Heroic you!

Welcome back all. I apologize for the unexpected downtime. The hazards of being employed.

So, on the plate today: You've been level 70 for a while now. You've gotten to revered in all the fun little factions you need to get your Heroic keys. You've gotten pretty much all the gear you can outside of raid instances. Maybe even a couple pieces from Karazhan. What do you look for now?

The answer, of course, is heroics. There's a few dungeons you're really going to want to frequent. Mostly, I'm just going to point out the leather caster gear here - if you're wearing mostly cloth, there's plenty for you.

First of all, you're going to want your Lower City key to get into Auchindoun heroics. The first reason? Epic flight form, of course! But there's another treat in store for you if you do Heroic Sethekk now and again. Terokk's Shadowstaff drops from the last boss in there. Beautiful staff, although it lacks spell hit. It's not quite as good as the Staff of Infinite Mysteries, but it's arguably better for PvP because it has a ton of Spell crit in the place of Spell Hit.

Heroic Mana Tombs has a nice little chestpiece of the first boss: Starry Robes of the Crescent. This is the best leather chestpiece for casters before Tier 4. Again, though, it comes with Spell Crit instead of hit, which can be a concern for those of us who are PvE types.

Back over in Hellfire, Blood Furnace presents us with a conundrum in Moonchild Leggings. While it has great stats overall, it's 21 points lower in spell damage compared to the easily obtainable Kurenai Kilt. Doing the math, I think I'd probably go with the Moonchild, but keep my Kurenai Kilt around just in case I ever ran into a situation where I really, really needed every ounce of spell damage. It's hard to choose +21 dmg over +3 crit, +26 sta, +9 int, and +19 spirit.

We can also nab the Moon-Touched Bands from The Maker in Blood Furnace. These are fairly comparable to the Bracers of the White Stag from Attumen in Karazhan, just a very small step down.

Finally, there Grips of the Lunar Eclipse which drop off Leiutenant Drake in Old Hillsbrad. Honestly, I think these need a large buff. As is, they are MAYBE just barely better than the Starlight Gauntlets. Yes. that's right - the level 70 drop from a heroic dungeon is MAYBE better than the level 63 gauntlets from Underbog. Lame. Very, very lame. At the very least, throw a few sockets into the Grips, and then they'll be worth it.

So yes, that's about it. 4 pieces of leather caster gear in heroics. None of it epic, all blue. What's the point of this?

Moonkin need better itemization, that's what. I know, people always say "just wear cloth, it's ridiculous to expect Blizzard to make more than a couple pieces of gear for a single spec of a single class!" If that's the case, then why is there a plethora of healing plate out there? Only a single spec of a single class can utilize healing plate, but you don't see people telling Holy paladins "You shouldn't wear plate, just wear healing mail or leather or cloth!" Yes, some choose to, but the choice is there for them not to if they so desire.

So yeah, there's my rant. Grab what loots you can, and if people yell at you for rolling on purple cloth (unfortunately, I have the feeling I'll be heading that way myself as much as I try to avoid it), then tell them to yell at Blizzard's developers instead.