Before I get to talking about quest rewards, I have some site news.  PTD has joined the illustrious ranks of such blogs as WoW Insider, World of Matticus and The Big Bear Butt.  No, I didn’t get a job with WI.  No, I didn’t get 1.2 million hits in the last week.  What happened is my blog is now blocked by the firewall at work.  Doh!  What this means is that I’m going to have to rethink how and when I do my posts.  I normally write and post during my lunch break, but with my access blocked that is now an impossibility.  Please bear with me if my posting habits change a bit in the coming weeks.

Now, about those early quest rewards.  If you were around when BC was released, there was an enormous gear "reset" because the stats and such on the gear in BC was far and away superior to anything you might have collected in the old world.  Raiders found themselves replacing shiny purples from Molten Core with green drops and quest rewards.  It was a little disheartening for some, as they had worked quite hard to get that great gear.  Once BC hit, that gear was VERY quickly replaced.

Because of this, people have feared the same would happen with the release of Wrath.  Well, I am here to tell you that this is not the case.  The drops and quest rewards are GOOD, mind you, but they aren’t leaps and bounds beyond top level BC loot.  Here is a pic I put together with a smattering of early quest rewards.  I was able to pick any of these up within my first hour or so questing in Northrend.

My apologies for the random distribution, I failed miserably at trying to arrange them in a sensible way.  I just wanted to get them all on one page. 

What I’ve gathered thus far is this:  if you are in a lot of T4 or higher gear, you won’t find a lot of use for the early quest rewards.  If you’ve got your drops from Kara, or from SSC or whatnot, you’ll be good for at least a little while. 

If you just recently hit 70, however, or you have a 70 you haven’t done much raiding with, you might be VERY interested in some of the quest rewards.  This is just one of the reasons that now is the perfect time to Change Your Main. 

These quest rewards can potentially also be very nice if you have holes in your gear you just never filled through raiding.  Maybe you’re still sporting a blue pair of bracers from Ramparts or something.  Maybe you just had bad luck with epic drops in a certain slot.  (I know my hunter has TERRIBLE luck with ranged weapon drops!)  You’ll probably find some good upgrades here.

There are a few general good things I’d like to note about the quest rewards. 

First, the change from healing or damage gear to just plain spellpower gear is a great help.  This really streamlines the gear table, and, in turn, the quest rewards.  In the past, many quests had to EITHER give a caster DPS piece OR a caster healing piece.  Not anymore.  While it’s true that this could make sorting out drops in instances more difficult, it has really improved the quest reward system. 

Next, I found that the quests had something for more classes this time around.  I don’t see any quests with a silly choice between a wand or a shield like in the old days.  Most quests were giving a wide assortment of upgrades that would appeal to MOST.  The quests I saw had at LEAST 3 or 4 upgrades to choose from, and they covered a lot of different bases. 

Lastly, one thing I noticed is there is a heck of a lot of stamina on some of this stuff.  I don’t know if this means we can expect to see mob HPs going way up or what, but there were some stamina numbers that I have rarely seen before.  Heck, the feral staff reward in that pic has more stamina on it than my Wildfury Greatstaff.

So there you have it.  Fear not, there is no huge gear reset this time.  Your shiny epics will remain shiny for at least a few levels in Northrend.  If you’ve been wondering whether you should bother continuing raiding for drops, the answer is why not?  Your epics will serve you well in Northrend, and what else do you have to do?  Also, if you’re gearing up a fresh 70, you’ll go all googly eyed over some of this stuff.  You’ll get some great upgrades, and you’ll get them FAST.  I finished most of the quests that gave the above rewards in about an hour.  That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.