Yther wrote:
I haven't looked at the recent patch yet, so unaware of the new stuff, but generally I switch to player bought HoT armor at 80 (Abtruse) and 81 for the jewelry, instead of waiting till 85 to obtain it myself. It's a huge upgrade over defiant..
This. Basically, with some exceptions, defiant is going to be your best bet up to level 80 (I actually found some of the cloth drops in SoD were slightly better, and the level ranges worked out where my pally would get them and hand them to my wiz, so there is that).
At level 80, just buy abstruse if you can afford it (and work to afford it if you can't).. The jump is so huge as to be almost a joke. If you can get into groups hunting in HoT (grounds for example), you can possibly pick up some tier2 drops (Re-something? Totally brain farting on the name EDIT: Doh. Recondite. Sigh...). It's level 82 required and is a modest upgrade from Abstruse. Still buy the abstruse stuff though, since you can use it to "upgrade" to the next level with the drop for cheap, while doing it without the abstruse piece will cost you about as much as you'd spend on the abstruse in the first place.
Past that, there are a couple possibilities. Probably think about rustic at some point (mid 80s? Check the site for the results to check level reqs). Or you can wait to buy the fear touched stuff (which requires level 92). Note that these are from different expansions (HoT, VoA, and RoF), so these sets of armors don't upgrade with each other. Basically, you can buy the tier1 piece directly in the bazaar. Progressively higher tiers within that expansions armor set are gained via no-trade drops in group and raid content, with each having higher level requirements and using the earlier piece with the drop to upgrade it to the next tier.
Typically, the purchased tier1 stuff of the next expansion will be better than even the tier2 group stuff of the previous one. So, money permitting, always buy abstruse when you reach the correct level. Depending on how fast you're leveling, and how important gear really is for you, you can buy rustic as it comes available or skip it. I'd suggest getting fear touched at level 92 though, doubly so if you skipped rustic since your gear will basically be 10 levels old by then and the post 90 game has a steep ramp up in terms of power and difficulty.
There's also CoTF armor. I haven't done more than glance at it myself, but there's some info about it on this site.
fronglo wrote:
Oh and if your missing any spells I THINK all spells are up to a certain level can not be purchased in POK library. Even thsoe pain in the butt LDON ones. The spell merchants are labeled for the level of spells they sell. Good chance your probably missing some spells, maybe even some you didn't even know existed.
Correct. Here's the lowdown on spells. Pre-70, all spells are available for purchase in the PoK library. Go there and buy any you are missing. The nice thing is that you can sort the scrolls by level and if you check the "only things I can use" box, it will not show you scrolls that you already have scribed in your spell book (yeah, amazingly useful). So buy every spell pre-70.
From level 71 on, spells come in tiers. The first tier is the base spell. They are purchasable from the vendors in the PoK library. So you can always get all the spells for your class at the level they become available. The days of having incomplete spellbooks are over (yay!). However, there are slightly better versions of the spells (rank II), that are tradeable drops in the game. These will often be available for sale in the bazaar. Sometimes, these can be pricey relative to the base spells, so you'll have to just make the decision as to whether to buy them or not. Oh. And there are also rank III spells, which are no-trade raid drops. You'll probably not need to worry about those until you're at max level where there's even remotely a point to trying to get them.
This will take you to level 80. At level 81, spell drops kinda disappear (OMG! Where did they go?!). They are replaced with generic trade in items. Read up on the spell descriptions for how to obtain the trade in items. The same rules apply though. Rank II spells come from tradeable items, rank III from no-trade items. Generally, you turn them in to some NPC for the appropriate expansion to get your spell. It's actually a pretty decent system IMO. You just have to remember to look up the trade in items and search for those in the bazaar rather than the spell scrolls. You look for the scrolls and you'll find zero.
Edited, Mar 7th 2014 2:25pm by gbaji