WHEEE!

[jestana]

I got my dranei pally to 85! That makes two toons at the max level! *does happy dance* So very pleased now. Of course, the question is gearing, gemming, and enchanting. Her specs are prot and ret. Any advice on what to gem and enchant for would be welcome. Here's her armory and I know the one gem she has sucks. I'm working on leveling up her

Comments

[unlovablehands]

For prot you'll want to gem mainly for mastery.
Yellow: Mastery
Blue: Mastery/Stam
Red: Mastery/Parry

At low gear levels, you may want to gem Mastery/Stam in yellow sockets as well, until you get to a comfortable amount of HP.

For ret, you'll want to gem like so:
Red: Strength
Blue: Strength/Hit
Yellow: Strength/Mastery

I would buy the rare quality gem cuts you can use first, as well as the +40 agi and +40 int ones to sell. The epic gems only drop in the new raid, so you can put off buying those for a bit until more of those gems get out to the public, or until you begin raiding Dragon Soul.

I used to farm elementium in Uldum a lot when I mined my own ore. The route is really easy since it's pretty much just flying back and forth along the border of Uldum and the other zones near it. It's such an easy route that you might find a lot of competition though.

[unlovablehands]

Clarifying for gemming. For prot you'll usually want to match all your socket bonuses. For ret, you'll only want to match for socket bonuses of +20 strength; if the bonus is like +20 crit or something, just gem pure strength, regardless of socket color.

[arwydd]

Drive-by icon <3s! x3

[commabut]

Try Noxxic.com... a friend described it as "elitist jerks cliff notes."

more specifically, http://www.noxxic.com/pve/paladin/protection

as far as JC, get the JC-only pattern/s first (the ones you want to use). if you are focusing on prot, I'd recommend getting the +67 mastery. if you are gearing up ret first, then get +67 strength.

pick a spec to gear up first and gem accordingly (see noxxic, they have a section on gems).

Chimera eye gems are sold on the AH so if you have the gold, don't waste tokens on getting the gems.

I farmed elementium in uldum. it was competitive at times.

grats on 85!

[jestana]

Thank you so much! That link really helped.

[caixarelato]

A good place to check gear optimization (for when you get to that point) is askmrrobot.com

Will tell you where the gear drops, how to gem it, reforge it, and enchant it. Very nifty.

[unlovablehands]

To answer your question about the JC trinkets (since the above noxxic link should give you the enchanting info you need):

- King of Boars is great for ret (the on-use strength matches up perfectly with your DPS cooldowns). You could probably use it until you get a proper tank trinket for prot as well, since all that mastery converts to a ton of block and the on-use strength would give you a small amount of extra parry.

- Earthen Guardian is a pretty good starting tank trinket, but ideally once you get into all blue-quality gear, you won't really need stam stack trinkets much. (They're mostly useful for fights with high magic damage [stuff you can't block/dodge/parry and just need to soak] or when doing content you undergear a bit.) The on-use dodge is pretty sweet though, just on a long-ish CD.