Now that the craziness of the Holidays are over and I’ve done a little bit of skiing, snowmobiling and relaxing, I’m here to present to you part two of the gearing guide for new tanks in Wrath of the Lich King.  This series started with Beginning Your Tanking Career, Getting 540 Defense and, as promised (though a bit late), here is the loot from heroics and badge items that you should be on the look out for now that you’re decked-out in all of your beautiful blue gear.

Note: “Badge” in this case refers to Emblems of Heroism, not Emblems of Valor of Badges of Justice.

Items Without a Badge Replacement

If I were you, these are the items I would focus on getting every day while accumulating badges to purchase other items.  This is especially the case if you don’t have a lot of play time.

Weapon: Run Utgarde Pinnacle until you’re blue in the face and pick up the Red Sword of Courage.

Bracers: Head over to Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom and get yourself a pair of the Bracers of the Herald.  Just make sure you didn’t do what I did and bring a Death Knight who wants to tank; they will win the roll and force you to come back nine or ten more times to get your own pair.  As an aside, I’m not bitter.  Really I’m not.

Ring: At the end of Drak’Tharon Keep is the most boring boss in the expansion, Prophet Tharon’ja, but he drops Keystone Great-Ring so it’s not all bad.

Pants: Violet Hold is where you’ll find the Bolstered Legplates which drop off of Cyanigosa.

Shield: I hope you enjoy the Culling of Stratholme since you’ll want to run it every day until you get the Royal Crest of Lordaeron. Not only is this an awesome shield but it looks amazing as well, one of Blizzards best-looking models ever.  Note: there is a badge-shield available but unless you got really bad luck with the drop from Stratholme, I don’t really think of it as a replacement, per se.  Plus this shield looks amazing while the Badge one looks like some hairy skin pulled over a metal frame.

Items With a Badge Replacement

Belt: You can find the Ancient Aligned Girdle clutched within Anub’arak’s talons at the end of Azjol-Nerub.

Gloves: And finally in Gun’drak you’ll have to beat a silly troll named Gal’darah senseless to get him to drop the Horn-Tipped Gauntlets.

And Finally… the Badge Gear

I’m not really going to bother repeating everything that Veneretio over at TankingTips.com has already said.  Go read his Emblem of Heroism article entitled, The Badge err… Emblem of Heroism Pick Order.  It should have everything you need to make an informed decision on what pieces of gear to get next.

Popularity: 100% [?]

When I first hit 70, I ran heroic Mechanaar only twice before the Sun Eater dropped for me.  Other tanks in my guild had run it until Exalted without even seeing it drop, let alone getting it.  Well apparently the World of Warcraft gods are cruel and unforgiving because I have run heroic Utgarde Pinnicle every day since dinging 80 and the Red Sword of Courage has yet to show it’s face to me.

A priest, a hunter and a DPS warrior in my guild have for Pete’s sake, but I haven’t even seen it drop.  In the meantime I’ve had the Abomination Shoulderblades drop from Gluth in Naxx-10 (which according to WoWHead have a drop rate of 0.7% from Gluth since he drops everything else in the zone).  My frustration has peaked to the point where the others who have it wear it around me before pulls and I’m going crazy.

Not to mention the Hammer of Quiet Mourning is one of the ugliest models and skins in the game.

Anyone else running into frustrating drop rates?

UPDATE (12/5/08): Woohoo it finally dropped for me!

Popularity: 19% [?]

Last night my guild did a run of 7/9 bosses in BT, downing both Reliquary of Souls and Mother when we had never seen either of those bosses before.  To top it all off, we downed Mother when 50% of the raid wasn’t wearing any shadow resist gear and the other 50% had maybe 110 resist tops.  We had an alchemist in the raid who made 20 or so Shadow Resist potions that the DPS and healers drank at when Mother hit 50% health.  I have no idea how effective that was but we killed her and that’s what matters.

I have to be honest: the trash leading up to both of those bosses are an absolute blast with the new Protection changes, and the trash in Hyjal was so much more fun when we ran that on Tuesday.  I had never seen any of that trash so being able to not only see the new content but tank it all was exhilarating.

Now some bragging: I got my Onslaught Shoulderguards!  I have never been a fan of the look of the Destroyer Shoulderguards so this is a change I’m pretty happy with for both the upgrade and the anesthetics.  Unfortunately my T5 looked better with the rest of my gear so I’m back to rollin’ through instances in a clownsuit but the shoulders were such a huge upgrade I just don’t care.

I was then faced with the dilemma of gemming.  As you guys recall from my previous post about tanking gemming in the expansion, I said that hit gems into yellow slots and strength/stamina gems into red slots would probably be the way to go.  Old habits die hard, though, and I ended up socketing for two +15 stamina gems and ignoring the socket bonus.

I just don’t know if it’s worth it at this point in the game to completely change the way I’m gemming because, frankly, threat has not been an issue since the patch went live so I might as well socket for survivability, right?

Popularity: 8% [?]