l2pvp: Gearing Up
Seems you're new here! If you like this site and don't want to refresh it like a madman, consider subscribing to the RSS feed to get updates delivered to you. Learn more...
This is the second post in a series of guides about PvP, which will hopefully help some of you newbies get into this wonderful aspect of our favorite game and tell you why rogues are OP.
So, you finally leveled your toon and decided to do some PvP, you entered the battleground eager to melt some faces, only to get disappointed and frustrated because everyone seems to be killing you, and the only thing you can do is crawl up in some corner and call in for reinforcements. You start thinking your class sucks and turn to PvE. Wrong.
You should know by now you need a whole lot of resilience. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to get the proper items for your adventures, and here’s your guide.
Reputation sets
Hardly the best items around, but cheap and easy to get. Since patch 2.4, quartermasters of various factions listed below are selling them for less than 150 gold, which is really cheap. You will need honored reputation to buy those items, which means you might have to do a couple of instance runs for some factions.
Cenarion Expedition, Sha’tar, Lower City, Keepers of Time, Thrallmar/Honor Hold - check each quartermaster to see which items they are selling for your class.
If you get the entire set, you should have around 120 - 140 resilience.
Honor gear (Guardian’s)
You can get it in either Hall of Legends or Champions’s Hall, depending on your faction. They will cost anywhere from 11,800 to almost 18,000 honor, but are well worth it. Note that some of these items have arena rating requirements, so you will have to work your way up in arena to get it. You can also buy Vindicator gear - stats are a bit lower but there are no rating requirements, however you should always aim for the best items possible.
- Boots: 17,850 honor point + 40 EoTS marks | 1700 rating
- Ring: 15,300 honor points + 10 AV marks | 1650 rating
- Bracers: 11,794 honor points + 20 WSG marks | 1575 rating
- Neck: 15,300 honor points + 10 EoTS marks | no rating
- Belt: 17,850 honor points + 40 AB marks | no rating
Necklace has a yellow socket, in which I recommend you put Steady Seaspray Emerald. If you feel you don’t need any resilience, you could go for other stats. Bracers have either a yellow or a red socket, which is best socketed with Steady Seaspray Emerald, or pure Healing/Agility/Strength/Spelldamage if red. You could get Shattered Sun neck pieces also, they are quite good, but if you need resilience you know what’s better.
Under no circumstance should you ever put a yellow gem in a red socket, no matter how much resilience you need: for example, Guardian’s Dragonhide Bracers. Steady Seaspray Emerald will give you +5 resilience and +7 stamina, while a Bold Crimson Spinel will give you +10 strenght and +2 resilience - much better. Always check your socket bonuses and put gems accordingly - there are exceptions but generally that’s the best way. Also, take note of which gems you will need for a meta gem. But enough about sockets.
You will need a total of 78,094 honor for these items, depending on your dedication it will take you anywhere from a week to two months to get it. When you pass 200 resilience, you should have no problems getting into premades, which will really boost your honor income.
Season 2 gear (Merciless Gladiator)
With the release of arena season 4, S2 items are available for purchase for honor points.
Armor
- Gloves - 10,500 honor points | 20 AV marks
- Chest - 14,500 honor points | 30 AB marks
- Head - 14,500 honor points | 30 AV marks
- Shoulders - 11,250 honor points | 20 AB marks
- Legs -14,500 honor points | 30 WSG marks
Total honor required for full season 2 set: 65,250.
S2 Weapons
- Two-hand weapons, bows, staves: 27,000 honor
- Idols, totems, librams - 8,000 honor
- One-hand & off-hand - 9,000 to 18,000 honor
- Shield - 15,000 honor
- Caster 1H - 25,200 honor
- Thrown - 8,000 honor
Needless to say, weapons are huge upgrades and worth every penny.
Other items
Back
For decent cloaks, PvE is your only option. G’eras in Shattrath city will sell you really amazing backs for 60 Badges of Justice - one week of doing heroics should net you with enough.
Trinkets
Medallion is your best buy, and a topic of my next guide, so I won’t get into it too much now.
Luckily our favorite azerothians can equip two trinkets.
Battlemaster’s trinkets (example) are pretty good, great bonuses and an extra 1750 health every 3 minutes is nothing to laugh at. They are however extremely expensive: 30,000 honor or 75 Badges of Justice. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is easier to farm, but this should be your last upgrade. There are also a number of great trinkets which you can get from PvE: HSH, Berserker’s Call, Shadowsong Panther, Eye of Magtheridon, and similar. Runed Fungalcap is terribad, but if you’re scraping for resilience it’s pretty easy to get.
But Horns, what should I get first?
Obviously, try to get as much reputation gear as you can at first. If you’re missing too much rep for honored (usually happens with Keepers of Time and Lower City), it might be faster to farm S2 items in battlegrounds.
As for S2 items, I recommend getting head piece and shoulders first: S4 require rather high personal ratings, 1700 for head and 2200 for shoulders, so don’t expect to get it soon. You will get a set bonus of +35 resilience with those two pieces, so that’s another boost. Also, since those items won’t be replaced so soon you can and should put decent gems and enchants on it. Shattered Sun Offensive has a +18 sta +20 resilience head enchant which is good for starters.
Get the Medallion as soon as possible - the epic one is obviously better than rare, but there is a huge difference in the cost - is 25 resilience worth 32,000 honor? I’d say no, at least for now. Insignia is only 2,805 honor, but don’t waste your hard earned points on that. Get the rare medallion, and save honor for something more important, like…
Weapons are especially important if you’re melee - warriors, rogues, enhtards and other misfits should get the best weapons available as soon as possible - S4 weapons have 2050 rating requirement so you can scrath that from your shopping list. Get S2 shinies.
If you didn’t buy rep gloves, get Merciless ASAP. The class specific bonuses are amazing, and 10,500 honor is hardly much compared to some other items. Remember, S4 gloves don’t have a rating requirement, so if you have spare arena points, spend them.
Although you can enchant your legs with spellthread/leg armors and it’s a huge upgrade at that point, chest is a much wiser choice: 3 sockets which you probably need to get the meta gem working, plus you can enchant it with resilience. Don’t forget you’re getting +35 resilience set bonus from reputation legs & chest, so you might consider upgrading some other items which will give the same stat wise, but you’ll still keep that bonus.
If you’re an enchanter, move rings a bit up on your list, due to, you know, enchants.
Few months before the expansion - can you be competitive?
I’m in the same dilemma. Only a couple of levels to go on my rogue, for about a month now. I’m still missing some feral pieces on my druid, so it would be quite a feat getting everyone geared.
Full S2 gear + S4 Guardian’s gear, both trinkets and weapons - you will need more than 250,000 honor! That’s a huge grind. If you do battlegrounds 10 hours every day, you will need a minimum of two weeks to get that - and 10 hours a day is a shitload of work.
One last tip before I wrap this up: start with arenas as soon as possible. Don’t wait until you have xxx amount of resilience or xx,xxx amount of health - get into arenas the same day you ding 70. Even if you have 1200 rating - that’s 250ish points weekly and some valuable skills you’ll pick up along the way. You will get killed repeatedly, get farmed by the same teams, loose to teams which clearly have better gear - but that happens at any rating. Remember, the day will come when you’ll be on the other side.
l2pvp part I: Resilience
l2pvp part III: The Trinket
Related posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Awesome guide. About 3 weeks ago I made 70 and bought the rep gear. I slowly Have been upgrading everything.In 3 weeks I have the full gladiator set now, I agree about the trinket,last night 2 warlocks were chain fearing me like battling bango’s, I’ll be getting that next.
I’m not quite sure what battling bango’s are but sounds cool - I’ll have to use that in my future posts
GETTING GEARED
I tend to get the armor sans gloves first. The pieces all have great bonuses… and it makes you look cooler… which lets be honest, i like it when my toon looks cool. After that, I start knocking out the most expensive upgrades I need, since as time goes on, grinding BGs becomes… well, a grind. That way, having knocked out the high point stuff, you get your rewards a liitle sooner, when you need the motivation the most. You know once you buy something for like 10.5k honor and you next item is like 17.85k honor… its depressing. The other way around and your like “I can do that in 1/2 the time, thats not too bad”. Is it the most productive way, of course not, but man it helps with keeping you interested.
ALLIANCE TRINKET
I actually hold off on the trinket until i can stand being stun locked anymore. the reason being, if you dont have it, your prolly poorly geared and are going to get smoked in the arena anyways, and when your in BGs… what a few more deaths :). About 1/2way through gearing I tend to be like “alright! thats it! Not geting controlled like “battling bango’s” anymore, and i breakdown and drop 8k honor for it. If however you are poorly geared and still hangin inthe high 1300s for the arena… get the trinket asap, it’ll bump you over 1400 easily. Plus you already got mad skilz sooooooo….
WEAPONS
Melee DPS? get weapons asap. Healer? Get Merc Salvation ASAP. Caster get it early, but not as important IMHO as the above two types.
ENCHANTS AND GEMS
People will tell you different stuff. My opinion is dont put any good gems or enchants in anything blue. Working on s4 gear with arena points, dont put expensive enchants or gems in the pieces you will be replacing in the next 3 weeks. Its a waste, unless your rich. Save your money for RESPECS BABY!!!!
RESPECCING?? (RESPECING?…RESPECIALIZING??)
First listen to me, and listen to me well, as this is important. Dont go to SK arena or other sites, and spec to the build thats most represented by the best players of your class. Just dont do it. I’ll tell you why. I play this game for fun. Being highly rated and getting titles are fun, but not at the expense of game play. Play the build you want, and poo poo anyone that tells you otherwise. I rather play the way I like with the toon I like and be rated 1500 than play the min/maxer build.. not have as much fun and be rated 1800. Shoot I did arena as a moonkin in full vengeful resto gear and it was fun as heck! Sure i missed the crit, sure i heard moonkins suck… but i dont care, cause they dont, and I had fun. I tried the SL/SL lock build… HATED IT. Full affliction is sweet. I dont understand how people play with out instant cast howl of fear!! I love it! its up every 40 seconds how sweet is that!!! Even for the affliction builds i go different (I think it is 45/5/11). No one puts 5 points in the first affliction skill that increases the chance your affliction spells are resisted…Me i got 5 in them (well i will when i go back as i tried SL/SL one more time just for kicks and giggles to see if my opinion had changed… it hasn’t). Warlocks got one CC they can use (besides succubus), fear. Its the most freaking resisted form of CC out there! Heck they should make that talent decrease resistance by twice as much IMHO. Ima actually try running with succubus only in PvP and try to see if i can keep someone locked down with fears till diminishing returns hits then seduce, though i wont be able to DoT them since it can break seduce. Im curious to see how well that can keep one toon locked up. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Wow I got really off topic. my bad. Back to work i suppose.
I believe Fear and Seduce share the same diminishing return, and succubus gets one-shotted by any decent player anyway. Ah the ‘good’ days of seduce > soulfire 1shotting people.
For specs, I go with the one with highest potential. If I’m loosing games at 1500 rating and die before you can even do some damage, then arenas aren’t really fun no matter the spec. I did quite good as dreamstate though, but it’s not much different than resto. It’s not that hard to kill SL/SL warlocks these days - why make it any easier?
I’m rather solidly destruction: the felhunter FAR takes precedence over the succubus, and I’m specced down to fel domination so I can quickly whip out a VW bubble if I need it. The reason the felhunter is so much better is because, as Horns said, seduce is mostly worthless, and a dispel/CS is a very strong pair of effects to swap out for something which is of minimal use.
Mmm because you’re solidly destruction the felhunter would be the way to go but it is arguable on which pet is better: felhound or blueberry? this is of course relating to sl/sl spec. I think in the 5s bracket though a felguard is dominant.