Four of us came back to play live server and we started with Heroic toons. 85 - mage, 85 - SK, 85 - Ranger, 85 - Enc, J5 cleric/dps mercs. Read where the next step up in gear "should" be T1 - VoA. Can this group farm VoA for Rustic drops? Should we mainly focus on levels and try for T2 - HoT gear or is that a waste of time? Looking for a little direction to play through the content.
At 85 you could do some HA'S from Gibble in DH or Marla in Tainted West Karana over and over and over. Don't be fooled by not getting any experience while doing them - it all comes at the final step and its usually good for quite a few AA - which you might need unless you guys auto granted. So by doing these HA's you earn Marks of Valor and there is a merchant that sells some nice 85 armor and the rings/earrings/weapons etc and also sells merc armor starting at level 75. My 85 SK has a lot of tier 2 HOT armor and used the marks of valor to round out the other areas, rings/neck/couple nice weapons and shields.
Frankly, mark of valor barter gear is bad. All that CotF stuff has problem with focus effects. Even your heroic gear focus effects work full power till 90. CotF foci start degrading right past their required level. To that end, I generally find it best to use marks from HAs on various augs, and maybe merc gear. Using them for gear only as a stop-gap. IMHO higher tier HoT is not worth the trouble. Your heroic should last you till 92. Maybe get some AC upgrades for the tank via Rustic/crafted/TBM, but what you really want is sell a krono or two and keep checking bazaar for good deals on Fear Touched(RoF). Makes ckass specific Boreal wearable at 92. Also watch out for non-visibles/jewelry thats 92 required/95 recommended. It is also from RoF. That stuff should let you get to 100. By 100, if you been doing HAs a lot, you can drop some marks on Manifested Etheric, and also do some TDS progression and earn Castaway stuff. TBM 'assembly required' gear is also an option.
I would suggest sticking to house of thule zones for a bit, at least to do the tasks to get a full set of augs (primarily for the tank, the whole group wants the tank to get those augs). I would also suggest the tank swaps to aa for a bit, to earn the small amount required to buy weapon stance. This will help them survive greatly moving into newer content. After the tank has a set of augs and weapon stance, I would alternate between Call of the forsaken heroics and The broken mirror heroics. Cotf heroics give better exp, and the currency earned can be spent on vendors ranging from level 75 - 95 with most of the top level group gear/augs. Gribbles can get very boring, alternate with heroics from maria gaslow in karana as well and another npc in neriak (can't recall the name, dark elf lady near the karana portal), both offer some heroics that are near the ease of gribbles. Tbm heroics will offer much better gear, that will last a long time. You just upgrade the augs as you level. Nearly all the named in these heroics don't scale well, there are a couple beatable at your level. Chests at the end provide items as well. These missions will be more difficult, but get easier as you learn them and get upgrades.
