Friday, May 29, 2009

Gearing up for Ulduar.... without raiding?!

My guild has been running low on numbers for raids lately; some days we're forced to run 10mans.

With that in mind, I started wondering - if, hypothetically, a brand-new, guildless 80 wanted to join our guild... could they gear up sufficiently in a short amount of time to join us in Ulduar *without* having done any raids whatsoever?

Rules

  • No 10man/25man raids and no Emblems of Valor
  • No heroic dungeon drops (said hunter has incredibly bad luck).
  • No Arena (said hunter doesn't have partners).
  • No BoE items from Ulduar drops/patterns (server isn't selling them yet)
  • Average enchants/gems (not necessarily best for the slot, but a decent choice)
  • Phyllixia's Talents and Glyphs (BM, and NOT the highest DPS BM raiding spec)

Gear


Required:

Comparison (using the Hunter DPS spreadsheet linked on the side bar):

Hypothetical BM hunter fully raid buffed - 5331.35 DPS, 25980 HP, 12341 Mana
Phyllixia's stats at the start of Ulduar - 6004. 07 DPS, 24879 HP, 14156 Mana

You have to admit - it's pretty close. Not to mention, if I switched the hypothetical hunter to a top DPS spec (Survival, with appropriate Glyphs and best-in-slot enchants/gems), it'd bump up the DPS at least by a few hundred.

Bottom line? Whether a guild will take you or not is another story... but hypothetically, it's definitely possible to gear up sufficiently for Ulduar without setting foot in a raid dungeon at all - and theoretically can be done in 2-3 weeks!

7 comments:

Bruski said...

Yes, gearing up a new 80 isn't that hard these days.
I came back from a vacation and my guild was full on tanks, so my 80 geared protadin was useless, and I lvled my boomkin from 68-80. He only dinged 80 5 weeks ago, yet since I took him to alot of heroics pretty fast, ran 25 man naxx three times, and did Sartharion and VoA every week, he's now got 4 piece t7.5 and is in the top 5 dps in a guild that's downing the keepers regularly on 25 man. I also spent many hours studying the best build and rotation so i could get into the raids as fast as possible, which far subpar gear, but superior knowledge and (hopefully) skill.
So I think within 3 weeks of dinging 80 most toons that work at it could go into Ulduar.

Bruski said...

Note: He received no special bonus while doing naxx or ulduar, I pugged most of the Naxxes, and he has virtually no ulduar gear since all my epgp depreciate while i was on vacation.

Francisco said...

I guess it would be possible to get a pretty good gear basically doing heroics - there's a lot of good gear to be bought with emblems of heroism, including a few t7 pieces.

Pugging naxx (or any other raid for that matter) is not something I would ordinarily recommend anyway.

Anonymous said...

lol, you restrictions described my orc hunter almost to a T (except I haven't been invited to a Heroic even, so no Heroes tokens). In this age of "Raid or Die!" I'll have to see how many of your tips I would still need to go Survival (Grrr, BM4life!) and actually get an Uldar invite. Thankss for putting this out there for us casual loners.

Phyllixia said...

@ Anon - No problem, and I'm glad there's at least one person that finds this useful :)

thorfinn@gmail.com said...

Yep. I found the same deal as a priest - I play pretty casually, at most 6-8 hours a week, and I got myself geared to be okay for entry Ulduar mostly by questing, doing VoA, getting a couple of heroic drops, a couple of select BoE Naxx epics off the AH, and a couple of Naxx ring drops.

I'm now geared totally fine for both Shadow *and* Disc/Holy, and I wasn't even trying to seriously collect Shadow gear.

Anonymous said...

God this blog helped A LOT. Thank you so much. My server seems to be filled with plenty of elitists it's hard to find laid back raiders. My girlfriend's guild is really small, with very very few active members and I don't ever plan on leaving. With other distractions it's hard to just sit all day to track down someone that's willing to let me in a raid. This helps so much you don't even know. Now I don't feel pressured at all.
- Thanks from Moonrunner