Gearing Up – The Climb #647

Monday 30^th November 2020

You might be mistaken for thinking that playing Shadowlands was as simple as getting a character to level 60 and that was that. From there on in it’s all happy times.

But it doesn’t stop there.

There are lots of levels in Warcraft: Your actual level, the level of your professions, the level of reputation with any of the various groups your encounter, the level of your gear.

The continual grind puts some people off and that’s a fair comment, but there’s nothing stopping you playing through the content and just enjoying it as you see fit.

But if you really want to progress, then the most important level after your actual level, is your ilevel (or the level of your gear).

The better your gear, the better you are to take damage, the better you are at hitting stuff. It’s why I spent so long gearing up all my alts so that their trip through The Maw to the profession Valhalla that is Oribos was so smooth and could be done whilst watching TV.

Behind the scenes, gear has stats. Different classes need different stats and stat combinations. Classes even use different types of armour. My Death Knight main uses plate and is after Stamina as a tank. My Demon hunter Alliance Alt uses leather and needs Agility. Decent gear is locked behind harder content and has level requirements so your level 30 rogue can’t go and find a ilevel 158 pair of boots and equip.

Your ilevel is, very roughly speaking, an average of the ilevel of all the gear you have equipped. So you might have a shitty helm, but the super-powered trinket makes up for it.

Blizzard squished the gear levels with Shadowlands. It doesn’t bother me, it’s just a number. It meant that doing Pre-patch I was looking for ilevel 100 gear to give all my characters an overall ilevel of around 90 or above.

Questing through Shadowlands will see you get rewarded upgraded gear and so you’ll end it around ilevel 140. That’s not enough to enter a raid. You’ll get one-shotted.

You get gear from numerous sources: it can be a reward from a world quest, or something you buy from an NPC when you have sufficient rep with them. However, the most efficient way is to go through dungeons.

Dungeons are group content. 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 DPS join up to go into an instance to work together to take down a number of elite bosses.

Once you level to 60, it’s then a case that you need to gear up. And this is where I tend to fail.

The next stage is to get better gear. I think the basic dungeons will drop ilevel 158 gear although they’ve nerfed how much gear now drops so you might do a dungeon and only get one new piece from all the bosses you kill. And even then it might not be the piece of gear you’re after.

Get your ilevel to 155 and you unlock heroic dungeons which drop 171 gear.

Mythic level dungeons drop 184 gear. The different level raids drop even higher gear.

But if I want to be ready for raiding I have to get my gear level up, which means dungeons, and I hate them. I don’t know them, I don’t know the mechanics and the mere thought of them gives me bizarre levels of anxiety. The group will be useless, I’ll be the useless one, I’ll queue for a group and then get kicked and have to wait again. Urgh!

But, if I want to raid – and even if I want my Death Knight to take longer than 2 minutes to kill anything – I need to do dungeons and upgrade my gear.

It’s the bit I hate most in Warcraft but it’s a hill I’m going to need to get over.