Gear up, of course!

I’ve touched on some general gearing guidelines for the pre-Karazhan Warlock in “Locked and loaded”, it’s time now to drill down to the specific pieces, especially since the introduction of Battlegear with patch 2.4.

Gear from random drops is generally considered tougher to obtain than those from quests, rep or crafting. Unless you are uncannily lucky, or enjoy repeatedly running any particular instance, even a “good” drop rate of 12% can be a stumbling block to getting the piece of gear that you desire.

Furthermore, it is tough nowadays to find people who would want to run the non-heroic versions of 5-man instances - good luck finding people, or even guildies, to run more unpopular ones like the Auchindoun dungeons. With that in mind, I’ll generally rate instance drops lower than gear from other sources, so that we can get your Warlock up to speed before WotLK is released.

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by Matthew Rossi

Gearing up Shaman - Shields for carnage, shield for wealThere are two shaman specs that realistically use a shield enough for it to be included in this column, elemental and restoration shamans. Each spec looks for different things from a shield. Elemental shamans want shields to aid them in the unleashing of elemental devastation, while resto shamans are generally all about the healing mojo. So you get two very different kinds of shields shamans like.

You may want to consider bringing Spellbreaker’s Buckler to Karazhan. It is a relatively easy (relatively, he says, remember that word) reward from the questAkama’s Promise which you could complete entirely within 5 man questing. Now, it’s admittedly a very long questline, but you’re guaranteed to get the shield when you’re done with it, and it is a solid shield for going into Kara. If you’d rather spend your time farming Shadow Labyrinth, however, there’s always theSilvermoon Crest Shield, from our old buddy Murmur. It looks exactly like the Spellbreaker’s, if that’s important to you. I’d say it’s better than the Akama quest shield, with more int and MP5 which the Spellbreaker’s lacks, but slightly less raw damage and no stam. If you just want to hit the AH and save some time, you can always get the Draenei Honor Guard Shield. It’s got nice spell crit on it, which is nice for Elemental Focus, and a decent amount of spell damage, not as good as the previous shields. Finally, in the ‘if you really need a shield badly and can’t get a better one’ category, there’s the Netherwing Defender’s Shield. It’s a tankadin shield, make no mistake, but if you really need one it does have spell damage on it. It can also be useful to keep it in your bags in case you expect to get hit a lot for some reason.

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by Eliah Hecht

Due to the unique mechanics of Shadow Priest combat, there is one stat that rises above the rest for you: +damage (either shadow or all schools). More +damage means more DPS, of course, but it also means more mana back from Vampiric Touch; this will be your primary form of mana regeneration, and you should have VT up at all times. Spell hit is also very important. Assuming you have5/5 Shadow Focus (which you should, unless you’re already hit-capped), you need 76 spell hit to reach the cap on level 73 mobs (raid bosses are considered level 73). Additional spell hit is relatively useless, although that once you reach 101 hit, you can take a point out of Shadow Focus and move it elsewhere; it’s probably not worth gearing for this specifically though.

Spell crit is much less important than +damage and (pre-cap) spell hit, given that we have only two spells that can crit: Mind Blast, and Shadow Word: Death. We do cast those spells fairly frequently, especially MB, so it’s not a worthless stat by any means, but you should definitely favor +damage over spell crit. Some Spirit is also good to have, since you will probably have Meditation. You need enough stamina not to die, but as with the Holy priests, I recommend not gearing for stamina specifically, but rather keeping some high-stam pieces in your bag to swap in for fights like Aran where you need them.

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by Eliah Hecht

Hello, fellow Holy priests! Are you interested in Karazhan, but have never gone yet? Maybe you want some Badges, maybe you want some nice epics, or maybe you just want to hang out with nine other folks and have some fun. But what to wear?

Well, the good news is you don’t need amazing gear to start KZ. In fact, healing KZ can be easier than healing many heroics, in my experience, if only because you have another healer or two there to help you out. Of course, the better your gear is, the better your performance will be, but there are many easy-to-reach pieces of gear that will perform fine, and several that will perform amazingly, for Karazhan. Join me as I step through some recommended options.

Note that priest gearing received a fairly major change in the recent 2.4 patch, for two reasons:

• Intellect now makes our spirit work better.
• Meditation now makes 30% of our spirit work while inside the five-second rule, instead of 15%.

The second of these two changes is by far the bigger; the net effect of both of them is to make spirit even more valuable than it was, and to make int. worth a bit as well.

That said, your primary stats to focus on will be, by far, +healing and spirit, followed by int and mp5, and stamina is also nice to have as well. Spell crit is really not an important priest healing stat - don’t shun it, but it will rarely be a reason to choose one piece over another.

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by Zach Yonzon

So you’re finally 70. Welcome to the select order of masochistic players who endured the tedious grind (or, if you leveled as Protection, the happy AoE grind) to max level with a class sometimes considered to be a WoW developer’s afterthought. The Paladin class, popular as it is, has traditionally had a slow development cycle. That said, one can choose to see it as a blessing (pardon the pun) rather than a curse, in the hopes that developers will build Paladin talents adaptively and from the lessons provided by other classes. Don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, so you’re Level 70. You’re now ready to enter Karazhan. Well, ok, not really. Right about now is when you should be gearing up for Karazhan, The Burning Crusade’s entry level and most popular raid instance. With the removal of the attunement process in Patch 2.4, you won’t even need to have The Master’s Key, but you’ll need to have a friend who can open the gate for you. More than a few Holy Paladins will have an easy time getting into a group for Karazhan because let’s face it, everybody loves a healer. Then there are the Paladin tanks who’ll get that loving invite to visit Deadwind Pass because, again, everybody loves a tank. But you, the vindictive 2-hander-wielding, Judgement-spamming,Crusader Striking champion of truth and justice… well, nobody loves you.

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by Christian Belt

Once upon a time, your Mage stumbled blearily out into Azeroth and cast his firstFireball at a kobold or a wolf or something. Then a bunch of other stuff happened, and now you’re level 70, and you just bought your flying mount and used it to see how far up you could go before your graphics card stopped rendering the ground. After you screw around a bit, maybe quest out Netherstorm, runShadow Labyrinth a few times and learn to hate the Blackheart fight, you may find yourself wondering what’s next for your green and blue-clad wizard. Perhaps…another color entirely? Wandering aimlessly about Shattrath one day, you notice a fellow spell-slinger clad in a robe you’ve never seen before. Inspecting her, you are shocked to see the name of the robe is written not in green…or even blue…but purple.

Asking where such a treasure might be obtained, you learn a name that will consume your waking thoughts and haunt your dreams: Karazhan.

Your guild, you learn, frequents the haunted castle that bears this name, and would be happy to take you along…if you can be of some use to them within its shadowed walls. Your current hodgepodge of mismatched quest rewards and 5-man drops simply won’t cut it. You must improve yourself, and quickly. But how? Read on, fellow Mages, and find out.

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