Upgrading Your Hunter Gear -- on day one of 5.4.8

When 5.4.8 lands we'll have a landslide of gear upgrades to make:

Gear changes are coming! First, in Patch 5.4.8 (which is currently in testing on the PTR), all upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels. This change will be applied to all items found on the Timeless Isle and in Siege of Orgrimmar. For instance, if you have an item level 553 Greatsword of Pride’s Fall and its Upgrade Level is 2/2 making it item level 561, once the new patch goes live it will display 2/4 and allow you the opportunity to bump it up to item level 569. Whether you’re working on a newly boosted character or progressing through Siege of Orgrimmar, we hope this change will provide you with the extra punch you need to take down your foes.

I've been generally just sitting at the cap.  If I feel like I will easily make up a bunch of valor, I'll blow some on upgrading pet-tanking gear.  But now all hunters will have 15 items to upgrade.  (Legendary cloaks were added in 5.4.)  If you're already maxed-out on 2/2 upgrades, it will take 7500 valor to get all those items from 2/4 to 4/4.

It's been a while since I've dealt with valor. You cannot earn more than 1000 valor in a week and can only amass 3000.  If you spend 3000 on day one and then valor cap your 1000 quickly there-after then you can get eight items upgraded.  Then week two you can get two more. Week three, two more.  Etc.

Since it will take at least four weeks to upgrade everything, you want to prioritize your upgrades.  My order of operations is:

1. Upgrade items I will not replace first
2. Upgrade items I am not likely to replace
3. Upgrade items with the biggest impact first

If you have tons to upgrade and just want the most immediate impact to be felt ... immediately, then you should upgrade your ranged weapon.  If it's replaced then you upgrade its replacement.  But if you want to be optimal and have a lot to upgrade, go with this priority order.

Evaluating this simple priority order is not simple.

My group of items in the above category 1 is a short list; I have a legendary cloak and pair of heroic-warforged boots. That will cost 1000 valor.

I have eleven other heroic items.  It is not particularly likely that I will get heroic-warforged versions of any of these, but it is possible.  Our raid is normally clearing the first 8 bosses in heroic in less than three hours.  We can clear the next two on heroic but can't seem to carry anyone for them and getting a full ten raiders isn't easy.  We are not currently doing Thok, Siegecrafter, Paragons, or Garrosh on heroic. Thok is a week or two of heavy progression attempts possibly with some locks extended. I have two normal set pieces that could be replaced by drops from heroic Thok and heroic Paragons. Siegecrafter and Garrosh are unlikely for a long while.

Getting a drop off heroic Thok is slightly less likely than getting a heroic-warforged piece.  However it's a specific drop as opposed to one that may happen to any of the other heroic non-set pieces.  All this makes me think that the helm, dropping off Thok, is more likely to be replaced than any other piece that I have.  For that reason, I should not upgrade it at this time.

Another consideration is that there are multiple rings and trinkets that are be usable by us. There are ways to juggle things around to accommodate upgrading one and getting another as a drop.  This is a pretty deep corner-case though. 

It is possible that I may get a random heroic-warforged gloves or chest drop which could cause me to shuffle my other tier choices around to retain the four-piece bonus. But generally, the other pieces that I will not replace are my heroic tier pieces: my chest and gloves. Tier pieces do not come in warforged variety. Those two pieces will cost another 1000.

To complete my first week of purchases I'll upgrade two more items.  I continue to coin bosses that drop ranged weapons and the magic trinket.  That said, it only makes it slightly more likely that I'll get a replacement weapon.  To that end, we use the third criteria: Upgrade items with the biggest impact first. The number one biggest impact is the ranged weapon.  I have 500 valor left for the first week.

Not all gear pieces are valued the same.  Yes item levels are there, but a chest piece is more important and has more stats than a ring.  For most pieces, you can see the weighted differences by looking the stats in a piece.  Agility + (secondary stats * 2) is your exact measure for non-trinkets.  And as a rule of thumb, you can just look at stamina.  This would push me to upgrade my pants or helm.  But my helm is more likely to be replaced off Thok so the pants are the choice...

...but the Assurance of Consequences trinket is exceptionally nice.  An additional 8 item levels should reduce the cooldown of abilities by more than 3% more.  That will not correspond to a 3% damage boost, but it will be noticed compared to +160 agility and a bit more than +200 secondary stats that the pants would give me.

This means that upgrading the Assurance of Consequences trinket will be my final 500 valor expenditure of the week.

In Summary

Upgrade items I will not replace first

• my legendary cloak and heroic warforged boots
• my other heroic tier pieces (can't be warforged!)

Upgrade items I am less likely to replace

• my list of heroic but not warforged gear (incl weapon and trinket)
• my normal mode tier pieces that drop from heroic modes we haven't killed (with likelihood of killing each)

Upgrade items with the biggest impact first within the previous categories

• my weapon
• my force-multiplier trinket

Kheldul on Episode 189 of the Hunting Party Podcast

I'm the big eye beholder guy.

Stat Weights and Judgement Calls

I'll have to check things out again, but currently AskMrRobot is showing me the following for stat weights. This means you should always choose the best DPS weapon, followed by agility, followed in secondary stat preference of crit, haste, and then mastery.  I'm not sure if this is cached in browsers or if they just updated their weights in the last few days.  I'll have to look at it more.

One of my personal reforging issues has been that I'm swimming in +hit.  And I got a new and better weapon that has +hit while my old one does not.  I checked FemaleDwarf and she told me even if I'm swimming in extra (and useless) hit rating it is an upgrade for overall DPS.  That's cool.

So when I look at what AskMrRobot suggests I go through the differences of what I have.  Yep, it suggests I remove the two +80agil/+160hit gems in my shoulders and replace them with +160agil gems.  Even with the set bonus loss of +120agil, I'm ahead of the game.

But it's worth stopping to consider another option.

Using the stat weights we see that 320 agil should be multiplied to 4.36.  We also see that any stamina value should be multiplied to zero.

The stat weight of stamina really isn't zero.  It is zero for the purposes of damage dealing.  Obviously all our gear comes with some and we don't reforge it off, but there is some value to surviving a two-shot combo boss mechanic.  Hypothetically, you or someone you raid with has done something wrong if you get two-shot.  Or you are very undergeared for the instance you're in.  It isn't "RNG".  But having some cushion can help, because accidents happen.

Part of me is tempted to put in agil/stam gems and wind up with 280agil/240stam instead of 320agil.  Maybe it's just the pet-tank-wanna-be in me though.  Trading 40 agility for 240 stamina isn't quite enough stamina to make me do it.  I'd probably give up even more stamina for agility.  But that price is pretty close to my break-point.  A little more stamina, or a little less agility and I'd go for a little more survivability.

Less on Haste - More on New Trinkets

In 5.4 haste is not necessarily going to be your friend.  Our stat weights will change.  In 5.4 items are being redesigned.  Currently, haste is great because it increases your opportunities for procs to occur.  And if a proc causes even more haste, then it's even more great.  If it causes our main stat to buff, then it's great as well because along with the haste you're doing a rolling and growing snow-ball of damage as your gear improves.

What can proc in the revised Real-Procs-Per-Minute (RPPM) model? Lots of stuff and the same stuff as now, most notably: Trinkets, tier bonuses, and legendary meta gems.  When 5.4 lands in two weeks, we'll want to change a few things.  One thing we'll really want to do is tend to our revised and redesigned trinkets.

I am using two trinkets now.  I have the upgraded form of the Heroic Renataki Soul Charm and the upgraded form of Bad Juju (Gnomes!).  Well these are turning into Renatakai Soul Charm (PTR) and Bad Juju (PTR).

You can see one difference if you look closely.  The duration of the effect is 20 seconds now for both, which is a nice size duration and makes the soul charm quite good.  But the PTR forms are coming in at half that duration; They have 10 second durations.  The soul charm still gets up to the same buff.  It gets better every second instead of every two seconds, but it will have less output and be more difficult to get a couple large shots in or anything big at its peak.

There are a few things that isn't listed in tooltips.  First, the Real Procs Per Minute have a "may the odds be ever in your favor" unlucky-streak balancer.  If you haven't gotten a proc in a certain time it buffs and buffs your chances until you're guaranteed to.  Overall, this works out to be a 9% bonus to your chance to proc.  The second is, that on a boss pull, they're putting you high up in that chance so you'll get a proc early in a boss pull.  The third is that most of the chances for procs are nearly doubling.  The Soul Charm currently will have on average 0.62 RPPMs which is becoming 1.21.  And my Voodoo Gnome Generator is going from 0.55 RPPMs to 1.10 RPPMs.

These are just two common RPPM examples.

All this means is that if you had been following along and stacking Haste as you got more RPPM items then you will not see as much benefit from that Haste as you do now.  The trinkets are half as good and double as good and a little juiced.  If you hadn't been stacking Haste before then you probably will notice nothing at all.  If you had been then you'll notice a DPS decline.

For more on the RPPM changes check out Lore's posts in this thread.

What can you do?  Get one of the new crop of 5.4 trinkets ASAP.  They are mind-blowingly good.  They seem to go counter to everything we've seen from Blizzard.  They give cleave opportunities from non cleave shots.  They act as partial readiness abilities.  They are generally amazing.  Here is our list:

• Discipline of Xuen
• Sigil of Rampage
• Assurance of Consequence
• Ticking Ebon Detonator
• Haromm's Talisman
• Unnamed Trinket

RPPM Changes Will Change Our Stat Priority

I haven't gone through all the changes and how items are being "re-balanced".  (I'm still catching up on things since my vacation.) This affects the performance of my RPPM gear, the value of prepotting, and all the gems, reforging, and some enchants.  In a nutshell, this is a rather huge change.  Haste will not be as good.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
There are some further changes to the RPPM system in development that we'd like to share with you. As you know, RPPM is something we've been doing a lot of iteration on, and we have another iteration that should be hitting the PTR soon:

As you may know, RPPM proc rates typically scale with haste. This was done because historically, attacking faster meant you had more chances to proc something, so got more procs, and we wanted to preserve that effect. However, most procs before RPPM were such that either their effect didn't also scale with haste, or their proc rate was predominantly limited by an ICD. Many of our RPPM effects thus far have had neither of these limitations, such that they effectively 'double-dipped' on haste, benefiting twice from it. In some extreme cases, the proc was designed such that they actually triple-dipped.

As RPPM effects have become more wide-spread and more impactful, this has caused a variety of problems. Primarily, it has skewed stat balances toward haste rather significantly. It's also a compounding problem where many of these procs stack multiplicatively with each other, causing insane burst when all of these procs go off together. That can be fun, but also raises the skill cap on your performance, and makes gearing choices more restricted to ones which stack together optimally.

For 5.4 we're going to change both new and existing RPPM procs to not double-dip on haste. Benefiting once from haste is fine and expected, but not twice. For example, suppose you have two hypothetical procs, Flamekissed and Villainy:
Flamekissed's proc rate scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: Deal 500 additional fire damage". This is fine, because only the proc rate scales with haste; the effect doesn't.
Villainy's proc rate also scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: +5000 Agility for 20sec." This is not fine, because both the proc rate and the proc effect scale with haste. The more haste you have, the more attacks you do in that 20sec period which benefit from the increased Agility.

If both the rate and effect of a proc scale with haste, we're going to remove the haste scaling from its proc rate. In these cases, we'll compensate for an expected amount of haste by increasing the base proc rate. For any procs whose effect does not scale with haste, their proc rate will continue to scale with haste as before. However, we're also revisiting the proc rate tuning on all existing procs that were made overbudget due to the addition of Unlucky Streak Prevention (which ends up increasing effective proc rate by 9%). These changes should bring RPPM procs back to being on-budget and tied with traditional ICD procs in value.

This will obviously have a noticeable effect on most players performance; don't panic. We're going to be adjusting damage/healing/tanking performance with these changes in mind.

These RPPM changes should make it to PTR soon, and you'll be able to find the exact changes to each such effect there. We now show RPPM proc rates in the tooltip of the effect, which should make it easy to find.

....

However, we recognize that not everyone likes the RPPM gameplay, and are going to greater lengths to provide alternative options in Siege of Orgrimmar. In addition to RPPM-based trinkets, there will be trinkets that use the older internal cooldown (ICD) method, as well as a few on-use trinkets if you'd prefer to have an even greater degree of control over when your trinkets are active. There's even a couple trinkets with completely passive effects.

Interesting Weapons in 5.4

There is a BoA raid weapon drop with the horde graphic which drops off of Garrosh Hellscream.  Yeah, BoA.  MMO Champion has some indication that it may scale to character level 100.

Then there are new "warforged" items and "flexible" items.  Flexible corresponds to the new Flex Raid type.  Warforged is the new label for Thunderforged.   This one looks tasty... especially when upgraded to i580.

Gearing Up Pet Tanking Sets

I re-did the video with much better audio this time.  Click thru for HD and better proportions.

Gearing Up for Pet-Tanking

Last week I started gearing up my pet-tanking set.  This week I filled it in a bit more.  The video shows what I'm doing and a little trick that can surprise people.  Click the bottom for full screen and/or HD.

I guess I really should do something with my YouTube channel...

Raiding This Week

We raid Wed, Thursday, and Mondays.  We one-shot all our farm bosses. I got a new heroic ring and yet-another Thunderforged ranged weapon.  (When it rains it pours!)  I also picked up two more pieces of gear that I'll only use for pet-tanking.  The new ranged weapon is nice because it lets me shed some of my excessive hit rating.  Then we hit Heroic Ji-Kun.  It only took us four pulls.  I was at about 210K dps. We had previously had everyone get practice on nests, but this was far too easy for us IMHO.  So we'll be trying a few other heroic modes.

I'll try and have another pet-tanking post soon.

Kheldul Raiding Updates

Kheldul got "lucky" on a coin.  I had worked it out with the number of drops, drop rates, boss kills, coin uses, etc. that Kheldul should have had three ranged weapons by now.  But he was still using his upgraded 496 rifle.  He did have one LFR bow, but the upgrade of that over the gun was less than 0.1%.  But he definitely got lucky as it is thunderforged -- and an actual gun.

Khel also got his 12th legendary token this week and did the epic cloak questline.  It's a bummer that the celestial blessings token gives us +10% to our Intelligence...  It would be a bit easier if it was +10% to our Agility.  In any case, the battle against the blindfolded Wrathion is pretty difficult if you battle everything as one would expect.  I did this and got him to about 10% life but then was done for.  The trick is that you DPS him until just before he summons the molten oozes.  Then lay off and dismiss or already pull back your pet to the platform.  Feign Death.  Wait a bit.  Bandage.  Etc.  Wait for Wrathion's mirror images and slimes to go away.  Wrathion will come for you.  Just blast him down and get your goods.

Kheldul also went on the taming excursion and picked up a fortitude pet, two new colored porcupine spirit beast "challenges", a blue Portent, and a bunch of other useful pets.  Portent was Khel's first tracking pet capture and was kinda neat.

Khel also worked on his "pet tanking" set.  He kept around all his side-grades or good-but-downgrade gear.  It is fairly impressive while gemmed and enchanted for pet-tanking.  He's at over 550K health, with two of the items being otherwise unused Thunderforged pieces.

It isn't currently clear if we're going to continue to work on heroic modes or have some of our raiders change classes for better class balance before 5.4.  If it's the latter -- and it looks that way -- we'll spend our time just plowing through stuff and gearing them up.

My QQ

Kheldul's equipped item level is 527.  Everything is at 522 or better with one exception.  The ranged weapon slot.  That slot has the gun from Terrace.  Sure it has a +500 sha agility gem and it's been upgraded since the day I got it.  But it's only an i504.

We've started doing heroics.  I'm still often the highest DPS, but the ranged slot is so incredibly important that it will soon gimp me.

I do have the LFR bow.  These are supposed to be better.   With the extra gem, bumping its ilevel up twice, and reforging I don't get it more than less than 300dps better out of 150K+.

I did a fair number of heroic scenarios and won what I thought would be a great base i516 gun.  Awesome.  Except the sim craft and femaledwarf both say it is worse than my current gun.  There are two problems with it.  First it can't get a gem slot as it's not "sha-touched" nor does it come from the "Throne of Thunder"!  The second and bigger problem is that it's speed is 2.70.  There aren't any other even semi-modern ranged weapons out there that are that fast.  It evidently makes a big difference.

What makes this hurt more?  My current gun was something it took me a LONG time to get.  I've been through this all just before.  Far more boss kills than anyone would expect.  I'm experiencing the same thing now.  We have had a ranged weapon drop ONCE.  The other hunter got it.  Since then there has been nothing in raid.

Coins you say?  Well, the other hunter has gotten the zone-drop 522, the iron qon gun, and --  I think -- tortos' bow from coins.  I don't have a strong memory of that bow as I think I made myself forget.  I only use my coins on the three bosses that have a ranged weapon in their loot table -- to increase my chance to get a coin drop from them.  Unfortunately, I've seen five pairs of shoes from Tortos.  He'd even love to give me one, but of course that's not possible.  I'd love to take one too, since I'd like our first heroic and/or thunderforged drop to be a roll-off instead of a QQ party for all.

Overall,  I've got 79 10-man ToT boss kills under my belt.  11 weeks of 3 coins for 33 coin rolls.  Clearly, I get loot.  But I have to wonder if the drop rates for these ranged weapons are too low.  wowhead puts them at 0.1%, 6%, 9%, and 10% each.   The loot tables are huge.  Do other people have similar issues?  And why the hell have I won five pairs of Quakestompers?  I'm going to have to try and throw them at the bosses.

Cloaked

For one day (which I happened to be raiding!) the Legendary Gem was stealth-hotfix-nerfed to 1/3rd it's damage.  Supposedly.  I was considering tossing it away for a normal meta.  But I didn't.  And the hotfix got rolled back.

The next item on the Wrathion buffet is a cloak.  It's not just any cloak.  It's a Bad-ass Cloak. The cloak is roughly seventy to eighty item levels better than what you have or may get.  So it's worth doing the questline. (Cough.)  I'm currently collecting more raid drops but at a frustrating pace.  (I have only two stones.)

When Loot Crushes Your 5.2 Plans

Last night -- the night before 5.2 lands -- Lei Shi gave me a new rifle via a soon-to-be-worthless coin.  I had been using an upgraded LFR version.  Well.  I was at about 720/1,000 valor for the week, but not earning any because I was already at the 3,000 total valor cap.  So plans demolished.

We were bringing a new raider in who I just guilded, so I went out and dropped the bag of gold for a new legendary gem and gem slot and yes, I upgraded that sucker twice for 1,500 valor.

I'm not sure if this puts me behind or ahead.  But I do know that I wont be picking up two epics from valor vendors in the first few days.  And it makes me more likely to get a ranged weapon upgrade as a raid drop. ;-)

Brawler's Guild Talk and Tips

The Brawler's Guild is quite fun and an adrenaline rush.

The fights start off comically easy.  If you've got enough skill or gear you can plow through them.

Then they start getting abilities similar to rares.  The only difference is that there is a general enrage timer (the fire storm you may have seen).  So there's a DPS requirement.

Then they start getting special abilities that aren't at all obvious.  You will die learning the fights or you can hit up wowhead.com for a little rundown on their abilities.  The comments are generally good around what the boss will do.  That said, don't bother with what other classes are doing. Hunters are different!

I'm only rank six at this point.  I only play doing this for a level or two at a time.  I got an invite from a guild friend.  When I get rank seven I'll pass one out to another guild friend.

I've stayed BM for all the fights so far.  One of my biggest challenges has been that my pet will keep aggro even with a dps pet (without growl) and cower-clicking.  Combine that with a situation where my pet bar sometimes disappears and I can't even macro-cast phoenix on my pet.  Quite irritating especially when my opponent is down to 25% health.  A few restarts and deep breaths and we're good.

So first some general tips:

• Join a buff group.  There's usually a raid available and you'll get healthstones and raid buffs.  Drop a feast and you're a champ.
• Be supportive of the others and you'll get their support instead of cat-calls. ;-)
• It's an adrenaline rush and pretty stressful.
• You need to concentrate even more than if you're raiding -- if you want to win.  There's no slack time.
• Use all the tools in your toolbox.
• Flask up on the tougher fights.
• You can pre-pot.  I don't have a timer, but I click it after quickly dropping one or two traps and it usually doesn't count toward the fight.  Make sure to use the cheap Brawler-only potions!  

Now some hunter tips:

• Some bosses will be easy for hunters and hard for others.  The opposite is also true.  Learn and adapt.
• Always drop traps before the opponent comes out.
• Spirit mend is great.  Spirit mend on yourself during a Stampede is [Great]x5.
• Some bosses are good for pet-tanking and make it trivial.
• Some bosses and even some AoE will destroy your pet.
• Always wait for your Stampede and Rapid Fire CDs to be ready before battling.
• There's no excuse for not moving and both kiting and dps'ng.
• Feign death and a dismissed/dead pet will pop you out of the brawl.
• Bind a Brawler agility potion quaff into your best DPS CD macros (e.g.- Rapid Fire). 
• On the harder fights, review your Talents each go around.   Would Binding Shot be extra nice over just a slow trap?  What about Wyvern Sting and an ice trap?  Or is the interrupt required?
• I've come to really like Spirit Bond for brawls.  Iron Hawk is good for when you have a real healer.  That said, I'm also liking Animal Bond for my pet and the Spirit Mends he gives me.
• Consider all the other Hunter Talents available and how they can be used on different bosses.
• Review the list of Glyphs as well.  For instance, if you're going to have a pet tank something impressive, then the Glyph of Mending is a very good choice.
• Consider all the pets you can bring and all their abilities.  It isn't a short list.  Use your tools!

That's all for now.

PS:  I suspect that if you are queued, grouped, and throwing some rotten fruit, then you can get pulled into someone else's brawl.  There might be a requirement that the group is cross-realm via a CRZ.  That sounds good and OP, but your boss will also show up!  I captured one on video and will post it when I get a chance.  It happened to me three times in a row.  It is quit e annoying because while I tried to just help the person who already had been battling for a minute, my brawl competitor annihilated both of us.

Scenario Hunter Epics

If you haven't tried scenarios they're pretty decent content and a good way to get an easy 40 valor.  I got all my transmog gear from them.  (It's the red colored version of the standard yellow gold 440/450/463 gear.)

With the release of patch 5.1, you are awarded a different box with potential for much better goodies.  Specifically, 476 epics and 463 blues.  It's too early to know what percentage this stuff will return and Blizzard isn't saying.  But there's a bunch.  All with those random "of the" enchantment flavors.

A ring!

Another ring!

A red helm!

Another red helm!

Some gloves!

A chest piece!

A neck piece!

Another neck piece!

And a cloak!

Will half of these have int on them and the rest have strength?  Probably not, but I wouldn't expect them to be ideal or rain down on you in buckets.

Bringing the Hammer

It was a four day auction.  I generally consider myself not lucky.  So I fully expect I will get a Sha-Touched weapon to drop within the next week.  In my mind, the result wouldn't be that I'd have two great weapons;  I'd beat myself up for wasting a few months of gold.

Your Valor Grind and Patch 5.1

Hunters rejoice!  Or if you were looking forward to getting off the valor treadmill, drown your tears in a dark ale.  Or three.  You're going to want a lot more valor -- and soon.

With 5.1 we have the ability to upgrade existing equipment.  Some equipment can be upgraded two levels and some only one.  If you're still stuck with some blue gear, you can get away with just spending 1,500 justice points to upgrade one i463 item to a i471 piece of gear.  You don't get to choose which stats get upgraded.  This will keep everyone on the treadmill for a lot longer.

If you scoff at the minor upgrades you can achieve with that valor expenditure, don't fret.  Blizz has you covered with more dailies and another faction grind.  I'll be happy for the variety myself.  For 6,500 valor and appropriate faction rep, you can outfit yourself with some lovely epic i496 gear; a nice ring, an on-use trinket, some decent shit-kickers, and a non-bullet oriented belt.

Of course all of that gear is upgradable twice as well.   Spend 750 valor and bump up a piece of i496 to i500.  Spend another 750 valor and it and its stats are that of a i504 piece.

Aww hell.  My ptr links are pointing to the wrong places somehow.  I had them all gathered up nicely and it's been changed somehow.  Ahh!  wow.Joystick.com has something corroborative.   They're buried in a large screenshot gallery otherwise I'd just link to the story. 

Fangs

A different kind of Halloween treat.  I did run this specific instance a decent number of days.

Gearing Up

I missed out on about a week of MoP so far because of travel, so I'm not exactly cutting edge.  Still I thought it might be good to have a rundown on what and how I've been gearing up.

Step 1: I bought the crafted gun (not terribly cheap) and a few cheap items off the AH.  I didn't dip into PvP gear right away.
Step 2: I visited one of the MoP Justice vendors and dropped as many Justice points as I could and filled the really bad holes first.
Step 3: I realized ZOMG Brewfest trinkets and did that until I had the appropriate one and another just for the possible need. You can do this at level 89.
Step 4: I kept queuing for instances and doing quests.  At some point my queuing started becoming heroic queuing.  My goal for quests is to clear out as many zones as possible.  Since there isn't much of a cap on dailies, I'm not particularly worried about falling behind there.  I managed to get about 7 hours in one day and got a lot of nice 463 upgrades.
Tip 1: I had just bought a new Justice item and got into an instance in 15mins.  We cleared it pretty quick and I got an upgrade over the Justice item I had just bought.  I was a little bummed because I had enchanted it.  But then I noticed that I still had an hour to return it to the vendor for a Justice point refund.  And it worked.  I'm sure the same thing can be done with PvP gear.
Step 5: I filled in a weak spot with a PvP boot upgrade, nudged up my iLevel with one final Justice purchase, and managed to finally get a heroic helm (with the meta gem slot).  This brought me to i459.
Step 6: Gem, enchant, and reforge everything.
Tip 2: You can equip junk you will not use in a LFR raid just to be eligible to queue.  I swapped out my i463 heroic agility trinket for an inappropriate i470 Brewfest trinket and was able to queue for the LFR instance.  I suspect that the overall item level of a character is rounded down.  In any case, as soon as I was in, I switched to the right trinket and it didn't boot me or anything.
Step 7: I ran the LFR bosses and scored a belt.  I'm not sure if the quality of LFR is good now but it didn't hurt that I was with a guild tank another good DPS and good healer.
Step 8: Fight the Sha worldboss with 39 other people.  Win nothing, but collect the quest item from the boss to get a nice pair of boots.
Step 9: Ran a whole bunch of quests and closed out two more zones and opened up the Golden Lotus Faction and the Gate.

Knight Mail Transmog Set

On my hunter, I have a transmog set that looks like plate. Not so coincidentally, it happens to be my pet-tanking set.

The base components of this set are from the "Knight's" set:
Knight's Breastplate
Knight's Legguards
Knight's Boots
Knight's Gauntlets
Knight's Girdle

The true gems are from other sets however:
Champion's Helmet
Ornate Pauldrons (shown) though if you want a softer look, the Ancient Pauldrons are nice.
Gossamer Cape

Now come your accessories and trimline:
Ranged - Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle (shown) though Rifle of the Platinum Guard is a very close second.
Tabard - Stormpike Battle Tabard (shown)
Shirt - White Tuxedo Shirt (shown).  The shirt does show through in many places.
Bracer - Any bracer. Color can show as a short banded cuff above the gloves.