World of Warcraft - Life at 80

So I've been pretty casually playing wow for about 10 months now mostly doing 5 man instances with real life friends once or twice a week. having recently hit level 80 I was like what now? I want to see more of the end game raid content so my goal was to gear up as efficiently as possible without having to stick to any kind of strict schedule. My time to play is rather sporadic and unpredictable. So this is what I've been doing with my first ever level 80 character (Maggiegordon - Mage).

Argent Tournament:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Argent_Tournament
- do the Aspirant & Valiant quest chain
learn to joust:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCvj6uBsY
It's pretty easy once you get the timing and pattern down.
You'll want to be able to joust because the first phase in Trials of the champion 5 man
http://www.wowwiki.com/Trial_of_the_Champion
requires you to joust.
Get champion at least once so you open up the ability to purchase from the quartermaster. I'm not sure what becoming champion of the other factions buy you but I'll find out soon.
- do the black knight chain
I find champion seals not really worth grinding for unless there is an heirloom item you want for an alt. I think I did end up purchasing one 10 seal item for my main.

Argent Crusade Daily quests:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Argent_Crusade
watch the video in the wiki.
Apparently you can get lots of gold in about 20-30min. I haven't run these yet but I'm guessing these are the dailies most people are running?

Tabard:

Before you start grinding randoms you should equip a tabard from one of the wotlk factions. They are cheap (usually under 1g) and you gain rep for every kill in a level 80 dungeon. It's free rep for no extra work. Grinding rep will get you access to purchase gear and patterns that you otherwise wouldn't have access too. Just open up your char sheet, look at your rep, pick one, wiki it to find where to go to buy the tabard. At this point I recommend swapping out your xp bar and sticking the faction rep you are working on as the bar. I would start with Kirin Tor and then Wyrmrest Accord if you are a mage.

The ones that are available are:

Wyrmrest Accord

Knights of the Ebon Blade

Argent Crusade

Kirin Tor

Dungeon Finder:

Start running normal random and start collecting triumph emblems. You get 2 for the first random normal you run each day (reset happens sometime during early morning). You should gear up pretty fast just from drops in normal random. Once you gear up enough some of the heroic ones will unlock (you can always check to see what is unlocked by going into dungeon finder and picking a specific dungeon to see the list). At that point you can start running random heroic. First one that day gets you 2 frost emblems, after that you can run as many randoms as you want and you will always get 2 triumph. You always get 1 triumph for every heroic boss you kill even if you choose a specific heroic dungeon but you only get the bonus 2 triumph from random. - Start planning out your gear. You'll keep getting purple lvl 200-232 gear upgrades from drops. At this point most people will be greeding (they are just there for the emblems) so you should upgrade pretty fast at the start. I would shoot for at least 4 pieces (get your set bonus) of a tier 9 (level 232) set first because it is pretty easy to grind out triumph emblems. http://www.wowwiki.com/Tier_9 (of conquest)
- it doesn't hurt to announce to the party if you are new to an instance. Usually the leader is pretty good about explaining things if needed.

I have 4 pieces from this set:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Conqueror%27s_Khadgar%27s_Regalia
I actually have a better chest piece from a drop.
- As you gear up use wow heroes to easily see where you can upgrade (missing enchants, belt buckle, gems)
http://wow-heroes.com/index.php?zone=us&server=Moonrunner&name=maggiegordon
At around tier 9 I would start getting the epic gems/highest enchants b/c it's gear you will probably hang on to for a while. The lower level stuff just get the cheaper gems/enchants b/c you will probably swap those out fairly quickly.
- I had no idea until a friend explained to me you can put any gem into any socket. You just won't get the socket bonus unless you meet the color requirement. Also don't forget about secondary colors that can match 2 colors:
There are three secondary colors:
* Orange - matching Red and Yellow
* Green - matching Yellow and Blue
* Purple - matching Blue and Red
Also, while planning your gems you should consider any meta gem requirements:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Meta_gem

Other stuff you can buy with emblems:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Emblem_of_Triumph
http://www.wowwiki.com/Emblem_of_Frost

Sons of Hodir:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Sons_of_Hodir
You want exalted with these guys because they are the only people who will sell you a shoulder enchant inscription. What I did was do that long quest chain listed above, the dailies one time, and bought around 200 relics of ulduar from the AH and that got me to exalted pretty quickly.

Watch your hit
http://www.wowwiki.com/Hit
You want to get to your hit cap pretty early on if you can. If you are missing a level 82 or 83 boss your dps will suck.
spell hit is well explained here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7475660772&sid=1
But basically heroic 5 man bosses only go up to level 82 so you can aim to get to hit cap for level 82 bosses for 5 man as you gear up and put the rest into dps. Then as you gear higher to start raiding get your hit cap all the way up for level 83 bosses. Balance out your gearing up between hit and dps as it makes sense.

Hit calculator:
http://wow-heroes.com/hitcalculator.php

Once you unlock frozen halls icc 5 man instances you'll want to do this one time quest chain for 6 frost.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Frozen_Halls
Start with "Inside the frozen Citadel". Using the specific dungeon feature in dungeon finder works well. Read up on the encounters because even on normal these are a bit more challenging than the other dungeons. On heroic there are some nice tier 9 loot drops in there. Loot is also pretty good in toc heroic (and is also tougher too). Once you complete this chain you will have done all 3 new 5 man instances with a nice little story line quest.

Use wow heroes site or gear score (they are calculated differently)
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/nvgearscore.aspx
to see where you sit for the different raids. Once you are high enough and your hit is good enough then start picking up the weekly raid quests
http://www.wowwiki.com/Weekly_raid
Where you have to kill some specific boss in a raid. Most guilds run weekly raids just for the quest. It's a fun way to grab a quick 5 frost and 5 triumph and get to see some of the end level raid content without committing to doing a complete raid that would take much longer.
- You can also check your gearscore addon online now:
http://www.gearscoreaddon.com/GearScoreChecker/index.php?CharName=MaggieGordon&ServerName=MoonRunner&Country=US

And that's as far as I got so far. In two weeks you can pretty easily go from lvl 187 gear -> tier 9.

Good Raid Strategy Videos:
http://www.tankspot.com/ (great site for raid strategy videos)
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f206/41778-project-marmot-video-listing.html

PvP - Wintergrasp:
- So yeah up to this point I have NEVER even tried pvp. I had about a spare 100 triumph emblems so I bought 2t9 of the furious gladiator set to get at least some resilience gear. I headed out to wintergrasp to gem and enchant those pieces for resilience and spell penetration. I had around 1000 stone keeper shards just from doing random heroics.
- I dual spec into frost and changed up my glyphs.
- 15 min before the start of wintergrasp (You can see time remaining until start in the map) I found a battle master and queued up.
- Moonrunner is pretty much all alliance so we often win. Defense it is. It was pretty chaotic. I really had no idea what was going on. I never got a vehicle. I just ran around, followed the crowd, attacked anything red, and umm died.....a lot. At least there is no durability death penalty and I like the auto rez (no need to run back to the corpse) so it's not that big of a deal.
- I completed all the dailies and earned a few marks of honor and around 20K honor points:
http://www.alteracvolley.com/daily-quest-guide-wintergrasp/
- So at this point I guess I could spend some of the honor points on more pvp gear. But I can see if you just turned 80 even some of the pvp gear you can earn would be better than quest rewards and would be a boost even in pve until you get better gear.
Captain Dirgehammer sells some nice gear for honor points. The list below is wrong. He now has off set items like gloves, bracers, trinkets, rings, etc all at ilevel 245. He is located in stormwind next to the target dummies in old town in champions hall.
http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=32381#sells
Captain O'Neal sells uncut epic gems for 10K honor each:
http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=34079
- Don't forget you can also convert stone keeper shards into honor points:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44115#sold-by
30 shards = 2000 honor.