I hope a lot of new 80s read it and learn.

And what Nick said. Run H ToC 5 man every day as your first heroic of the day. If you have time to run 2, then do the daily. Then hit the heroics that drop more emblems like Gundrak and Nexus.

This has worked well for me and people in my guild who’ve asked how I gear up my alts and alt specs so quickly with limited playtime.
If you’re trying to do it quickly and fast, it’s all about optimizing time and efficiency, and not worrying about whether you overgear the content.
If you study your class well, you will be contributing enough to the group you are in, not being carried. A great player with decent gear generally does better than a mediocre player with awesome gear.
First off, quest greens and blues and whatever BoEs you can afford should be good enough in Reg ToC, and it drops approximately 9 epics per hour, as opposed to regular heroics, which drop maybe 1.5 epics per hour. 2 if you’re counting emblems. In 4-5 hours of farming it you’ll have almost full epics and be ready for Heroic ToC. Now, you can only do this once a day, so I made it a point on my alts to make sure I did it once a day, every day, like clockwork. This takes a lot less time than doing 3-4 heroics or anything, and gives gear better than naxx 10, better than naxx 25, even better itemized than alot of uld 10 loot!

Note: When my next alt dings 80 in 2-3 weeks, I’ll be using this strategy slightly amended, as I’ll then be able to farm ICC 5 mans regular for 219 items, and then heroic for 232 items. And it’ll be *even easier* since rather than three 219 epics per day, I’ll be able to have a shot at eight 232 epics per day.
Btw, rep grinds are unnecessary in my opinion unless you’re in a very serious raiding guild. My alts do just fine with pvp enchants from Wintergrasp, with whatever stonekeeper’s shards they have lying around. And in 3.3, all these items are becoming bind on account, so alts won’t have *any* reason to do rep grinds.

“Sorry about the heroism/conquest mix up, I wrote this before 3.2 and forgot to update it”
With ToC5 and ToC5H, gearing up is noticeably different in 3.2, and people following your guide will gear up much slower then they could have if they focused their time and energy on the new content which enables bypassing the lower level raids.
Re: “Learning new strategies”, this is a gearing guide, not a raiding guide.

The route in my mind, particularly for a healer, is to get a uber-geared tank, three dps and an disenchanter and farm ToC-5 man normal mode 5-7 times. That will get you 200 lvl epics that often have better stats than Naxx-10/25. Then ToC-5 heroic every day and some other heroics to fill things out badges. Burn some dough and get some or all of the the tailoring pieces – chest, wrists, belt, and boots. Honestly, with the crafted cloth, ilvl213 badge BoE wrists, and farm runs of ToC-5 regular, you’re ready for ToC-10 in 2 days.

Moreover, the new 5-mans in ICC will drop ToC-10/Uld-25 equiv gear. So, farming the ICC-5 regular will skip those as well.

Personally I did exactly this. I switched mains about 5 weeks ago, going from a hunter to a holy priest. The guild is running ToC-10/25 and ToGC-10/25 plus finishing up Ulduar hardmodes. I hit 80 in dungeon blues, and within a week was running pug ToC-10s without grinding heroic 5-mans. To this day, I have not set foot in Naxx on taht cahracter. I was in ToC-25 and ToGC-10/25 before I got to Uld-10 or 25.

I will admit to having a couple gaps. I don’t have a good off-hand to go with a 239 hardmode mace for my Disc second spec, but I have the heroic Cold Convergence anyway. My wand is marginal, and my trinkets are not optimal. But those are a matter of RNG in To(G)C-10/25.

I think that’s a testament to Blizzard’s design that there are multilple ways to gear up, and if you have a guild that you can run Naxx and Ulduar with, I have no doubt that that method can take less time and be less repetitive.

One other idea that I would toss out there, for anyone else, is how I went about tracking my gear wish-list.

I started by making an excel sheet with the gear slots and what I’m wearing, followed by columns for the major stats that I’m looking for (and what bonuses my current gear gives me). Then I went through all of the lists of good beginning healing gear (there are several on different sights), and I filled them in under the right gear slots with their bonuses. I also gave comments and color coded them by how I could get them (heroics, emblems, faction rep, etc.)

Next, I started working towards gear. When I got a new upgrade, I would put it in my top space for that gear slot and bold it, then cross out anything that had just become a downgrade. This allowed me to not only see what upgrades I still needed to get, but also to compare the different upgrades of the same slot and decide if I’d rather have one over another based on the bonuses (or if I wanted to pass up running a certain heroic dungeon every day in the hopes that one piece woudl drop because I could get a better piece with emblems of triumph).

Finally, I would periodically go back and fill in new upgrades as I got better gear. When I had all of the beginning gear, I was able to go to guildox and search for upgrades from there, etc.

Hope this helps someone!
Jennifer´s last blog ..

Sadly… I was hoping for more (but then again.. my expectations are always high). I feel more details around your gear strategy could have added value to this article:
– A list of easy to get quest gear. This could offer a list of quests you’d want to prioritize when leveling/questing. Matt’s “how to gear up your fresh lvl 80 priest” could serve as a starting point but it could use an update.
– A list of easy to get normal dungeon gear. If you’re going to do dungens, prioritize these and show what to aim for. ToC (5m) normal will give you a boatload of decent gear for example.
– A list of easy to get heroic dungeon gear. If you’re going to farm badges in heroics, priotize these.
– A list of awesome badge gear (conquest – T8!) to aim for and a list of T9 badge gear to aim for.

If I put myself in the position of a new priest alt and I ask ‘how can I quickly gear up and get ready?’ then basically this article gives me a progression path and a few loot sites. That’s good info, but most players with a lvl 80 priest alt already have this information available. Giving them a more concrete list of items to shoot for will spare readers a lot of work and make this article a reference for future priests.

Perhaps you could share which gear you were aiming at or wasn’t there a detailed quick gearup strategy?