So, you want to get fully caught up with 5000 gearscore in a single week. You want to be comfortably raining Trial of the Grand Crusader and getting full base in time for Phase 4. You probably also don't want to be missing out on a chance to kill the Lich King or get the legendary Shadowmourne or an invisible Mount.

I'm gonna break down the exact step-by-step process that has gotten countless players I know as well as my own characters fully caught up in record time.

Get To Level 80

Step one is to get level 80. Whatever method you prefer, Questing, Battlegrounds or boosting, as you level up, you'll be stockpiling enough WOTLK Classic Gold since we'll be using both at level 80. Please note: If you use the coupon code “Lich” here, you can also get a 3% discount.

Also, while you level, you should be liquidating all your Wintergrasp Marks and Stonekeeper's Shards in your main characters and accommodations. We'll be mailing all these directly to our new level 80 to cut a huge chunk of time out of the next step.

So, we've ding dating we've opened our mail.

Pick Up Dailies

Now, it's time to pick up all the weekly Wintergrasp quests and start hitting Wintergrasp every three hours.

I usually pick up five weekly quests, which give me 18,000 Honor with a hundred gold and 50 bonus Stonekeeper's Shards. Not only will we be generating around 10 thousand Honor from a typical Wintergrasp game, but we'll also be getting the quest done at the same time. That's going to speed up the process by at least 50%.

Get These Items First

As a rule of thumb, we're going to prioritize getting Deadly weapons.

First, you can get them from Zom Bocom and the Circle of Wills in the Dalaran Sewers. Going from a blue staff to a 213 staff will jump your gearscore from 350 to 696 just by itself.

After the weapon, the highest weighted and highest priority items are the helmet, the chest, and the legs. After that, we have the belt, the boots, the gloves, and the shoulder at 261 gearscore each. Then, finally, we have the 213 items that give the lowest gearscore and are the lowest priority. These are the Necklace, the Back, the Bracer, the Rings and the Trinkets at 195 gearscore each.

There's a really useful tool to play around with to decide which pieces to prioritize first. That's why we choose online Gearscore Calculator. I really want you to be aware of the priority of items right now. But don't buy anything yet. So, back to the reason we held off on buying anything other than the weapon.

Also Read: WOTLK Classic: How To Get The Most Out Of Phase 3 Call of the Crusade? - 5 Must-Know Tips

Buy Crafted BOEs

That's because in Step 3, we're going to buy BOEs first.

The BOEs were going to be focusing on the Crusader and Runecloth items, which are the bracers, the chest, the boots, and the belts.

Note that you should never be buying these BOEs from the Auction House. Instead, I recommend farming or buying the raw materials and then getting a crafter to make the item. With a tip of just 50 gold to the crafter, you can save a lot of money in most cases.

Assuming you were able to afford at least a couple of key BOEs like the 245 chest, we can now fill out the rest of the slots with PVP gear. We can grab the 245 Relentless gear for bracers, necklace, rings, cloaks, and trinkets. We can also grab the 232 belts and rings as well.

Naturally, some of these slots will overlap with the BOE gear. And as a general rule, I wouldn't recommend replacing a 232 or higher BOE with PVP gear. Though after you have all the high item level pieces filled in, you can definitely grab some Deadly pieces to complete your basic gear set.

Trial Of The Champion Items

On to step 4, while we're PVPing and hitting the Auction House, you'll have a lot of free time for dungeons.

One problem you'll run into is that having full PVP gear on a gear dependent like a tank. It's pretty bad in that specific case. The single best recommendation I can give is to add in a few hours of Travel the Champion normal spam. This spam generates dozens of 200 item level armor pieces and trinkets since you can do five runs per hour.

Just recently, I invited a fresh 2200 gearscore tank, and we were able to clear no problem once he understood the polls.

So, now you should mostly have Deadly gear with BOEs and Relentless gear filling in slots like the back and the rings. Hopefully, you've also gotten a few pieces from the Trial of the Champion and maybe even a shiny trinket.

This will easily put you over 4400 gearscore, which is more than enough to make your own Heroic Plus groups. At this point in the gearing process, you should really be hitting the daily heroic quest and as many heroic plus dungeons as possible. You’ll be getting Emblems of Triumph from the daily quest, which you can use to work towards high item level pieces like the 245 rings.

We can also buy tier gear with the emblems. But you should really avoid 232 Tier 9 unless it’s filling a really weak slot. That’s because it’ll be replaced really fast once you start ToC rating. Every heroic will also give us one Sidereal Essence from the last boss to work towards a 239 piece of gear at the new gear vendor.

As for which piece of gear to buy, I definitely recommend checking out the Phase 3 and even the Phase 2 business on Wowhead to see which pieces show up.

For my Fury Warrior, I’ll be grabbing the Mjolnir Runestone and the Dark Matter, which are both top four BiS on the Phase 3 Fury list.

Ulduar Items

In between Heroic Plus Dungeons and PVP, we can also start looking for Ulduar soft reserve runs or even GDKPs if you have the gold.

Many of the Ulduar runs going on nowadays are focused on normal mode, so the gear requirements are usually around 4,500 gearscore or even lower.

This is also where I love to start hitting lockouts for Vault of Archavon in Onyxia. I haven’t missed a single 10 or 25 man Vault of Archavon Irani on any of my three healers so far and I’ve been rewarded with multiple 245 drops. That includes weapons, thousands of gold and gems. It’s just crazy how good these runs are and nobody even does gear checks.

One tool I’ve been using to make sure I don’t miss any lockouts is my Raid Lockout Checklist:

Character 1:

• VoA 10
• VoA 25
• Onyxia 10
• Onyxia 25
• ToC 10
• ToC 25

Character 2:

• VoA 10
• VoA 25
• Onyxia 10
• Onyxia 25
• ToC 10
• ToC 25

Character 3:

• VoA 10
• VoA 25
• Onyxia 10
• Onyxia 25
• ToC 10
• ToC 25

I just make a copy each week and I check the boxes for each raid as I do them to keep things organized. This is also the great point at which we can start finally looking for normal mode ToC runs for both 10 and 25 man. These runs are your best key to grab more emblems, trophy tier tokens (Trophy of the Crusade) and of course the higher item level gear to get into those hard mode runs.

With around 4,600 gearscore, you can start making or even joining 10 man hard mode runs. Although you likely won’t get 50 out of 50 in the first few weeks, you’ll be generating a huge amount of relevant upgrades then at about 4 800 gearscore. It should be no problem to get into hard mode runs or to even join a guild.

Just don’t get too comfortable though because phase four is coming and you don’t want to be playing catch-up all over again. And that’s why you should also read my Phase 4 Investments guide, so you don’t get way behind on gold.