Ding! LF4m Heroics!

Yes, I dinged while working on Sons of Hodir

Wrath of the Lich King’s PvE content may be easy compared to The Burning Crusade, but there remains a line of progression.  For instance, hitting level 80 does not mean you should immediately jump into one of the many heroic dungeons.  With my long weekend, I figured I could get a bunch of heroics under my belt seeing as I have finally hit level 80 (DING!).  My old warrior buddy set me straight in only the way he can, through ridicule and yelling.

I still have a lot of gear from Season 2, Karazhan and high level crafted items equipped and haven’t seen many alternatives.  This is why I was thinking about banging out a dozen or so heroics with my free day.  After the text-lashing, I checked in with WoWHead to see just how much my gear could be upgraded through non-heroics.  Turns out to be a crapload.  Nearly every dungeon from Gundrak on has some sort of an upgrade, incremental and not so incremental.  The only thing that they lack is a pair of quick daggers for my Mutilate build.  Guess I will be sticking with old trusty for awhile longer.

Rather than diving into the ranks of heroic runners, I have taken the advice of my friend (although I will never admit it to him) and segued to the non-heroic instances for the moment.  By the end of the day I will have run over a dozen non-heroic dungeons, and hopefully, bumped by gear into the next level.  But damn if I don’t want a new off-hand dagger.

Doing non-heroics before jumping to heroics may seem like an obvious notion to many of you, but I have run across countless people in the non-heroics who are barely geared for them, let alone the more difficult flavor of the dungeon.  Even many of my guild mates tried to make the leap from level 79 to heroics.  The better geared members were able to roll with the punches, but just as many had to be replaced during the instance.  From our anecdotal evidence, anyone decked out in SSC gear or better, with some Wrath gear mixed in there, was more than ready for heroics.

Nice, just found a group for Halls of Lightning, off to shiv some baddies from Nordic lore.  This will be my first run at Loken, hopefully he is kind enough to drop his hood.  For those still leveling, do all the heroic runners a favor, check out which dungeons have gear you need and hit them up first.  My tank is sick of out DPSing other party members in heroics…

How many of you had the patience to gear up before attempting your first heroics?  For those that just dove right in, what was your gear like and how did you do?