One of the trickiest problems with gear, I find, is the internal debate over whether you should take a readily available PvP piece of equipment that is a big iLevel upgrade for you, or if it’s better to keep going with your PvE gear and just keep grinding out those badges. When I PvP, my problem is exactly the reverse: dip into that tempting Frost pile I never use to replace those ancient gloves, or grit my teeth and Arena until I pile up the points there?
How do you when it’s better to take the lesser PvE gear over the higher-level PvP gear, or vice versa?
Here are a few tools to help you decide:
- Rawr: Rawr is a program which runs on your computer, looks up your character, then gives you automated suggestions for gear upgrades for PvP or PvE. Take the suggestions with a grain of salt, though; it’s been known to make mistakes, as Bang & Blame notes this week.
- WoW Armory:
– For PvE: Look up a high-level, endgame raiding guild on a guild progression website like GuildProgress.com. Search within the ranked guilds for a discipline priest who has completed the raid you’re currently on, and then check out his gear on the armory. Compare and contrast with yourself.
– For PvP: Look up a high-level arena team who is doing the same arena numbers that you are (or for battlegrounders, look up a 5v5 team) at an arena team ranking site like Arena Junkies. Find a team with a disc priest of the size you want, then check out her gear on the armory. Compare and contrast with yourself. - PlusHeal: PlusHeal is a forums-driven healers website divided into classes. Check out the PlusHeal Priest section, and specifically this thread to compare your own stats with those on endgame raiders (or PvPers, if that’s your bag).
This all comes with a caveat we all know only too well: Even if you choose the lesser piece of equipment for all the right reasons, raids and guilds will look at your gearscore and not your gear nine times out of ten. If you’re not getting into high-level raids, you’re not going to be pulling down extra Frost. If you’re not pulling down extra Frost, you’ll be stuck in that noble, low-level, perfectly appropriate PvE gear for a very long time.
Walk the line, my little priestlings. Walk the line.
Disciplinary Action 
*walks the line*
I’m actually somewhat “in between” characters now. We’re having some major discussions about going back to an old guild – if we do there’s apparently a big risk/chance (however you want to see it) that I have to go back to my priest whom I’ve not played seriously since TBC (as in raided with outside PUGs). There would be a LOT of gearing needed!
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It’s such a hard thing to do, going back to an old character. I have a dusty old undead warlock (on my main server!) whom I keep looking at and going, “What was I *thinking*?!”
In reality- pre-progression-guild- I tended to grab all the gear that was an improvement and then looked for PUG raids with my very best on. Then I switched it to the ‘useful’ underscored PvE gear when they’d been fooled into taking me. Evil! But you’ve gotta play the game, if you want to do any raiding and haven’t got a good guild!
But it sounds like you have a nice guild waiting for you, and of course I’d recommend going Disc if you haven’t yet! 🙂
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Healing as disc is admittedly new to me – I was always holy, all the way back to Vanilla. But Disc does seem really interesting. Only ever used it in PvP before. 🙂 Should I end up being a Disc priest I will definitely be going through all your posts one more time (at least!) 🙂
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